Josephus: The Complete Works
The Plainspoken Classics - Scriptorium Press (First Edition, 2026)
An original AI translation made directly from the source language.
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======== Jewish War — Book 1 ========

The war of the Jews against the Romans was the greatest not only of the wars of our own time but, one might almost say, of all the wars between cities or between nations that report has handed down to us. Yet it has not been written up as it deserves. Some who were not present at the events have gathered up random and inconsistent hearsay and written it up in the manner of sophists; others who were present have falsified the facts, some out of flattery toward the Romans, some out of hatred for the Jews, so that their books contain now denunciation and now panegyric, but nowhere the precision of true history. I have therefore set myself, for the benefit of those who live under Roman rule, to render into Greek the account I had earlier composed in my native tongue and sent to the barbarians of the interior. I am Joseph, son of Matthias, a priest from Jerusalem, who fought against the Romans myself in the opening stages of the war and was present, of necessity, at everything that followed.
For when this vast upheaval broke out, the internal affairs of the Romans were in sickness, and the revolutionary party among the Jews, seizing the troubled times, rose up flourishing in both manpower and money — so much so that, amid the excess of turmoil, some regions of the East were gripped by hope of gain and others by fear of loss. The Jews hoped that their kinsmen beyond the Euphrates would rise with them, while on the Roman side the neighboring Gauls were restive and the Celtic country would not stay quiet; everything was full of disorder after Nero's death, and the moment tempted many to reach for the throne, while the armies, in hope of profit, longed for a change of masters. I thought it monstrous to let the truth wander astray amid events of such magnitude — to let the Parthians and Babylonians and the most distant Arabs, and our own kinsmen beyond the Euphrates, the Adiabenians, learn through my careful account exactly where the war began, through what sufferings it ran its course, and how it ended, while the Greeks and those Romans who took no part in the campaign remain ignorant of it, dependent on flattering or fictional accounts. And yet these writers have the nerve to entitle their works histories — works which, besides telling nothing sound, seem to me to miss their very purpose as well.
For they wish to make the Romans appear great, yet they constantly disparage and belittle the Jews. I do not see, however, how conquerors of the weak can be thought great. These writers respect neither the length of the war, nor the numbers of the exhausted Roman army, nor the stature of the generals who labored so hard around Jerusalem — labor which, I think, they find humiliating to their reputation if the achievement is made to look small. I, for my part, have no intention of competing with those who exalt Rome by inflating the deeds of my own people. I will set out the actions of both sides with precision, but the reflections that arise from the events I reserve for my own feelings, allowing myself to grieve over the calamities of my country. That internal strife destroyed her, and that it was the tyrants of the Jews who drew down the unwilling hands of the Romans and the fire onto the Temple, Caesar Titus himself, the very man who sacked the city, can testify: throughout the whole war he pitied the populace held under guard by the insurgents, and often deliberately postponed the city's capture, giving the siege more time so the guilty might yet repent.
If anyone should charge me with slander for the things I say against the tyrants and their banditry, or for lamenting my country's misfortunes, let him excuse the feeling, even if it goes against the rule of history. For of all the cities under Roman rule, ours rose to the greatest prosperity, and fell back again to the depths of disaster. Indeed, measured against the calamities of the Jews, I think all the misfortunes of every age since the beginning of the world are found wanting. And no foreigner was to blame for them, so that it was impossible to master one's grief. If some judge should prove harsher than pity allows, let him assign the events to history and the lamentations to the writer.
And yet I might justly reproach the learned men of Greece, who, though events of such magnitude occurred in their own time — events that make the wars of old look small by comparison — sit in judgment on them, carping at those who strove to record them, though in eloquence they may surpass, in purpose they fall short. Instead, they write about the Assyrians and the Medes, as though the ancient historians had told those stories none too well. Yet they fall as far short of those old writers in power of composition as they do in seriousness of purpose. For the ancients each strove to write of their own times, precisely because presence at the events gave their account vividness, and lying in front of those who knew the truth would have been shameful. But to preserve past events for memory, and to hand down the record of one's own age to those who come after, is worthy of praise and gratitude. A man is not industrious merely for reworking someone else's arrangement and structure, but only if, while saying something new, he builds the very body of his history as his own.
For my part, at very great expense and labor, I, a foreigner, dedicate to Greeks and Romans alike this record of great achievements. But among our own people, the mouth and tongue that gape wide open at once over profits and lawsuits are struck dumb the moment it comes to history, where one must speak the truth and gather the facts with much labor; they yield the field to the weaker sort, men who do not even know how to write of the deeds of their leaders. Let the truth of history, then, be honored among us, since it has been neglected among the Greeks.
As for tracing the ancient history of the Jews — who they were, how they departed from Egypt, what country they wandered through and how much of it they later occupied, and how they migrated from it — I judged this untimely now, and in any case superfluous, since many Jews before me have set out the history of our ancestors with precision, and some Greeks too, translating those accounts into their own tongue, have not strayed far from the truth. I will begin my narrative where those writers and our own prophets left off. Of what follows, I will treat the war of my own time in greater detail and with as much thoroughness as I can manage, while the events before my own lifetime I will run through briefly:
how Antiochus, called Epiphanes, took Jerusalem by force, held it for three years and six months, and was driven out of the country by the sons of Asamoneus; how their descendants, quarreling over the kingship, then drew the Romans and Pompey into their affairs; and how Herod, son of Antipater, brought in Sosius and put an end to their dynasty; how the people rose in rebellion after Herod's death, while Augustus governed the Romans and Quintilius Varus held the country; and how, in the twelfth year of Nero's reign, the war broke out — the events involving Cestius, and all that the Jews accomplished by arms in their first onslaughts, and how they fortified the surrounding towns; and how Nero, alarmed at Cestius's setbacks for the whole enterprise, put Vespasian in charge of the war; how Vespasian, with the elder of his sons, invaded the land of the Jews with what forces of the Romans he used, and how many allies were cut down throughout Galilee; and how, of its cities, some he took entirely by force and others by surrender — at which point I will also describe the discipline of the Romans in war and the training of their legions, the extent and nature of both Galilees, the boundaries of Judaea, and further the peculiar character of the country, its lakes and springs, and the sufferings that befell each captured city, described with precision, as I saw them or endured them myself —
for I will not conceal even my own misfortunes, since I mean to speak to people who already know them. Then, how, with the Jews' fortunes already failing, Nero died, and Vespasian, having set out for Jerusalem, was drawn back by his elevation to supreme power; the signs that appeared to him concerning this, and the revolutions at Rome, and how he himself was proclaimed emperor by the soldiers against his own will, and, on his departure to administer the whole empire, how sedition broke out among the Jews, how the tyrants rose up against them, and their quarrels with one another. And how Titus, setting out from Egypt, invaded the country a second time; what forces he gathered, where and how many; and in what state internal strife had left the city at his arrival; how many assaults he mounted and how many earthworks he raised; the circuits of the three walls and their measurements; the strength of the city, and the layout of the sanctuary and the Temple, and further the measurements of the altar as well, all with precision; certain customs of the festivals, the seven purifications, and the priests' ministrations; and further the vestments of the priests and of the high priest, and the character of the Temple's holy place — concealing nothing and adding nothing to what has been discovered.
Next I will set out the cruelty of the tyrants toward their own countrymen and the restraint of the Romans toward foreigners, and how often Titus, wishing to save the city and the Temple, invited the insurgents to come to terms; and I will distinguish the sufferings of the populace and the calamities they endured — however many were brought low and captured by war, by internal strife, or by famine. Nor will I pass over the misfortunes of the deserters, or the punishments of the captives; how the Temple was burned against Caesar's will, and how much of the sacred treasures was seized from the fire; the capture of the whole city and the signs and portents that preceded it; the captivity of the tyrants, the number of those enslaved, and the fate to which each was allotted; and how the Romans went on to deal with what remained of the war and tore down the fortified strongholds; Titus's traversal of the whole country, restoring order to it; and finally his return to Italy and his triumph.
All this I have set out in seven books, leaving no ground for reproach or accusation to those who know the facts and were present at the war — at least to those who love the truth — for I have written it not to please, but as it happened. I will make this the beginning of my narrative, the same beginning I gave among my chapter headings.
When strife broke out among the powerful men of the Jews, at the time when Antiochus, called Epiphanes, was contending with Ptolemy the Sixth for possession of the whole of Syria, their rivalry turned on supremacy, each man of rank refusing to submit to his equals: Onias, one of the high priests, gained the upper hand and expelled the sons of Tobias from the city. They fled to Antiochus and begged him to use them as guides and invade Judaea. The king agreed, having long been eager to do so, and setting out himself with a very great force, he took the city by storm and killed a great number of Ptolemy's partisans. Letting his soldiers loose without restraint to plunder, he himself pillaged the Temple and put a stop to the daily sacrifice for three years and six months. The high priest Onias fled to Ptolemy and, receiving from him a place in the district of Heliopolis, founded a small town modeled on Jerusalem and built a temple like it there — of which we will speak again in its proper place.
But for Antiochus, neither his unexpected mastery of the city nor the plundering and the great slaughter were enough. Overcome by the violence of his passions, and remembering what he had suffered during the siege, he tried to force the Jews to abandon their ancestral laws, to leave their infants uncircumcised, and to sacrifice swine upon the altar. All refused, and the most eminent among them were slaughtered. Bacchides, the garrison commander sent by Antiochus, adding to his natural cruelty these impious orders, left no excess of lawlessness untried, torturing the notable men one by one and daily displaying to the city, as a group, the spectacle of its own coming ruin.
Until, driven by the excess of these wrongs, he goaded the sufferers into daring resistance. Mattathias, then, son of Asamoneus, one of the priests, from a village called Modein, gathered his own household about him — for he had five sons — and killed Bacchides with daggers. Then, fearing at once the numbers of the garrison, he fled to the mountains; but as many of the people joined him, he took heart and came down again.
He met the generals of Antiochus in battle and defeated them, driving them out of Judaea. Passing from success to power, and, because he had freed his people from foreign rule, ruling them now with their own consent, he died, leaving the leadership to Judas, the eldest of his sons. Judas, supposing that Antiochus would not remain quiet, mustered the forces of the region and was the first to make an alliance with the Romans; and when Epiphanes invaded the country again, he repelled him with a heavy blow.
Fresh from this success, he moved against the garrison in the city, which had not yet been dislodged, and, driving the soldiers out of the upper city, forced them back into the lower — the part of the town called the Acra. Having gained control of the Temple, he cleansed the whole precinct and walled it round, had new vessels made for its ministrations and brought them into the sanctuary, since the old ones had been defiled, built another altar, and began the sacrifices anew. But just as the city was recovering its sacred order, Antiochus died, and his son, also named Antiochus, inherited both the kingdom and the hatred toward the Jews.
Gathering fifty thousand infantry, five thousand cavalry, and eighty elephants, he invaded Judaea through the hill country. He took the small town of Bethsura, and at a place called Beth-Zachariah, where the pass was narrow, Judas met him with his forces. But before the lines could close, his brother Eleazar, catching sight of the tallest of the elephants, adorned with a great tower and gilded outworks, and supposing Antiochus himself to be mounted upon it, ran far out ahead of his own men, cut through the enemy's ranks, and made his way to the elephant.
He could not reach the man he took for the king, because of the height, but he struck the beast under the belly, bringing it crashing down upon himself; he was crushed and died, having accomplished nothing more than
He had set his heart on great deeds and put fame ahead of his own life. Yet the man who drove the elephant was only a common soldier, and even if it had been Antiochus himself, the one who dared this would have gained nothing more than the appearance of choosing death in hope of a glorious success. The whole battle turned into an omen for his brother as well, since the Jews fought hard and held out for a long time, but the king's forces, superior in numbers and favored by fortune, prevailed, and after killing many of them Judas took the survivors and fled to the district of Gophna.
Antiochus advanced to Jerusalem and stayed there a few days, but withdrew for lack of provisions, leaving behind a garrison he judged sufficient and marching the rest of his army off to winter in Syria. Once the king had withdrawn, Judas did not rest. Many from the nation joined him, and gathering up those who had survived the battle, he engaged Antiochus's generals at the village of Adasa. There he proved himself outstanding in the fighting, killed many of the enemy, and was himself killed, and a few days later his brother John was murdered through a plot by men loyal to Antiochus.
His brother Jonathan succeeded him. He kept a watchful guard over affairs with the local population, strengthened his rule through friendship with the Romans, and made a treaty with the son of Antiochus. None of this, however, was enough to secure him. Trypho, the usurper who served as guardian of Antiochus's son but had long been plotting against him, tried to remove Jonathan's friends: when Jonathan came to Ptolemais with a small escort to meet Antiochus, Trypho seized him by treachery, put him in chains, and marched on Judea. But he was driven off by Simon, Jonathan's brother, and in his rage at the defeat he killed Jonathan.
Simon took command with distinction. He captured Gazara, Joppa, and Jamnia, towns in the neighborhood, and, after overcoming its garrison, razed the citadel as well. He then became an ally of Antiochus against Trypho, whom Antiochus was besieging at Dora before his campaign against the Medes. But helping to destroy Trypho did nothing to check the king's greed: not long after, Antiochus sent his general Cendebaeus with an army to ravage Judea and subdue Simon. Although now an old man, Simon conducted the war with youthful vigor. He sent his sons ahead with the strongest of his men, while he himself took a division of the army and advanced by another route. Setting many ambushes in the hills, he succeeded in every plan and won a brilliant victory. He was declared high priest, and one hundred and seventy years after the Macedonian domination began, he freed the Jews from it.
But he too died by treachery, murdered at a banquet by Ptolemy his son-in-law, who had shut up Simon's wife and two of his sons and sent men to kill the third, John, who was also called Hyrcanus. Learning of the attempt in advance, the young man hurried to reach the city, relying above all on the people's memory of his father's achievements and their hatred of Ptolemy's lawlessness.
Ptolemy also tried to enter by another gate, but was quickly driven back by the people, who had already welcomed Hyrcanus. He withdrew at once to one of the strongholds above Jericho called Dagon. Hyrcanus, having recovered his father's high priesthood and offered sacrifice to God, hastened against Ptolemy to help his mother and brothers, and, attacking the fortress, had the upper hand in every other respect but was defeated by his own sense of justice. Whenever Ptolemy was hard pressed, he brought Hyrcanus's mother and brothers up onto the wall in plain view, tortured them, and threatened to throw them down unless Hyrcanus withdrew at once. At this, pity and fear overcame Hyrcanus's anger, but his mother gave in neither to the torments nor to the death threatened against her; she stretched out her hands and begged her son not to be swayed by her outrage into sparing that godless man, since for her a death at Ptolemy's hands, exacting punishment for the crimes he had committed against their house, was better than immortality.
Whenever John recalled his mother's fortitude and heard her pleading, he was moved to press the attack, but whenever he saw her being beaten and torn, he grew soft and was overcome entirely by his feelings. Because the siege dragged on for this reason, the sabbatical year set in, which the Jews leave fallow every seven years just as they rest on the seventh day. During this time Ptolemy, released from the siege, killed John's brothers along with their mother and fled to Zeno, surnamed Cotylas, who was tyrant of Philadelphia.
Antiochus, angered by what he had suffered at Simon's hands, marched into Judea and besieged Hyrcanus, laying siege to Jerusalem. Hyrcanus opened the tomb of David, who had been the wealthiest of kings, and removed from it more than three thousand talents of silver; with three hundred talents of this he persuaded Antiochus to lift the siege, and he became the first of the Jews to hire foreign mercenaries out of his surplus wealth.
Later, when Antiochus campaigned against the Medes, this gave Hyrcanus his chance for revenge, and he at once set out against the cities of Syria, expecting to find them stripped of their best fighting men, which proved correct. He himself captured Medaba and Samaga along with their neighboring towns, as well as Shechem and Gerizim, and along with these the nation of the Cuthaeans, who lived around the temple built in imitation of the one in Jerusalem. He also took a good many towns in Idumea, including Adora and Marisa. He advanced as far as Samaria, where the city of Sebaste now stands, built by King Herod, and after walling it in on every side, he set his sons Aristobulus and Antigonus over the siege. When the Samaritans refused to yield, famine drove the people in the city to eat food unfit even to be named. They called on Antiochus, surnamed Aspendius, to help them, and he readily agreed, but was defeated by Aristobulus's forces. Pursued by the brothers as far as Scythopolis, he escaped, while they turned back against the Samaritans, shut the whole population up inside the wall again, and, after taking the city, razed it to the ground and enslaved its inhabitants.
With their successes still mounting, they did not slacken their drive, but pressed on with the army as far as Scythopolis, overran it, and divided up between them the whole region south of Mount Carmel. But envy at the good fortune of John and his sons stirred up sedition among the local population, and many gathered against them and would not stay quiet until they were driven to open war and defeated.
For the rest of his life John lived in prosperity, managed the affairs of his rule in the finest way, and died after thirty-three years, leaving five sons, truly blessed and allowed by fortune no grounds whatever for complaint on his own account. He alone possessed the three greatest things: rule over the nation, the high priesthood, and the gift of prophecy. For the divine spoke with him, so that he was ignorant of nothing that was to come; indeed, he foresaw and foretold concerning two of his elder sons that they would not remain masters of affairs. Their downfall deserves to be told, showing how far they fell short of their father's good fortune.
After their father's death, the eldest, Aristobulus, converted the rule into a kingship and was the first to put on the diadem, four hundred and seventy-one years and three months after the people had returned to their own land, freed from slavery in Babylon. Of his brothers, he kept the one next to him in age, Antigonus, whom he appeared to love, on an equal footing with himself, but the others he had chained and imprisoned. He also imprisoned his mother, who disputed his authority with him, for John had left her as mistress of the whole realm, and he carried his cruelty so far that he let her die of starvation in chains.
Retribution for these acts fell in turn on his brother Antigonus, whom he loved and had made partner in the kingship; for he killed him too, on the strength of slanders concocted by wicked men at court. At first Aristobulus disbelieved what they said, both because he loved his brother and because he attributed much of what was being reported to envy. But when Antigonus, splendid from a military campaign, arrived for the festival at which it is the ancestral custom to build booths for God, it happened that Aristobulus fell ill in those very days, and Antigonus, at the close of the festival, went up as magnificently equipped as possible with the armed men around him, chiefly to honor his brother.
At that moment the wicked men went to the king and told him about the parade of armed men and about Antigonus's bearing, greater than that of a private citizen, saying that he had come with so large a force in order to kill him, since he could not bear holding mere honor from the kingship when it was in his power to seize it outright. Little by little, and against his will, Aristobulus was won over by these reports, and, taking care that his suspicion should not become apparent and arranging in advance against the uncertain outcome, he stationed his bodyguards in one of the dim underground chambers—he himself was then lodging in the fortress once called Baris, later renamed Antonia—with orders to leave Antigonus alone if he came unarmed, but to kill him if he approached in arms, and he sent men to Antigonus telling him in advance to come unarmed.
At this the queen, with great cunning, conspired with the plotters: they persuaded the messengers sent to Antigonus to say nothing of what the king had actually said, but instead to tell Antigonus that his brother, hearing he had prepared magnificent arms and military equipment for him in Galilee, was prevented by his illness from inspecting it himself, and that now, since Antigonus was about to leave, he would be delighted to see him in his armor.
Hearing this, and led on by his brother's evident affection to suspect nothing wicked, Antigonus went forward in his arms as if for a display. But when he reached the dark passage called the Tower of Strato, he was killed by the bodyguards, proving beyond doubt that slander destroys every kind of goodwill and natural affection, and that of all good feelings none is so strong as to hold out forever against envy.
One might well marvel, in this connection, at Judas, an Essene by birth, who was never once mistaken or found false in his predictions. When he saw Antigonus passing through the temple on that very day, he cried out to his companions—and there were not a few of them sitting with him, students of his teaching—"Ah, how good it would be for me to die now, since the truth has died before me and one of my own predictions has proved false: for this Antigonus is alive today, though he was fated to be killed."
The place fixed for his slaughter was Strato's Tower, and that place is six hundred stadia from here, and it is already the fourth hour of the day; the time itself refutes the prophecy. Having said this, the old man remained troubled and downcast, and shortly afterward news came that Antigonus had been killed in the underground chamber which was itself also called Strato's Tower, sharing its name with the coastal city of Caesarea. This, then, was what threw the seer into confusion.
As for Aristobulus, remorse for his crime struck him at once with sickness, and with his mind forever troubled by the thought of the murder, he wasted away until his innards, torn apart by his unmixed grief, brought up a great quantity of blood. One of the attendants carrying this away slipped, by some divine providence, at the very spot where Antigonus had been slaughtered, and poured out the blood of the murderer onto the bloodstains from the killing still visible there. At once a cry of grief rose from those who saw it, as though the young man had deliberately poured a libation of blood on that very spot. Hearing the outcry, the king asked the reason.
When no one dared to speak, he pressed all the harder, wanting to learn the truth, until at last, under threats and force, they told him what had happened. He filled his eyes with tears, and, groaning with all the strength left in him, said, "So then I was not going to escape the great eye of God as I committed unholy deeds, but swift justice pursues me for the blood of my own kin. How much longer, most shameless body, will you hold on to a soul condemned by a brother and a mother? How much longer shall I pour out my own blood to them drop by drop? Let them take it all at once, and let the divine no longer mock itself with libations poured from my own entrails." With these words he died at once, having reigned no more than a year.
His wife released his brothers and made Alexander king, the one who seemed to surpass the others both in age and in moderation. On taking power, he killed one of his brothers, who aspired to the throne, and kept the one who remained, content to live without meddling in affairs, in private life. He also fought a battle against Ptolemy, surnamed Lathyrus, who had taken the city of Ashocis; he killed many of the enemy, but the victory tipped in Ptolemy's favor. After Ptolemy was driven off by his mother Cleopatra and withdrew to Egypt, Alexander took Gadara by siege, and Amathus as well, the greatest of the strongholds beyond the Jordan, which held the most valuable possessions of Theodorus son of Zeno.
But Theodorus fell on him without warning, recovered his own property along with the king's baggage train, and killed as many as ten thousand of the Jews. Alexander recovered from the blow, however, and, turning toward the coast, took Gaza, Raphia, and Anthedon, later renamed Agrippias by King Herod. After he had enslaved the populations of these towns, the Jewish people rose against him at a festival—for it is above all at their feasts that sedition takes hold among them—and it seems he would not have gotten the better of the plot had his foreign troops, Pisidians and Cilicians, not come to his aid; for he would not accept Syrians as mercenaries because of their inborn hostility toward the nation.
After killing more than six thousand of the rebels, he turned against Arabia, and, conquering the Gileadites and the Moabites there, imposed tribute on them and returned to Amathus. When Theodorus, terrified by his successes, abandoned the fortress, Alexander took it deserted and razed it. Then, engaging Obedas king of the Arabs, who had set an ambush for him in the region of Gaulanitis, he fell into the trap and lost his whole
He lost his army there, crushed together in a deep ravine and trampled by the sheer mass of camels. He himself escaped to Jerusalem, but the scale of the disaster provoked a nation that already hated him into rebellion. Even so he proved stronger this time, and in a series of battles killed no fewer than fifty thousand Jews over six years. Yet he took no joy in these victories, since he was wearing down his own kingdom to win them. So he laid down his weapons and tried instead to come to terms with his subjects through negotiation.
But this only made them hate him more, both for his change of heart and for the unpredictability of his temper. When he asked what he could do to pacify them, they told him: die. A dead man might just possibly be reconciled to people he had wronged so grievously. At the same time they sent for Demetrius, known as Akairos. He readily answered their call, hoping for greater gains, and when he arrived with an army the Jews joined forces with his allies near Shechem.
Alexander met them both with a thousand cavalry and eight thousand mercenary infantry, along with about ten thousand Jews still loyal to him. His opponents had three thousand cavalry and fourteen thousand infantry. Before the armies clashed, the two kings tried, through public appeals, to win over each other's troops — Demetrius hoping to detach Alexander's mercenaries, Alexander hoping to win back the Jews fighting alongside Demetrius. But when neither the Jews nor the Greeks abandoned their loyalties, the matter was settled by arms. Demetrius won the battle, even though many of Alexander's mercenaries displayed great courage and skill.
Yet the outcome of the engagement turned out contrary to what either side expected: the very men who had summoned Demetrius did not stay with him even in victory, while six thousand Jews, moved to pity by Alexander's reversal of fortune, went over to him as he fled into the mountains. Demetrius could not withstand this shift; reckoning that Alexander was now capable of fighting again, and that the whole nation might drift back to him, he withdrew. Even so, the greater part of the people did not lay down their quarrel with Alexander once his allies had retreated, and the war against him went on relentlessly,
until, after killing great numbers, he drove the rest into the town of Bemeselis, took it too, and led the captives back to Jerusalem. His rage carried him, through sheer excess, into an act of impiety: of the prisoners he had taken, he crucified eight hundred in the middle of the city, and had their wives and children slaughtered before their eyes — all while he sat drinking, reclining among his concubines and looking on.
Such terror gripped the people that eight thousand of his opponents fled that very night beyond the borders of Judea altogether, and did not return until Alexander's death. Only by such deeds did he manage, late and with difficulty, to bring peace to his kingdom and lay down his arms.
Then a new source of turmoil arose: Antiochus, also called Dionysus, a brother of Demetrius and the last of the line of Seleucus. Alexander, fearing that Antiochus, who had set out to campaign against the Arabs, might turn against him instead, dug a deep trench across the stretch of land between the hill country above Antipatris and the shore at Joppa, raised a high wall in front of the trench, and built wooden towers to block off the easy points of entry. But this did not succeed in stopping Antiochus: he burned the towers, filled in the trench, and drove his army through with the rest of his force.
Setting aside for the moment his revenge on the man who had tried to hinder him, he marched at once against the Arabs. Their king withdrew into the more favorable parts of the country for battle, then suddenly wheeled his cavalry — ten thousand strong — and fell upon Antiochus's disordered troops. In the fierce battle that followed, so long as Antiochus lived his army held its ground, even though the Arabs were cutting them down without mercy.
But once he fell — for he had always been the first to risk himself in support of his hard-pressed men — the whole army broke. Most of them perished, either in the battle itself or in the flight that followed, and those who escaped to the village of Kana all died there, save a few, for lack of provisions. After this, the people of Damascus, out of hatred for Ptolemy son of Mennaeus, invited Aretas in and made him king of Coele-Syria.
He marched against Judea, defeated Alexander in battle, and then withdrew under a treaty. Alexander, for his part, took Pella, then advanced on Gerasa, again coveting Theodorus's possessions; he walled the garrison off with a triple line of siege-works and took the place by force. He also subdued Golan, Seleucia, and the region called the Ravine of Antiochus.
In addition he captured the strong fortress of Gamala, removed its commander Demetrius from office on numerous charges, and returned to Judea, having completed three years of campaigning. The nation welcomed him gladly because of his successes, but the very rest from war brought on the beginning of an illness. Afflicted by fevers that recurred every fourth day, he thought he could shake off the sickness by throwing himself once more into action.
So he committed himself to ill-timed campaigns, forcing his body beyond its strength for the sake of activity, and it gave out. He died, in fact, in the midst of turmoil, having reigned twenty-seven years. He left the kingdom to his wife Alexandra, convinced that the Jews would submit to her more readily than to anyone else, since she was as far removed as possible from his own cruelty and had opposed his lawless acts, which had won her the people's goodwill.
And her hope was not disappointed: the woman held the throne securely, on the strength of her reputation for piety. She was scrupulous above all in observing the ancestral law, and from the outset excluded from public life those who transgressed the sacred laws. She had two sons by Alexander. The elder, Hyrcanus, she appointed high priest, both because of his age and because he was
too sluggish by nature to trouble himself with affairs of state generally; the younger, Aristobulus, she kept as a private citizen because of his fiery temperament. Into her administration crept the Pharisees, a group of Jews reputed to be more scrupulously pious than the rest and more exact in their exposition of the laws. Alexandra deferred to them to an extraordinary degree, being wholly given over to religion. They, for their part, gradually took advantage of the woman's simplicity,
until they had become, in effect, the administrators of the whole state, free to banish and recall whomever they wished, to release and to imprison. In short, the enjoyment of royal power was theirs, while the expense and the difficulties fell to Alexandra. She proved formidable in managing the larger affairs of state: she kept building up her forces until she had doubled them, and gathered no small body of foreign troops, so that she not only held her own nation in check
but was also feared by foreign rulers. Yet while she ruled everyone else, the Pharisees ruled her. They put to death, for instance, a certain Diogenes, a prominent man who had been a friend of Alexander, charging him with having advised the king in the matter of the eight hundred men who had been crucified. They kept pressing Alexandra to have the rest of those who had provoked Alexander against the victims put to death as well; and yielding
to her own superstitious fear, she let them kill whomever they pleased. Those in danger who seemed to be of the highest standing fled to Aristobulus, and he persuaded his mother to spare them, out of respect for their rank, but to send them out of the city if she did not consider them innocent. So, once granted this reprieve, they scattered throughout the country. Alexandra also sent an army against Damascus, on the pretext that Ptolemy
was continually harassing the city, but it accomplished nothing of note. She also won over, through treaties and gifts, Tigranes, king of Armenia, who was encamped before Ptolemais and besieging Cleopatra. But he broke off the siege because of unrest at home, after Lucullus had invaded Armenia. Meanwhile, while Alexandra lay ill, her younger son Aristobulus seized the moment, gathered his household servants — of whom he had many,
all devoted to him because of his fiery spirit — and took control of every fortress in the land. With the money these yielded he gathered mercenaries and had himself proclaimed king. Hyrcanus, distressed at this, was pitied by his mother, who confined Aristobulus's wife and children in the Antonia — a fortress adjoining the northern side of the Temple, formerly called, as I have said, the Baris,
but later renamed, once Antony came to prominence, just as, from Augustus and Agrippa, the cities Sebaste and Agrippias took their names. Before Alexandra could move against Aristobulus for overturning his brother's rule, she died, having governed for nine years. Hyrcanus was heir to the whole kingdom, which she had entrusted to him even while she lived, but Aristobulus surpassed him in power and in spirit.
When the two came to a decisive clash near Jericho, most of Hyrcanus's men deserted him and went over to Aristobulus. Hyrcanus, with those who remained loyal, managed to escape first to the Antonia and seize control of the hostages held there for security — these being Aristobulus's wife and children. Before the affair could turn to real bloodshed, however, the brothers reached an agreement: Aristobulus would be king, while Hyrcanus, stepping aside,
would enjoy every other honor due to a king's brother. On these terms they were reconciled in the Temple, and, with the people standing around them, embraced each other warmly and exchanged houses — Aristobulus moving into the palace, and Hyrcanus withdrawing into Aristobulus's own house. But fear now fell upon the rest of Aristobulus's opponents, since he had won power against all expectation, and above all upon Antipater, who had long been his enemy.
Antipater was an Idumaean by birth, and by virtue of his ancestry, his wealth, and his general power he stood foremost among his people. It was he who persuaded Hyrcanus, once he had taken refuge with Aretas, king of Arabia, to try to recover his kingdom, and who persuaded Aretas to receive Hyrcanus and restore him to power — heaping abuse on Aristobulus's character, and praising Hyrcanus at length,
urging Aretas to receive him, and arguing that it was fitting for the ruler of so splendid a kingdom to extend a helping hand to a man who had been wronged — and Hyrcanus had indeed been wronged, deprived of the rule that belonged to him by right of primogeniture. Having thus prepared them both, he took Hyrcanus by night and slipped away from the city, and by hard, continuous flight made it safely to the place called Petra, the royal seat of Arabia. There he handed Hyrcanus
over to Aretas, and by much flattering conversation and many gifts persuaded him to supply a force to restore him. This force numbered fifty thousand, infantry and cavalry combined, and against it Aristobulus could not hold his ground; defeated in the first engagement, he was driven back into Jerusalem. He would soon have been taken by storm, had not Scaurus, the Roman commander, intervened at just that moment
and lifted the siege. Scaurus had been sent into Syria from Armenia by Pompey the Great, who was then at war with Tigranes; arriving at Damascus, which had recently been captured by Metellus and Lollius, he removed them from it, and, once he learned of events in Judea, hurried there as if to seize a windfall. As soon as he entered the country, envoys came to him at once from each of the brothers, each begging for his help.
But three hundred talents from Aristobulus outweighed the claims of justice: on receiving this sum, Scaurus sent word to Hyrcanus and the Arabs, threatening them with Rome and Pompey if they did not lift the siege. Aretas, alarmed, withdrew from Judea to Philadelphia, and Scaurus went back to Damascus. But Aristobulus was not content merely to have avoided capture; he gathered his whole force
and pursued the retreating enemy. Engaging them near the place called Papyron, he killed more than six thousand, among them Phallion, the brother of Antipater. Hyrcanus and Antipater, stripped of Arab support, now shifted their hopes to the other side; and when Pompey, advancing through Syria, arrived at Damascus, they took refuge with him, and, setting gifts aside, used the same arguments they had used with Aretas,
pleading with him to detest Aristobulus's violence and to restore to the kingship the man to whom it belonged, both by character and by seniority. Nor was Aristobulus slow to act; trusting in the bribe he had given Scaurus, he too presented himself, arrayed as splendidly as a king could be. But he found it beneath him to court favor in this way, and, unwilling to lower himself to the demands of the moment, he withdrew from the city
of Dium. Pompey, angered by this, and moved besides by the entreaties of Hyrcanus's party, set out against Aristobulus, bringing with him the Roman army and a large body of allied troops from Syria. Passing by Pella and Scythopolis, he reached Coreae, from which point, going inland, the territory of the Jews begins, and there he heard that Aristobulus had taken refuge at Alexandreium, a fortress
built with the greatest lavishness, set on a high mountain. He sent orders for Aristobulus to come down. The king, though summoned, felt the impulse — natural to one used to command — to risk everything rather than obey; but seeing that his people were terrified, and with his friends urging him to consider that Rome's power was irresistible, he yielded to their advice, went down to Pompey, made a long defense of his right to rule, and then returned to the fortress. Then again,
at his brother's renewed challenge, he came down, spoke on the justice of his claims, and departed again, Pompey raising no objection. He was caught between hope and fear: he would come down as if to persuade Pompey to concede everything to him, and then go back up to the citadel, so as not to seem to have given himself up too soon. But when Pompey finally ordered him to surrender his fortresses, and instructed the garrison commanders — who were bound to obey only written orders in his own hand —
he forced Aristobulus to write to each of them, telling them to withdraw. Aristobulus did as he was ordered, but in anger withdrew to Jerusalem and began preparing for war against Pompey. Pompey, giving him no time to prepare, followed at once, his resolve strengthened further by news, brought to him near Jericho, of the death of Mithridates. It was there, in Jericho, that the richest part of Judea is found, abundant in palms and in balsam,
which the people gather by slitting the trunks with sharp stones and collecting what oozes, weeping, from the cuts. Pompey camped there one evening, and at dawn hastened toward Jerusalem. Terrified at his approach, Aristobulus came to him as a suppliant, promising money and offering to submit himself and the city, and so managed to calm Pompey's anger. But none of what had been agreed came to pass:
for the men loyal to Aristobulus would not even let Gabinius, who had been sent to collect the money, into the city. Furious at this, Pompey kept Aristobulus under guard, went up to the city himself, and surveyed it to determine how best to attack — seeing that the strength of its walls made it hard to approach, that the ravine before them was formidable, and that the Temple within the ravine was fortified more strongly still, so that even if the city itself fell, there would be a second
This was a refuge for the defenders. For a long time the people inside were undecided, until factional strife broke out: Aristobulus's supporters wanted to fight and rescue the king, while Hyrcanus's supporters wanted to open the gates to Pompey. Fear of Roman discipline drove many of the people to side with the latter. Beaten, Aristobulus's party withdrew into the temple and cut away the bridge connecting it to the city, preparing to hold out to the end.
The other faction let the Romans into the city and handed over the palace. Pompey sent in one of his own officers, Piso, with a force to take charge of these; Piso stationed garrisons through the city, and since he could not persuade by argument any of those who had fled into the temple to come to terms, he made the surrounding ground ready for an assault, with Hyrcanus's men eager in both planning and service. Pompey himself set up on the north side, filling the ditch and the whole ravine there, his troops hauling in timber from everywhere. It was hard to fill the ravine, its depth being immense and the Jews blocking every attempt from above; the work would have gone on forever for the Romans had Pompey not watched for the Sabbaths, on which the Jews, out of religious scruple, refrain from all labor. He raised his siege-mound on those days, keeping his soldiers back from hand-to-hand fighting, since on the Sabbath the Jews defend only their own persons. Once the ravine was filled, he set high towers on the mound, brought up the siege engines shipped from Tyre, and began battering the wall; the defenders' stone-throwers kept driving off those working from above. The towers on this side held out longest, being finer and larger than the rest.
The Romans suffered heavily here, and Pompey marveled at the Jews' endurance in general, and above all at how they let nothing interrupt their worship even amid a hail of missiles. As if the city were at perfect peace, the daily sacrifices, libations, and every rite of divine service were carried out to the last detail, and even at the moment of capture, while being cut down beside the altar, they did not abandon their daily observances. In the third month of the siege the Romans finally brought down one of the towers and broke into the temple. The first man bold enough to scale the wall was Faustus Cornelius, son of Sulla, followed by two centurions, Furius and Fabius, each with his own company; surrounding the temple on every side, they killed some as they fled for refuge to the sanctuary, others as they made a brief stand. Many priests, seeing the enemy bearing down on them swords in hand, stayed calmly at their duties and were cut down while pouring libations and burning incense, putting the service of God above their own survival.
Most of the dead, though, fell at the hands of their own countrymen in the opposing faction, and many, in desperation, threw themselves from the cliffs; some near the wall, driven mad by their helplessness, set fires and burned along with them. Twelve thousand Jews were killed; very few Romans died, though more were wounded. Nothing in that catastrophe struck the nation harder than the exposure, by foreigners, of the holy place that until then had been unseen. Pompey, with his staff, went into the sanctuary — a place only the high priest was permitted to enter — and viewed what was inside: the lampstand and its lamps, the table, the libation vessels, the censers, all of solid gold, a great heap of spices, and sacred treasure amounting to two thousand talents.
He touched none of this, nor any other sacred object, and the day after the capture he ordered the temple attendants to purify the sanctuary and resume the customary sacrifices. He then reappointed Hyrcanus high priest, both for the eagerness he had shown throughout the siege and because he had kept the population of the countryside from joining Aristobulus's war effort — by this, as a good commander should, he won the people's support more through goodwill than through fear. Among the captives was Aristobulus's father-in-law, who was also his uncle. Pompey executed by the axe those most responsible for the war, while rewarding Faustus and the men who had fought bravely with him with splendid decorations, and imposed tribute on the country and on Jerusalem.
He stripped the nation of the cities it had taken in Coele-Syria, placing them under the Roman governor appointed over that region, and confined the Jews within their own borders alone. He rebuilt Gadara, which the Jews had razed, as a favor to a certain Demetrius of Gadara, one of his own freedmen. He also freed from Jewish control the inland cities that had escaped destruction — Hippos, Scythopolis, Pella, Samaria, Jamnia, Marisa, Azotus, and Arethusa — and likewise the coastal cities of Gaza, Joppa, and Dora, along with the city once called Strato's Tower, later rebuilt with magnificent works by King Herod and renamed Caesarea. All of these he restored to their native inhabitants and assigned to the province of Syria.
He put this province, together with Judea and the territory as far as Egypt and the Euphrates, under Scaurus's administration, with two legions, while he himself hurried through Cilicia to Rome, bringing Aristobulus and his family as captives. Aristobulus had two daughters and two sons; one son, Alexander, escaped along the way, while the younger, Antigonus, was carried to Rome with his sisters.
Meanwhile Scaurus invaded Arabia but was kept from Petra by the difficult terrain, though he ravaged the surrounding country widely, suffering hardship in the process since his army was starving. Hyrcanus came to his aid by sending supplies through Antipater. Scaurus, knowing Antipater was on friendly terms with Aretas, sent him to negotiate an end to the war for money. The Arab king agreed to pay three hundred talents, and on these terms Scaurus withdrew his forces from Arabia.
Alexander, Aristobulus's son who had escaped from Pompey, in time gathered a considerable force and became a heavy burden to Hyrcanus, overrunning Judea; it seemed he would soon overthrow him, since he was already bold enough to attempt rebuilding the wall in Jerusalem that Pompey had torn down. But Gabinius, sent to Syria as Scaurus's successor, proved himself a capable man in many affairs and marched against Alexander. Alexander, alarmed at his approach, gathered an even larger force, amounting to ten thousand infantry and fifteen hundred cavalry, and fortified strategic places — Alexandreion, Hyrcania, and Machaerus, near the Arabian mountains.
Gabinius sent Mark Antony ahead with part of the army and himself followed with the whole force. Antipater's picked men and the rest of the Jewish contingent, commanded by Malichus and Peitholaus, joined Antony's officers and went out to meet Alexander; before long Gabinius arrived with the main body. Faced with the united enemy force, Alexander did not stand his ground but withdrew, and near Jerusalem was forced to give battle. He lost six thousand men in the fighting — three thousand killed and three thousand taken prisoner — and fled with the survivors to Alexandreion. When Gabinius arrived there and found many entrenched, he first tried, before fighting, to win them over by promising pardon for their offenses; when they would not listen to reason, he killed many of them and shut the rest up in the fortress. In this battle the commander Mark Antony distinguished himself, always brave everywhere but never so much as here.
Leaving men to reduce the fortress, Gabinius himself moved on, restoring cities that had not been destroyed and rebuilding those that had. At his order Scythopolis, Samaria, Anthedon, Apollonia, Jamnia, Raphia, Marisa, Adora, Gabala, Azotus, and many others were resettled, their inhabitants gladly flocking to each. After seeing to this, he returned to Alexandreion and pressed the siege harder, until Alexander, giving up on the whole enterprise, sent envoys asking pardon for his offenses and surrendered the captured fortresses — Hyrcania and Machaerus, and later Alexandreion as well. Gabinius, at the urging of Alexander's mother, demolished all of these so they could not again serve as a base for a second war; she came to appease Gabinius out of fear for the captives at Rome, her husband and her other children. After this, Gabinius brought Hyrcanus back to Jerusalem and entrusted him with the care of the temple, while setting the rest of the administration in the hands of the leading men.
He divided the whole nation into five councils, assigning one to Jerusalem, one to Gadara, one to render account at Amathus, a fourth allotted to Jericho, and for the fifth Sepphoris was designated a city of Galilee. The people, glad to be freed from rule by a single man, were governed from then on by an aristocracy.
Not long after, however, trouble began again for them: Aristobulus escaped from Rome and once more rallied many Jews to him, some eager for change, others devoted to him from before. At first he seized Alexandreion and tried to refortify it, but when Gabinius sent an army against him under Sisenna, Antony, and Servianus, he learned of it and withdrew to Machaerus. There he discharged the useless crowd and kept with him only the armed men, about eight thousand, among them Peitholaus, the former deputy commander at Jerusalem, who had deserted to him with a thousand men. The Romans pursued, and in the engagement that followed Aristobulus's men held out bravely for a long while, but at last, overwhelmed by the Romans, five thousand fell, about two thousand fled to a hill, and the remaining thousand, with Aristobulus, cut through the Roman line and made for Machaerus. There, on the first night, the king camped among the ruins, hoping to gather another force once the fighting eased, and fortified the stronghold as best he could; but when the Romans attacked, he held out for two days beyond what his strength allowed and was captured, along with his son Antigonus, who had fled with him from Rome. He was taken in chains to Gabinius, and from Gabinius back to Rome, where the Senate imprisoned him; his children, however, Gabinius sent on to Judea, having promised this by letter to Aristobulus's wife in exchange for the surrender of the strongholds.
When Gabinius was setting out to campaign against the Parthians, Ptolemy stood in his way; turning back from the Euphrates, Ptolemy led him down into Egypt, making full use along the way of Hyrcanus and Antipater for every need — Antipater supplied money, weapons, grain, and auxiliaries, and persuaded the Jews guarding the approaches at Pelusium to let Gabinius pass. Meanwhile the rest of Syria rose up at Gabinius's departure, and Alexander, Aristobulus's son, again incited the Jews to revolt; gathering a very large force, he set out to destroy every Roman in the country. Alarmed at this, Gabinius, who had just returned from Egypt in haste because of the disturbances there, sent Antipater ahead to some of the rebels and won them over by persuasion; but thirty thousand remained with Alexander, and he was determined to fight. So Gabinius marched out to battle; the Jews came to meet him, and in the clash near Mount Tabor ten thousand were killed and the rest of the multitude scattered in flight.
Gabinius then came to Jerusalem and settled the constitution as Antipater wished. From there he marched out, defeated the Nabateans in battle, and secretly sent away Mithridates and Orsanes, who had fled from the Parthians, though he told his soldiers they had escaped. At this point Crassus arrived as his successor and took over Syria. Setting out on his campaign against the Parthians, Crassus stripped away all the remaining gold from the temple at Jerusalem and carried off the two thousand talents that Pompey had left untouched. He crossed the Euphrates and there perished, along with his army — a matter not to be told here. After Crassus, Cassius checked the Parthians, who were eager to cross over into Syria, by escaping into the province and securing it.
He then hurried against the Jews, took Tarichaeae, and sold about thirty thousand Jews into slavery; he also killed Peitholaus, who was stirring up Aristobulus's partisans, and Antipater advised this killing. Antipater, who had married a woman of noble Arabian birth named Cypros, had four sons by her — Phasael and the future king Herod, and besides these, Joseph, Pheroras, and a daughter, Salome. He had won over the most powerful men everywhere with ties of friendship and hospitality, and above all the Arab king, through his marriage connection; and when he took up the war against Aristobulus, he sent his children to the Arab king for safekeeping. Cassius, having forced Alexander by treaty to keep the peace, returned to the Euphrates to block the Parthian crossing — a matter we shall speak of elsewhere.
Meanwhile Caesar, after Pompey and the Senate had fled across the Ionian Sea and he had made himself master of Rome and of the whole state, released Aristobulus from his chains, gave him two legions, and sent him quickly to Syria, hoping to win over that province and, through him, the affairs of Judea, with ease. But envy outran both Aristobulus's zeal and Caesar's hopes: he was poisoned by men loyal to Pompey, and for a long time was denied even burial in his native land — his body lay preserved in honey until Antony sent it to the Jews to be buried in the royal tombs. His son Alexander was also put to death, beheaded at Antioch by Scipio on Pompey's orders, after a formal charge was brought against him for the harm he had done to the Romans. His siblings were taken in by Ptolemy, son of Mennaeus, who ruled Chalcis under Lebanon; he sent his son Philippion to fetch them at Ascalon. Philippion took Antigonus and his sisters away from Aristobulus's widow and brought them to his father, but, smitten with love, married one of the sisters himself — and was afterward killed by his own father because of her, for Ptolemy killed his son and married Alexandra himself.
...because of this marriage he showed himself more solicitous toward his brothers-in-law.
After Pompey's death, Antipater changed sides and cultivated Caesar. When Mithridates of Pergamum, leading the force he was bringing against Egypt, was held up at Ascalon and blocked from the approaches to Pelusium, Antipater, drawing on his connections as a guest-friend, persuaded the Arabs to come to his aid and himself arrived leading close to three thousand Jewish men-at-arms. He also roused the powerful men of Syria to lend assistance—Ptolemy, the settler of the Lebanon, and Iamblichus—through whom the cities of that region readily joined the war effort.
Mithridates, now emboldened by the strength Antipater had added to him, marched on Pelusium, and when he was prevented from passing through, laid siege to the city. In the assault Antipater distinguished himself above all: breaching the section of the wall opposite him, he was the first to leap into the city with his men. Pelusium was taken. But as Mithridates pressed on, he was again blocked, this time by the inhabitants of the district called the Land of Onias—Jews of Egyptian residence. Antipater persuaded these not merely to stop obstructing but to supply the army with provisions, with the result that even the people of Memphis no longer offered resistance and instead went over to Mithridates of their own accord.
Mithridates, having now made his way round the Delta, engaged the rest of the Egyptians in battle at a place called the Camp of the Jews. He and his entire right wing were in danger in the fighting when Antipater came round along the riverbank and rescued him—for on his own side, holding the left wing, he had already prevailed—then fell upon the men pursuing Mithridates, killed many of them, and pursued the survivors so far that he even captured their camp. He lost only eighty of his own men, while Mithridates lost about eight hundred in the rout. Saved beyond his hope, Mithridates became an unstinting witness before Caesar to Antipater's achievements.
Caesar at that time spurred the man on with praise and with hopes for the dangers he would still face on his behalf; and in all of these Antipater proved the most reckless of fighters, wounded many times over nearly his whole body, bearing on it the marks of his courage. Later, when he had settled affairs in Egypt and returned to Syria, Caesar granted him Roman citizenship, exemption from taxation, and, out of honor and goodwill, made him an object of envy, and on his account confirmed Hyrcanus in the high priesthood as well.
About this same time Antigonus, son of Aristobulus, who was present before Caesar, unexpectedly became the cause of still greater advancement for Antipater. For rather than lamenting that his father seemed to have been poisoned over his quarrels with Pompey, and rather than reproaching Scipio's cruelty toward his brother, and mixing no envious passion into his plea for pity, he instead came forward and accused Hyrcanus and Antipater of this: that they had most lawlessly driven him and his brothers from all their ancestral land, and that out of excess they themselves had committed many outrages against the nation, and that the force they had sent to Egypt they had sent not out of goodwill toward Caesar but out of fear stemming from their old quarrels and to shed their friendship with Pompey.
In response to this Antipater tore off his cloak and displayed the number of his wounds, saying that concerning his goodwill toward Caesar there was no need of words on his part, for his body cried out even while he kept silent. As for Antigonus's audacity, he said he marveled at it—that a son of an enemy of Rome, and of a fugitive from Rome, with a hereditary bent for revolution and faction himself, should attempt to bring accusations against others before the Roman commander and try to gain some advantage, when he ought to be content simply to be alive; for even now he craved power not so much out of need as in order to come forward and set the Jews at odds with one another and use against those who had given him his opportunities the very resources they had given him. Hearing this, Caesar declared Hyrcanus the more worthy of the high priesthood, and gave Antipater his choice of office. Antipater, leaving the measure of his honor to the one who was honoring him, was appointed procurator of all Judea, and obtained in addition permission to rebuild the walls of his homeland, which had been torn down.
Caesar ordered these honors inscribed on the Capitol, as a mark both of his own justice and of the man's future merit. Antipater, having escorted Caesar out of Syria, returned to Judea. There he first rebuilt the wall of his homeland that Pompey had torn down, and then went about the country suppressing the disturbances that had broken out, acting toward each community both as one who threatens and as one who advises: that if they held to Hyrcanus's cause they would live in prosperity and quiet, enjoying their own possessions and the common peace; but if they were persuaded by the cold hopes of those bent on revolution for their own private gain, they would find him a master instead of a protector and Hyrcanus a tyrant instead of a king, and the Romans and Caesar enemies instead of rulers and friends—for they would not tolerate the removal from power of the man they themselves had installed.
Even as he said this he was in fact establishing his own control over the country, seeing that Hyrcanus was sluggish and too feeble for kingship. Phasael, the eldest of his sons, he appointed governor of Jerusalem and its surrounding district, and Herod, the next after him, though quite young, he sent out on equal terms to Galilee.
Herod, being by nature vigorous, immediately found material for his ambition. Catching Hezekiah, the brigand chief, who was overrunning the districts bordering Syria with a very large band, he seized and killed him along with many of the brigands. This above all won him the gratitude of the Syrians—indeed Herod was celebrated in the villages and in the cities as one who had restored peace to them and safeguarded their possessions. It was through this that he also became known to Sextus Caesar, a relative of the great Caesar and governor of Syria; and rivaling his brother's good repute, Phasael too competed in the same honorable contest, winning over the people of Jerusalem to greater goodwill toward himself, and though he held the city in his own hands, never abusing his power in any tasteless way. From this Antipater came to enjoy from the nation a royal court of attendance and honors from everyone as though he were master of all—yet he himself never shifted at all from his goodwill or loyalty toward Hyrcanus.
But it is impossible in times of prosperity to escape envy. Hyrcanus was already, quietly, on his own, being gnawed by resentment at the young men's renown, and above all he was distressed by Herod's successes and by the constant stream of messengers proclaiming each new triumph; and many of the envious men at court, whom either the sons' or Antipater's moderation had offended, incited him further, saying that in yielding affairs to Antipater and his sons he sat holding only the name of king, stripped of power—"How long will you go on being deceived into raising up kings against yourself? They no longer even pretend to be mere stewards—they are openly masters, having pushed you aside, since without your order, without your command, Herod has put to death so many men in violation of Jewish law. If he is not king but still a private citizen, he ought to come before the court and answer for himself, to you and to the ancestral laws, which do not permit the killing of men without trial."
By these words Hyrcanus was gradually inflamed, and finally, his anger breaking out, he summoned Herod to be tried. Herod, both because his father urged it and because circumstances allowed him confidence, went up, but first secured Galilee with garrisons. He went with a strong body of troops, so that he would neither seem, by bringing an impressive force, to be intent on overthrowing Hyrcanus, nor fall unguarded into the grip of envy. Sextus Caesar, fearing for the young man—lest, cut off among his enemies, he should come to harm—sent men to Hyrcanus expressly instructing him to acquit Herod of the capital charge; and Hyrcanus, who in any case was so inclined, for he loved Herod, voted for his acquittal.
Herod, however, supposing that he had escaped against the king's wishes, withdrew to Damascus, to Sextus, preparing not to obey again if summoned. And once more the wicked men provoked Hyrcanus, saying that Herod had gone off in anger and was making preparations against him. The king, believing this, did not know what to do, seeing that the disagreement had grown greater. But when Herod was appointed general of Coele-Syria and Samaria by Sextus Caesar, he became formidable, not only through the goodwill of the nation but through military power as well, and Hyrcanus fell into the utmost fear, expecting at any moment that he would march against him with an army.
Nor was he wrong in his surmise: Herod, in anger over the threat of that trial, gathered an army and led it against Jerusalem to depose Hyrcanus. And he would have done this without delay, had not his father and his brother gone out to meet him and checked his impulse, urging him to measure his vengeance by threat and menace alone, and to spare the king, through whom he had risen to such power. He ought, they said, if he had been provoked by being summoned to trial, at least to give thanks for his acquittal, and not meet harshness with harshness while being ungrateful for his deliverance; and if one must reckon that the outcomes of war are decided by God, then the injustice lay more heavily on the side of the campaign, since he was about to engage a king who was also his foster-companion, and often his benefactor, never harsh toward him except insofar as, swayed by wicked advisers, he had cast a shadow of wrongdoing over him.
Herod was persuaded by this, judging that it was enough for his future hopes to have simply displayed his strength to the nation. Meanwhile there arose around Apamea a Roman disturbance and civil war: Caecilius Bassus, out of loyalty to Pompey, treacherously murdered Sextus Caesar and took over his forces, while Caesar's other generals gathered an army to avenge the murder. To these men, both because of the one killed and because of the one still living—both being his friends—Antipater, through his sons, sent military support. As the war dragged on, Murcus arrived from Italy as Sextus's successor; and at this same time there broke out among the Romans the great war of Cassius and Brutus, who had treacherously killed Caesar after he had held power for three years and seven months.
After the enormous upheaval caused by this murder, and with the leading men split into factions, each moved according to his own hopes toward whatever he judged to his advantage; and so Cassius came into Syria to take over the forces around Apamea. There he reconciled Bassus and Murcus and their divided legions, freed Apamea from siege, and then, taking command of the army himself, went about the cities levying tribute and exacting payments beyond their capacity. When the Jews too were ordered to contribute seven hundred talents, Antipater, fearing Cassius's threats, divided the task of collecting the money quickly among his sons and certain other associates, among them a certain Malichus, one of his rivals—so pressing was the necessity.
Herod was the first to placate Cassius, bringing in a hundred talents from his own share in Galilee, and for this he was counted among his closest friends. The rest Cassius reviled for their slowness and vented his anger on their cities. Gophna and Emmaus and two other, lesser towns he reduced to slavery, and he was on his way to put Malichus to death as well, for not having collected his share promptly, when Antipater averted his ruin, and that of the other cities, by quickly winning over Cassius with a hundred talents.
Malichus, however, once Cassius had withdrawn, did not repay Antipater's kindness with gratitude, but instead began plotting against the very man who had so often saved him, eager to remove the obstacle to his own crimes. Antipater, fearing the man's power and cunning, crossed the Jordan to gather an army in defense against the plot. But Malichus, though found out, got the better of Antipater's sons through sheer shamelessness: by many protestations and oaths he beguiled both Phasael, the guardian of Jerusalem, and Herod, who held command of the forces, into becoming intermediaries for him with their father—so that once again he was saved through Antipater's intervention, who persuaded Murcus, then governor of Syria, who had been intent on putting Malichus to death for his rebellious conduct.
When war broke out against Cassius and Brutus on the part of the young Caesar and Antony, Cassius and Murcus, gathering an army out of Syria, and since Herod seemed to contribute a great deal to their needs, appointed him at that time overseer of all Syria, giving him both infantry and cavalry, and Cassius promised that after the war was settled he would make him king of Judea as well. But it turned out that the very strength of his son and this hope became the cause of Antipater's destruction: for fearing these things, Malichus bribed one of the royal cupbearers with money to give Antipater poison. And so, having become the victim of Malichus's crime, he died after a banquet—a man in other respects vigorous in the conduct of affairs, and one who had both recovered the throne for Hyrcanus and preserved it for him.
Malichus, suspected of the poisoning, denied it and won over the angry populace, and made himself still more powerful by mustering men-at-arms; for he supposed that Herod would not remain quiet—and indeed Herod at once appeared, leading an army to avenge his father. But when his brother Phasael advised him not to move openly against the man, lest the populace be thrown into factional strife, for the moment Herod received Malichus when he came to defend himself, and professed to absolve him of suspicion, while conducting a splendid funeral procession for his father.
Turning then to Samaria, which was in the grip of civil strife, he restored order to the city; then, at the time of a festival, he returned to Jerusalem leading his troops. And when Hyrcanus sent word—for Malichus, in his fear of Herod's approach, urged him to do so—forbidding foreign troops to be brought in among the ritually purified native population, Herod disregarded both the pretext and the one giving the order and entered by night. And again Malichus, coming to him, wept over Antipater; Herod, with difficulty, pretended in return, restraining his anger, and in letters to Cassius, who hated Malichus in any case, he lamented his father's murder. Cassius, writing back, ordered him to avenge his father's murderer, and secretly instructed the tribunes under his own command to assist Herod in this just act.
And when, after Herod had taken Laodicea, the powerful men from every quarter gathered bringing gifts and crowns, Herod set aside this occasion for his vengeance. Malichus, growing suspicious, as this took place at Tyre, resolved secretly to withdraw his son, who was being held hostage among the Tyrians, and made ready to flee himself into Judea; and it was his despair of safety that spurred him to this plan.
and forced King Antiochus to surrender Samosata. Meanwhile Herod's affairs in Judea were falling apart. He had left his brother Joseph in charge of everything, with orders to attempt nothing against Antigonus until his own return, since Machaeras had not proved a reliable ally, to judge from what he had done. But when Joseph heard that his brother was far away, he ignored those orders and marched on Jericho with five cohorts that Machaeras had sent along with him, meaning to seize the grain at the height of the harvest. The enemy attacked him in the mountains and difficult terrain; he himself died, showing great courage in the battle, and the whole Roman force was destroyed, for the cohorts were newly levied from Syria and had no admixture of the so-called veteran soldiers able to support men inexperienced in war.
Antigonus was not satisfied with the victory. He carried his rage so far as to abuse Joseph's corpse: once he held the bodies, he cut off his head, even though Pheroras, Joseph's brother, offered fifty talents as ransom for it. After Antigonus's victory, affairs in Galilee were thrown into such turmoil that his partisans there seized the leading men who favored Herod and drowned them in the lake. Much of Idumea also changed sides, where Machaeras was fortifying one of the strongholds, called Gitta. Herod had not yet learned of any of this. After the fall of Samosata, Antony placed Sossius in charge of Syria and ordered him to support Herod against Antigonus, then withdrew himself to Egypt. Sossius sent two legions ahead into Judea to assist Herod and followed close behind with the rest of his force.
While Herod was at Daphne, near Antioch, clear dreams foretold his brother's death, and as he leapt from his bed in distress, messengers brought news of the disaster. He mourned the loss only briefly, put off the greater part of his grief, and pressed on against the enemy, marching beyond what his strength allowed. Reaching Lebanon, he gathered eight hundred men from around the mountain as allies, and one Roman legion joined him there. With these forces, without waiting even a single day, he invaded Galilee and drove the enemy, who had come out to meet him, back to the position they had abandoned earlier.
He kept attacking the fort without pause, but before he could take it a violent storm forced him to encamp in the nearby villages. When, a few days later, the second legion arrived from Antony and joined him, the enemy, fearing his strength, abandoned the stronghold during the night. From there he pressed on through Jericho, hurrying to hunt down his brother's killers as quickly as possible. There a strange, providential thing happened to him, from which, saved against all expectation, he won a reputation as a man especially beloved by God: many of the leading men had dined with him that evening, and once the banquet broke up and everyone had left, the house immediately collapsed. Reading this as a common sign of both the dangers and the deliverance awaiting him in the coming war, he set his army moving at dawn.
About six thousand of the enemy came running down from the mountains and tested his front ranks, not daring to close with the Romans hand to hand but hurling stones and javelins from a distance, wounding many. In this skirmish Herod himself, riding past, was struck in the side by a javelin. Wanting to prevail not only through his men's daring but also through sheer numbers, Antigonus sent a certain Pappus, one of his companions, with an army around to Samaria. Pappus's task, then, was to deal with Machaeras, while Herod overran the enemy's territory, destroyed five small towns, killed two thousand of their inhabitants, burned the houses, and returned to camp, quartered near the village called Cana. Each day a great crowd of Jews joined him, from Jericho itself and from the rest of the country, some driven by hatred of Antigonus, others stirred by Herod's successes, though most were moved simply by an irrational hunger for change. Herod hurried to give battle, and Pappus's men, undaunted by either the numbers or the momentum against them, went out eagerly to meet him.
When the fighting began, the rest of the enemy's forces held out only briefly, but Herod, risking himself in memory of his murdered brother and determined to punish those responsible for the killing, quickly overpowered the men before him, then turned again and again against whatever body still held together, pursuing them all. The slaughter was immense: some were driven back into the village they had set out from, while Herod pressed the rearmost and killed without number. He burst in among the enemy inside the village itself; every house was packed with armed men, and the rooftops above were crowded with defenders. Once he had mastered those outside, he tore apart the dwellings and dragged out those hiding within, bringing the roofs down on many at once and destroying them in heaps, while the soldiers met with drawn swords those who scrambled out of the wreckage. So great a heap of corpses piled up that it blocked the roads for the victors.
The enemy could not bear this blow. What remained of their gathered force, once it saw those throughout the village destroyed, scattered in flight, and Herod, at once emboldened by the victory, would have marched straight on Jerusalem had a most violent storm not held him back. This delay proved an obstacle both to his complete triumph and, for Antigonus, to his ruin, since it left him weighing whether to abandon the city already. Toward evening, Herod sent his exhausted friends off to have their bodies tended, and went himself, still warm from his armor, to bathe in rather soldierly fashion, with only a single attendant. Before he reached the bathhouse, one of the enemy ran out to face him with a drawn sword, then a second, a third, and several more after them. These men had fled from the battle armed into the bathhouse and had been crouching there in hiding; but when they saw the king, shock overcame them, and they ran past him trembling, though he stood there unarmed, and made for the exits. By chance none of his other men were present to seize them, and Herod was content simply to have escaped unharmed, so all of them got away.
The next day he beheaded Pappus, Antigonus's general, who had already fallen in the battle, and sent the head to his brother Pheroras as payment for their murdered brother, since it was Pappus who had killed Joseph. Once the storm had passed, he marched on Jerusalem, led his force up to the wall — it was now the third year since he had been declared king at Rome — and encamped before the Temple, on the side vulnerable to attack, the very side by which Pompey too had earlier taken the city. He divided the army for the labor, cut down the suburbs, and ordered three earthworks raised with towers built upon them; then, leaving the most capable of his companions in charge of the works, he went himself to Samaria to marry the daughter of Alexander, son of Aristobulus, who had already been promised to him, as we mentioned, treating the wedding as a mere incident to the siege, since he already held the enemy in contempt.
Having married, he returned to Jerusalem with a larger force. Sossius joined him there with a very large army of cavalry and infantry, which he had sent ahead by the inland route while he himself marched through Phoenicia. Once the whole force was assembled — eleven legions of infantry and six thousand cavalry, apart from the Syrian allies, who were no small part of it — they encamped near the north wall: Herod relying on the Senate's decrees by which he had been declared king, Sossius relying on Antony, who had sent the army under his command to support Herod. The Jewish population throughout the city was in turmoil of every kind. The weaker element, gathered around the Temple, indulged in wild talk more suited to superstition than to the crisis, while the bolder spirits carried out raids of every sort in bands, above all seizing the city's provisions and leaving neither horses nor men any food. The more disciplined part of the fighting men, however, was arrayed for the defense: they kept those building the earthworks away from the wall and constantly devised some new countermeasure against the siege engines. In nothing did they gain the advantage over the enemy so much as in their tunneling.
Against their raids the king devised companies of soldiers to check their sallies, and against the shortage of provisions, supplies brought from a distance. In the fighting itself the Romans had the advantage through skill and experience, though the defenders left no degree of daring untried: openly they clashed with the Romans in the certainty of death, and through tunnels they suddenly appeared in the enemy's midst; before any part of the wall could be brought down, they had already built another in its place. In short, they spared neither their hands nor their ingenuity, determined to hold out to the last. Despite so great a force besieging them, they held out for five months, until some of Herod's picked men, daring to mount the wall, burst into the city, followed by Sossius's centurions.
The area around the Temple was captured first, and once the army poured in everywhere there was boundless slaughter — the Romans enraged by the length of the siege, Herod's Jewish troops determined to leave no rival alive. Great numbers were butchered, crowded together in the alleys, in the houses, and as they fled for refuge to the Temple. There was no pity for infants, for old age, or for the weakness of women; though the king sent word around urging restraint, no one held back his hand, and they went after every age as though possessed. There Antigonus, giving no thought to either his former or his present fortune, came down from the citadel and threw himself at Sossius's feet. Sossius, showing him no pity in his reversal of fortune, laughed at him without restraint and called him "Antigone." Yet he did not release him as one would a woman free of guard, but had him bound and kept under watch.
Herod, now master of his enemies, was anxious also to master his foreign allies, for the throng of foreign troops was eager to see the Temple and the sacred things within the sanctuary. The king, by persuading some, threatening others, and in some cases restraining them outright, held them back, judging the victory harsher than defeat if anything forbidden should be seen by them. He also put a stop to the plundering throughout the city, protesting strongly to Sossius that if the Romans emptied the city of both money and men and left him king over a desert, he would count so vast a slaughter of citizens a poor exchange even for dominion over the whole world. When Sossius replied that it was only fair to let the soldiers plunder in place of pay for the siege, Herod said he would himself distribute the rewards to each man from his own funds. In this way he ransomed what remained of his homeland and kept his promises: he rewarded each soldier splendidly, the officers in proportion, and Sossius most royally of all, so that no one went away wanting for money.
Sossius, having dedicated a golden crown to God, withdrew from Jerusalem, taking Antigonus in chains to Antony. Antigonus, who had clung to life to the very end on a craven hope, met the death his ignoble spirit deserved, by the axe. King Herod, meanwhile, separated out the population of the city: those who had favored his cause he made more loyal still through honors, while those who had sided with Antigonus he put to death. And since money was now scarce, he had whatever ornaments he owned melted down and sent to Antony and his circle.
Yet even this did not buy him complete immunity from harm, for Antony, by now ruined by his passion for Cleopatra, was in every way a slave to his desire. Cleopatra, having worked her way through her own family until none of her blood remained, turned next to murdering outsiders as well, and by slandering the leading men of Syria to Antony induced him to have them put to death, so that she might easily become mistress of each man's property. Extending her greed further still, toward the Jews and the Arabs, she worked to have both peoples' kings, Herod and Malchus, put to death. Antony, however, coming partly to his senses over these demands, judged it impious to kill men so honorable and kings of such standing, and instead turned away the friends closest to them; yet he still cut away much of their territory — including the palm grove at Jericho where balsam is produced — and gave her all the cities within the Eleutherus river except Tyre and Sidon.
Once mistress of these lands, and having escorted Antony as far as the Euphrates on his campaign against the Parthians, Cleopatra came to Judea by way of Apamea and Damascus. There Herod appeased her hostility with great gifts, and also leased back the territories cut away from his kingdom for two hundred talents a year, and escorted her as far as Pelusium, showing her every courtesy. Not long after, Antony returned from Parthia bringing as a captive Artabazes, son of Tigranes, a gift for Cleopatra; for along with the money and all the plunder, the Parthian prince was handed over to her at once.
When the war at Actium broke out, Herod had already prepared to join Antony's expedition, being now free of the other disturbances in Judea and having subdued Hyrcania, a stronghold held by Antigonus's sister. But Cleopatra craftily kept him from sharing in Antony's dangers; for, as we said, plotting against the two kings, she persuaded Antony to entrust to Herod the war against the Arabs, so that whichever side won — if Arabia prevailed or if Judea were defeated — she would become mistress of it, using one ruler to destroy the other.
But the scheme turned out to Herod's advantage. First, driving off raiders against the enemy and gathering a large body of cavalry, he sent it against them near Diospolis and won, even though they had put up a stiff resistance. In response to this defeat a great uprising of the Arabs followed, and, gathering at Kanatha in Coele-Syria in numbers beyond count, they waited for the Jews. Herod arrived there with his force and tried to conduct the war more cautiously, ordering a fortified camp to be built. But his men would not obey; emboldened instead by their earlier victory, they rushed at the Arabs, and when these turned back at the first charge, pursued them — and it was in this pursuit that Herod was ambushed, through the treachery of Athenion, by the local people of Kanatha,
He answered the messengers as his grief dictated and turned back toward Egypt. The first evening he lodged at a local shrine, gathering up those who had fallen behind; the next day, as he pressed on toward Rhinocorura, word reached him of his brother's death. Adding mourning to the cares he had just set aside, he pushed forward all the harder. The Arab, repenting though slowly, sent men in haste to recall the man he had wronged, but Herod had already outrun them and reached Pelusium. There, unable to get passage from the ships stationed at anchor, he appealed to their commanders, who, respecting his reputation and rank, sent him on to Alexandria. Entering the city, he was received splendidly by Cleopatra, who hoped to secure him as a general for the campaign she was preparing; but he brushed aside the queen's invitations and, fearing neither the depth of winter nor the turmoil in Italy, sailed for Rome.
He ran into danger off Pamphylia and, after throwing most of his cargo overboard, barely made it to Rhodes, a city badly battered by the war with Cassius, where he was received by his friends Ptolemy and Sappinius. Though short of funds, he had a very large trireme built, and in it, together with his friends, sailed to Brundisium and from there hurried on to Rome. There he first sought out Antony, because of the friendship between their fathers, and laid out before him the disasters that had befallen himself and his family: how he had left his closest kin besieged in a fortress and had sailed through winter, a suppliant, to reach him. Antony was moved to pity by this reversal of fortune, and, remembering Antipater's hospitality and, above all, recognizing the man's own worth, resolved then and there to make king of the Jews the very man he had earlier made tetrarch. What drove him was no less his quarrel with Antigonus than his regard for Herod, for he took Antigonus to be a rebel and an enemy of Rome.
Caesar proved even readier than Antony, recalling Antipater's campaigns alongside his own father in Egypt, his hospitality, his goodwill in every matter, and seeing besides Herod's own energetic character. Antony convened the Senate, where Messalla, and after him Atratinus, presented Herod, reviewing the services of his father and his own goodwill toward Rome, and showing at the same time that Antigonus was an enemy — not only for his earlier quarrel with Rome but because he had now seized power through the Parthians, holding Rome in contempt. When the Senate had been stirred by this, Antony rose and declared that for the sake of the war against Parthia it was in Rome's interest that Herod be king, and all present voted for it. When the session broke up, Antony and Caesar went out with Herod between them, while the consuls and the other magistrates led the way to offer sacrifice and to deposit the decree in the Capitol. On the first day of Herod's kingship, Antony gave a feast in his honor.
During this same time Antigonus was besieging those holding Masada, who had supplies enough of everything else but were running short of water. So Joseph, Herod's brother, together with two hundred of his household, was planning to flee to the Arabs, having heard that Malchus now regretted his offenses against Herod. He would have abandoned the fortress had it not happened, on the very night set for the escape, that a heavy rain fell; the cisterns filled, and the need to flee vanished. Instead they went out against Antigonus's men, openly engaging some and ambushing others, destroying a good many — though not always with success, for at times they themselves were driven back after a setback. Meanwhile Ventidius, the Roman general sent from Syria to drive back the Parthians, turned aside into Judea after them, ostensibly to help Joseph's party but in reality to extort money from Antigonus. Camping close by Jerusalem until he had filled his coffers, he withdrew with the bulk of his force, leaving Silo behind with a portion, so that pulling everyone out at once would not expose the bribery. Antigonus, still hoping the Parthians would come to his aid, courted Silo for the time being, so that he would cause no trouble before that hope was tested.
By now Herod had sailed from Italy to Ptolemais and, having gathered no small force of foreign and native troops, was marching through Galilee against Antigonus, with Ventidius and Silo cooperating — for Dellius, sent by Antony, had persuaded them to help bring Herod home. Ventidius happened to be occupied settling the disturbances the Parthians had caused in the cities, while Silo remained in Judea, bribed by Antigonus. Herod, however, was not short of strength; as he advanced, his forces grew day by day, and all of Galilee but for a few joined him. His most urgent task lay ahead: relieving Masada and rescuing his kin from the siege there. But Joppa stood in his way, and, being hostile, had to be taken first, so that no enemy stronghold would remain at his back once he advanced on Jerusalem. Silo gladly joined him in this, glad of a pretext to withdraw, and was pursued by the Jews as he did so. Herod, sallying out against them with a small band, quickly routed them and rescued Silo, who was defending himself poorly. Then, having taken Joppa, he hurried on to Masada to rescue his kin.
Of the local people, some were drawn to him by their fathers' friendship, others by his own renown, others by gratitude for benefits received from both him and his father, but the greatest number by hope, as toward a king already secure in his throne; and so a force not easily shaken had gathered. As he advanced, Antigonus set ambushes for him, blocking the useful passes, though these did the enemy little or no harm. Herod, having taken up his kin from Masada, easily took also the fortress of Rhesa, and marched on Jerusalem. Silo's troops joined him there, along with many from the city, terrified by his strength. When they had camped on the western side of the city, the guards posted there shot arrows and hurled javelins at them, while others sallied out in bands to test the strength of the front ranks. Herod at first ordered a proclamation made around the wall, that he had come for the people's good and the city's safety, that he would not take revenge even on his open enemies, and that he would grant amnesty even to his bitterest opponents. But when Antigonus's men shouted him down, allowing no one to hear the proclamations or change sides, he thereafter permitted his own men to strike back at those on the wall, and they quickly drove everyone from the towers with their missiles.
It was then that Silo's bribery came out into the open: he had stirred up a great many of the soldiers to cry out over a shortage of supplies and demand money for provisions, and to press for withdrawing to winter quarters in their own territory, on the grounds that the country around the city had been stripped bare, Antigonus's men having cleared it out in advance. He broke camp and tried to withdraw. Herod, meeting with Silo's officers and with the rank and file in a body, begged them not to abandon him, sent as he was by Caesar, Antony, and the Senate; he would, he said, resolve their shortages that very day. And after this appeal he set out at once into the countryside and brought back so great an abundance of provisions that he cut away every pretext of Silo's. Taking thought also that the supply not fail in the days that followed, he wrote to the people around Samaria — a city on friendly terms with him — to bring down grain, wine, oil, and cattle to Jericho.
When Antigonus heard of this, he sent men throughout the countryside with orders to block the roads and ambush the grain convoys. They obeyed, and a great number of armed men gathered beyond Jericho, taking up positions on the hills to watch for those bringing in the supplies. Herod, however, would not rest: taking ten cohorts, of which five were Roman and five Jewish, along with some mixed mercenaries and a few cavalry, he came to Jericho, and found the city itself abandoned, but five hundred men holding the heights together with their wives and children. These he released once he had taken them, while the Romans burst into the rest of the town and plundered it, finding the houses full of every kind of valuable. The king then left a garrison at Jericho and turned back, dispersing the Roman army for the winter among Idumea, Galilee, and Samaria, all now on his side. Antigonus for his part also managed, through Silo's venality, to have a portion of the army quartered at Lydda, as a courtesy to Antony.
While the Romans lived in plenty with their arms laid aside, Herod did not rest. He secured Idumea with two thousand infantry and four hundred cavalry, sending his brother Joseph there so that nothing might turn toward Antigonus in his absence, while he himself brought his mother and all the kin he had brought out of Masada to Samaria, and, having settled them there safely, went on to subdue the rest of Galilee and drive out Antigonus's garrisons. Marching on Sepphoris through a violent snowstorm, he took the city without a blow, its guards having fled before he even arrived. There he took up those of his men who had suffered from the storm — supplies were abundant — and then set out against the brigands living in the caves, who were ravaging much of the country and inflicting on the local people evils no less than those of war. Sending ahead three infantry regiments and one cavalry squadron to the village of Arbela, he himself came up after forty days with the rest of his force. The enemy were not frightened by his approach but met him in arms, having the experience of soldiers along with the daring of brigands; engaging his men, they drove back the left wing of Herod's line with their own right.
But Herod, quickly wheeling around from his own right wing, came to the rescue, turned back his own men from their flight, and, falling upon the pursuers, checked their advance until, unable to bear the assault head-on, they turned aside. He pursued them, killing, as far as the Jordan, destroying a great part of them; the rest scattered beyond the river, so that Galilee was cleared of danger except for those still lurking in the caves, and dealing with these required time. So first he paid his soldiers the fruits of their labors, distributing a hundred and fifty silver drachmas to each man and far more to the officers, sending it to them at the quarters where they were wintering. He instructed Pheroras, the youngest of his brothers, to see to their supplies and to fortify Alexandreium, and Pheroras attended to both tasks.
Meanwhile Antony was spending his time around Athens, and Ventidius, preparing for the war against the Parthians, summoned Silo and Herod, writing first that affairs in Judea should be settled beforehand. Herod, glad to be rid of him, released Silo to join Ventidius, and himself campaigned against the men in the caves. These caves lay against sheer cliffs, approachable from no direction except by narrow, oblique paths. The rock facing them dropped away into very deep ravines, plunging steeply down to the gorges, so that the king for a long time was at a loss before the impossibility of the place, until at last he resorted to a most hazardous device: lowering his strongest men in chests, he had them let down to the mouths of the caves. There they slaughtered the occupants along with their families and threw fire in upon those who resisted.
Wishing to spare some of them, Herod had it proclaimed that they should come out to him. Not one came voluntarily, and of those taken by force, many chose death over captivity. There one old man, father of seven children, when his sons and their mother begged to be allowed to come out under a pledge of safety, killed them instead in this manner: ordering them to come forward one at a time, he himself stood at the mouth of the cave and cut down each son as he stepped forward. Herod, watching from a distance, was seized with pity and stretched out his hand to the old man, begging him to spare his children. But the man, yielding to none of it, and even reproaching Herod for his baseness, killed the children and then the wife as well, and, throwing the bodies down the cliff, at last threw himself down after them.
In this way Herod subdued the caves and those within them. Leaving behind as much of his army as he judged sufficient to guard against uprisings, with Ptolemy in command, he turned back toward Samaria, taking three thousand infantry and six hundred cavalry with him against Antigonus. But no sooner had he withdrawn than those accustomed to stir up trouble in Galilee, seizing their chance, fell suddenly upon Ptolemy the commander and killed him, and went on to ravage the countryside, taking refuge in the marshes and other places hard to search out. When Herod learned of the uprising, he hurried to the rescue, destroyed a great number of them, and, reducing all their strongholds by siege, exacted from the cities, as the penalty for their defection, a hundred talents.
Now that the Parthians had been driven out and Pacorus killed, Ventidius, on Antony's instructions, sent Herod a thousand cavalry and two legions as reinforcements against Antigonus. Antigonus, by letters, begged their commander Machaeras to come and help him instead, complaining bitterly of Herod's violence and promising money. Machaeras did not slight the man who had sent for him, especially since he was offering more than Herod, yet he did not go over to the betrayal; instead, feigning friendship, he went to spy out Antigonus's position, ignoring Herod's efforts to dissuade him. Antigonus, sensing his intent beforehand, shut the city against him and defended the walls as against an enemy, until Machaeras, ashamed, withdrew to Emmaus to join Herod. Furious at the rebuff, he killed every Jew he came across, sparing none of Herod's own men either, treating them all as though they belonged to Antigonus.
Angered at this, Herod set out to retaliate against Machaeras as an enemy, but, mastering his rage, rode instead to Antony to accuse Machaeras of his lawless conduct. Antony, on reflection, recognized the wrongs that had been done and quickly pursued the king, and after much entreaty was reconciled with him. Even so, Herod did not slacken his drive toward Antony; hearing that he was pressing the siege of Samosata with a large force — a strong city near the Euphrates — he hurried there all the faster, seeing the moment fit both for a display of courage and for winning Antony's favor still further. Arriving, he brought the siege to its conclusion, killing many of the barbarians and carrying off a great deal of plunder, so that Antony, who had long admired his valor, now held him in even higher regard than before, and added a great deal more to the honors he had already given him.
to the other honors he showed him and to his hopes for the kingship, and forced King Antiochus to surrender Samosata. Meanwhile Herod's affairs in Judea were falling apart. He had left his brother Joseph in charge of everything, with orders to undertake nothing against Antigonus until his return, since Machaeras could not be trusted as an ally after what he had done.
But when Joseph heard that his brother was very far away, he ignored these instructions and marched on Jericho with five cohorts that Machaeras had sent along, intending to seize the grain at the height of the harvest. The enemy fell upon him in the mountains and rough terrain; he himself died, showing great courage in the battle, and the entire Roman force was destroyed. The cohorts were newly levied men from Syria, and none of the so-called veterans had been mixed in among them who could have supported troops inexperienced in war.
The victory was not enough for Antigonus; his rage went so far that he even mutilated Joseph's corpse. Once he had the bodies in his power, he cut off Joseph's head, even though Pheroras his brother offered fifty talents as ransom for it. After the victory of Antigonus, Galilee was thrown into such upheaval that the partisans of Herod among the leading men were seized by Antigonus's supporters and drowned in the lake. Much of Idumea also changed sides, where Machaeras was fortifying a stronghold called Gitta.
Herod had not yet learned of any of this. After the capture of Samosata, Antony had set Sossius over Syria and ordered him to help Herod against Antigonus, and had himself withdrawn to Egypt. Sossius sent ahead two legions into Judea to reinforce Herod, and himself followed close behind with the rest of the army. While Herod was at Daphne near Antioch, clear dreams foretold his brother's death, and he leapt from his bed in distress just as messengers came in with news of the disaster.
He gave brief vent to grief over the misfortune, but put off the greater part of his mourning and pressed on against the enemy, forcing the march beyond his strength. Reaching Lebanon, he took on eight hundred of the mountain people as allies and joined with them one Roman legion. With these he did not wait even a day but invaded Galilee, and the enemy who came out to meet him were driven back to the position they had earlier abandoned.
He kept up a steady assault on the fortress, but before he could take it he was forced by a very severe storm to encamp in the neighboring villages. When a few days later the second legion from Antony joined him as well, the enemy, fearing his strength, abandoned the stronghold by night. From there he pressed on through Jericho, hurrying to overtake his brother's murderers as quickly as possible. There a strange and providential thing happened to him, from which, having been unexpectedly saved, he gained a reputation as a man especially favored by God.
Many of the leading men had dined with him that evening, and after the banquet broke up and everyone had left, the house immediately collapsed. Judging this a sign common to both the dangers and the deliverance of the coming war, he roused the army before dawn. About six thousand of the enemy came running down from the hills to test his front ranks; not daring to close with the Romans hand to hand, they hurled stones and javelins from a distance and wounded many. In this skirmish Herod himself, riding along the line, was struck in the side by a javelin.
Antigonus, wanting to prevail not only in daring but in numbers, sent a certain Pappus, one of his companions, with an army around toward Samaria. Machaeras became this man's opponent, while Herod overran the enemy's territory, destroyed five small towns, killed two thousand of their inhabitants, burned the houses, and returned to camp; he had bivouacked near the village called Cana. Every day a great crowd of Jews came over to him from Jericho itself and from the rest of the country, some out of hatred for Antigonus, others stirred by his own successes, but the majority driven by nothing more than a senseless craving for change.
Herod was eager to give battle, and Pappus and his men, undaunted by either the numbers or the ardor of his forces, came out boldly to meet him. When the lines engaged, the rest of the enemy's units held out for only a short while, but Herod, fighting recklessly in memory of his murdered brother in order to punish those responsible for the killing, quickly overcame the troops facing him and then, turning always against whatever body still held together, routed them all. The slaughter was great: some were driven back together into the village they had set out from, while Herod pressed hard on the rearmost, killing without number.
He burst into the village along with the fleeing enemy; every house was packed with armed men, and the roofs above were crowded with defenders. Once he had overcome those outside, he tore apart the buildings and dragged out those within. On many he brought the roofs down all at once, crushing them in heaps, while his soldiers with drawn swords caught those who tried to escape from the wreckage; so great a mass of dead piled up that the roads were blocked even to the victors. The enemy could not bear this blow; as soon as the survivors gathering together saw their comrades throughout the village destroyed, they scattered in flight, and Herod, emboldened at once by the victory, would have marched straight on Jerusalem had he not been checked by a most violent storm. This alone stood in the way both of his complete success and, for Antigonus, of a defeat that would have made him abandon the city already.
Toward evening Herod dismissed his friends, worn out, to attend to their bodies, and he himself, still hot from his armor, went off to bathe in soldierly fashion, with only one servant attending him. Before he reached the bathhouse, one of the enemy ran out toward him with a drawn sword, then a second, a third, and several more after them. These men had fled from the battle into the bathhouse still armed, and had been crouching there in hiding; but when they caught sight of the king, panic overcame them, and they ran past him, naked and trembling as he was, making for the exits. No one else happened to be present to seize the men, and Herod was satisfied simply to have come to no harm, so all of them got away. The next day he beheaded Pappus, Antigonus's general, who had fallen in the battle, and sent the head to his brother Pheroras as payment for their murdered brother, since it was this man who had killed Joseph.
When the storm subsided, he marched on Jerusalem and brought his army up to the wall; it was now the third year since he had been declared king at Rome. He encamped before the temple, since that side was open to attack, the very point where Pompey too had earlier taken the city. He divided the army for the work, and after clearing the suburbs he ordered three earthworks raised and towers built upon them, and leaving the most capable of his companions in charge of the works, he himself went to Samaria to marry Alexander's daughter, granddaughter of Aristobulus, who had been betrothed to him as we mentioned, treating the wedding as a mere incident to the siege, since he already held the enemy in contempt.
Having married, he returned to Jerusalem with a larger force; Sossius too joined him with a very large army of both cavalry and infantry, which he had sent on ahead through the interior while he himself marched through Phoenicia. When the whole force was assembled, eleven legions of infantry and six thousand cavalry besides the Syrian allies, who were no small part of it, they encamped near the north wall, Herod relying on the decree of the senate by which he had been declared king, Sossius acting as ally to Herod on behalf of Antony, who had sent the army under his command.
The mass of the Jews throughout the city was thrown into various kinds of confusion. The weaker sort, gathering around the temple, spun out prophecies filled with superstition and wishful thinking suited to the crisis, while among the bolder men there were bands of raiders of every sort, who above all plundered the supplies around the city and left neither horses nor men any food. But the better-disciplined part of the fighting force was posted to defend against the siege; they kept those building the earthworks away from the wall and forever devised some new countermeasure against the siege engines. In nothing did they have the advantage over the enemy so much as in mining.
Against the raiders the king devised ambush parties by which he checked their sallies, and against the shortage of supplies, convoys brought from a distance; but in the actual fighting the Romans had the advantage through their skill, though the defenders left no degree of daring untried. Openly they threw themselves upon the Romans in the face of certain death, and through the mine tunnels they suddenly appeared in the enemy's very midst, and before any part of the wall had been battered down they had already built another behind it. In short, they were tireless in hand and in ingenuity, resolved to hold out to the very end. Indeed, against so great a force laying siege, they kept up the resistance for five months, until some of Herod's picked men, daring to mount the wall, broke into the city, followed by Sossius's centurions.
First the area around the temple was taken, and once the army poured in everywhere there was slaughter without measure, the Romans enraged by the length of the siege, and Herod's Jewish troops determined to leave not one of their opponents alive. They were butchered in droves, crowded together in the alleys and in the houses, and as they fled for refuge to the temple; there was no pity for infants, none for old age, none for the weakness of women. Though the king sent men around begging that they be spared, no one held back his hand, but as if possessed they cut down every age alike. It was then that Antigonus, giving no thought to his past or present fortune, came down from the citadel and fell at Sossius's feet. But Sossius, showing him no pity in his change of fortune, laughed at him without restraint and called him Antigone, as if he were a woman; yet he did not let him go free as a woman would be, but had him bound and kept under guard.
Once he had mastered his enemies, Herod's next concern was to master his foreign allies as well; for the mass of foreign troops was eager to view the temple and the sacred things within the sanctuary. The king, by persuading some and threatening others, and restraining a few even by force, held them back, judging the victory harsher than defeat if anything forbidden to be seen were exposed by them. He also put a stop by now to the plundering of the city, protesting strongly to Sossius that if the Romans left him king of an emptied city, stripped of both money and men, they would be valuing the rule of the whole world too cheaply against the killing of so many citizens. When Sossius replied that it was only just to allow the soldiers the plunder in place of the siege pay, Herod said he himself would distribute the wages to each man from his own funds. In this way, having ransomed the rest of his native city, he fulfilled his promises: he rewarded each soldier splendidly, the officers in proportion, and Sossius most royally of all, so that no one went away wanting for money.
Sossius, after dedicating a golden crown to God, withdrew from Jerusalem, taking Antigonus in chains to Antony. This man, who had clung to life to the last out of a cold hope, met the axe he deserved for his cowardice. King Herod, meanwhile, sorted out the population of the city, showing greater favor and honor to those who had supported him and putting to death the partisans of Antigonus. And now, being short of funds, he sent to Antony and his circle all the gold ornaments he had, converted into coin. Even this did not buy him complete immunity from harm, for Antony, by now corrupted by his passion for Cleopatra, was in all things a slave to his desire, while Cleopatra, having worked her way through her own family so that not one of her blood relations was left, now turned her murderous designs on outsiders, and by slandering the leading men of Syria to Antony persuaded him to have them put to death, so that she might easily become mistress of each man's property. Extending her greed further, to the Jews and the Arabs, she worked to have Herod and Malchus, the kings of the two peoples, put to death.
In the matter of these orders, however, Antony came partly to his senses: he judged it impious to kill men so good and kings of such standing, but he did break off his friendship with those closest to them. He cut away a good deal of their territory, including the palm grove at Jericho where the balsam is produced, and gave it to Cleopatra, along with all the cities within the Eleutherus river except Tyre and Sidon. Once mistress of these, she escorted Antony as far as the Euphrates on his campaign against the Parthians and then came to Judea by way of Apamea and Damascus. There Herod won over her ill will with lavish gifts, and also leased back the territories cut away from his kingdom for two hundred talents a year, and escorted her as far as Pelusium, showing her every attention. Not long after, Antony returned from the Parthian campaign bringing as a captive Artabazus, son of Tigranes, a gift for Cleopatra; for along with the money and all the plunder, the Parthian prince himself was straightway given to her. When the war at Actium had broken out,
Herod was already preparing to set out with Antony, having by now freed himself from the other disturbances in Judea and having gained control of Hyrcania, a stronghold held by Antigonus's sister. But he was cunningly kept by Cleopatra from sharing in Antony's dangers; for, as we said, plotting against the kings, she persuaded Antony to entrust the war against the Arabs to Herod, so that whichever man prevailed, whether he conquered Arabia or was conquered and lost Judea, she might become mistress and use the one ruler to bring down the other. The scheme, however, tipped in Herod's favor: first, driving off cattle from the enemy and gathering a large body of cavalry, he launched it against them near Diospolis and was victorious, even though they resisted stoutly. In response to this defeat a great uprising of the Arabs arose, and gathering at Canatha in Coele-Syria in countless numbers,
they waited for the Jews. There Herod came up with his army and tried to conduct the war more cautiously, ordering a fortified camp to be built. But the army would not obey; emboldened by their earlier victory, they rushed upon the Arabs, and when the enemy broke at the first onset they pursued them, but in the pursuit Herod was ambushed, Athenion having let loose against him the local people of Canatha,
This man had always been at odds with Herod among Cleopatra's generals. Under this attack the Arabs took heart and turned to face the Jews again; massing their forces amid rocky, impassable ground, they routed Herod's men and inflicted very heavy losses. The survivors of the battle fled to Ormiza, where the Arabs surrounded their camp as well and captured it, men and all.
Not long after, Herod arrived with reinforcements, too late to be of use. The blame for this blow fell on the insubordination of his officers, for if the engagement had not broken out unexpectedly, Athenion would never have found the occasion for his trap. Herod nevertheless took his revenge on the Arabs, overrunning their country again and again, until he had recovered his single lost victory many times over.
But while he was still punishing his enemies, another calamity struck him, one that seemed to come from heaven: in the seventh year of his reign, at the height of the war at Actium, at the beginning of spring the earth was shaken and destroyed countless numbers of cattle and thirty thousand people, though the army escaped unharmed, since it was camped in the open. In the midst of this the Arabs were emboldened to still greater insolence by rumor, which as always added something still worse to the gloom already there. Believing all Judea leveled and the land empty for the taking, they set out against it, first sacrificing the envoys who had come to them from the Jews.
The people, terrified by this invasion and worn down by the weight of one disaster following another, lost heart, and Herod gathered them together and tried to rouse them to defend themselves with a speech of this kind:
"It seems to me quite unreasonable that the present fear should be taking hold of you. Being disheartened at the blows that came from heaven was understandable enough, but to feel the same way before a human attack is a mark of cowardice. I myself am so far from cringing before the enemy after the earthquake that I take it the god has set this very thing before the Arabs as bait, to bring them to justice; for they have come relying not so much on weapons or their own hands as on the misfortunes that struck us by chance, and hope resting on another's misery rather than one's own strength is a shaky thing.
"Neither ill fortune nor its opposite is stable among men; one can see fortune shifting to both sides in turn. You can learn this from your own experience: in the earlier battle, though we had the upper hand, the enemy defeated us, and it is likely that now, when they think they are sure to win, they will be caught, for overconfidence goes unguarded, while fear teaches foresight. So it is precisely your present dread that gives me grounds for confidence. When you grew bolder than was wise and rushed out against the enemy against my judgment, that was when Athenion's ambush found its opportunity; but now your hesitation, and what looks like faintheartedness, is my guarantee of victory. Still, this frame of mind should hold only until the moment we advance; once in action, you must rouse your spirits and convince the most godless of men that no evil, whether from men or from heaven, will ever bring down the courage of the Jews, so long as they keep their resolve, and that no one will stand by and watch an Arab become master of another man's goods, when he has time and again all but fallen into that man's hands as a captive.
"And do not let the tremors of lifeless matter unsettle you, nor take the earthquake as a sign portending some further disaster; such disturbances of the elements are natural, and bring men no harm beyond the damage they do in themselves. Of plague, famine, and tremors of the earth some small warning sign might come beforehand, but these very things have a limit to their scale; what greater harm, after all, could the earthquake do to us than a war, once it has gained the upper hand? But the greatest portent of the enemy's coming destruction has come about not by accident nor at another's hand: they have put our envoys to death in brutal violation of the law common to all mankind, and have crowned the war with such offerings to god. They will not escape his great eye and his unconquerable right hand; they will pay us the penalty at once, if only we now summon up the spirit of our fathers and rise as avengers of the men who were murdered in violation of the truce. Let each man go forth, not for wife, not for children, not for a homeland in danger, but in defense of the envoys; the dead will command this war better than the living. And I myself will risk danger before you, if you follow me obediently; for be assured, your own courage is irresistible, unless some rashness does you harm."
With this speech he roused his army, and when he saw them eager for battle, he offered sacrifice to God and after the sacrifice crossed the river Jordan with his forces. Encamping near Philadelphia, close to the enemy, he skirmished with them over a fort that lay between the two camps, wanting to bring on a battle quickly, for the Arabs too had already sent some men ahead to seize the stronghold. These the king's men quickly drove back and took the hill, while Herod himself led his forces out day after day and drew them up for battle, challenging the Arabs to fight.
But no one came out against him, for a terrible panic gripped them, and even their general Elthemus stood rigid with fear before the eyes of his own troops. At last, driven on by necessity, they came out to battle, disorganized, infantry and cavalry mixed in confusion. In numbers the Jews were outmatched, but they were far superior in eagerness, though the Arabs too fought recklessly out of despair of victory. So as long as they held their ground the slaughter among them was not great, but once they showed their backs, many were destroyed by the Jews and many more trampled by their own comrades; five thousand fell in the rout, and the rest of the mass just managed to crowd into the camp. Herod surrounded and besieged them, and as they were about to be overcome by force, thirst, brought on by the failure of their water supply, pressed them even harder. The king scorned their attempts to negotiate, and even when they offered five hundred talents as ransom pressed the siege all the harder. As their thirst grew unbearable they came out in crowds and surrendered themselves to the Jews of their own accord, so that in five days four thousand were taken prisoner, and on the sixth the remaining mass, driven by despair, came out to fight; Herod engaged them and killed about seven thousand more.
Having thus punished Arabia with so heavy a blow and crushed the spirit of its men, he rose so far in standing that the nation chose him as its protector. But at once the concern for the whole state of affairs took hold of him again, because of his friendship with Antony, now that Caesar had won at Actium. Yet he had more to fear from the appearance of the thing than he actually suffered, for Caesar did not consider Antony truly beaten while Herod still stood by him. The king, for his part, resolved to face the danger head-on; sailing to Rhodes, where Caesar was staying, he came before him without his diadem, in dress and bearing a private citizen, but in spirit a king. Holding back nothing of the truth, he spoke to him directly:
"I, Caesar, was made king by Antony, and I admit that in everything I proved myself useful to Antony. Nor would I hold back from saying this too: you would certainly have found me a grateful ally with my arms as well, had the Arabs not prevented it. I sent him what help I could, and many thousands of measures of grain besides, and even after the disaster at Actium I did not abandon my benefactor, but became his best counselor, once I was no longer of use to him as an ally, telling him that the one remedy for his failures was the death of Cleopatra. Had he put her to death, I promised him money, walls for security, an army, and myself as a partner in the war against you. But it seems his ears were stopped up by his longing for Cleopatra, and by the god who was granting the victory to you. I have fallen together with Antony, and I have laid down my diadem along with his fortune. I have come to you holding to virtue as my hope of safety, believing that you would first want to examine what kind of friend I was, not whose friend."
To this Caesar replied: "No, be safe, and rule now on firmer ground than before; for you deserve to govern a great many, holding to your friendships as steadfastly as this. Try to remain just as faithful to me, now that fortune has favored me more. For my part I have the highest hopes for a man of your spirit. Antony, though, did well to be persuaded by Cleopatra rather than by you, for through his folly we have gained you. It seems, moreover, you are already beginning to do me good service, to judge by what Ventidius writes me, that you have sent him aid against the gladiators. For now, then, I declare by decree that your kingdom is secure. And I shall try in the future to do you further good, so that you will not miss Antony."
With these kind words to the king, he set the diadem back on his head and made known this gift by public decree, in which he spoke at length and generously in the man's praise. Herod, having won him over further with gifts, begged from him the life of Alexas, one of Antony's friends who had become his suppliant; but Caesar's anger prevailed, since he had many harsh complaints against the man he was asked to spare, and so he refused the request. Afterward, when Caesar was traveling to Egypt through Syria, Herod received him with all his royal wealth and rode out with him for the first time as Caesar reviewed his forces near Ptolemais, and feasted him together with all his friends; after them he distributed provisions for a banquet to the rest of the army as well. He also took care to supply plentiful water for those marching through the waterless country as far as Pelusium, and the same again on the return, so that the army lacked for nothing it needed. Indeed, it struck both Caesar and his soldiers that the kingdom left to Herod was far too small a reward for what he had provided. For this reason, when Caesar reached Egypt, now that Cleopatra and Antony were both dead, he not only heaped further honors on Herod but added to his kingdom the territory that Cleopatra had cut away from it, and besides this, from outside, Gadara, Hippos, and Samaria, and along the coast Gaza, Anthedon, Joppa, and Strato's Tower. He also gave him four hundred Galatians as a bodyguard, who had formerly served Cleopatra as spearmen. Nothing spurred Caesar on to such gifts so much as the greatness of spirit shown by the man who received them.
After the first Actiad, he added to Herod's kingdom the district called Trachonitis, and the neighboring Batanea and Auranitis, for the following reason. Zenodorus, who had leased the estate of Lysanias, did not stop letting loose the bandits of Trachonitis on the people of Damascus. They fled to Varro, the governor of Syria, and begged him to report their disaster to Caesar; and Caesar, on learning of it, sent back orders that the band of robbers be wiped out. Varro accordingly took the field, cleared the land of the men, and took it away from Zenodorus. Caesar later gave this territory to Herod, so that it would not again become a base for bandits threatening Damascus. He also made him procurator of the whole of Syria when he returned to the province ten years later, so that nothing could be done by the other procurators without his advice. And when Zenodorus died, he assigned to Herod as well the whole territory between Trachonitis and Galilee. But what mattered more to Herod than all this was that he was loved by Caesar second only to Agrippa, and by Agrippa second only to Caesar. From this point he advanced to the height of prosperity, his spirit rose to greater things, and the greater part of that ambitious spirit he turned toward acts of piety.
Thus in the fifteenth year of his reign he rebuilt the temple itself and enclosed a precinct around it twice the size of the former one, sparing no expense and matching it with unsurpassed magnificence. Proof of this could be seen in the great colonnades around the sanctuary and the fortress on its north side; the colonnades he built up from their foundations, while the fortress, which he refurbished with lavish wealth, he named Antonia in Antony's honor, making it in no way inferior to a royal palace. His own palace, which he built in the upper city, contained two very large and beautiful wings, with which not even the temple could be compared; these he named, after his friends, the Caesareum and the Agrippeum.
Nor did he confine their memory and their names to buildings alone; his ambition to honor them spread to whole cities. In the territory of Samaria he built a city with a very fine wall twenty stadia in circuit, settled six thousand people there, gave them the richest land, and in the middle of the new city founded a very great temple with a sacred precinct around it three and a half stadia across dedicated to Caesar, and named the town Sebaste; he also granted its inhabitants a special constitution. Since Caesar further rewarded him with the grant of additional territory, Herod there too founded him a temple of white marble near the springs of the Jordan. The place is called Panium: there a mountain peak rises to an immense height, and at the foot of the cliff a shaded cave opens up, through which a chasm plunges down to an unfathomable depth, filled with still water so deep that no line let down to explore the bottom of the earth has ever proved long enough. Outside the cave, at the base of the rock, the springs rise up; and this, as some think, is the true source of the Jordan, though we will explain the precise truth of the matter later.
The king also built other structures at Jericho, between the fortress of Cypros and the former palaces, finer and more useful for visits, and named them after the same friends. In short, there was no site anywhere suitable in his kingdom that he left without some mark of honor to Caesar. And once he had filled his own country with temples, he poured his honors out over the province as well, founding a Caesarea in many cities. Noticing, too, a city on the coast that was already in decline, called Strato's Tower, he saw that the natural advantages of the site could match his ambition, and rebuilt the whole of it in white stone, adorning it with the most splendid palaces; here above all he displayed the greatness of his natural genius, for between Dor and Joppa, midway between which the city lies, the entire coast lacks a harbor, so that everyone sailing along Phoenicia toward Egypt must ride at anchor out at sea because of the threat from the southwest wind, which even at a moderate blow raises so great a swell against the rocks that the backwash of the waves churns the sea into fury far and wide. But the king, overcoming nature by his outlay and his ambition, built a harbor larger than Piraeus, and within its recesses other deep anchorages besides. Since the whole site worked against him, he fought the difficulty to a standstill, so that the strength of the construction proved unconquerable by the sea, while its beauty was adorned as though no difficulty stood in the way at all; for having measured out the size we have described...
He let down stones twenty fathoms into the sea to form the harbor's breakwater, most of them fifty feet long, nine feet deep, and ten feet wide, some even larger. Once the submerged foundation had been filled in, the wall rising above the water was widened to two hundred feet. Of this, a hundred feet had been built out first to break the force of the waves — hence it was called the breakwater — and the rest supports the stone wall running around the harbor.
This wall is broken up by very large towers, the finest and most prominent of which, named after Caesar's stepson, is called the Drusion. Frequent vaulted chambers receive those putting in to anchor, and the whole area in front of them forms a broad walkway, circling round, for passengers landing. The entrance faces north, since the north wind is the calmest at that place, and at the mouth of the harbor stand three colossal statues on each side, resting on columns: on the left as one sails in a solid tower holds them up, while on the right two upright stones stand joined together, larger than the tower on the opposite side. Houses of white stone adjoin the harbor as well, and the streets of the city run down to it, laid out at equal intervals.
Opposite the harbor mouth, on a rise of ground, stands a temple of Caesar, remarkable for its beauty and size; in it is a colossal statue of Caesar, not inferior to the Olympian Zeus, on which it was modeled, and one of Rome equal to the Hera of Argos. He dedicated the city to the province, the harbor to those who sail these waters, and the honor of the whole construction to Caesar — accordingly he named it Caesarea.
The rest of the works — an amphitheater, a theater, and marketplaces — he built worthy of that name as well. He also instituted games held every four years, likewise named after Caesar, and was himself the first to offer the greatest prizes, in the hundred and ninety-second Olympiad, in which not only the winners but also those who came second and third shared in the king's wealth. He rebuilt the coastal town of Anthedon, destroyed in war, and renamed it Agrippeion, out of excessive devotion to his friend, whose name he also inscribed on the gate he himself built in the temple.
He was, if any man was, devoted to his father: he raised a monument to him in the form of a city, which he founded in the finest plain of his kingdom, rich in rivers and trees, and named Antipatris. He also fortified the stronghold above Jericho, remarkable for its strength and beauty, and dedicated it to his mother, calling it Cypros. For his brother Phasael he built the tower in Jerusalem bearing his name, whose form and lavish scale we will describe in what follows. And he founded another city in the valley leading north from Jericho, which he named Phasaelis.
Having provided for his household and friends in this way, he did not neglect his own memory either: he fortified a stronghold on the mountain toward Arabia and named it Herodeion after himself, and the breast-shaped hill, artificially made, sixty stadia from Jerusalem, he likewise named after himself, but adorned it more lavishly still. He surrounded its summit with round towers and filled the enclosure with the most costly palaces, so that not only the interior of the rooms was splendid to see, but wealth was lavished on the outer walls, copings, and roofs as well. From far off, at enormous expense, he brought in an abundance of water, and laid an ascent of two hundred steps of purest marble, for the hill was fairly high and entirely artificial. Around its base he also built other palaces able to house his baggage and his friends, so that because it had everything, the fortress seemed like a city, though in its layout a palace.
Having built so much, he displayed his generosity toward a great many cities outside his kingdom as well. To Tripolis, Damascus, and Ptolemais he gave gymnasia; to Byblos, a wall; to Berytus and Tyre, exedras, colonnades, temples, and marketplaces; to Sidon and Damascus, theaters; to the coastal Laodiceans, an aqueduct; to the people of Ascalon, baths and costly fountains, and colonnades admired for their workmanship and size; to some he dedicated groves and meadows. Many cities, as though they were partners in his kingdom, received territory from him as well; on others he bestowed annual and perpetual revenues to fund gymnasiarchies, as he did for the Coans, so that this honor would never lapse.
He supplied grain to all who were in need, and gave money to Rhodes, many times and in many ways, for building their fleet; and when the temple of Apollo there burned down, he rebuilt it at his own expense, and better than before. What need is there to speak of his gifts to the Lycians or the Samians, or of his generosity throughout all Ionia, wherever people were in need? The Athenians, the Spartans, the people of Nicopolis, and Pergamum in Mysia — are they not full of Herod's dedications? And the broad street of the Syrian Antiochenes, which people avoided because of the mud — did he not pave it with polished marble for twenty stadia in length, and adorn it with a colonnade of equal length as protection from the rain?
These gifts one might call particular to each people that benefited from them. But what he granted the Eleans was a gift not only to Greece as a whole but to the entire inhabited world, since the fame of the Olympic games reaches to it. Seeing that these games were collapsing for lack of funds, and the sole remnant of ancient Greece slipping away, he not only became the president of the games for the one four-year cycle he happened to attend, sailing to Rome, but also provided funds in perpetuity, so that the memory of his presidency would never fade.
It would be an endless task to go through his cancellations of debts or remissions of taxes, as when he lightened the annual tribute for the people of Phaselis, Balanea, and the small towns of Cilicia. Yet his greatest generosity was checked most of all by fear — fear of seeming to court popularity, or to be pursuing something greater by benefiting cities more than their own means allowed.
His body matched his spirit: he was always an excellent hunter, succeeding in this especially through his skill on horseback — on one occasion he brought down forty wild animals in a single day. The country breeds wild boar, and is abundantly stocked with deer and wild asses. As a warrior he was irresistible; many, watching him at exercises, were amazed to see him the most accurate of javelin-throwers and the surest of archers.
To his advantages of mind and body good fortune was added as well: he rarely suffered a setback in war, and when he did, the fault lay not with him but with the treachery of some or the recklessness of his soldiers.
Yet fortune avenged his successes abroad with troubles at home, and his misfortunes began with the woman he loved most. For when he came to power, he divorced the wife he had married as a private citizen — her name was Doris, from Jerusalem — and married Mariamme, daughter of Alexander son of Aristobulus. Because of her his household fell into faction, sooner than one might expect, but especially after his return from Rome. First he banished Antipater, his son by Doris, from the city on account of the children he had by Mariamme, allowing him to return only for festivals.
Then he killed Hyrcanus, his wife's grandfather, who had come to him from the Parthians, out of suspicion of a plot — the same Hyrcanus whom Barzapharnes had taken captive when he overran Syria, and whom their fellow countrymen beyond the Euphrates had begged for out of pity. Had he listened to their advice not to cross over to Herod, he would not have perished; but the marriage of his granddaughter proved the bait that lured him to his death. Trusting in this and yearning more than was wise for his homeland, he came. It was not that he himself aspired to the kingship that provoked Herod, but that kingship fell naturally to him.
Of the five children born to him by Mariamme, two were daughters and three were sons. Of these the youngest died being educated in Rome, and Herod raised the two eldest as royal heirs, both because of their mother's noble birth and because they had been born to him as king.
Stronger than all these considerations was Herod's love for Mariamme, which burned in him more fiercely day by day, so that he was insensible to all the pain her attitude caused him — for as great as his love for her was, so great was her hatred of him. Her resentment had a reasonable basis in what had happened, and speaking her mind came from being loved: she openly reproached him for what he had done to her grandfather Hyrcanus and to her brother Jonathan. For he had not spared Jonathan either, boy though he was — he gave him the high priesthood at seventeen, and immediately after honoring him put him to death, because when the boy put on the sacred vestments and approached the altar at the festival, the crowd burst into tears at the sight of him. So the boy was sent by night to Jericho, and there, on Herod's orders, was drowned in a pool by the Galatians.
For these reasons Mariamme reproached Herod, and heaped bitter insults on his sister and his mother as well. He himself was silenced by his passion for her, but the women were seized with fierce resentment, and to strike at what would most move Herod, they accused her of adultery, fabricating many plausible details, among them the charge that she had sent her portrait to Antony in Egypt, and out of excessive shamelessness had displayed herself, though absent, to a man mad for women and capable of taking her by force.
This news struck Herod like a thunderbolt, unsettling him above all through jealous love, but also because he reckoned with Cleopatra's ruthlessness, through which King Lysanias had been put to death, and Malchus the Arab as well — for he measured the danger not by the loss of a wife, but by death itself.
So when he was about to travel abroad, he entrusted his wife to Joseph, the husband of his sister Salome, a man he trusted and who was well disposed to him through their kinship, secretly giving orders to kill her if Antony killed him. But Joseph, not out of malice, but wishing to demonstrate the king's love to her — that even in death he could not bear to be parted from her — revealed the secret.
When Herod returned, she, in the course of their private conversations, as he swore repeatedly how deeply he felt for her and that he had never loved another woman, said, "You certainly showed your love for me well enough in the orders you gave Joseph — commanding him to kill me." As soon as he heard the secret revealed, he was beside himself, and declared that Joseph would never have disclosed the order unless he had seduced her; carried away by his passion, he leapt from his bed and paced wildly about the palace.
His sister Salome seized this moment to press her slanders further, confirming the suspicion against Joseph. Driven mad by unbridled jealousy, Herod at once ordered them both put to death. But remorse followed immediately upon the deed, and as his anger subsided, his love flared up again. So fierce was the fever of his desire that he seemed not even to believe she was dead, but in his grief spoke to her as though she still lived, until time taught him to grieve for her properly, with sorrow suited to one who was truly gone.
Her sons inherited their mother's resentment, and coming to understand the horror of it, looked on their father as an enemy — at first while being educated in Rome, and even more once they returned to Judea; and as they grew, their feelings grew with them. When they came of age for marriage, one married the daughter of his aunt Salome, who had accused their mother, and the other married the daughter of Archelaus, king of Cappadocia; and gaining this support, they now spoke their hatred more openly.
Their boldness gave their accusers an opening, and some now spoke more openly to the king, saying that both sons were plotting against him, and that the one connected by marriage to Archelaus was preparing to flee, relying on his father-in-law, in order to bring an accusation against Herod before Caesar. Filled with these slanders, Herod, as though setting up a bulwark against his sons, brought back Antipater, his son by Doris, and began to give him preference in every way.
To the brothers this reversal was unbearable, and seeing a son of a common mother advancing at the expense of their own noble birth, they could not contain their indignation, and at every grievance let their anger show, so that day by day they grew more hostile, while Antipater was now courted for his own sake as well — a man most skilled in flattering his father, and in fabricating varied slanders against his brothers, some he invented himself, others he had his associates spread, until at last he had utterly stripped his brothers of any hope for the throne. Indeed, in the will he himself was already named successor, and openly so: he was sent to Caesar as if he were already king, using every mark of royal state except the diadem. In time he even succeeded in bringing his mother into Mariamme's bed.
Using two weapons against his brothers, flattery and slander, he worked on the king to the point of endangering his sons' lives. He dragged Alexander all the way to Rome, and his father brought a charge before Caesar of a plot against his own life. Alexander, having with difficulty won leave to voice his grief, and finding a judge far more experienced and wiser than Antipater or Herod, modestly passed over his father's faults, but vigorously refuted the slanders against himself. Having also shown that his brother was innocent and shared in the same dangers, he then lamented Antipater's villainy and their own dishonor. His case was helped, along with his clear conscience, by his gift for speech, for he was indeed a most powerful speaker. And in the end, saying that it would even be pleasant for their father to kill them, and offering himself to the charge, he moved everyone to tears, and so affected Caesar that he dismissed the accusations against them and reconciled Herod with them at once. The terms of reconciliation were that the sons should obey their father in everything, while he should leave the kingdom to whomever he wished.
After this the king returned from Rome, appearing to have dropped the charges against his sons, but not free of suspicion, for Antipater remained close at hand, the source of his hatred. Still, out of respect for the one who had brought about the reconciliation, he did not openly show his hostility. But as he sailed along the coast of Cilicia and put in at Elaeusa, Archelaus received him warmly and gratefully, for the safety of his son-in-law, and joined in the reconciliation.
rejoicing at it, since he had also written more quickly to his friends in Rome, urging them to assist in Alexander's case. He escorted him as far as Zephyrium, giving him gifts worth up to thirty talents.
When Herod arrived in Jerusalem, he gathered the people together, brought his three sons forward, and spoke in defense of his journey abroad. He thanked God at length, and thanked Caesar at length as well, for having set his troubled household in order and for having granted his sons something greater than kingship — harmony, which he himself, he said, would bring into still closer accord.
"For Caesar has made me master of the succession and arbiter of who inherits it, and I, in keeping with what is advantageous, repay him in kind. These three sons I declare kings, calling first upon God to ratify my judgment, and then upon you as well. Age recommends the succession to one, noble birth to the others, but the size of this kingdom is enough for even more than these. Those whom Caesar has joined together, and their father now appoints, you must maintain, giving them honors neither unjust nor uneven, but each according to his rank; for no one is so gladdened by being honored beyond his years as he is pained by being dishonored. As for the kinsmen and friends who must attend upon each of them, I will assign these myself and make them guarantors of harmony, knowing well that it is the ill nature of one's companions that breeds factions and rivalries, whereas if these men are decent, they preserve affection. And I ask not only these men but also the officers of my army to place their hopes in me alone for the present; for I am handing over to my sons not kingship but the honor of kingship — they will enjoy its pleasures as rulers, while the weight of affairs remains mine, even against my will. Let each of you weigh my age, my manner of life, and my piety: I am not so old a man that I might quickly be given up for dead, nor have I given myself over to the kind of luxury that cuts short even the young; and I have cultivated the divine so well that I may hope to reach the furthest span of life. Whoever pays court to my sons in hope of my downfall will answer to me concerning them as well; for it is not out of envy toward my own offspring that I check the eager attentions shown them, but because I know that such eagerness becomes, for young men, fuel for rashness. If each man who approaches them would consider that, being upright, he will receive his reward from me, but that if he stirs up faction, his ill nature will prove unprofitable even with the one he courts, I think all will come to share my mind — which is to say, my sons' mind as well; for it serves them that I should rule, and it serves me that they should be in harmony. But you, good sons, consider first the sacred bond of nature, which even wild beasts preserve in their affections; then consider Caesar, who brought about our reconciliation; and third, myself, who ask this of you while I still have the power to command it: remain brothers. I give you now royal dress and royal attendance, and I pray to God to uphold my judgment, if you keep this harmony."
Having said this, and having affectionately embraced each of his sons, he dismissed the crowd — some joining in prayer for what had been said, but those who longed for a change of regime pretending not to have heard it at all.
Yet the discord left with the brothers still intact, and they parted holding worse suspicions of one another than before: Alexander and Aristobulus grieving that the right of seniority had been confirmed to Antipater, Antipater resentful that his brothers ranked second to him. But Antipater, the most versatile in character of the three, knew how to hold his tongue, and with great cunning concealed his hatred toward them, whereas the other two, because of their noble breeding, spoke whatever they thought. Many provoked and pressed them on, and still more of their friends slipped in among them as spies. Whatever was said by Alexander reached Antipater at once, and passed from Antipater to Herod with additions; for the young man could not simply speak without being held to account — whatever he said was twisted into slander, and if he ever spoke with modest frankness, the smallest things were built up into the greatest. Antipater was forever sending men to provoke him, so that his lies might rest on some real foundation, and when even one of the rumors was proven true, it lent credit to all the rest. As for his own friends, each was either by nature perfectly closemouthed or was won over with gifts so that nothing secret ever leaked out, and one would not be wrong to call Antipater's life a mystery of wickedness. But Alexander's companions he corrupted with money or won over with flattery, until he had turned every one of them into a traitor and a spy on what was done or said. Staging everything with great care, he made his approaches to Herod through slander the most skillful of all — wearing the mask of a brother himself while sending other men as informers. Whenever some charge against Alexander was reported, he would come forward and pretend to make light of it, but then would quietly work it up and provoke the king to indignation. Everything was traced back to a plot, to the appearance that Alexander lay in wait for his father's murder; for nothing lent more credit to the slanders than Antipater's own show of defending him. Herod, exasperated by all this, transferred to Antipater, day by day, exactly as much affection as he withdrew from the young men.
Some of those at court inclined the same way, some willingly, others under compulsion — men like Ptolemy, the most honored of the king's friends, the king's own brothers, and the whole family; for Antipater was everything, and — most bitter of all to Alexander — Antipater's mother was everything too, a counselor against them harsher than any stepmother, hating the sons of the queen more fiercely than stepmothers commonly hate stepchildren. So by now everyone courted Antipater in hope of the future, and the king's own orders estranged each of them further still, since he had instructed the most honored men neither to approach nor to pay attention to Alexander's circle. He was feared not only by those within the kingdom but by friends abroad as well; for Caesar had given no king such power that a man who fled from him could be extradited even from a city with no connection to him. The young men, meanwhile, knew nothing of the slanders, and for that very reason fell into them all the more unguardedly; for their father found no open fault with them, but came to understand things little by little from his own coolness, and grew harsher the more it pained him. Antipater also turned their uncle Pheroras against them with hostility, and their aunt Salome as well, working on her constantly, courting her favor and provoking her further.
What also fed the hatred toward Salome was Alexander's wife Glaphyra, who traced out her own noble descent and boasted that she was mistress of everyone in the palace, being descended on her father's side from Temenus and on her mother's side from Darius son of Hystaspes. She often reproached Herod's sister and his wives for their low birth, since each of them had been chosen for her beauty and not for her lineage. And there were many such wives, since it was ancestral custom among the Jews to marry several, and the king delighted in having many; and all of them, because of Glaphyra's arrogance and her insults, hated Alexander. As for Salome, although she was his mother-in-law, it was Aristobulus himself who set her against him, she being already angered by Glaphyra's insults; for he constantly reproached his own wife for her low birth, saying that he had married a commoner while his brother Alexander had married a king's daughter. His wife, in tears, reported this to Salome, adding that Alexander's circle threatened that once they took the kingdom, they would make the other brothers' mothers weavers alongside the slave women, and the brothers themselves village clerks — mocking them as men so carefully educated. At this Salome, unable to contain her anger, reported everything to Herod; and she was a very credible witness in speaking against her son-in-law. Another slander converged with this one and further inflamed the king's anger: he heard that they were constantly invoking their mother's name, wailing and cursing him, and that often, when he passed on some of Mariamne's garments to his later wives, they threatened that before long they would fit them out with garments made of hair in place of royal robes.
Because of this, although he had come to fear the young men's proud spirit, he did not yet abandon hope of setting things right. Instead he summoned them — for he was also about to sail to Rome — and threatened them briefly as a king, but for the most part admonished them as a father, urging them to love their brothers and granting them pardon for their past offenses, if they would be better men in the time to come.
They cleared themselves of the slanders, calling them false, and said they would confirm their defense by their deeds; but they also said that he too must block the path of such gossip by not believing it so readily, for there would never be a shortage of people willing to lie about them as long as there was someone ready to believe. Having won him over as a father with these words, they quickly dispelled the immediate danger, but took on grief for what lay ahead; for they learned that Salome was their enemy, and their uncle Pheroras too — both of them burdensome and harsh, but Pheroras the more so, since he shared in the whole kingdom except the diadem, had revenues of his own amounting to a hundred talents, and enjoyed the fruit of the entire country beyond the Jordan, which he had received as a gift from his brother, who had also had him made tetrarch by petitioning Caesar on his behalf. Herod had even judged him worthy of a royal marriage, giving him his own wife's sister to marry; and after her death he had pledged to him his eldest daughter, with a dowry of three hundred talents. But Pheroras fled from the royal marriage out of love for a slave woman, at which Herod, in anger, joined his daughter instead to his nephew, who was later put to death by the Parthians. Yet not long after, he relaxed his anger toward Pheroras, excusing him on account of his passion.
Pheroras had also been accused, even earlier while the queen was still alive, of plotting against Herod with poison, and now a great number of informers came forward, so that although Herod loved his brother more than anyone, he was led into believing what was said and into dread of it. Having tortured many of those under suspicion, he came at last to Pheroras's friends. Not one of them openly confessed to a plot, but they said that Pheroras was preparing to carry off his beloved and flee to the Parthians, and that his partners in this scheme and in the flight included Costobarus, Salome's husband, to whom the king had given her in marriage after her first husband had been put to death for adultery. Nor was Salome herself free of slander; for Pheroras's own brother accused her of an agreement of marriage with Syllaeus, the steward of Obodas, king of the Arabs, who was Herod's bitterest enemy. Cross-examined on this charge, and on every other that Pheroras brought against her, she was cleared; and the king released Pheroras himself as well from the accusations.
But the storm within the household now shifted to Alexander, and settled its whole weight upon his head. There were three eunuchs held in the highest honor by the king, and their duties made this plain: one was appointed to pour his wine, another to serve his dinner, and the third put him to bed and lay down beside him. Alexander won these men over into intimacy with great gifts. When this was reported to the king, they were examined under torture; they confessed at once to the intimacy, and also revealed the promises made to secure it — how they had been persuaded by Alexander, who told them they should not place their hopes in Herod, a shameless old man who dyed his hair (unless they supposed that by this he also wished to pass for young), but should look instead to him, who would succeed to the kingdom before long even against his father's will, take vengeance on his enemies, and make his friends happy and blessed — these men above all. He told them, too, that a secret following of powerful men already surrounded him, including the officers of the army and the company commanders, who met with him in private.
This so terrified Herod that he did not dare bring the informations out into the open even at once, but sent spies about by night and by day to search out everything done or said, and put to death at once anyone who fell under suspicion. The palace was filled with dreadful lawlessness: everyone, out of private enmity or hatred, fabricated slanders of his own, and many used the king's murderous temper as a weapon against their rivals. A lie won instant credit, while the punishments that followed slander were swifter still than the slander itself. A man who had just brought an accusation would himself be accused, and would be led off together with the very man he had exposed; for the danger to one's own life cut short the king's inquiries. His bitterness reached such a pitch that he could not even look with kindness on anyone not yet accused, and he was harshest of all toward his friends — he barred many of them from the palace, and toward those on whom he had no power to lay hands, he was harsh in word. Antipater joined in against Alexander amid these misfortunes, gathering a whole company of kinsmen, and left no slander untried. The king was driven to such terror by Antipater's monstrous fabrications and contrivances that he seemed to himself to see Alexander standing over him, sword in hand.
So he suddenly had him seized and bound, and turned to torturing his friends. Many died in silence, saying nothing beyond what their conscience allowed; others, forced by their agonies to lie, said that Alexander was plotting against him together with his brother Aristobulus, that he was watching for his chance to kill him while hunting, and then meant to flee to Rome. Although these statements were not plausible but improvised under compulsion, the king believed them gladly, finding comfort, in having bound his son, in the thought that he had not done so unjustly.
But Alexander, once he saw that it was impossible to change his father's mind, resolved to meet the danger head-on, and composed four books against his enemies, in which he admitted the plot but named as accomplices most of the men themselves — above all Pheroras and Salome, saying that Salome had even once forced herself upon him at night against his will. These books, loud with grave and terrible charges against the most powerful men, came into Herod's hands, and Archelaus hurried to Judea with all speed, in fear for his son-in-law and his daughter. He proved a most far-sighted ally to them, and skillfully turned aside the king's threat.
Meeting Herod at once, he cried out: "Where, where is that accursed son-in-law of mine? Where shall I see that head, a father's murderer, so that I may tear it apart with my own hands? And I will hand over my daughter too, to her fine bridegroom; for even if she has had no share in the plot, she is defiled simply by having become such a man's wife. I am amazed, too, at your patience — you who were the very man plotted against — that he still lives...
...Alexander—until now. I hurried here from Cappadocia expecting to find him already condemned, and meaning to discuss with you the question of my daughter, whom I had betrothed to him out of respect for your rank. But now we must take counsel about them both together. And if you are too indulgent a father to punish a treacherous son, let us join right hands and become heirs to each other's anger.
With this bluster he won Herod over, guarded as the king had been. He gave him the letters composed by Alexander to read, and going through them chapter by chapter, discussed each with him. Archelaus took this as his opening move, and little by little shifted the blame onto the men named in them, and onto Pheroras. When he saw that the king believed him, he said, "We must consider whether the young man is really being plotted against by so many scoundrels—
not by the young man himself. For I cannot see what reason he would have to fall into so great a crime, when he already enjoys the kingship and hopes for the succession besides—unless certain men were egging him on and exploiting the pliability of his age for evil ends. It is through such men that not only the young but even the old are deceived, and the most splendid households and whole kingdoms overturned."
Herod agreed with what he said, and relaxed his anger against Alexander for a while, but grew the more incensed against Pheroras; for Pheroras was the subject of the four letters. Pheroras, seeing the king's volatility and Archelaus's friendship with him prevailing over everyone, realized there was no honorable way to safety, and so procured one through shamelessness: he abandoned Alexander and fled for refuge to Archelaus.
Archelaus said he could not see how he could ask for his pardon when he was implicated in so many charges, from which it was plainly shown that he had plotted against the king and had caused the young man's present troubles—unless he was willing to drop his cunning and his denials, and instead confess to the charges and beg forgiveness from his brother, who loved him; for in that case Archelaus himself would cooperate in every way. Pheroras was persuaded,
and having arranged himself so as to appear as pitiable as possible, in black clothing and in tears, he fell at Herod's feet, as he had often done before when begging pardon, confessing himself to be vile—for he had indeed done everything he was accused of—yet lamenting a derangement of mind and a madness, whose cause, he said, was his love for his wife. Having thus put forward Pheroras as his own accuser and witness, Archelaus at once
began to plead for him and to check Herod's anger, using illustrations drawn from his own case: he too, he said, had suffered far worse at his brother's hands, yet had set the claims of nature above those of vengeance; for in kingdoms, as in large bodies, some part is always inflamed by its own weight, and this ought not to be cut off, but treated more gently. By saying much along these lines he softened Herod toward Pheroras, though he himself continued to feign anger at Alexander, and declared he would separate his daughter from him and take her away—until he brought Herod round to pleading on the young man's behalf and to betrothing his daughter to him once again.
Very convincingly Archelaus said he would let her marry whomever she pleased, except Alexander; for he set the highest value on maintaining toward him the rights owed by the marriage bond. When the king said his son would receive this as a gift from him if he would not dissolve the marriage—since they already had children together, and the wife was so loved by the young man that her staying with him would restrain his faults, while her being torn away would drive him to total despair, for reckless daring grows milder when entangled with one's own affections—Archelaus reluctantly gave in, was reconciled, and reconciled the young man to his father.
He said, however, that Alexander must by all means be sent to Rome to speak with Caesar, for he himself had written to him about the whole matter. So Archelaus's stratagem, by which he rescued his son-in-law, achieved its end, and after the reconciliation they spent their days in feasting and mutual goodwill. As Archelaus was leaving, Herod presented him with gifts worth seventy talents, a gold throne set with jewels, eunuchs, and a concubine named
Pannychis, and he honored each of his friends according to his rank. In the same way, at the king's command, his relatives too all gave splendid gifts to Archelaus, and he was escorted by Herod and the nobles as far as Antioch. Not long after, a man far more capable than Archelaus at such stratagems arrived in Judea, one who not only undid the reconciliation Archelaus had arranged for Alexander,
but became the cause of his destruction as well. He was a Spartan by birth, named Eurycles, driven into the kingdom by a longing for money, since Greece could no longer support his extravagance. He brought Herod splendid gifts as bait for what he was hunting, and having at once received many times as much in return, he considered a clean gift worthless unless he could trade in the kingdom through bloodshed. He went about winning the king over with flattery
and cleverness of speech and false praises of himself. Quickly grasping Herod's character, and saying and doing everything to please him, he became one of his foremost friends; for the king, on account of his homeland, and everyone around him too, gladly gave the Spartan preference. Once he had learned the rotten spots in the household—
the quarrels among the brothers, and how the father stood toward each of them—finding that Antipater had already won him over through hospitality, he feigned friendship with Alexander, falsely claiming to have long been a companion of Archelaus as well; and so he was quickly received as one already trusted, and Alexander at once introduced him to his brother Aristobulus too. Having tested every face, he approached each in his own way; but above all he became Antipater's hired agent and Alexander's betrayer,
reproaching Antipater, if he, being the eldest, would overlook those lying in wait for his hopes, and reproaching Alexander, if he, born of a queen and married to a queen, would allow the son of a commoner to succeed to the throne—especially since he had so great an advantage in Archelaus. He posed as a trusted counselor to the young man, having fabricated a friendship with Archelaus; and so, holding nothing back, Alexander poured out to him his complaints about Antipater, and
how, since Herod had killed their mother, it was no wonder if he also took from them her kingdom; at which Eurycles pretended to pity and share his pain. He induced Aristobulus to say the same things, and having entangled both of them in their complaints against their father, he went off and carried their secrets to Antipater; he also falsely added a plot, as though the brothers were lying in ambush for him
and all but drawing their swords already. Having taken a great sum of money on top of this, he became a champion of Antipater's cause even before the father. And finally, having contracted for the death of Aristobulus and Alexander, he became their accuser before their father, and coming to him declared that he was offering Herod his life in return for his benefactions, and repaying the light of day in exchange for his hospitality; for long ago
a sword had been sharpened against him, he said, and Alexander's right hand made ready for it, and he himself had stood in the way, feigning cooperation in order to slow things down; for Alexander had said, he claimed, that Herod was not content to reign himself over what belonged to others, and, after murdering their mother, to have squandered her kingdom, but was even bringing in a bastard as successor, offering their grandfather's kingdom to Antipater the corrupter. He would
avenge Hyrcanus and Mariamme with his own hand; for it was not fitting, he said, that he should inherit the throne from such a father without bloodshed. There were, moreover, many things that provoked him daily, so that not even the most innocent kind of talk had been left free of slander: whenever the noble birth of others was mentioned, he himself was insulted for no reason, since his father would say that Alexander alone was noble and despised his own father
for his lack of noble birth; and in the hunts, if he made some mistake he was met with silence, but if he did well he was met with ironic praise. Everywhere he found his father implacable, and affectionate only toward Antipater—for whose sake he would gladly die too, if he failed in his plot. And if he succeeded in killing him, his best hope of safety, he said, lay first with Archelaus, being his father-in-law, to whom he could easily escape, and then with Caesar, who up to now did not know Herod's true character;
for he would no longer, as before, present himself trembling before his overbearing father, nor speak only of his own grievances, but would first proclaim the nation's sufferings and the people taxed to the point of exhaustion, and then the luxuries and doings on which the money raised through bloodshed had been squandered, the sort of men from among them who had grown rich, and at whose expense the favored cities had been beautified. He would also seek out
his grandfather there, and his mother, and would proclaim all the pollutions of the kingdom, crimes for which he would not be judged a parricide. Having fabricated such monstrous tales against Alexander, Eurycles heaped much praise on Antipater, declaring that he alone was devoted to his father and for that reason had so far stood in the way of the plot. The king, not yet fully calmed after the earlier accusations, now flared up into an ungovernable rage.
And once again seizing the opportunity, Antipater sent forward other accusers against his brothers, to say that they were secretly conferring with Jucundus and Tyrannus, men who had once been the king's cavalry commanders but had since fallen from their rank because of some offenses. Herod, in a fury over this, immediately had the men tortured. They, however, confessed nothing of what was charged against them; but a letter was produced and brought before the commander
of the garrison at Alexandreion, from Alexander, urging him to receive him and his brother Aristobulus into the fortress once they had killed their father, and to let them make use of the weapons and the other resources there. Alexander said this was a forgery of Diophantus; Diophantus was the king's secretary, a bold man skilled at imitating anyone's handwriting, who, after many such forgeries, was in the end put to death for it.
Herod tortured the garrison commander as well, but learned nothing from him either about the charges. Yet, although he found the proofs weak, he ordered his sons kept under guard—though still unbound for the moment—while he called Eurycles, the corrupter of his household and the stage-manager of the whole abomination, his savior and benefactor, and rewarded him with fifty talents. Eurycles, outrunning the accurate report of events, went off to Cappadocia and extracted money
from Archelaus too, daring to say that he had actually reconciled Herod with Alexander. Then, crossing to Greece, he put his ill-gotten gains to similarly base use: indeed, having twice been accused before Caesar of filling Achaea with sedition and stripping its cities bare, he was sent into exile. Such was the requital that overtook him for the ruin of Alexander and Aristobulus. It is worth setting Euarestus of Cos over against the Spartan; for he too
was among Alexander's closest friends, and, visiting at the same time as Eurycles, when the king questioned him about the things Eurycles had been slandering the young men with, he swore on oath that he had heard nothing of the kind from them. Yet this did nothing to help the unfortunate youths; for of all reports, Herod was quickest to lend an ear to those of wrongdoing, and anyone who shared his suspicions and shared his outrage found favor with him. Salome too
provoked his savagery toward his children; for Aristobulus, wishing to bind her to their danger since she was both mother-in-law and aunt to them, sent word urging her to save herself, since the king was ready to kill her too, accused—as before—of secretly passing on the king's confidential business to Syllaeus the Arab, whom she was eager to marry, though he was Herod's enemy. This news, like a final storm,
overwhelmed the young men, already caught in the tempest; for Salome ran to the king and reported the warning she had received. Herod, no longer able to restrain himself, had both his sons bound and kept apart from one another, and sent Volumnius the camp commander and his friend Olympus in haste to Caesar, bearing written reports. When they had sailed to Rome and delivered the king's letter,
Caesar was deeply distressed over the young men, but did not think it right to take from their father his authority over his sons. He wrote back, then, establishing Herod as sole judge, but saying he would do well to examine the plot in a joint council of his own relatives and the governors of the province; and if they were found guilty, to put them to death, but if they had merely planned flight, to punish them
more moderately. Herod complied with these instructions, and on arriving at Berytus, where Caesar had directed, convened the tribunal. The governors took their seats as Caesar's letter had prescribed—Saturninus and his colleagues from Pedanius's staff—together with Volumnius the procurator; after them the king's relatives and friends, Salome and Pheroras; and after them the leading men of all Syria, except Archelaus the king;
for Herod, since Archelaus was Alexander's father-in-law, held him under suspicion. As for the sons themselves, he did not bring them before the court, very deliberately; for he knew that the mere sight of them would inevitably win them pity, and that if they were also given a chance to speak, Alexander would easily clear himself of the charges. So they were kept under guard in the village of Platana in Sidonian territory. The king, standing as though they were present, pressed his case,
accusing them of the plot rather weakly, as one at a loss for proofs of it, but bringing forward countless insults, jeers, abuse, and offenses against himself, which he declared to the assembled council to be worse than death. Then, when no one contradicted him, he made a show of pity, as though he himself were the one convicted, and were winning a bitter victory over his own children, and asked each man's opinion in turn. Saturninus was the first to declare his verdict: that the young men should be condemned, but not to death;
for it was not right for him, he said, with three children of his own standing by, to vote for the destruction of another man's children. The two envoys with him agreed, and some others followed their lead. Volumnius, however, opened with the grimmer sentence, and after him all condemned the young men to death, some out of flattery, some out of hatred for Herod, but none out of real indignation. At that point
all Syria and Judea alike hung in suspense, waiting for how the drama would end; yet no one supposed that Herod's cruelty would go so far as to kill his own children. But he had his sons dragged off to Tyre, and from there sailed across to Caesarea, pondering what manner of death to give the young men. There was an old soldier of the king's, named Tiro, whose own son was a close friend and companion of Alexander's,
and who himself had grown fond of the young men in his own right; out of the excess of his indignation he lost all self-control, and at first went about crying out that justice had been trampled underfoot, that truth had perished, that nature itself had been thrown into confusion, that life was filled with lawlessness, and everything else that his passion, careless of his own life, dictated to him. In the end he even dared to approach the king himself, and said, "To me you seem the most cursed of men, you who...
...against your dearest kin you let yourself be persuaded by the most wicked men, if indeed, having often condemned Pheroras and Salome to death, you now believe them against your own children—men who, cutting off your legitimate heirs, leave you with Antipater alone, choosing for themselves a king they can easily manage. Consider, too, that this same man may one day earn the soldiers' hatred for the death of his brothers; for there is no one who does not pity the boys, and many of the officers show their anger openly." As he said this, he named the men who were angry.
Herod immediately arrested them, and Tiron himself, and his son. At this a court barber named Trypho, driven by some supernatural folly, rushed forward and informed on himself: "This Tiron," he said, "tried to persuade me too, whenever I attended you with the razor, to cut your throat, and promised me great rewards from Alexander." Hearing this, Herod put Tiron, his son, and the barber to torture. The father and the barber denied everything, and when the son said nothing further, Herod ordered Tiron tortured more severely. The son, pitying him, promised the king he would tell everything if his father's life were spared. When the king agreed, he said that his father, persuaded by Alexander, had wanted to kill him. Some thought this had been invented to end his father's torment; others believed it true.
In an assembly Herod accused the officers and Tiron before the people and set the crowd on them; there, at any rate, they were killed along with the barber, stoned and clubbed to death. He then sent his sons to Sebaste, not far from Caesarea, with orders to strangle them. When the order had quickly been carried out, he had the bodies brought up to the fortress of Alexandrium, to be buried with Alexander their maternal grandfather. Such, then, was the end of Alexander and Aristobulus.
With Antipater now undisputed heir, unbearable hatred against him arose from the nation, for everyone knew that he had contrived all the accusations against his brothers; and there lurked in him no small fear as he watched the growing family of the men he had destroyed. For Alexander had two sons by Glaphyra, Tigranes and Alexander, and Aristobulus had, by Berenice daughter of Salome, sons Herod, Agrippa, and Aristobulus, and daughters Herodias and Mariamme. Glaphyra, with her dowry, Herod sent back to Cappadocia once he had killed Alexander; Berenice, Aristobulus's widow, he married to Antipater's uncle on his mother's side—for Antipater, working to win over Salome, who was estranged from him, arranged this marriage. He also courted Pheroras with gifts and every kind of service, and sent no small sums of money to Caesar's friends in Rome. Saturninus and his circle in Syria, too, were all glutted with his gifts.
But the more he gave, the more he was hated, since it was plain he was not being generous out of magnanimity but spending out of fear. And it turned out that those who received something became no more friendly, while those to whom he gave nothing became still harsher enemies. He made his distributions more lavish by the day, seeing the king—contrary to his own hopes—caring for the orphans and showing repentance for those he had killed by pitying their children.
Once, gathering his relatives and friends, and setting the children before him, Herod filled his eyes with tears and said: "A grim spirit has taken from these children their fathers, but this loss stirs in me, together with nature itself, pity for their orphaned state. Though I proved the unluckiest of fathers, I mean to prove a more devoted grandfather, and after my death to leave them guardians drawn from those dearest to me. I betroth your daughter, Pheroras, to the elder of Alexander's two sons, so that you will be bound to him as his necessary guardian; and to your son, Antipater, I betroth Aristobulus's daughter—so you may become a father to the orphan girl. Her sister my own Herod shall take, since on his mother's side he is grandson of a high priest. Let this be my settlement, one that none of those who love me should undo; and I pray God to bless these marriages for the good of my kingdom and my descendants, and to let these children look on with calmer eyes than their fathers did." Having said this, he wept and joined the children's right hands together, then kissed each one affectionately and dismissed the council.
Antipater at once turned pale and showed his distress to everyone; for he supposed that the honor paid the orphans by his father meant the overthrow of his own position, and that he would again be in danger for everything, if Alexander's sons had Archelaus and Pheroras the tetrarch as their allies. He weighed his own unpopularity against the nation's pity for the orphans, and how eager and lasting the Jews' memory was for the brothers who had perished because of him. He resolved, then, to break off the betrothals by every means.
He was afraid to approach his harsh and quick-to-suspect father by cunning, so he ventured to come to him directly and beg him not to strip him of the honor he had been granted, nor let him keep the name of king while the power belonged to others; for he would never control affairs, he said, if Alexander's son gained Archelaus as grandfather and Pheroras as father-in-law. He pleaded, since the royal family was so large, that the marriages be rearranged; for the king had nine wives, and seven children by them: Antipater himself by Doris; Herod by Mariamme, the high priest's daughter; Antipas and Archelaus by Malthace the Samaritan, and a daughter Olympias, whom his own nephew Joseph had married; by Cleopatra of Jerusalem, Herod and Philip; by Pallas, Phasael. He had other daughters too, Roxane and Salome, the one by Phaedra, the other by Elpis. Two of his wives were childless, a niece and a great-niece. Besides these there were the two daughters of Alexander and Aristobulus by Mariamme. With the family so crowded, Antipater begged that the marriages be changed.
The king was bitterly angered when he perceived Antipater's disposition toward the orphans, and the thought struck him concerning the murdered brothers, that these children too might one day become material for Antipater's slanders. So at that time he answered him harshly and drove him away, but afterward, won over again by his flattery, he relented, and married him to Aristobulus's daughter, and his son to Pheroras's daughter.
One can gauge how much Antipater's flattery achieved in these matters from Salome's failure in similar circumstances. Though she was his sister, and though she begged repeatedly, through Livia the wife of Caesar, to be given in marriage to Syllaeus the Arab, Herod swore he would treat her as his bitterest enemy if she did not give up her pursuit, and in the end married her, against her will, to a certain Alexas, one of his friends; and of her daughters he married one to Alexas's son, the other to Antipater's uncle on his mother's side. Of Mariamme's granddaughters, one married her aunt's son Antipater, the other her uncle's son Phasael.
Having broken off the orphans' hopes, and having arranged the marriages to his own advantage, Antipater sailed on as if his hopes rested on secure ground; and, adding to his wickedness a new confidence, he became unbearable, for being unable to shed the hatred each man bore him, he sought his safety instead by making himself feared. Pheroras too helped him in this, now that he was, as it were, already a settled king.
There also arose a faction among the women at court, which stirred up fresh disturbances. Pheroras's wife, joined by her mother and sister and by Antipater's mother too, behaved with great insolence throughout the palace, and even dared to insult two of the king's daughters, for which Herod above all had come to detest her; yet, hated as they were by everyone else, they held their ground. Only Salome opposed their unity, and told the king that their alliance boded no good for his affairs. When they learned of her accusation, and of Herod's anger, they gave up their open meetings and displays of friendship, and instead pretended to quarrel with one another when the king was listening; Antipater joined in this pretense too, openly clashing with Pheroras. But in secret they met and held nighttime revels, and the watchfulness this required only deepened their unity. Salome, however, knew everything that was going on and reported it all to Herod.
He blazed into anger, especially against Pheroras's wife, since Salome accused her more than the rest. So he gathered a council of friends and relatives and brought many charges against the woman, including the insult to his own daughters, and that she had paid the Pharisees money to work against him and had bewitched his brother into hostility toward him with drugs. Finally he turned his speech to Pheroras, telling him to choose one of two things, either to remain his brother or to keep his wife. When Pheroras said he would sooner give up his life than his wife, Herod, not knowing what to do, turned to Antipater and ordered him to have no dealings with Pheroras's wife, or with Pheroras himself, or with anyone belonging to her. Antipater did not openly disobey the order, but secretly spent his nights with them; and fearing the watchful Salome, he arranged, through his friends in Italy, to have himself sent to Rome. For they wrote that Antipater ought after so long a time to be sent to Caesar, and Herod, without delay, sent him off with a splendid retinue and a great sum of money, and had him carry the will, in which Antipater was named king, and Antipater's successor was to be Herod, the son of Mariamme the high priest's daughter.
Syllaeus the Arab also sailed to Rome, having disregarded Caesar's orders, and meaning to contest with Antipater the case which Nicolaus had more speedily won. He also had no small quarrel with Aretas, his own king; for he had killed several of Aretas's friends, including Soaemus, one of the most powerful men in Petra. He had bribed Fabatus, Caesar's steward, with large sums, and used him as an ally even against Herod. But Herod, giving more, drew Fabatus away from Syllaeus, and through him collected what Caesar had ordered paid. Syllaeus, paying nothing, went so far as to accuse Fabatus before Caesar, saying he was steward not of Caesar's interests but of Herod's. Fabatus, angered by this—he was still held in the highest honor by Herod—betrayed Syllaeus's secrets, telling the king that Syllaeus had bribed his bodyguard Corinthus, whom he should be on guard against.
The king believed him; for Corinthus had indeed been raised in the kingdom, though by birth an Arab. He at once arrested not only Corinthus but two other Arabs found with him, one a friend of Syllaeus, the other a tribal chief. Under torture they confessed that they had persuaded Corinthus, for a large sum of money, to kill Herod. These men, after examination, were sent on to Rome by Saturninus, governor of Syria.
Herod did not let up pressing Pheroras to separate from his wife, nor did he stop devising some means of punishing the woman, having many reasons for his hatred, until at last, in extreme anger, he banished both her and his brother. Pheroras, content with the insult, withdrew to his own tetrarchy, swearing that the only end to his exile would be Herod's death, and that he would never return while his brother lived; nor did he come back even when his brother fell ill, though urgently summoned, for Herod wished to leave him certain instructions, believing he was about to die. But Herod, against expectation, recovered, and soon after Pheroras fell ill himself, and Herod proved gentler than before; indeed he came to him and nursed him with sympathy. Yet this did not overcome the illness, for after a few days Pheroras died. Though Herod had loved him to the last, it was even rumored that he himself had had him poisoned. He had the body brought to Jerusalem, proclaimed the deepest mourning for the whole nation, and gave him a most splendid funeral. Such was the end that came to one of the murderers of Alexander and Aristobulus.
The penalty now passed to the true author, Antipater, beginning with Pheroras's death. Some of Pheroras's freedmen came to the king in distress, saying that his brother had been destroyed by poison; that his wife had brought him something unusually prepared, and that as soon as he ate it he fell ill; that two days before, her mother and sister had brought in a woman skilled in drugs from Arabia, supposedly to prepare a love-potion for Pheroras, but that instead she had given him something deadly, procured through Syllaeus, to whom this woman was known. Struck by these many suspicions, the king put maidservants and some free women to torture. One of the women, in her agony, cried out: "May God, who rules earth and heaven, punish the one responsible for these evils among us—Antipater's mother!"
Seizing on this lead, the king pursued the truth further. The woman revealed the friendship between Antipater's mother and Pheroras and his wives, and their secret meetings, and that Pheroras and Antipater used to drink with these women on their way back from the king, letting no servant or maid, man or woman, be present through the whole night. One of the free women made this disclosure. Herod then had the slave women tortured separately, one by one, and all of them told the same story as before, and added that Antipater had arranged with Pheroras that Antipater would go to Rome and Pheroras withdraw to Perea; for they had often said to one another that once Alexander and Aristobulus were gone, Herod would turn next against them and their wives, since after Mariamme and her children he would spare no one else, so that it was better to flee as far as possible from the beast. They said too that Antipater, often complaining to his mother, said that he himself was already gray, while his father grew younger every day, and that he might well die before he even began his true reign—and even if his father should die at some point, when indeed would that be?
So he would be left with only the briefest enjoyment of the succession, since the hydra's heads kept sprouting again -- the sons of Aristobulus and Alexander. His father had also stripped him of any hope for his own children, since it was not one of Antipater's own sons but Herod, Mariamme's son, whom he had named successor after his death. And in this too his father must think himself thoroughly worn down, since he intended to leave the will as it stood -- he would see to it, Antipater said, that none of that generation was left alive. Herod, though the most child-hating of all fathers who ever lived, hated his brother far more: he had given him a hundred talents just to stop speaking with Pheroras. When Pheroras asked what harm he had done him, Antipater answered that he wished Herod would take everything from them and let them live, if only naked. But there was no escaping so murderous a beast, one with whom no one could even show open affection for another. "Even now we meet each other only in secret," he said, "but we shall meet openly once we find in ourselves the courage and the strength of men."
This was what the women said under torture, and also that Pheroras had planned to flee with them to Petra. Herod believed everything they said, on account of the hundred talents, since only with Antipater had he discussed that matter. His anger fell first on Doris, Antipater's mother: he stripped her of every ornament he had given her -- and there were many talents' worth -- and banished her a second time. Pheroras' wives, having been reconciled, he now treated kindly despite the torture. But he was shaken with fear, and every suspicion set him ablaze; he dragged many who were not guilty into torture, afraid he might overlook one of the guilty. In the midst of this he turned
to Antipater the Samaritan, who was the steward of Antipater's estate. Torturing him, he learned that Antipater had sent for a deadly poison from Egypt through one of his companions, Antiphilus; that Theudion, Antipater's uncle, had received it from him and handed it over to Pheroras -- for Antipater had instructed him to kill Herod while he himself was in Rome, safely removed from suspicion -- and that Pheroras
had entrusted the poison to his wife. The king summoned her at once and ordered her to bring what she had received. She went out as if to fetch it, but threw herself from the roof, forestalling both the exposure and the abuse she expected from the king. By the providence of God, it seems, who was pursuing Antipater, she did not fall on her head but to one side, and so survived. When she was brought to him,
the king revived her -- for she had been stunned by the fall -- and asked why she had thrown herself down, swearing that if she told the truth he would free her from all punishment, but if she held anything back he would tear her body apart with torture and not even leave it a grave. To this the woman, pausing a moment, said: "Why indeed should I still spare the secrets of Pheroras, now that he is dead, or protect the man who has destroyed us all,
Antipater? Listen, O king, and let God be witness with you to my truth, God who cannot be deceived. When you sat weeping beside the dying Pheroras, he called me to him and said: 'How greatly, wife, I misjudged my brother's feelings toward me -- hating the one who loved me so, and plotting to kill the one who, even now that I am dying, is not at ease about me. But I
already pay the penalty for my impiety. You, take the poison you keep against him, left with us by Antipater, and destroy it quickly before my eyes, so that I may not carry the avenging fiend with me even to Hades.' At his command I brought it and, before his eyes, poured out most of it into the fire, but I kept back a little for myself, against the unknown and against my fear of you."
So saying, she produced the box, which still held a small amount of the poison. The king then turned the torture on Antiphilus's mother and brother, and they too confessed that Antiphilus had brought the box from Egypt and that he had received the poison from his brother, a physician practicing in Alexandria. And now the avenging spirits of Alexander and Aristobulus went about searching out and exposing every hidden thing, dragging into the inquiry even those furthest removed from suspicion.
So it was discovered that even Mariamme, the high priest's daughter, had knowledge of the plot, for her brothers, under torture, testified to this against her. The king punished the son for his mother's daring as well: he struck Herod, her son, from the will, though he was Antipater's designated successor. On top of this
Bathyllus too was drawn into the inquiry, the final proof of all that had been plotted against Antipater. He was a freedman of his, and he had brought yet another poison -- the venom of asps and the juices of other reptiles -- so that if the first poison should fail, Pheroras and his wife might arm themselves with this against the king. As a mere byproduct of his boldness against his father, Antipater had also brought along the
letters fabricated against his brothers. Archelaus and Philip, the king's sons, were being educated at Rome, already young men and full of spirit. Eager to remove these two, who kept reviving in his prospects, Antipater forged letters against them in the names of their friends at Rome, while others he persuaded to write, corrupting them with money, saying that they spoke much abuse against their father and openly lamented Alexander
and Aristobulus, and grew indignant at being recalled -- for their father had already sent for them, and this was what most troubled Antipater. Even before his journey, while he was still in Judea, he had been buying up such letters against them from Rome, and approaching his father as though above suspicion, he would defend his brothers, calling some of what was written false and other parts merely the errors of youth.
At the same time, having given great sums of money to those who wrote against his brothers, he tried to confuse the inquiry, buying up costly garments, embroidered coverlets, silver and gold cups, and many other treasures, so that by the sheer scale of this spending he might disguise the wages he had paid for those letters -- he had in fact spent two hundred talents, and of these
the greatest pretext was his lawsuit against Syllaeus. Now that all of this, even the smaller matters, had come to light amid the greater evil -- when every torture cried out his father's murder and every letter cried out a second fratricide -- still no one arriving from Rome reported to him what had happened in Judea, although seven months had passed between the exposure and his return. So great
was the hatred everyone bore him. Perhaps too the avenging spirits of his murdered brothers stopped the mouths of those who meant to report it. In any case he wrote from Rome announcing the good news of his own swift arrival, and that Caesar had released him with honor. The king, eager to get the plotter into his hands, and afraid he might somehow learn the truth beforehand and be on his guard, wrote back a false, friendly letter, urging him to hurry, and saying that he would deal with the complaints against his mother once Antipater had pressed on with speed -- for Antipater was not unaware of his mother's banishment.
Earlier, in fact, he had received the letter about Pheroras' death while at Tarentum, and made a great show of mourning, which some praised as filial devotion; but it seems, rather, that his confusion arose from his plot having failed, and that he was not weeping for Pheroras
but for his own agent. By now some fear of what he had done was creeping over him, that the poison might somehow be discovered. Then, in Cilicia, he received the letter from his father mentioned above, and pressed on at once; but as he was putting in at Celenderis, a certain foreboding about his mother's misfortunes seized him, his soul already divining them on its own. Some
of the more cautious among his friends advised him not to go to his father until he had learned clearly why he had banished his mother, for they feared it might add to the accusations against her. But the less thoughtful, more eager to see their homeland than mindful of Antipater's own interest, urged him to press on and not, by delay, give his father grounds for suspicion
or his accusers an opening -- for even now, they said, if anything had stirred against him, it had happened during his absence; surely no one would have dared it had he been present. It would be absurd, they said, to be deprived of manifest goods for the sake of unclear suspicions, and better to hand himself over to his father at once and secure the kingship that hung on him alone. He yielded to this advice -- for it was his fate driving him on -- and crossing over,
he put in at Sebastos, the harbor of Caesarea. What met him there, against all expectation, was a great emptiness: everyone turned aside, and no one dared approach him. He had always been hated equally by all, but now the hatred found the freedom to show itself; and many were turned away besides by fear of the king, since every city was already full of the rumor against Antipater, and Antipater alone was ignorant of what concerned him.
No one had ever been escorted more splendidly when he sailed for Rome, nor received with less honor. He already sensed the disasters at home, but out of cunning he still concealed it, and though dead with fear within, he forced his face to look composed. There was no longer any flight, no slipping away from what surrounded him, and even there nothing certain about home was reported to him, for fear
of the king's threats. Yet a brighter hope remained: perhaps nothing had been discovered, or if something had, he might disguise it with shamelessness and cunning -- the only provisions left for his survival. Fortified with these, then, he came to the palace without his friends, for they were insulted and shut out at the very first gate. Varus, the governor of Syria, happened to be inside.
Antipater went in to his father and, emboldened by his own audacity, drew near to embrace him. But Herod thrust out his hands and turned his head aside. "This too," he cried, "is a parricide's doing -- wanting to embrace me when he stands accused of such crimes! Away, most impious of heads -- do not touch me until you have cleared yourself of the charges. I grant you a court and a judge who has arrived just in time,
Varus. Go now and prepare your defense for tomorrow -- I give you that much time for your schemes." To this, unable to answer anything in his confusion, Antipater withdrew, and his mother and wife, coming to him, related to him all the proofs that had been brought forward. Then, recovering himself, he set about considering his defense. The next day the king gathered a council of
his relatives and friends, and summoned Antipater's friends as well. He himself presided together with Varus, and ordered all the accusers brought in. Among those brought in were also some servants of Antipater's mother, arrested not long before, carrying a letter from her to her son, which read: "Since all those matters have been discovered by your father, do not come to him unless
you can obtain some support from Caesar." When these had been brought in along with the others, Antipater entered, and falling face down before his father's feet, said: "I beg you, father, do not condemn me beforehand, but give me an unbiased hearing for my defense; I will prove myself innocent, if you are willing." But Herod, shouting at him to be silent, said to Varus: "That you, Varus,
and every righteous judge will condemn Antipater as utterly corrupt, I am certain. But I fear that you too may come to hate my own fortune, and judge me deserving of every calamity for having fathered such sons. Yet I ought all the more to be pitied for this, that I was so devoted a father to such wretched creatures. My earlier sons, when they were still young, I honored with royal rank and, besides their upbringing at Rome, made them
friends of Caesar, and objects of envy to other kings -- yet I found them plotting against me, and they are dead, mostly through Antipater's doing; for it was he, being young and my successor, for whom above all I was securing safety. But this vile beast, having gorged itself on my forbearance, could not endure me any longer -- for he thought I had lived too long, and my old age weighed on him, and he could not bear to become king unless
by killing his father. And rightly so, in his reckoning, since I had brought him back from the obscurity to which he had been cast down, and had set aside the sons born to me by a queen to declare him my successor. I confess to you, Varus, my own madness: I turned those sons against myself, cutting off their just hopes for Antipater's sake. And what benefit did I ever give them equal to what I gave him? To him, while I still lived,
I all but yielded my authority, and openly named him successor to the throne in my will; I assigned him fifty talents in income of his own, I lavished my money on him without limit, and when he sailed for Rome just now I gave him three hundred talents, and out of my whole family I commended him alone to Caesar as my savior. What did those other sons do so impious as Antipater? Or what
proof was ever brought against them to match what convicts this one as a plotter? Yet the parricide has dared to speak, and hopes once more to cloak the truth with his tricks. Varus, you must be on your guard -- I know the beast, and I foresee already the show of credibility to come, and the counterfeit lamentation. This is the one who once urged me, while Alexander still lived, to be on my guard and not trust my body to everyone; this is the one who
used to escort me even to my bed, watching that no one lie in wait for me there; this is the keeper of my sleep and the provider of my peace of mind, the one who consoled my grief over those I had put to death and weighed the loyalty of my surviving sons, my shield, my bodyguard. When I recall, Varus, his cunning in each of these roles, and his hypocrisy, disbelief in my own survival comes over me, and
I marvel at how I escaped so grave a plotter. But since some fiend is emptying my house and continually raising up my dearest ones against me, I will weep for my unjust fate and groan in private over my desolation, but no one who thirsts for my blood will escape, even if the proof should come to touch every one of my children." Saying this, he broke off, overcome by his own agitation, and signaled to Nicolaus,
one of his friends, to present the proofs. Meanwhile Antipater, raising his head -- for he had remained thrown down before his father's feet -- cried out: "You yourself, father, have made my defense for me. How can I be a parricide, when you yourself admit I have always been your guardian? You call my devotion a monstrous pretense and hypocrisy. How could a man so cunning in
"...in other things so foolish as not to realize that so great a defilement, once contrived, is not easy to hide even from men, let alone from the judge in heaven, who cannot be evaded, who watches over everything and is present everywhere? Or did I not know the fate of my brothers, whom God pursued in this way for their scheming against you? What, then, provoked me against you? Hope of the kingdom? But I was already king. Suspicion of hatred? For was I not loved? Some other fear from you? No — it was you I was guarding, and for that I was feared by others. Want of money? And who had more license to spend than I? For if I had become the most depraved of all men and had the soul of a savage beast, father, I would not have been overcome by your kindnesses — you who brought me back, as you yourself said, preferred me above so many children, and declared me king while you still lived, and by the very excess of your other favors made me an object of envy.
"Wretched me, for that bitter journey abroad — how much time I gave to envy, how long a reprieve to those plotting against me! Yet it was for you, father, and for your struggles that I went abroad, so that Syllaeus might not despise your old age. Rome is my witness to my devotion, and Caesar, guardian of the world, who often called me a lover of my father. Take, father, the letters from him. These are more trustworthy than the slanders spoken here; these are my only defense; by these tokens I prove my affection for you. Remember that I did not sail willingly, knowing the hostility toward me lurking within the kingdom. You, father, destroyed me against your own will, forcing me to give envy its opportunity for slander.
"I stand ready for the proofs; I stand ready, though I have suffered nothing anywhere, on land or sea, I who am called a patricide. But do not yet love me for that. I have already been condemned, both before God and before you, father. And condemned as I am, I beg you not to trust the tortures of others — let the fire be brought against me instead, let the instruments pass through my own entrails, let no cry of pity spare this vile body. For if I am truly a patricide, I ought not to die without torture."
Such were his words, cried out amid lament and tears, and they moved everyone else, even Varus, to pity; only Herod's rage kept him from tears, for he knew the charges to be true. At this point Nicolaus, at the king's command, after saying much beforehand against Antipater's villainy and pouring out the pity due him, delivered a bitter accusation, laying upon him all the crimes committed throughout the kingdom, but above all the murder of his brothers, showing that they had perished through his slanders. He said that Antipater had also been plotting against those who survived, as rivals to the succession; for the man who had prepared poison for his own father would hardly have spared his brothers.
Coming then to the proof of the poisoning, he produced the depositions in order, and railed bitterly concerning Pheroras — that Antipater had made him too a fratricide, and by corrupting those dearest to the king had filled his whole house with pollution. Having said much else besides and demonstrated it, he ended his speech. Varus then ordered Antipater to defend himself, but he said nothing more than that God was his witness that he had done no wrong, and lay there in silence. Varus, asking for the poison, gave it to one of the prisoners condemned to death to drink. When the man died at once, Varus, having kept his private conversations with Herod confidential and having written to Caesar about the proceedings of the council, departed after a single day. The king put Antipater in chains and sent men to Caesar to report the calamity.
After this, Antipater was found to have been plotting against Salome as well; for one of Antiphilus's servants arrived bearing letters from Rome, from Livia's maidservant, named Acme. In them she had written to the king that she had found among Livia's papers letters from Salome, and that she was sending them to him secretly out of goodwill. Salome's letters contained the bitterest abuse of the king and the gravest accusations. Antipater had forged these letters, and having corrupted Acme, had persuaded her to send them to Herod. But he was exposed by his own letter to her, for the woman had written back to him: "As you wished, I have written to your father in your name, and I sent those letters believing the king would not spare his sister once he read them. You would do well, once everything is settled, to remember what you promised."
When this letter was discovered, along with the letters forged against Salome, a suspicion fell upon the king that the letters against Alexander too might have been forgeries, and he was overcome with grief at the thought that he had nearly killed his own sister because of Antipater. He no longer put off taking vengeance for it all. Though set on moving against Antipater, he was checked by a grave illness; but concerning Acme and the schemes contrived against Salome he wrote to Caesar. He also asked for his will and rewrote it, now naming Antipas king and passing over the elder sons, Archelaus and Philip — for Antipater had slandered them too. To Caesar, along with the customary gifts of money, he assigned a thousand talents; to his wife, children, friends, and freedmen, about five hundred; and to everyone else he distributed no small part of his land and wealth. His sister Salome he honored with the most splendid gifts of all. These were the changes he made to his will.
His illness advanced toward the worse, since his ailments had come upon him in old age together with despondency; he was by now nearly seventy, and his spirit had been brought low by the calamities concerning his children, so that even in health he took no pleasure in anything sweet. What made the intensity of his illness still worse was that Antipater still lived, whom he meant, once recovered, to kill without delay. In the midst of these calamities a popular uprising also arose against him. There were two teachers in the city thought especially exacting in their knowledge of the ancestral laws, and for this reason held in the greatest esteem by the whole nation — Judas, son of Sepphoraeus, and another, Matthias, son of Margalus. Not a few of the young men attached themselves to them as they expounded the laws, and day after day the two men gathered around themselves what amounted to an army of the young.
These men, learning that the king was sinking under his despondency and his illness, spread word among their followers that now was the most fitting time to avenge God and tear down the works set up in defiance of the ancestral laws. For it was forbidden, they said, that there be in the temple any image, or bust, or work bearing the likeness of any living creature. Now the king had set up over the great gate a golden eagle, and it was this that the teachers now urged the young men to cut down, saying it was a noble thing, even if some danger should follow, to die for the ancestral law; for those who died in this way would have souls that remained immortal and a perception of good things that endured forever, while the base, ignorant of their own wisdom, loved life too much out of ignorance and preferred a death from illness to a death through virtue.
Together with their words it was also rumored that the king was dying, so that the young men set about the undertaking with still greater boldness. At midday, then, with many people moving about the temple, they let themselves down from the roof on thick ropes and began cutting down the golden eagle with axes. Word of this was reported at once to the king's commander, who hurried up with a considerable force, arrested about forty of the young men, and brought them down to the king. When he asked them first whether they had dared to cut down the golden eagle, they admitted it. When he asked next who had ordered it, they answered: the ancestral law. And when he asked why they were so cheerful though about to be put to death, they said, as they were led off to be killed, that they would enjoy greater blessings after death.
At this the king, in his excess of rage overcoming even his illness, went out to an assembly, and after accusing the men at length as temple-robbers who under pretext of the law were attempting something greater, he demanded to punish them beyond the ordinary penalty, as impious men. The people, fearing that the inquiry might reach a great many, begged him to punish first those who had proposed the deed, then those caught carrying it out, and to let his anger toward the rest go no further. The king, with difficulty, was persuaded, and he burned alive those who had let themselves down from the roof, together with the two teachers, and handed the rest of those arrested over to his attendants to be killed.
From that point his whole body was overtaken by the disease, which divided itself among a variety of afflictions: the fever was not violent, but the itching over the whole surface of his skin was unbearable, and there were continuous pains in the bowels, swellings in the feet as of a man with dropsy, inflammation of the lower abdomen, and — worse still — a gangrene of the genitals that bred worms, together with labored, difficult breathing and convulsions in every limb, so that those given to prophecy declared his sicknesses a punishment for the teachers. Yet, wrestling with so many afflictions, he still clung to life, hoped for recovery, and devised remedies; crossing the Jordan, he made use of the hot springs at Callirrhoe, whose waters flow down into the Dead Sea and are sweet enough to drink.
There the physicians decided to warm his whole body with hot oil, lowering him into a tub filled with it; he collapsed, and his eyes rolled back as though he were dead. When his attendants raised an outcry he was revived by the sound, but from then on, having given up hope of recovery, he ordered fifty drachmas distributed to each of the soldiers, and large sums of money to his officers and friends. Returning to Jericho himself, he arrived already in the grip of melancholy, and, all but defying death itself, pressed on toward a monstrous scheme: gathering the leading men from every village throughout all Judea, he ordered them shut up in the place called the hippodrome.
Then, summoning his sister Salome and her husband Alexas, he said: "I know the Jews will celebrate my death as a festival, but it is in my power to be mourned by other means and to have a splendid funeral, if you are willing to carry out my orders. As soon as I breathe my last, have these guarded men killed at once, surrounding them with soldiers, so that all Judea and every household will weep for me, however unwillingly." Such were his instructions.
Letters then arrived from the envoys in Rome, announcing that Acme had been put to death by Caesar's order, and that Antipater had been condemned to death — though they added that if his father preferred to banish him instead, Caesar would permit it. This lifted his spirits a little, but then, worn down by lack of food and a spasmodic cough, overcome by his pains, he resolved to anticipate his fate. Taking an apple, he asked for a small knife, since he was in the habit of peeling it before eating; then, looking around to see that no one was there to stop him, he raised his right hand as if to strike himself. But his cousin Achiabus ran up and stopped him, seizing his hand. At once a great wailing rose through the palace, as though the king were dead, and Antipater, hearing it, quickly took heart and, overjoyed, begged his guards, with a bribe of money, to release him by loosening his chains.
But the officer not only refused but ran to the king and reported the plot. Herod cried out more violently than his illness allowed, and, sending his bodyguards at once, had Antipater killed. He ordered the body buried at Hyrcania, and once more revised his will, naming Archelaus, his eldest son, as successor, and Antipater's brother Antipas as tetrarch. Five days after his son's execution he died, having reigned thirty-four years from the time he overthrew Antigonus and took control of affairs, and thirty-seven from the time the Romans declared him king. In every other respect he had enjoyed good fortune, if any man ever did, who from a private citizen won a kingdom and, having kept it so long, left it to his own children — but in his household affairs he was the most unfortunate of men.
Before news of his death became known, Salome, going out with her husband, released the prisoners the king had ordered killed, telling them the king had changed his mind and was sending each of them home. Once they had gone, she and her husband then announced the death to the soldiers and gathered them, together with the rest of the people, into an assembly in the amphitheater at Jericho. There Ptolemy, entrusted with the king's signet ring, came forward, first pronounced the king blessed, then addressed the crowd, and read out the letter the king had left for the soldiers, in which he urged at length their loyalty to his successor. After the letter, he opened and read the codicils, in which Philip was made heir of Trachonitis and the neighboring territories, Antipas — as already said — tetrarch, and Archelaus declared king.
To Archelaus he had entrusted the task of carrying his own signet ring to Caesar, along with the sealed arrangements of the kingdom; for Caesar was to be the final authority over all his dispositions and the guarantor of his will, while everything else was to stand according to the earlier will. At once a shout went up from those rejoicing with Archelaus, and the soldiers, company by company, came forward with the people, promising their loyalty and praying also for God's blessing on him; after this they turned to the burial of the king. Archelaus spared nothing in magnificence, bringing out the whole royal array to accompany the body in procession: the bier was of solid gold, studded with jewels, its coverlet of embroidered purple, and on it the body itself lay wrapped in purple; a diadem rested on the head, and above it a golden crown, with the scepter beside the right hand.
Around the bier walked his sons and the multitude of his kinsmen, followed by the bodyguards and the Thracian company, the Germans and the Gauls, all arrayed as for war. Behind them marched the rest of the army, fully armed, following their commanders and captains in good order, and after them five hundred household servants and freedmen carrying spices. The body was carried seventy stadia to the Herodium, where, in keeping with his instructions, it was buried. And such was the end of Herod's story.

======== Jewish War — Book 2 ========

New disturbances for Archelaus arose from the necessity of his journey to Rome. He had mourned his father seven days and given the people a lavish funeral banquet — a custom among the Jews that ruins many through poverty, since one must give the feast regardless of cost; to omit it is impious — and then he changed into white clothing and went up to the temple, where the people met him with all kinds of acclamations.
He greeted the crowd from a raised platform and a golden throne, thanking them for the zeal they had shown at his father's funeral and for the deference they were already paying him as though he were confirmed king. But he said he would for the present hold back not only from the power itself but even from the titles of it, until Caesar, who by the terms of the will was master of the whole succession, ratified it for him — indeed he had refused to let the army fasten the diadem on him at Jericho. Still, for their eagerness and goodwill, shown alike by the soldiers and by the people, he would repay them in full once his kingship had been confirmed by the ruling powers; for he meant in every way to show himself better to them than his father had been.
Delighted by this, the crowd at once tested his intentions with large demands: some shouted for lighter taxes, others for the abolition of tolls, still others for the release of prisoners. He agreed readily to all of it, courting the crowd's favor, and then, after sacrificing, spent the time feasting with his friends.
It was then, toward evening, that a considerable number of men bent on revolution gathered and began a mourning of their own — now that the public mourning for the king was over — lamenting those whom Herod had punished for cutting down the golden eagle from the temple gate. Their grief was not restrained: there were piercing wails, orchestrated dirges, and beating of breasts that echoed through the whole city, as though for men who had perished by fire for the sake of the ancestral laws and the temple.
They shouted that vengeance ought to be taken on those Herod had honored, and first of all that the man he had installed as high priest should be removed; it was fitting, they said, that they choose a more pious and purer man in his place. Archelaus was provoked by this, but he held back from retaliating because of the pressure of his imminent departure, fearing that if he provoked the crowd to war he might himself be caught up in the uprising. He therefore tried persuasion rather than force to check the agitators, sending the commander of his forces to appeal to them to stop.
But the moment this officer entered the temple, before he could utter a word, the rebels drove him off with stones, along with those who had come with him to restore order — though Archelaus sent many of them in. Whatever was said back to them was met with fury, and it was clear they would not be still if their numbers grew. And now the feast of Unleavened Bread was approaching, which the Jews call Passover, a feast expecting a great multitude of sacrificial victims; countless people came down from the country for the observance, while the mourners for the sophists gathered in the temple, drawing sustenance for their sedition. Alarmed at this, Archelaus, before the sickness could spread through the whole crowd, sent in a tribune with a cohort, with orders to seize the ringleaders of the sedition by force.
At this the whole crowd flew into a rage; most of the cohort they killed by stoning, and the tribune barely escaped, wounded. After this the people, as though nothing terrible had happened, turned back to their sacrifices. But Archelaus no longer thought the crowd could be controlled without bloodshed, and he sent his whole army against them — infantry in a body through the city, cavalry across the plain.
Falling suddenly upon people in the midst of their sacrifices, they killed about three thousand and scattered the rest into the nearby hills. Archelaus' heralds followed, ordering everyone to go home, and all left, abandoning the feast. Archelaus himself, with his mother and his friends Poplas, Ptolemy, and Nicolaus, went down to the coast, leaving Philip in charge of the palace and the household.
Salome set out with him too, along with her children and the king's nephews and sons-in-law — ostensibly to support Archelaus's claim to the succession, but in truth to bring charges over the lawless acts committed at the temple. At Caesarea they were met by Sabinus, the procurator of Syria, on his way up into Judea to secure Herod's money.
Varus arrived and stopped him from going any further, since Archelaus, through Ptolemy, had begged repeatedly for his intervention. So Sabinus, out of deference to Varus, did not hurry to the fortresses at that time, nor did he seal off the treasuries of the royal money from Archelaus, but promised to remain quiet until Caesar's decision, and stayed on at Caesarea. When the obstacles were removed, Varus set off for Antioch, and Archelaus put to sea for Rome.
As soon as he reached Jerusalem in haste, he took possession of the palace and summoned the garrison commanders and stewards, trying to examine the accounts of the money and to take over the fortresses. But Archelaus's own guards did not neglect their orders; they remained at their posts, holding each place in trust for Caesar rather than for Archelaus.
Meanwhile Antipas again disputed the succession, going out to press his claim, insisting that the earlier will was more valid than the codicil, since in it he himself had been named king. Salome had promised beforehand to support him, as had many of the relatives sailing with Archelaus. He brought with him his mother and Nicolaus's brother Ptolemy, who seemed likely to carry weight because of the trust Herod had placed in him — he had in fact been the most honored of his friends.
But Antipas relied most of all, for skill in speaking, on the orator Irenaeus, and it was on his advice that he rejected those who urged him to yield to Archelaus's seniority and to the terms of the codicil. At Rome the sympathies of all the relatives, who hated Archelaus, now shifted to Antipas; each one, above all, wanted autonomy under a Roman governor, but failing that, wanted Antipas as king.
Sabinus helped their cause too, sending letters to accuse Archelaus before Caesar and praise Antipas at length. Salome's party drew up their charges and submitted them to Caesar, and after them Archelaus sent in, through Ptolemy, a written summary of his own claims, along with his father's signet ring and his accounts. Caesar weighed what each side presented privately — the size of the kingdom, the amount of its revenue, and the number of Herod's descendants — and having also read beforehand the dispatches sent by Varus and Sabinus on these matters, he convened a council of the leading Romans, in which he seated, for the first time, Gaius, the adopted son of Agrippa and his daughter Julia. He then gave the parties leave to speak.
Salome's son Antipater, the most formidable speaker among Archelaus's opponents, rose and made his accusation: he said that Archelaus, though in words disputing the kingship only now, had in fact long since made himself king in deed, and was now merely mocking Caesar's hearing — the very man he had not waited for as judge of the succession. For after Herod's death he had sent in agents to place the diadem on him, had sat enthroned in judgment as king, had reassigned ranks in the army and granted promotions, and had moreover granted the people everything they thought fit to ask of a king, releasing even those his father had imprisoned on the gravest charges — and now he had come to beg from his master a mere shadow of the kingship whose substance he had already seized for himself, making Caesar lord not of the facts but only of the titles.
He reproached him too for mocking even the mourning for his father — feigning grief on his face by day, while by night he was drunk with revelry — during which, he said, the very disorder among the crowd had arisen from their outrage at this. And he pressed the whole weight of his case on the multitude slaughtered around the temple, who had come for the feast and were butchered ruthlessly in the midst of their own sacrifices, so that such a heap of corpses had piled up in the temple as not even a foreign war, breaking out without warning, could have produced.
This very cruelty, he said, his own father had foreseen, and had never thought him worthy even of the hope of the kingship, not even when, weaker in mind than in body, he was no longer master of sound judgment and did not even know whom he had named successor in the codicil — and this though he could find no fault at all with the man named in the will proper, which he had drawn up in full bodily health and with a soul free of all passion. But even if one were to give greater weight to the judgment of the dying man, Archelaus had disqualified himself from the kingship by his own lawless acts against it — for what sort of man would he become, once he had received the rule from Caesar, who before receiving it had already destroyed so many?
Having gone through many such charges, and having brought forward most of the relatives as witnesses to each of the accusations, Antipater ended his speech. Then Nicolaus rose on behalf of Archelaus, and argued that the killing in the temple had been unavoidable: those killed had become enemies not only of the kingdom but of Caesar himself, who was the very judge of that kingdom's fate. As to the other charges, he showed that the accusers themselves had been counselors in the very acts they now denounced. And as for the codicil, he argued it should carry authority precisely because in it Herod had made Caesar the guarantor of the succession; for a man sound enough of mind to yield his authority to the master of the world could hardly have erred in judging his own heir — a man sound enough to choose his own arbiter surely knew the one he was choosing.
When Nicolaus had gone through everything, Archelaus came forward and quietly fell at Caesar's knees. Caesar raised him up most kindly, making clear that he thought him worthy of his father's succession, though he pronounced nothing final. He dismissed the council for that day and considered privately what he had heard, weighing whether he should appoint one of those named in the wills as sole successor, or divide the realm among the whole family — for it seemed that, given the sheer number of claimants, some accommodation for all of them was needed.
Before Caesar could decide anything on this, Archelaus's mother, Malthace, fell ill and died, and letters arrived from Varus in Syria concerning a revolt of the Jews. Varus had foreseen this — for after Archelaus sailed he had gone up to Jerusalem to restrain the agitators, since it was plain the crowd would not stay quiet — and had left behind, in the city, one of the three legions from Syria that he had brought with him. He himself returned to Antioch. But Sabinus, arriving on the scene, gave them an occasion for further revolution: he tried to force the garrisons to hand over the fortresses, and searched harshly for the royal money, relying not only on the soldiers Varus had left behind but on a multitude of his own slaves, whom he armed and used as agents of his greed.
When Pentecost came round — the Jews give this name to a feast that falls after a count of seven weeks and takes its title from that number of days — it was not the usual religious observance but sheer outrage that drew the people together. An immense crowd converged from Galilee, from Idumea, from Jericho, and from Perea across the Jordan, though the native population of Judea itself outdid the rest both in numbers and in eagerness. They divided themselves into three companies and encamped in three places — one on the north side of the temple, one on the south by the hippodrome, and the third by the palace on the west — and surrounded the Romans on every side, besieging them.
Sabinus, alarmed both at their numbers and their resolve, sent messenger after messenger to Varus, begging him to come to his aid quickly, warning that the legion would be cut to pieces if he delayed. He himself climbed to the highest tower of the fortress, the one called Phasael after Herod's brother who had been killed by the Parthians, and from there signaled the soldiers of the legion to attack the enemy — for in his terror he did not even dare go down to his own men. Persuaded by his signal, the soldiers rushed forward into the temple and joined fierce battle with the Jews; and for as long as no one attacked them from above, their experience in war gave them the advantage over the untrained crowd. But when many of the Jews climbed onto the porticoes and rained missiles down on their heads,
many of the Romans were crushed, and it was neither easy to fend off those shooting from above nor to withstand those fighting hand to hand at close quarters. Hard pressed on both counts, they set fire to the porticoes — works admirable for their size and their splendor. Those caught on them by the sudden blaze perished in great numbers in the flames; many others leapt down among the enemy below and died there, some threw themselves backward off the wall,
and toppled to their deaths, while others, in their desperation, forestalled the fire with their own swords. Those who crept down from the walls and rushed at the Romans were easy enough to handle, given their panic. With so many dead and the rest scattered by fear, the soldiers fell upon the now-undefended treasury of God and plundered about four hundred talents, of which Sabinus collected whatever the soldiers had not managed to steal for themselves.
But the destruction of these buildings and of these men roused against the Romans a far greater number of Jews, and fiercer ones. They surrounded the palace and threatened to kill everyone inside unless they left at once, promising Sabinus safe passage if he wished to withdraw with his legion. Most of the royal troops deserted and joined them. But the most warlike unit, the three thousand Sebastenes, together with Rufus and Gratus — the one commanding the royal infantry under him, the other the cavalry, each of them, even apart from any troops under his command, a decisive force in war through his own courage and skill — went over to the Romans. The Jews pressed the siege of the walls, meanwhile also attempting the fortress itself and calling on Sabinus and his men to leave and not stand in the way of their regaining, after so long a time,
their ancestral independence. Sabinus would gladly have withdrawn, but he distrusted their promises, suspecting their mildness to be bait set for an ambush; and at the same time, hoping for relief from Varus, he dragged out the siege. Meanwhile the country was in turmoil in many places, and the moment tempted a great many men to aspire to kingship. In Idumea, for instance,
Two thousand of the men who had once served under Herod banded together under arms and fought the royal troops, whom Achiabus, the king's cousin, led from the most defensible positions, avoiding open combat on the plains. In Sepphoris of Galilee, Judas, son of that Ezekias who had once ravaged the countryside as chief brigand and had been subdued by King Herod, gathered no small following, broke open the royal armories, armed the men around him, and made a bid for power against those who coveted it.
In Perea, a certain Simon, one of the king's own slaves, trusting in his handsome build and great size, set a diadem on his own head. Roaming about with a band of brigands he had gathered, he burned the palace at Jericho and many other costly country houses, easily enriching himself with plunder from the flames. He would have gone on to burn every fine residence, had not Gratus, commander of the royal infantry, taken the Trachonite archers and the most warlike of the men of Sebaste and gone out to meet him. Many of the Perean rebels fell in the battle; Simon himself, fleeing up a steep ravine, was cut off by Gratus, who struck him a blow across the neck from the side as he fled and felled him. The palace near the Jordan at Betharamatha was likewise burned, by another band that had gathered from Perea.
At that time a shepherd too dared to lay claim to the kingship. His name was Athronges, and what gave him hope for it was his bodily strength, a spirit that despised death, and, besides these, four brothers just like him. To each of these he assigned an armed company, using them as generals and satraps for his raids, while he himself, like a king, busied himself with the graver matters. It was then that he set the diadem on his own head, and he continued for no small time afterward, overrunning the country with his brothers. Killing Romans and royal troops was their chief object, but no Jew who fell into their hands escaped either, if there was profit to be had. Once they even dared to surround an entire company of Romans near Emmaus, who were conveying grain and weapons to the legion.
They shot down the centurion in command, Arius, and forty of his bravest men; the rest, in danger of suffering the same fate, escaped when Gratus came to their aid with the men of Sebaste. Having done many such deeds to both natives and foreigners throughout the war, in time three of the brothers were captured — the eldest by Archelaus, the next two by falling into the hands of Gratus and Ptolemy — while the fourth surrendered to Archelaus under a pledge of safety. This was the end that awaited them later; but at the time they filled all Judea with a war of brigandage.
When Varus received the letters from Sabinus and the commanders, he grew fearful for the whole legion and hastened to its relief. Taking the remaining two legions and the four squadrons of cavalry attached to them, he marched for Ptolemais, ordering the auxiliary forces from the kings and other rulers to assemble there as well. Passing through Berytus he also took on fifteen hundred heavy infantry from its people. When the rest of his allied forces had joined him at Ptolemais, and when Aretas the Arab, out of his hostility toward Herod, arrived with no small force of cavalry and infantry, Varus at once sent part of his army into Galilee, which bordered on Ptolemais, under Gaius, one of his own friends in command. Gaius routed those who came out against him, took the city of Sepphoris, burned it, and enslaved its inhabitants.
Varus himself, with the whole of his remaining force, marched on Samaria, but spared the city, finding it had taken no part in the disturbances of the others, and instead camped near a village called Arous. This was an estate of Ptolemy's, and for that reason it was plundered by the Arabs, who bore a grudge even against Herod's friends. From there he advanced to another fortified village, Sappho, which they plundered in the same way, along with all the neighboring places they came upon. Everything was filled with fire and slaughter, and nothing withstood the Arabs' plundering.
Emmaus too was burned, its inhabitants having fled, for Varus had ordered it in anger over the killing of Arius and his men. Advancing from there to Jerusalem, he had only to be seen with his army for the Jewish encampments to scatter; the rebels fled off into the countryside, while the people of the city received him and set about clearing themselves of the charge of revolt, saying that they themselves had incited no disturbance but had received the crowds for the festival only under necessity, and so had found themselves besieged along with the Romans rather than fighting alongside the rebels. Coming out to meet him beforehand were Joseph, cousin of Archelaus, and, with Gratus, Rufus, bringing with them the royal army together with the men of Sebaste, and those of the Roman legion arrayed in their customary fashion; for Sabinus could not bear even to appear before Varus, and had already left the city for the coast.
Varus sent detachments of his army throughout the country against those responsible for the uprising, and when many were brought in, he imprisoned those who appeared the less turbulent and crucified about two thousand of the chief offenders. He was informed that ten thousand armed men still remained together in Idumea. Finding that the Arabs were not behaving like allies but were campaigning to satisfy their own resentment, doing harm to the country beyond the bounds of his own policy, out of their hatred for Herod, he sent them away, and hurried against the rebels with his own legions. They, before coming to blows, surrendered themselves on the advice of Achiabus; Varus released the mass of them from blame but sent their leaders to Caesar to be examined.
Caesar pardoned most of them, but ordered some of the king's relatives to be punished, since some among them were kin to Herod by blood, because they had taken up arms against a king of their own house. Having thus settled affairs in Jerusalem and left the legion that had been there before as a garrison, Varus returned to Antioch.
At Rome, meanwhile, another suit arose against Archelaus, brought by the Jews who, before the revolt, had gone out with Varus's permission as envoys concerning the nation's autonomy. Fifty of them were present, and they were joined by more than eight thousand of the Jews resident at Rome. Caesar assembled a council of the leading Romans and his friends in the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, a building of his own construction, adorned with wonderful magnificence. On one side, with the envoys, stood the Jewish crowd; opposite them, with his friends, stood Archelaus; the friends of his relatives stood with neither side — unwilling to join Archelaus out of hatred and envy, yet ashamed to be seen by Caesar among his accusers. Among them was also Philip, Archelaus's brother, sent ahead out of goodwill by Varus for two reasons: to support Archelaus, and, should Caesar divide Herod's estate among all his descendants, to be judged worthy of a share himself.
When the accusers were given leave to speak, they first ran through the lawless acts of Herod, saying they had endured not a king but the cruelest tyrant that ever held power; for though very many had been put to death by him, those left alive had suffered such things that the dead were to be counted fortunate. He had tortured not only the bodies of his subjects but their cities as well: he had disfigured his own, while adorning those of foreigners, lavishing the blood of Judea on peoples abroad. In place of the nation's ancient prosperity and ancestral laws, he had filled it with poverty and the extremity of lawlessness, and, in sum, the Jews had endured more calamities from Herod in a few years than their forefathers had suffered in all the time since their return from Babylon, when Xerxes was king, after their earlier dispersion.
Yet they had advanced so far in submissiveness and in the habit of misfortune that they even endured a voluntary succession to their bitter servitude: they had readily hailed Archelaus, son of so great a tyrant, as king immediately after his father's death, had joined him in mourning Herod's death, and had prayed with him for the succession. And he, as though anxious that he might be thought Herod's bastard rather than his true son, had opened his reign with the slaughter of three thousand citizens — so many victims offered up to God for the sake of his rule, so many corpses with which he had filled the temple at a festival. Those who survived so many disasters had understandably at last turned to face their misfortunes and, by the law of war, were willing to receive their wounds face-on.
They begged the Romans to have pity on what remained of Judea, and not to cast what was left of it before those who tore at it so savagely, but rather to join their country to Syria and administer it under governors of their own; for it would be shown that these people, now slandered as seditious and warlike, knew well how to obey moderate rulers. With this plea the Jews concluded their accusation. Then Nicolaus rose and cleared the kings of the charges leveled against them, while accusing the nation in turn of being by nature unruly and disobedient toward its rulers. He also cast blame on those relatives of Archelaus who had gone over to the side of the accusers.
Then Caesar, having heard both sides, dismissed the council, and a few days later gave half the kingdom to Archelaus, styling him ethnarch, and promising to make him king as well if he proved himself worthy of it. The other half he divided into two tetrarchies, which he gave to two other sons of Herod: one to Philip, the other to Antipas, who had contended with Archelaus over the kingship. Under Antipas came Perea and Galilee, yielding revenue of two hundred talents; Batanea, Trachonitis, Auranitis, and certain parts of the house of Zeno around Jamnia, yielding a revenue of one hundred talents, were placed under Philip.
Archelaus's ethnarchy comprised Idumea, all of Judea, and Samaria — the last relieved of a quarter of its tribute in honor of its refusal to join the others in revolt. The subject cities allotted to him were Strato's Tower, Sebaste, Joppa, and Jerusalem; for the Greek cities of Gaza, Gadara, and Hippos he cut away from the kingdom and added to Syria. The revenue of the territory given to Archelaus came to four hundred talents. Salome, besides what the king had left her in his will — Jamnia, Azotus, and Phasaelis — was made mistress of these, and Caesar also granted her the palace at Ascalon; her total revenue from all these came to sixty talents. Her estate he placed under the authority of Archelaus's toparchy.
Each of the rest of Herod's family received what had been left to them in the will. To his two unmarried daughters, Caesar granted from his own funds five hundred thousand pieces of silver, and gave them in marriage to the sons of Pheroras. After settling the estate, he further divided among them the gift Herod had left to himself, amounting to a thousand talents, keeping back for himself only a few of the deceased's belongings as a token of honor.
About this time, a young man, Jewish by birth but raised at Sidon in the household of a Roman freedman, came to Rome falsely claiming, on the strength of a physical resemblance, to be Alexander, whom Herod had put to death, hoping to pass unnoticed. He had an accomplice of his own people who knew everything about the affairs of the kingdom; coached by him, he claimed that those sent to kill him and Aristobulus had, out of pity, spirited them away by substituting look-alike bodies. With this story he deceived the Jews of Crete and, richly supplied for the journey, sailed on to Melos, where he gathered even greater support through the extraordinary credibility of his tale, and persuaded his hosts there to sail with him to Rome as well. Landing at Dicaearchia, he received an abundance of gifts from the Jews there and was escorted on his way by his father's friends as though he really were king.
So far had the likeness of his features carried conviction that even those who had seen Alexander and knew him well swore that this was indeed he. The whole Jewish population of Rome poured out to see him, and an immense crowd thronged the narrow streets through which he was carried; for the people of Melos had gone so far in their folly as to carry him about in a litter and to provide him with a royal retinue at their own expense.
Caesar, however, who knew Alexander's features exactly, having had him described by Herod's own accusation before him, saw through the deception even before he laid eyes on the man; still, allowing some room for more agreeable hope, he sent a certain Celadus, one of those who knew Alexander well, with orders to bring the youth to him. As soon as Celadus saw him, he at once detected the differences in his face, and, noting that his whole frame was coarser and had the look of a slave, understood the entire scheme. What provoked him most, though, was the impudence of the man's own claims: to those who asked after Aristobulus, he said that he too had survived, but had been purposely left behind in Cyprus to guard against plots, since it was harder to move against them when separated.
Taking him aside privately, Celadus said to him: 'Caesar grants you your life on one condition — that you name the man who persuaded you to play out so great a deception.' The man, promising to tell him, followed him to Caesar and pointed out the Jew who had exploited his resemblance for profit, saying that he had received more gifts in every city than Alexander himself had ever received while alive. Caesar, laughing at all this, enrolled the false Alexander among the oarsmen on account of his fine physique, and ordered the man who had put him up to it to be put to death; the people of Melos were let off with the expenses they had incurred as sufficient punishment for their folly.
Once Archelaus had taken up the ethnarchy, he treated not only the Jews but the Samaritans as well with harshness, in remembrance of their old quarrels with him. Both peoples sent embassies against him to Caesar, and in the ninth year of his rule he was banished to Vienne, a city in Gaul, and his property was confiscated to Caesar's treasury.
Before he was summoned by Caesar, they say he had a dream of this kind: he seemed to see nine ears of grain, full and large, being devoured by oxen. Sending for the seers and some of the Chaldeans, he asked what they thought it signified. When the interpretations differed, a certain Simon, of the Essene sect, said that the ears of grain should be reckoned as years, and the oxen as a change of fortunes, since oxen, in plowing, turn the soil about; so that he would reign for as many years as there were ears of grain, and would end his life after undergoing changes of fortune of various kinds. Five days after hearing this, Archelaus was summoned to trial. I have thought it worth recording also the dream of his wife Glaphyra, which —
She was the daughter of Archelaus, king of Cappadocia, and had first been the wife of Alexander—the brother of the Archelaus we have been discussing, and son of King Herod, by whose hand he had been put to death, as we have shown. After Alexander's death she married Juba, king of Libya, and when he too died she returned home and was living there as a widow with her father. It was then that the ethnarch Archelaus saw her and fell so deeply in love that he at once divorced his wife Mariamme and married her instead. Not long after her arrival in Judea, she dreamed that Alexander stood over her and said:
"Your marriage in Libya should have been enough for you. Not satisfied with that, you have come back again to my hearth, taking a third husband—and my own brother at that, shameless woman. Still, I will not overlook this outrage. I will take you back, whether you wish it or not."
After telling this dream, she lived scarcely two more days.
When Archelaus's territory had been reduced to a Roman province, Coponius, a man of equestrian rank, was sent out as procurator, holding from Caesar the power of life and death. Under his administration a Galilean named Judas incited the local population to revolt, reproaching them for submitting to pay tribute to Rome and, after God, tolerating mortal masters. This man was a teacher with a school of thought all his own, quite unlike the others.
For there are three schools of philosophy among the Jews. The followers of the first are called Pharisees, of the second Sadducees, and the third, who claim to cultivate a particularly strict piety, are called Essenes. These are Jews by birth, but bound to one another by a stronger affection than the others show.
They shun pleasure as an evil and regard self-control and the mastery of the passions as virtue. Marriage they hold in contempt, though they take other men's children while still young enough to be taught and treat them as their own kin, molding them according to their own principles. They do not condemn marriage itself, or the succession it brings, but they guard against the wantonness of women, convinced that no woman keeps faith with one man alone.
They despise wealth, and their sharing of property is remarkable—one cannot find among them a single person who owns more than another. It is their rule that those who enter the sect surrender their property to the order, so that among them all there appears neither the abjectness of poverty nor the excess of riches; the possessions of each member are mingled together as though they belonged to brothers, forming a single estate for them all.
They regard oil as a defilement, and if anyone is anointed against his will he scrubs his body clean; for they set store by a rough, unadorned appearance and by wearing white garments at all times. Officers to manage the community's affairs are chosen by vote, and each is assigned without distinction to the tasks the group as a whole requires.
They have no single city, but many of them live as residents in each town. And to members arriving from elsewhere, all that the local community possesses is thrown open just as if it were their own, and they go in to men they have never met before as if they were their closest friends. For this reason, when they travel they carry nothing at all with them, except weapons against bandits. In every city a steward of the order is appointed specifically to look after visitors, supplying them with clothing and other necessities. In dress and bearing they resemble children brought up under a strict tutor.
They do not change their clothes or sandals until the old ones are completely torn to pieces or worn out by time. They neither buy nor sell anything among themselves; rather, each man gives what he has to whoever needs it and receives in exchange whatever useful thing that man has to offer, and even without such an exchange they are free to take from one another whatever they wish.
Toward the divine they show a particular reverence: before sunrise they speak no word on ordinary matters, but recite certain ancestral prayers to the sun, as though entreating it to rise. After this they are dismissed by their officers, each to the trade he knows, and work diligently until the fifth hour, when they gather again in one place. There, girding themselves with linen cloths, they bathe their bodies in cold water,
and after this purification they assemble in a private hall, which no one of a different persuasion is permitted to enter. Clean now themselves, they proceed to the dining hall as though it were a sacred precinct. Once they are seated in silence, the baker sets out the loaves in order, and the cook serves each man a single dish of one kind of food. Before the meal the priest says a grace,
and it is forbidden for anyone to taste the food before the prayer. When he has finished his meal, he offers a further prayer; both at the beginning and at the end they praise God as the giver of life. Then, laying aside their garments as sacred things, they return again to their labors until evening. Coming back, they dine in the same way, the visitors, if any happen to be present, sitting down with them. No shouting or disturbance ever defiles the house;
in conversation they yield to one another in due order. To outsiders the silence within seems like some fearsome mystery, but the cause of it is their constant sobriety and the fact that among them food and drink are measured out only to satisfaction, never to excess.
In everything else they do nothing except at the command of their officers, but two things are left to their own free choice: giving help and showing mercy. They may assist the deserving on their own initiative whenever there is need, and supply food to those in want; but gifts to relatives may not be made without the permission of the stewards.
They are just stewards of their anger, keep their temper in check, are champions of good faith, and ministers of peace. Whatever they say carries more weight than an oath, and they refrain from swearing at all, regarding it as worse than perjury; for they say a man is already condemned if he cannot be believed without invoking God.
They are remarkably devoted to the writings of the ancients, singling out above all those that serve the health of soul and body; from these they research roots with healing power and the properties of stones, for the treatment of ailments. For those who wish to join their sect, admission is not immediate; the candidate remains outside for a year and follows the same rule of life,
being given a small hatchet, the loincloth already mentioned, and a white garment. Once he has proved his self-control over that period, he is brought closer to their way of life and allowed to share in the purer waters used for cleansing, but he is still not admitted to full membership. After this demonstration of endurance, his character is tested for two more years, and only when he is shown to be worthy is he enrolled in the group.
Before he may touch the common meal, he must swear fearsome oaths to them: first, that he will show piety toward God; then, that he will observe justice toward men, that he will wrong no one whether of his own accord or under orders, that he will always hate the unjust and fight alongside the just, that he will keep faith always with all people, and especially with those in authority, since no one attains power except by God's will;
that if he himself should hold authority, he will never abuse his position or outshine his subordinates in dress or any other display of finery; that he will always love truth and expose liars; that he will keep his hands free from theft and his soul from unholy gain; that he will conceal nothing from his fellow members nor reveal anything of theirs to others, even under threat of death.
Beyond this he swears to pass on the sect's teachings to no one except as he himself received them, to abstain from banditry, and to preserve in like manner both the books of their sect and the names of the angels. With such oaths do they bind those who come to them.
Those convicted of serious offenses they expel from the order. The one expelled often meets a most pitiable end; for bound as he still is by his oaths and customs, he is unable to share in the food of outsiders, and so, forced to eat grass, he wastes away from hunger until he dies. This is why they have, out of pity, taken many such men back at their last gasp, judging that a punishment carried to the point of death is penalty enough for their offenses.
In matters of judgment they are extremely exacting and just; they render verdicts only when at least a hundred are gathered together, and what they decide is unalterable. After God, the name of the lawgiver commands their deepest reverence, and anyone who blasphemes him is punished with death. They defer to their elders and to the majority as a matter of course—if ten sit together, no one will speak against the wishes of the other nine.
They are careful never to spit into the middle of a gathering or to the right side, and they are stricter than all other Jews about refraining from work on the Sabbath. Not only do they prepare their food a day in advance so as to kindle no fire on that day, but they will not even move a vessel or relieve themselves. On other days they dig a hole a foot deep with the small trowel—for this is the kind of little hatchet they give to new members—and, wrapping their cloak around them so as not to offend the rays of the sun,
they crouch over it. Afterward they pull the excavated earth back over the pit, and for this purpose they choose the more remote spots. And though the discharge of waste is a natural function, it is their custom to wash afterward as though defiled by it.
They are divided by length of time in the discipline into four grades, and the junior members are so far inferior to the senior ones that if the latter so much as touch them, they must wash themselves as though they had come into contact with a foreigner. They are long-lived, most of them surviving beyond a hundred years, which I attribute to the simplicity of their diet and their regular way of life. They hold the trials of life in contempt, overcoming pain by strength of will, and regard death, if it comes with honor, as better than immortality itself. The war with Rome tested their spirits to the utmost,
for in it, though racked and twisted, burned and broken, and made to pass through every instrument of torture, so that they might be forced to blaspheme the lawgiver or to eat some forbidden food, they endured neither—nor would they ever flatter their tormentors or shed a single tear. Smiling in their agony and mocking those who inflicted the torment, they gave up their souls cheerfully, confident they would receive them back again.
For this belief is firmly held among them: that the body is corruptible and its matter impermanent, but the soul endures forever, immortal; that souls, emanating from the finest ether, become entangled with bodies as though drawn down into a kind of prison by some natural spell, but that once released from the bonds of the flesh, as though freed at last from a long slavery,
they rejoice and are borne upward. And, in agreement with the sons of Greece, they hold that for the good souls a dwelling place beyond the ocean is reserved, a region troubled by neither rain nor snow nor scorching heat, but ever refreshed by a gentle west wind blowing in from the ocean; while for base souls they mark out a dark and stormy hollow, full of unending torments. It seems to me that the Greeks had the same idea in mind when they assigned
the Isles of the Blessed to their bravest men, whom they call heroes and demigods, and, for the souls of the wicked, the region of the impious in Hades, where they tell tales of certain figures being punished—Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion, and Tityus. They too, first of all, hold that souls are everlasting, and second, that this belief serves to encourage virtue and deter vice.
For the good, they say, become better in this life through hope of honor even after death, while the wicked find their impulses checked by the fear that, even if they escape notice while alive, they will suffer undying punishment after death is done. This, then, is the Essenes' theology concerning the soul, an inescapable lure they hold out to those who have once tasted their wisdom.
There are among them also some who profess to foreknow the future, trained from childhood in sacred books, various rites of purification, and the sayings of the prophets; and rarely, if ever, do they miss the mark in their predictions.
There is also another order of Essenes, agreeing with the rest in way of life, customs, and rules, but differing from them in their view of marriage. They believe that men who do not marry cut off the greatest part of life, the continuation of the race—indeed, that if everyone thought the same way, the race would very quickly die out entirely.
Even so, they put their prospective wives to a three-year test, and only marry them once they have menstruated three times, as proof that they are able to bear children. They do not have relations with their wives once they are pregnant, showing thereby that they marry not for pleasure but for the sake of children. Women bathe wearing a garment, just as the men bathe wearing a loincloth. Such are the customs of this order.
Of the two earlier schools, the Pharisees are those reputed to interpret the laws with the greatest precision, and they constitute the leading school. They attribute everything to fate and to God, holding that acting justly or otherwise lies for the most part with human beings, but that fate cooperates in every action as well. Every soul, they maintain, is imperishable, but only the souls of the good pass into another body,
while the souls of the wicked are subjected to eternal punishment. The Sadducees, the second school, do away with fate altogether and hold that God has no part in doing or in overseeing evil; they say that good and evil lie before men to choose between, and that each man turns to one or the other according to his own inclination. They deny the persistence of the soul, and along with it the punishments and honors of the afterlife.
The Pharisees, moreover, are affectionate toward one another and cultivate harmony within the community, whereas the Sadducees are harsher in their dealings even with each other, and their relations even with their own kind are as cold as if they were dealing with strangers. This is what I have to say about the philosophical schools among the Jews.
When Archelaus's ethnarchy had been converted into a province, his remaining brothers, Philip and Herod—known as Antipas—governed their own tetrarchies. Salome, upon her death, left her toparchy, along with Jamnia and the palm groves at Phasaelis, to Julia, the wife of Augustus. When, after the death of Augustus, the government of Rome passed to Julia's son Tiberius, who directed affairs for fifty-seven years, six months, and two days,
Herod and Philip remained in their tetrarchies throughout. Philip founded a city at the sources of the Jordan, in Paneas, calling it Caesarea, and in lower Gaulanitis he founded Julias. Herod founded Tiberias in Galilee, and in Peraea a city likewise named after Julia. Pilate, sent to Judea as procurator by Tiberius, brought into Jerusalem by night, under cover, the...
...images of Caesar, which are called standards, into Jerusalem by night, hidden from view. When this became known by day it stirred the greatest turmoil among the Jews. Those near enough to see them were shocked, since they took it that their laws had been trampled underfoot — for they hold that no likeness may be set up in the city — and at the outcry of the people in the city a great crowd streamed in from the countryside as well. They rushed to Pilate at Caesarea and begged him to remove the standards from Jerusalem and to preserve for them the customs of their fathers.
When Pilate refused, they threw themselves on their faces around his house and held out, unmoving, for five days and as many nights. On the next day Pilate took his seat on the tribunal in the great stadium and, summoning the crowd as if to give them an answer, gave the soldiers a prearranged signal to surround the Jews under arms. When the ranks had closed around them three deep, the Jews stood speechless at the unexpected sight, and Pilate, declaring that he would cut them down unless they accepted the images of Caesar, motioned to the soldiers to bare their swords. But the Jews, as if by agreement, fell to the ground all together and bent back their necks, crying out that they were ready to be killed rather than transgress the law. Pilate, astonished at the depth of their devotion to their religion, ordered the standards removed from Jerusalem at once.
After this he stirred up a further disturbance by spending the sacred treasury — called the Corbonas — on an aqueduct, drawing water from a distance of four hundred stadia. The people were indignant at this, and when Pilate came to Jerusalem they surrounded his tribunal and shouted him down. But he, having foreseen their unrest, had mixed soldiers in with the crowd, armed but disguised in ordinary clothing, and had ordered them not to use the sword but to beat the shouters with clubs; he now gave the signal from the tribunal. Many of the Jews perished from the blows, and many others were trampled to death by their own countrymen in the flight. The crowd was so struck with dismay at the disaster to those who had been killed that it fell silent.
At this time Agrippa, son of that Aristobulus whom his father Herod had put to death, came before Tiberius as an accuser of Herod the tetrarch. When Tiberius refused to entertain the charge, Agrippa remained in Rome, cultivating the goodwill of the emperor's intimates, and above all of Gaius, the son of Germanicus, who was then still a private citizen. Once, entertaining him at dinner and showing him every kind of attention, he finally raised his hands and openly prayed that he might soon see Gaius master of the whole world, once Tiberius was dead. One of his household servants reported this to Tiberius, who, enraged, imprisoned Agrippa and kept him in chains for six months, until he himself died, having governed for twenty-two years, six months, and three days.
When Gaius Caesar was proclaimed emperor, he released Agrippa from his chains and, since Philip had died, made him king in place of Philip's tetrarchy. When Agrippa arrived to take up his rule, envy stirred up in Herod the tetrarch a longing for the like honor. It was above all his wife Herodias who drove him toward this hope of a kingdom, reproaching him for his inaction and telling him that it was only his refusal to sail to Caesar that had cost him a greater rule — for if Caesar had made Agrippa king from a private citizen, how much less would he hesitate to raise Herod from a tetrarch? Persuaded by these words, Herod went to Gaius, who, condemning his greed, punished him with exile to Gaul; for Agrippa had followed him there as his accuser, and Gaius added Herod's tetrarchy to Agrippa's realm. Herod died in Gaul, his wife having gone into exile with him.
Gaius Caesar, meanwhile, grew so insolent toward fortune that he wished to be seen and called a god, and to strip his country of its noblest men, and he extended his impiety to Judea as well. He sent Petronius with an army to Jerusalem to set up his statues in the Temple, with orders that if the Jews refused to receive them, he was to put to death those who resisted and to enslave the rest of the nation. But God, it seems, had other plans for these commands. Petronius, with three legions and many allies from Syria, marched from Antioch into Judea. Some of the Jews disbelieved the reports of war, while others, believing them, found themselves helpless to resist; and fear quickly spread through the whole population once the army had arrived at Ptolemais.
This city lies on the coast of Galilee, built beside the great plain, and is enclosed by mountains: on the east by the hills of Galilee, sixty stadia away; on the south by Carmel, a hundred and twenty stadia distant; and on the north by the highest ridge, which the local people call the Ladder of Tyre, a hundred stadia off. About two stadia from the town flows the little river Belus, beside which stands the tomb of Memnon, and near it a remarkable spot a hundred cubits across. It is round and hollow, and yields a glassy sand: whenever many ships have put in and emptied it, the hollow fills again, as the winds, as if on purpose, sweep in from outside more of the ordinary sand, which the mine at once turns wholly into glass. Still more remarkable to me is that the overflow of glass from that place reverts again to ordinary sand. Such, then, is the nature of this place.
The Jews, gathering with their wives and children in the plain before Ptolemais, begged Petronius, first on behalf of the laws of their fathers, and then for themselves. He, yielding to the crowd and their entreaties, left the statues and the army at Ptolemais, and going on into Galilee summoned the people and all the notables to Tiberias, where he set out for them the strength of Rome and the threats of Caesar, and declared their demand unreasonable.
"All the subject nations," he said, "have set up in their cities, alongside their own gods, the images of Caesar as well; for you alone to stand against this, virtually alone in refusing, would be an act of rebellion joined with insult." When they answered by pointing to the law and the custom of their fathers, saying that it was not lawful to set up the image even of a god — let alone of a man — either in the Temple or anywhere else in the land, Petronius replied: "But I too must keep the law of my own master. If I transgress it and spare you, I will justly perish. It is he who sent me who will make war on you, not I; for I too, like you, stand under orders." At this the whole crowd cried out that they were ready to suffer anything rather than break the law.
Petronius, quieting their outcry, said, "Will you then make war on Caesar?" And the Jews replied that twice each day they offered sacrifice on behalf of Caesar and the Roman people, but that if he wished to set up the images, he would first have to sacrifice the whole nation of the Jews; and they declared themselves ready for slaughter, together with their wives and children. At this Petronius was overcome with wonder and pity at the men's unsurpassed devotion to their religion and their readiness to face death, and for that day they parted without result.
On the following days he gathered the powerful men privately and the multitude in public, sometimes urging them, sometimes advising them, but for the most part threatening them, holding over them the might of Rome, the wrath of Gaius, and his own necessity in the matter. But when they yielded to no attempt to move them, and he saw the land in danger of going unsown — for during the sowing season the people kept the land idle for fifty days on his account — he finally gathered them and said, "I would rather run the risk myself: either, with God's help, I will persuade Caesar and be saved along with you, and gladly; or, if he is enraged, I will readily give up my own life for the sake of so many." With this he dismissed the crowd, who called down many blessings upon him, and taking the army from Ptolemais he returned to Antioch. From there he wrote at once to Caesar, reporting his own entry into Judea and the nation's supplications, and saying that unless Caesar wished to destroy the land along with its men, he must let them keep their law and withdraw the order.
To this letter Gaius replied with no great moderation, threatening Petronius with death for having been a slow servant of his commands. But it happened that the couriers carrying this letter were storm-driven at sea for three months, while others, bringing news of Gaius's death, had a fair voyage. So Petronius received the letter reporting Gaius's death twenty-seven days before the one condemning him.
When Gaius, after ruling three years and eight months, had been murdered, Claudius was seized by the soldiers in Rome and made emperor; the Senate, however, under the leadership of the consuls Sentius Saturninus and Pomponius Secundus, entrusting the guarding of the city to the three cohorts that remained loyal to it, assembled on the Capitol, and, because of Gaius's cruelty, voted to make war on Claudius, intending to restore the government to an aristocracy, as it had been governed of old, or to choose by vote whoever was worthy of the command. It happened at this time that Agrippa, who was staying in Rome, was summoned by the Senate to its council, and by Claudius as well, from the camp, so that he might be of use to each side as needed. Seeing that Claudius already held the advantage in armed strength, Agrippa went over to him.
Claudius sent him as an envoy to the Senate to make known his own intentions: first, that he had been seized against his will by the soldiers, and that he judged it neither right to abandon their zeal for him nor safe to trust to his own fortune — for even to have received the imperial summons was itself dangerous; and second, that he would govern the empire as a good leader, not as a tyrant, content with the honor of the title, and would give back to all a share in deliberation over every matter. Even if he were not by nature a moderate man, he said, the death of Gaius stood before him as sufficient warning toward self-restraint. This was the message Agrippa delivered. The Senate answered that, trusting in its army and its good counsel, it would not submit to voluntary servitude. When Claudius heard the Senate's answer, he sent Agrippa back once more, to tell them that he could not bring himself to betray those who had joined together for his sake, and that he would make war, unwillingly, against those he least wished to fight — but that a place outside the city should first be designated for the battle, since it was not right to defile the sacred precincts of their homeland with kindred bloodshed brought on by their own poor judgment. Agrippa, on hearing this, reported it to the senators.
In the meantime one of the soldiers on the Senate's side drew his sword and cried out, "Comrades, what has come over us, that we should wish to kill our own brothers and rush upon Claudius's kinsmen — when we have an emperor against whom no charge can be brought, and so many just claims upon those against whom we are about to march in arms?" With these words he charged straight through the midst of the Senate, drawing all his fellow soldiers after him.
The patricians, terrified at once by this desertion, and then, when no safe way of retreat appeared, hurried along the soldiers' path toward Claudius. They were met before the wall by men who, in their eagerness to flatter fortune, bared their swords, and those in front would have been in danger before Claudius even learned of the soldiers' intent, had not Agrippa run to him and revealed the danger of the moment — telling him that unless he restrained the fury of those raging against the patricians, he would lose the very men through whose worth his rule would be respected, and be king over an emptied desolation. On hearing this Claudius restrained his soldiers' fury, received the Senate into the camp, and, treating them kindly, went out with them at once to offer to God the thank-offerings for his rule.
He immediately made Agrippa a gift of the whole of his father's kingdom, adding to it from outside its bounds the territories of Trachonitis and Auranitis, which Augustus had given to Herod, and, besides these, a further kingdom, that called after Lysanias. He announced this gift to the people by edict, and ordered the magistrates to have the grant engraved on bronze tablets and set up on the Capitol. He also made a gift to Agrippa's brother Herod — who was also his brother-in-law, being married to Berenice — of the kingdom of Chalcis.
Wealth soon flowed to Agrippa, as was to be expected from so great a realm, and he himself was not slow to make use of it: he began to surround Jerusalem with a wall so massive that, had it been completed, it would have made the Roman siege of the city impossible. But he died at Caesarea before the work could be raised to its full height, having reigned three years as king, and before that having ruled the tetrarchies for three further years. He left three daughters born of Cypros — Berenice, Mariamme, and Drusilla — and a son by the same wife, Agrippa. Since the son was still quite an infant, Claudius once again made the kingdoms into a province and sent as procurator Cuspius Fadus, and after him Tiberius Alexander, who, without disturbing any of the local customs, kept the nation at peace.
After this Herod, king of Chalcis, also died, leaving by his niece Berenice two sons, Berenicianus and Hyrcanus, and by his earlier wife Mariamme, Aristobulus. His other brother Aristobulus had also died as a private citizen, leaving a daughter, Iotape. These, as I have said, were the children of Aristobulus the son of Herod; Aristobulus and Alexander, meanwhile, were sons born to Herod by Mariamme, whom their father had put to death, and the line of Alexander came to reign over Greater Armenia. After the death of Herod, who had ruled Chalcis, Claudius set Agrippa's son Agrippa over his uncle's kingdom, while the procuratorship of the rest of the province passed from Alexander to Cumanus, in whose time disturbances began, and destruction again came upon the Jews.
For when the multitude had gathered in Jerusalem for the feast of Unleavened Bread, and a Roman cohort stood on guard above the portico of the Temple — for they always keep armed watch over the festivals, so that the assembled crowd may not stir up any disorder — one of the soldiers pulled up his garment, bent over indecently, and turned his backside toward the Jews, accompanying the gesture with a sound to match...
and accompanied the gesture with a sound to match. At this the whole crowd was outraged, and they shouted at Cumanus to punish the soldier. The less disciplined among the young men, along with the naturally rebellious element of the nation, went out to fight, snatching up stones and hurling them at the soldiers. Cumanus, afraid the whole population might rush upon him, sent for more men-at-arms. When these poured into the porticoes, panic seized the Jews beyond control, and they turned and fled from the temple into the city. So great was the crush at the exits as people pushed against one another that more than thirty thousand were trampled and crushed to death, and the festival turned to mourning for the whole nation and to lamentation in every household.
Hard on this disaster came another disturbance caused by bandits. On the public road to Beth-horon, robbers fell upon and plundered the baggage of a certain Stephen, a slave of Caesar, as it was being transported. Cumanus sent men to bring in the inhabitants of the surrounding villages in chains, charging them with failing to pursue and capture the robbers. In the course of this, one of the soldiers, finding in a certain village a copy of the sacred Law, tore the scroll apart and threw it into the fire.
The Jews, as though their whole country had been set ablaze, were thrown into confusion, and drawn together by their piety as if by a single instrument to one common outcry, they all ran together to Caesarea before Cumanus, begging him not to leave unpunished the man who had so outraged their God and their Law. He, since the crowd would not be calm unless it found some satisfaction, ordered the soldier led out and, marching him between the ranks of his accusers, commanded that he be taken away to execution. At this the Jews withdrew.
After this came a clash between Galileans and Samaritans. At a village called Geman, which lies in the great plain of Samaria, while many Jews were going up for the festival, a certain Galilean was murdered. At this a great number rushed from Galilee, ready to make war on the Samaritans, but the notables among them went to Cumanus and begged him, before any irreparable disaster occurred, to cross into Galilee and punish those responsible for the murder; only in this way, they said, could the crowd be persuaded to disperse before war broke out. Cumanus, however, ranked their petitions below the business then in hand and sent the suppliants away without result.
When news of the murdered man's fate reached Jerusalem, it threw the crowds into an uproar, and abandoning the festival they rushed toward Samaria without any general in command, obeying none of the magistrates who tried to restrain them. The leaders of their bandit and rebellious element were Eleazar son of Dinaeus and Alexander, who fell upon the neighboring district of the toparchy of Acrabatene, killed the inhabitants without sparing any age, and set the villages on fire. Cumanus, taking one squadron of cavalry called the Sebastenes from Caesarea, went out to help those under attack; he captured many of Eleazar's men and killed a great many more.
As for the rest of the crowd bent on making war against the Samaritans, the magistrates of Jerusalem ran out to them, wrapped in sackcloth and pouring ashes on their heads, and begged them to withdraw, and not, by taking vengeance on the Samaritans, to provoke the Romans against Jerusalem itself; they should have pity on their homeland and their temple, on their own children and wives, all of whom stood in danger of being destroyed for the sake of avenging a single Galilean. Persuaded by this, the Jews dispersed. But many turned to brigandage now that they could act with impunity, and throughout the whole country there was plundering and uprisings by the more reckless.
The leading men among the Samaritans went to Ummidius Quadratus, the governor of Syria, at Tyre, demanding satisfaction from those who had ravaged their country. The notables of the Jews and the high priest Jonathan son of Ananus were also present, and said that it was the Samaritans who had begun the disturbance because of the murder, and that Cumanus was to blame for what followed, because he had refused to pursue the perpetrators of the killing. Quadratus for the time being deferred both parties, saying that he would investigate everything once he came to the region himself; then, going on to Caesarea, he crucified all those whom Cumanus had taken alive.
From there he went on to Lydda and again heard the Samaritans out, and summoning eighteen Jews whom he had learned had taken part in the fighting, he had them executed with the axe. Two others of the most powerful men, together with the high priests Jonathan and Ananias, the latter's son Ananus, and certain other notable Jews, he sent up to Caesar, and likewise the most eminent of the Samaritans. He also ordered Cumanus and Celer the tribune to sail to Rome to give Claudius an account of what had happened. Having settled these matters, he went up from Lydda to Jerusalem, and finding the crowd celebrating the festival of unleavened bread without disturbance, returned to Antioch.
In Rome, Caesar, on hearing the case presented by Cumanus and the Samaritans — Agrippa was also present, arguing zealously on the Jews' behalf, since many of the powerful men stood by Cumanus as well — condemned the Samaritans and ordered three of their most powerful men executed, and sent Cumanus into exile. Celer he sent back a prisoner to Jerusalem, ordering that he be handed over to the Jews for punishment; he was dragged around the city and then had his head cut off. After this Claudius sent Felix, brother of Pallas, as procurator of Judea, Samaria, Galilee, and Peraea, while transferring Agrippa from Chalcis to a greater kingdom, giving him the province that had once belonged to Philip — that is, Trachonitis, Batanea, and Gaulanitis — and adding to it the kingdom of Lysanias and the tetrarchy formerly held by Varus. Claudius himself, having administered the empire for thirteen years, eight months, and twenty days, died, leaving Nero as his successor to the throne, whom, through the schemes of his wife Agrippina, he had adopted as heir to the empire even though he had a legitimate son, Britannicus, by his earlier wife Messalina, and a daughter, Octavia, whom he had married to Nero; he also had a daughter, Antonia, by Petina.
How far Nero, through an excess of good fortune and wealth, lost his senses and abused fortune, or in what manner he dealt with his brother, his wife, and his mother, from whom he went on to extend his cruelty to the noblest men, and how at last, out of derangement, he sank to the stage and the theater since this is common knowledge to all, I shall pass over, and turn instead to what happened among the Jews in his time. He gave Lesser Armenia to Aristobulus, son of Herod, to rule, and to Agrippa's kingdom he added four cities with their toparchies — Abila and Julias in Peraea, Tarichaeae and Tiberias in Galilee — while over the rest of Judea he appointed Felix procurator.
Felix captured the bandit chief Eleazar, who had plundered the country for twenty years, along with many of his companions, and sent them to Rome; the number of the brigands he crucified and of the townspeople convicted of complicity with them whom he punished was beyond counting. Once the country had been cleared of these, another kind of bandit began to grow up in Jerusalem, the so-called sicarii, who murdered people in broad daylight and in the very heart of the city, mingling with the crowd especially at the festivals and concealing small daggers under their clothing, with which they stabbed their opponents.
Then, once their victims had fallen, the killers themselves joined in the outcry of indignation, and by this show of good faith they went entirely undetected. The first to be assassinated by them was the high priest Jonathan; after him many were killed daily, and the fear of these calamities was harder to bear than the calamities themselves, each person expecting death at any hour as if in wartime. Men kept watch from a distance for their enemies, and not even those approaching as friends could be trusted; in the midst of their suspicion and on their guard they were still cut down — such was the speed of the plotters and their skill at escaping notice.
Along with these there arose another band of villains, cleaner of hand but more impious in purpose, who did no less harm to the city's welfare than the assassins did. For deceivers and impostors, under the pretense of divine inspiration, worked to bring about revolutionary changes, and persuaded the crowd to act as if possessed and led them out into the wilderness, promising that there God would show them signs of freedom. Against these Felix, since he judged this the beginning of a revolt, sent cavalry and heavy infantry and destroyed a great number.
But it was the Egyptian false prophet who inflicted an even greater blow on the Jews. This impostor, a magician who had given himself the standing of a prophet, came into the country and gathered about thirty thousand of the deceived; leading them around from the wilderness to the mount called the Mount of Olives, he intended from there to force his way into Jerusalem, overpower the Roman garrison and the people, and rule as a tyrant using the bodyguard who had burst in with him. But Felix anticipated his attack, meeting him with the Roman heavy infantry, and the whole populace joined in the defense, so that when the clash came the Egyptian fled with a few followers, while most of those with him were killed or taken alive, and the rest of the crowd scattered and slipped away each to his own home.
Once these too had been put down, as in a diseased body another part again became inflamed. For the magicians and bandits banded together and drove many into revolt, urging them on toward freedom and threatening death to those who submitted to Roman rule, declaring that they would forcibly strip away the position of those who chose to remain slaves willingly. Dividing themselves by companies throughout the country, they plundered the houses of the powerful, killed the owners, and set the villages on fire, so that the whole of Judea was filled with their madness. And this war, too, was kindled further day by day.
Another disturbance arose around Caesarea, where the Jews mixed among the population there fell into strife with the Syrians in the city. The Jews claimed the city belonged to them, saying that its founder had been a Jew — this was King Herod — while the others, admitting the founder was a Jew, maintained that the city itself belonged to the Greeks, since Herod would never have set up statues and temples in it had he intended it for Jews. Over this the two sides disputed, and their rivalry advanced to weapons, with the bolder men on both sides rushing out to fight each day; for the Jewish elders were unable to restrain their own agitators, and the Greeks thought it a disgrace to be bested by Jews.
The Jews had the advantage in wealth and bodily strength, the Greek population in the support of the soldiers, since the greater part of the Roman force stationed there had been levied from Syria, and being kinsmen of the Syrians were ready to assist them. The governors, for their part, were concerned to suppress the disturbance, and constantly arrested the more violent troublemakers and punished them with whips and chains. Yet the sufferings of those arrested caused no restraint or fear among those left behind; rather they were provoked all the more toward the strife. Once, when the Jews were winning, Felix came forward into the marketplace and with threats ordered them to withdraw; when they did not obey, he sent the soldiers against them and killed a great many, whose property was in the process plundered. As the strife continued, he selected notable men from each side and sent them as envoys to Nero to plead their rights.
Festus, succeeding Felix in the procuratorship, went after what was most damaging the country: he captured a great many of the bandits and destroyed not a few. But Albinus, who came after Festus, did not conduct affairs in the same way — there was no form of wrongdoing he left untried. Not only did he steal from and plunder private estates in matters of public business, and not only did he burden the whole nation with taxes, but he also ransomed back to their relatives, for a price, those imprisoned for banditry by local councils or by earlier procurators, and only the man who paid nothing to the prisons was left behind as a criminal.
At that time the boldness of those in Jerusalem who wished for revolution grew reckless. The powerful men among them won Albinus over with money, so that he would allow them freedom to foment strife, while the common people, who found no joy in quiet, inclined toward Albinus's associates. Each of these ruffians, girded about with his own band, stood out from the pack like a bandit chief or a tyrant, and used his bodyguard to plunder the more moderate citizens. The result was that those who had been robbed had to keep silent about what should have provoked their outrage, while those still untouched, out of fear of suffering the same fate, flattered a man who deserved punishment. In short, free speech everywhere was cut off, and tyranny prevailed on many fronts, and it was from this time that the seeds of the coming destruction were sown in the city.
Such was Albinus, yet Gessius Florus, who came after him, made him appear excellent by comparison. Albinus did most of his wrongdoing furtively and with some concealment, but Gessius paraded his crimes against the nation openly, and, as though sent as an executioner to punish condemned men, left out no form of plunder or outrage. In pitiable cases he was most savage, in shameful ones most shameless; no one ever poured greater contempt on the truth, and no one devised more cunning paths of villainy. To him, gain taken man by man seemed a small thing; he stripped whole cities bare and ruined entire populations, and all but proclaimed throughout the country that everyone was free to plunder, provided he himself received a share of the spoils. Because of his greed, it came about that all the cities were left desolate, and many people abandoned their ancestral ways and fled into foreign provinces.
As long as Cestius Gallus governed the province of Syria, no one dared send an embassy to him against Florus. But when he came to Jerusalem while the festival of unleavened bread was under way, the people, no fewer than three million, crowded around him begging him to have pity on the nation's sufferings, and cried out against Florus as the scourge of the country. Florus, who was present and standing beside Cestius, mocked their cries. Cestius, however, having quieted the crowd's impulse and given them reason to hope that he would make Florus more moderate toward them in the future, returned to Antioch. Florus escorted him as far as Caesarea, all the while deceiving him, and already contemplating war against the nation as the only means by which he supposed he could conceal his own crimes; for he expected that in time of peace the Jews would bring accusers before Caesar, whereas by engineering...
...their revolt, he would use the greater disaster to divert scrutiny away from the milder charges. So, to make sure the nation would be driven to break away, he increased their sufferings day by day.
Meanwhile the Greeks of Caesarea, having won from Nero the right to govern the city, brought back the documents recording the verdict, and the war took its beginning in the twelfth year of Nero's reign, the seventeenth of Agrippa's kingship, in the month Artemisios.
The pretext for it was not proportionate to the scale of the disasters that followed from it. The Jews of Caesarea had a synagogue next to a plot of ground whose owner was a Greek of Caesarea. They had often tried to buy the place, offering a price many times its value; but when he scorned their pleas and, to spite them further, built over the plot, putting up workshops and leaving them only a narrow and thoroughly cramped passage, the hotter-headed of the young men at first rushed forward and tried to stop the building. When Florus checked them from using force, the leading men among the Jews — John the tax collector among them — in their helplessness persuaded Florus, for eight talents of silver, to stop the work. He, intent only on getting the money, promised to do everything asked of him, but once he had taken it, he left Caesarea for Sebaste and abandoned the dispute to run its own course, as if he had sold the Jews a license to fight.
The next day, a Sabbath, when the Jews had gathered at the synagogue, a certain rabble-rouser of Caesarea overturned a pot at their entrance and set it up to sacrifice birds on it. This drove the Jews to an incurable fury, feeling both that their laws had been outraged and that the place had been defiled. The steady and moderate among them thought they ought to take refuge with the authorities, but the seditious element, inflamed by youth, blazed up for a fight. The rioters of Caesarea stood ready, having sent the sacrificer ahead by prior arrangement, and a clash quickly broke out. Jucundus, the cavalry commander assigned to prevent it, came forward, removed the pot, and tried to put an end to the disturbance, but overpowered by the violence of the Caesareans, the Jews snatched up their scrolls of the Law and withdrew to Narbata, a district of theirs sixty stadia from Caesarea. Meanwhile the twelve leading men around John went to Florus at Sebaste, lamented what had happened, and begged for help, delicately reminding him of the eight talents. He had the men arrested and put in chains, charging them with carrying the Law out of Caesarea.
At this there was outrage in Jerusalem, but the people still held their tempers in check. Florus, however, as if he had contracted to fan the war into flame, sent to the sacred treasury and removed seventeen talents, pretending it was for Caesar's needs. At once confusion seized the people; they ran together to the Temple, calling on Caesar's name with piercing cries and begging to be freed from Florus's tyranny. Some of the rioters shouted the foulest abuse at Florus and, carrying a basket around, demanded coins for him, as if he were a pauper in need. This did nothing to check his greed for money — it only provoked him to extort still more. So instead of going to Caesarea, as he should have, to put out the fire of war that had begun there and remove the causes of the unrest — which was, after all, what he was paid to do — he marched on Jerusalem with a force of cavalry and infantry, so that by Roman arms, by fear, and by threats he might strip the city bare.
The people, wanting to disarm his fury in advance, went out to meet the soldiers with acclamations, and made ready to receive Florus with every courtesy. But he sent ahead the centurion Capito with fifty horsemen and ordered them to withdraw, telling them not to mock him now with these professions of friendliness after abusing him so shamefully; for if they were truly noble and outspoken, they should mock him to his face, and prove themselves lovers of liberty not only in words but in arms as well. Terrified by this, and further scattered as Capito's horsemen bore down into their midst, the crowd dispersed before they could greet Florus or show the soldiers their obedience. They withdrew to their houses and passed the night in fear and humiliation.
Florus spent that night quartered in the palace. The next day he had a tribunal set up before it and took his seat, and the chief priests, the leading men, and the most notable citizens of the city came forward and presented themselves before the tribunal. Florus ordered them to hand over the men who had abused him, telling them they would feel his vengeance unless they produced the guilty parties. They replied that the people were peaceably disposed, and asked pardon for those who had spoken out of turn; for in so great a crowd it was no wonder that some were more reckless and, because of their youth, thoughtless, and it was impossible to pick out the guilty one by one, since every offender, once he repented, denied what he had done. If, they said, he truly cared for peace in the nation and wished to preserve the city for Rome, he ought, for the sake of the many who were blameless, to forgive the few who had offended, rather than throw so good a people into turmoil for the sake of a few troublemakers.
This only provoked Florus further. He shouted an order to his soldiers to plunder the so-called upper market and kill whomever they met. Greedy for gain, and taking their commander's order as encouragement, they not only plundered the district to which they had been sent but rushed into every house and slaughtered the occupants. There was flight through the alleys and slaughter of all who were caught; no form of plunder was left untried, and many respectable citizens were seized and brought before Florus, who first had them scourged and then crucified. The total number of those who perished that day, counting women and children — for not even infants were spared — came to about six hundred and thirty. What made the calamity still more grievous was the novelty of this Roman cruelty: what no one had ever dared before, Florus now did — scourging men of equestrian rank before the tribunal and nailing them to the cross, men who, whatever their birth as Jews, held Roman rank.
At this time King Agrippa happened to be away in Alexandria, congratulating Alexander, whom Nero had entrusted with the governance of Egypt. His sister Berenice, however, was present in Jerusalem, and as she watched the soldiers' lawless violence, a terrible anguish came over her. Again and again she sent her cavalry commanders and bodyguards to Florus, begging him to stop the killing. But he, looking neither to the number of the slain nor to the rank of the woman pleading with him, but only to the profit to be made from the plunder, paid no heed. The soldiers' fury even turned against the queen herself: not only did they torture and kill their victims before her very eyes, but they would have killed her too, had she not fled in time to the royal palace, where she spent the night under guard, dreading the soldiers' assault.
She was staying in Jerusalem at the time to fulfill a vow to God; for it is the custom for those afflicted by illness or by other troubles to vow, thirty days before the sacrifice they intend to offer, to abstain from wine and to shave their heads. It was in the midst of performing this very rite that Berenice, barefoot, stood before the tribunal pleading with Florus, and far from meeting with any respect, she found herself in danger of her life.
These events took place on the sixteenth of the month Artemisios. The next day the grief-stricken populace streamed into the upper market and raised loud cries of lamentation over the dead; most of the shouting, though, was hatred directed at Florus. At this the leading men, together with the chief priests, grew afraid; they tore their garments and, falling before each person in turn, begged them to stop, and not provoke Florus into some irreparable act on top of what they had already suffered. The people were quickly persuaded, out of respect for those who appealed to them and in the hope that Florus would commit no further outrage against them.
But once the disturbance had died down, Florus was displeased, and set about rekindling it. He summoned the chief priests and the notable men and told them the only proof that the people intended no further revolt would be if they went out to meet the soldiers coming up from Caesarea — two cohorts were on their way. While the chief priests were still convening the crowd, he sent word ahead instructing the centurions of the cohorts to tell their men neither to return the Jews' greeting, and, if the Jews said anything against him, to use their weapons. The chief priests gathered the people into the Temple and urged them to go out and meet the Romans, and to greet the cohorts before some irreparable disaster occurred. But the seditious element would not obey, and because of those who had died, the people leaned toward the more reckless.
At this every priest and every minister of God brought out the sacred vessels and the vestments in which it was their custom to perform their service, and the harpists and hymn-singers, together with their instruments, threw themselves down and implored the people to preserve these sacred ornaments for them and not provoke the Romans into plundering the divine treasures. The chief priests themselves could be seen with their heads smeared with dust, their chests bare where they had torn their garments. They called each notable man by name, and the people as a whole, begging them not to betray their homeland, for the sake of the smallest offense, to those eager to destroy it. For what benefit, they asked, would it bring the soldiers if the Jews greeted them, or what remedy would it bring for what had already happened, if they failed to go out now? But if they welcomed those approaching, as was customary, Florus would be deprived of any pretext for war, and they themselves would keep their homeland and suffer nothing further. Besides, to obey a handful of rioters, when they themselves, being so great a people, ought instead to compel even those men to see reason, was sheer folly.
Softened by these words, the people, together with the leading citizens, restrained the rioters, some by threats and some by appeals to shame. Then, leading the way in quiet and orderly fashion, they went out to meet the soldiers and greeted them as they drew near. But when the soldiers made no reply, the rioters began shouting against Florus — this was the prearranged signal against them. At once the soldiers surrounded them and struck them with clubs, and the cavalry, pursuing those who fled, trampled them underfoot. Many fell, beaten down by the Romans, but more were crushed by one another in the press. There was a terrible crush at the gates, and as each man rushed to get through ahead of the rest, the flight became slower for everyone, and the destruction of those who stumbled was dreadful; for they were suffocated and crushed by the weight of the crowd pressing in on them, and vanished without trace, so that not even a relative was left behind to recognize them for burial. Soldiers too fell upon them, striking down without discrimination those they overtook, and drove the crowd by force through the place called Bethesda, struggling to get past and to seize control of the Temple and the Antonia fortress. Florus, aiming at the same objective, led out from the royal palace the men who were with him and strove to reach the fortress. But he failed in his design; for the people turned to face him directly and blocked his advance, and, spreading out over the rooftops, pelted the Romans with missiles. Worn down by the shots raining down from above, and too weak to cut through the crowd choking the alleys, they withdrew to the camp beside the palace.
The rioters, fearing that Florus might attack again and seize the Temple by way of the Antonia, at once went up and cut through the colonnades connecting the Temple to the Antonia. This cooled Florus's greed; for he had been eager to get at God's treasures, and it was for that reason he wished to gain access to the Antonia, but once the colonnades were broken off, his ambition was checked. He summoned the chief priests and the council and told them he himself intended to leave the city, but would leave behind whatever garrison they thought fit. When they promised full responsibility for security and for keeping the peace, provided he left them one cohort — though not the one that had fought, since the people bore that cohort particular ill will for what they had suffered — he exchanged the cohort as they asked and withdrew to Caesarea with the rest of his force.
Seeking another pretext to further the war, he wrote to Cestius, falsely charging the Jews with revolt, laying the blame for the start of the fighting on them, and claiming that they had done what in fact they themselves had suffered. Nor did the magistrates of Jerusalem stay silent; they and Berenice wrote to Cestius as well about Florus's lawless conduct in the city. Cestius, having read both accounts, took counsel with his officers. Some advised him to march up with an army, either to punish the revolt, if it had really occurred, or to secure the Jews more firmly in their loyalty; others advised him to send ahead one of his staff officers to investigate the situation and report faithfully on the Jews' state of mind. He sent one of his tribunes, Neapolitanus, who, on the road, encountered King Agrippa returning from Alexandria near Jamnia and informed him who had sent him and why.
There too the chief priests, together with the leading men and the council, came to greet the king. After paying him their respects, they poured out their own sufferings and recounted Florus's cruelty. Agrippa was indignant at this, but with a statesman's tact he turned his anger toward the very Jews he pitied, wishing to humble their spirit and, by making it seem they had not suffered unjustly, to turn them away from thoughts of retaliation. The leading men, being men of standing and, because of their own property, eager for peace, understood the king's rebuke as well-meant; but the common people went out sixty stadia from Jerusalem to greet Agrippa and Neapolitanus. The wives of the murdered men ran ahead wailing, and at their cries of grief the people broke into lamentation and begged Agrippa to help them; they cried out to Neapolitanus over all they had suffered at Florus's hands, and when they entered the city they showed him the deserted marketplace and the plundered houses. Then, through Agrippa, they persuaded Neapolitanus to walk through the city as far as Siloam with a single attendant, so that he might see for himself that the Jews submitted to all other Romans, and hated only Florus, because of the excess of his cruelty toward them. When he had gone through the city and gained sufficient proof of their peaceable temper, he went up to the Temple. There he called the people together, and after praising them at length for their loyalty to Rome, and urging them much...
Agrippa urged them to keep the peace, and then, having worshipped God from the place where the sanctuary could be seen, went back to Cestius. But the crowd of the Jews turned to the king and the chief priests and pressed them to send envoys to Nero against Florus, and not, by staying silent over so much bloodshed, leave themselves open to the suspicion of revolt; for they would appear to have begun the fighting themselves if they did not act first to point out who had actually begun it. It was plain that they would not calm down if anyone tried to stop the embassy.
To Agrippa, appointing men to bring charges against Florus seemed likely to provoke resentment, but standing by while the Jews were fanned into war did not seem to serve his own interests either. So he summoned the crowd to the Xystus, stationed his sister Berenice where all could see her at the house of the Hasmoneans—which stood above the Xystus, facing the upper city, with a bridge joining the Xystus to the temple—and Agrippa spoke as follows.
"If I saw all of you determined to make war on the Romans, and not the purest and most sincere part of the people preferring to keep the peace, I would never have come before you, nor ventured to offer advice; for any speech urging what ought to be done is wasted once an entire audience has agreed on the worse course. But since some of you, through youth, have no experience of the horrors of war, some are swayed by a reckless hope of freedom, and others are goaded by simple greed and by the profit to be made from the weak once matters are thrown into confusion—so that these people, brought back to their senses, might change their minds, and the innocent not suffer for the bad judgment of a few—I thought it right to gather you all in one place and tell you what I believe serves your interest. Let no one raise an uproar against me if he does not like what he hears; for those set irrevocably on revolt can go on thinking as they do even after I have spoken, but for me the speech is wasted even on those willing to listen, unless everyone keeps silent.
I know that many turn the outrages of the procurators and the praises of freedom into high drama. But before I examine who you are and whom you propose to fight, let me first untangle the knot of pretexts you offer. If you are defending yourselves against wrongdoers, why make so much of freedom? If you think slavery itself unbearable, then your complaint against your governors is beside the point—for slavery is equally shameful even under governors who behave with restraint.
Consider each of these grievances in turn and see how slight a foundation they give for war. Take first the charges against the procurators. Those in power need to be placated, not provoked; when you turn small faults into great denunciations, you only convict yourselves in the process, and you drive men who might have wronged you secretly, out of some shame, into wronging you openly instead. Nothing checks blows so well as bearing them, and the patient endurance of the wronged is itself a rebuke that unsettles the wrongdoer. But grant that the Roman officials are incorrigibly harsh—it is not yet true that all Romans wrong you, still less Caesar, against whom you are actually choosing to make war. No villain comes from them by his order, nor can those in the west easily even hear, let alone act on, what happens under the eastern sky so quickly. It is absurd to make war on so many because of one man, and for petty causes against people so great—people who do not even know what we accuse them of. Our own grievances could be put right quickly enough, since no procurator stays forever, and his successors are likely to prove more moderate; but a war, once set in motion, cannot easily be laid down again without disaster, nor easily carried through either.
As for wanting freedom now, the moment for that has passed—you should have fought to keep from ever losing it in the first place. The experience of slavery is bitter, and the struggle to avoid ever entering it is a just one; but the man who has once been mastered and only then revolts is a stubborn slave, not a lover of liberty. That was the time to do everything possible to keep the Romans out—when Pompey first set foot in this land. But our ancestors and their kings, though far superior to you in wealth, in strength, and in spirit, could not hold out against even a small fraction of Roman power; and you, who have inherited mere submission by succession, so much weaker in resources than those who first submitted, mean to stand against the whole dominion of Rome?
Even the Athenians, who once gave up their own city to the flames for the freedom of the Greeks, who chased the arrogant Xerxes—the man who marched over land and sailed over sea, whom the seas could not contain though he led an army wider than Europe—like a runaway on a single ship, and who broke the might of all Asia around little Salamis, now serve the Romans, and the city that once led Greece takes its orders from Italy. The Spartans, after Thermopylae and Plataea and their Agesilaus who ransacked Asia, are content with the same masters, and the Macedonians, who still dream of Philip and of the world dominion that spread out before them under Alexander, bear this same great reversal and bow before the ones to whom fortune has now turned. Countless other nations, with far stronger grounds for asserting their freedom, submit; you alone think it disgraceful to serve those to whom everything else is subject.
With what army, trusting in what weapons, do you mean to fight? Where is the fleet that will dispute the Roman seas for you? Where are the treasuries to fund your ambitions? Do you imagine you are going to war against Egyptians and Arabs? Will you not take the measure of Roman power, will you not weigh your own weakness? Our forces, and those of our neighbors, have been defeated again and again, while Roman strength stands unconquered across the world—and even that has not satisfied them. The whole Euphrates in the east was not enough for them, nor the Danube in the north, nor Libya searched to its uninhabited southern edge, nor Gades in the west; they sought out another world beyond the ocean and carried their arms as far as the Britons, unknown to history before them. What then—are you richer than the Gauls, stronger than the Germans, more clever than the Greeks, more numerous than every people on earth? What gives you the confidence to rise against Rome?
Slavery is harsh, someone will say. How much more so for the Greeks, who surpass every people under the sun in nobility of birth and hold so vast a territory, yet bow before six Roman rods—as do the Macedonians, who have a far better claim than you to fight for their freedom. And the five hundred cities of Asia—do they not, without even a garrison, bow before a single governor and his consular rods? Need I mention the Heniochi, the Colchians, the tribe of the Tauri, the people of the Bosporus, and the nations around the Pontus and Lake Maeotis? Among them, formerly, not even a ruler of their own kind was recognized; now three thousand hoplites hold them in check, and forty warships have brought peace to a sea once unnavigable and wild. Bithynia, Cappadocia, the Pamphylian people, the Lycians, the Cilicians—for all they might say about freedom, do they not pay tribute without needing a single soldier to enforce it? And the Thracians, who occupy a land five days wide and seven long, rougher and far better defended than yours, whose bitter cold turns back any invader—do they not obey two thousand Roman guards? The Illyrians beyond them, who inhabit the territory cut off toward Dalmatia by the Danube, submit to no more than two legions, with whose help they themselves hold back the raids of the Dacians. And the Dalmatians, who rose up for freedom so many times, and who, no sooner subdued than they gathered their strength to revolt again, now keep still under a single Roman legion.
If any people had grounds great enough to justify revolt, it should have been the Gauls, walled in by nature itself—the Alps to the east, the river Rhine to the north, the Pyrenees to the south, the ocean to the west. Yet surrounded by such barriers, numbering three hundred and five nations, holding what one might call the very springs of prosperity and flooding nearly the whole world with their goods, they endure being a source of Roman revenue, their own prosperity managed for them by others. And they endure this not from any weakness of spirit or lack of manly courage—they fought for eighty years for their freedom—but because, along with Roman power, they were overawed by the fortune that serves Rome even better than her arms do. And so they serve under twelve hundred soldiers, though they have almost more cities than that.
Not even the gold mined by the Iberians was enough to sustain their war for freedom, nor the great distance separating them from Rome by land and sea, nor the fierce tribes of the Lusitanians and Cantabrians, nor the neighboring ocean with its tides, fearsome even to the natives themselves; the Romans stretched their arms beyond the Pillars of Heracles, marched through the clouds over the Pyrenees, and enslaved these peoples too—a single garrison sufficed for men so hard to fight and so far removed. Who among you has not heard of the vast numbers of the Germans? You have surely seen for yourselves, often enough, their strength and the size of their bodies, since Romans everywhere keep captives taken from them. Yet these people, who range over boundless land, whose spirit is greater even than their bodies, whose souls despise death and whose tempers outdo the fiercest of wild beasts, are held to the Rhine as the limit of their advance, and tamed by eight Roman legions; those taken captive serve as slaves, while the rest of their nation survives only by flight.
Consider too the wall of the Britons, you who put your trust in the walls of Jerusalem: though ringed by the ocean and inhabiting an island no smaller than our own known world, the Romans sailed there and enslaved them too, and four legions now guard so great an island. And what need is there to say more, when even the Parthians, the most warlike of races, ruling so many nations and possessing such power, send hostages to Rome, and one can see in Italy, under the pretense of peace, the nobility of the East living in servitude? When nearly every people under the sun bows before Roman arms, will you alone go to war—without even considering the fate of the Carthaginians, who, for all their pride in the great Hannibal and their Phoenician nobility, fell before the hand of Scipio?
Neither the Cyrenaeans, of Spartan stock, nor the Marmaridae, the tribe that stretches to the parched desert, nor the Syrtes, dreaded even by those who only hear of them, nor the Nasamones, the Moors, and the countless multitude of the Numidians checked the might of Rome. And the third part of the inhabited world, whose peoples are not even easy to count, bounded by the Atlantic sea and the Pillars of Heracles and reaching to the Red Sea, home to the boundless Ethiopian peoples—all of it they have subdued, and beyond the yearly crops that feed the population of Rome for eight months, its peoples are taxed in every other way as well, and readily supply what the empire needs, counting none of these demands an outrage, as you do, even though only a single legion remains stationed among them.
And what need is there to point you to Rome's power from far away, when Egypt lies close at hand—stretching to the Ethiopians and Arabia Felix, serving as the harbor of India, holding seven and a half million people apart from the residents of Alexandria, as one can reckon from the poll tax—and yet does not think Roman rule beneath it, even though it has in Alexandria such a spark for revolt, given the sheer number of its men, its wealth, and besides that its size. Alexandria's length alone is thirty stades, its width no less than ten, and in a single month it delivers more to Rome than your whole year's tribute, and beyond money, grain enough to feed Rome for four months; and it is walled on every side by impassable deserts, harborless seas, rivers, or marshes. Yet none of this was found stronger than Rome's fortune, and two legions stationed in the city hold deep Egypt in check, along with the Macedonian nobility there.
What allies, then, will you find for this war, out of an uninhabited world? Everyone within the inhabited world is Roman—unless someone stretches his hopes beyond the Euphrates and imagines the kinsmen of Adiabene will come to his aid. But they will not entangle themselves in so great a war without good reason, nor will the Parthian king allow it even if they should decide badly; for he is careful to preserve his truce with Rome, and will regard it as breaking the treaty if any of his subjects marches against the Romans. It remains, then, to take refuge in the help of God. But even this stands arrayed on the side of Rome, for without God it would be impossible for so vast an empire to have been established.
Consider, too, how the strictness of your own religion, even if you were fighting an easily beaten enemy, would make war hard to manage—and how the very observances by which you hope to keep God as your ally, you will be forced to break, and so turn him away instead. Keep the customs of the sabbath, refuse to act on any matter on that day, and you will easily be taken, just as your ancestors were by Pompey, who made those very days the busiest time of his siege, since the besieged themselves stayed idle on them. But break your ancestral law in the course of the war, and I do not know what you will still be fighting for, since your one concern is to preserve your ancestral customs intact. How will you call on the divine for help, once you yourselves have willingly broken the service you owe it?
All who go to war rely on either divine or human help; but when both are cut off as likely sources of aid, those who still fight are choosing plain destruction for themselves. What is there to stop you from killing your own children and wives with your own hands, and burning this most beautiful of homelands? Madness of that kind would at least spare you the reproach of defeat. It is good, friends—it is good, while the ship is still in harbor, to look ahead to the coming storm, rather than be swept into the middle of the gales and perish there. Those who fall into disasters they could not foresee at least keep the world's pity; but a man who rushes toward plain destruction earns reproach as well. Unless, that is, someone imagines he will fight on agreed terms, and that the Romans, once victorious, will show you moderation, rather than—to make an example for the other nations—burn the sacred city and destroy..."
your whole race. For even if you survive, you will find no place to flee, since every people either already has the Romans as masters or fears having them. And the danger is not only for those here, but also for those living in other cities. There is no nation on the inhabited earth that does not contain some portion of our people, and if you go to war, your enemies will slaughter all of them, and because of a few men's bad judgment every city will be filled with the blood of Jews. Those who did it would find some excuse; but if it does not happen, consider how impious it is to raise arms against a people so humane. Let pity move you, if not for your children and wives, then at least for this mother city and its sacred precincts. Spare the temple, and keep the sanctuary with its holy things for yourselves — for the Romans will no longer spare what they have taken, once they have gotten no thanks for sparing it before. I call to witness your holy things, God's sacred angels, and our common homeland, that I have held back nothing that might save you. If you decide on what is necessary, you will have peace together with me; but if you are carried away by passion, you will face the danger without me."
Having said this, he broke into tears, together with his sister, and by his weeping checked much of the crowd's impulse. Yet they cried out that it was not against Rome but against Florus, for what they had suffered, that they meant to fight. To this King Agrippa replied, "But your actions are already those of men at war with Rome — you have not paid Caesar his tribute, and you have torn down the porticoes joining the Antonia. You could remove the grounds for the charge of revolt if you rebuild these and pay the tax; for the fortress does not belong to Florus, nor would you be giving the money to Florus."
The people were persuaded by this, and going up to the temple together with the king and Berenice, they began rebuilding the porticoes, while the magistrates and councilors dispersed through the villages to collect the taxes. The forty talents still owing were quickly gathered. In this way Agrippa held off the threat of war for the time. But when he next tried to persuade the people to obey Florus until Caesar sent a successor in his place, they were provoked, cursed the king, and proclaimed him banished from the city; some of the rebels even dared to throw stones at him.
Seeing that the impulse of the revolutionaries was now beyond restraint, and angered at the insult done to him, the king sent their leaders, along with the men of standing, to Florus at Caesarea, so that Florus might appoint from among them men to collect the region's taxes, while he himself withdrew to his own kingdom. Meanwhile, some of those most eager to stir up war banded together and rushed against a fortress called Masada. Seizing it by stealth, they killed the Roman garrison and installed men of their own in its place.
At the same time, in the temple, Eleazar son of the high priest Ananias, a most audacious young man then serving as captain, persuaded those who officiated in the sacred rites to accept no gift or sacrifice from any foreigner. This was the true foundation of the war against Rome, for by it they rejected the sacrifice offered on Caesar's behalf. Although the chief priests and the notables urged them at length not to abandon the custom of sacrificing for their rulers, they would not yield, relying heavily on their own numbers — for the most vigorous of the revolutionaries supported them — and looking above all to Eleazar, who held command.
So the men of standing came together with the chief priests and the notable Pharisees, and, as though the situation were already beyond remedy, they took counsel about the whole matter. Having decided to try persuading the rebels by argument, they gathered the people before the bronze gate, which faced east on the inner side of the temple. First they reproached them at length for the audacity of their revolt and for threatening their homeland with so great a war; then they exposed the unreasonableness of their pretext, pointing out that their ancestors had adorned the temple mostly with gifts from foreigners, had always accepted the offerings of outside nations, and had never once forbidden anyone's sacrifice — for that would be most impious — but had even set up around the temple the votive offerings still visible after so long a time. These men, by contrast, were now provoking the arms of Rome and courting war from that quarter, introducing a strange innovation in worship, and, along with the danger, condemning the city to impiety, if among the Jews alone no foreigner might sacrifice or worship. If such a rule were imposed on even a single private citizen, they said, people would be indignant at so inhuman a restriction — yet they overlooked it when Rome and Caesar were being excluded from the covenant. They said they feared that, having cast aside the sacrifices offered on Rome's behalf, the Jews might themselves be forbidden to offer sacrifices for their own sake, and that the city might be cut off from the empire's protection, unless they quickly came to their senses, restored the sacrifices, and corrected the wrong before word of the outrage reached those they had insulted. While saying this, they brought forward priests learned in the ancestral traditions, who testified that all their forebears had accepted sacrifices from foreigners. But none of the revolutionaries paid any attention, nor would the men bent on brigandage, busy laying the foundations of war, come near them.
Seeing then that the rebellion was already hard to put down by their own efforts, and that the danger from Rome would fall upon them first, the men of standing tried to clear themselves of blame. They sent envoys to Florus, led by Simon son of Ananias, and others to Agrippa, among them the notables Saul, Antipas, and Costobar, kinsmen of the king. They asked both to come up to the city with a force and, before the revolt became unmanageable, to crush it. For Florus this was welcome news of a grim kind, and since he had already resolved to kindle the war, he gave the envoys no answer. Agrippa, however, caring equally for those in revolt and for those against whom the war was being raised, and wishing the Jews to be preserved for Rome and the temple and mother city to be preserved for the Jews — knowing besides that the disturbance would bring him no advantage — sent two thousand cavalry to help the people: Auranites, Batanaeans, and Trachonites, under the cavalry commander Darius, with Philip son of Jacimus as general.
Emboldened by these forces, the men of standing, together with the chief priests and all of the populace that loved peace, seized the upper city, while the rebels held the lower city and the temple. Both sides used slingstones and long-range weapons without pause, and there was a constant exchange of missiles from either quarter; at times companies sallied out and fought hand to hand, the rebels excelling in daring, the king's men in experience. For the king's men the chief aim of the struggle was to gain control of the temple and drive out those defiling it, while the rebels under Eleazar sought, in addition to what they already held, to seize the upper city as well. For seven days there was heavy slaughter on both sides, and neither yielded the ground it held.
On the following day, the Feast of Wood-Carrying took place, at which it was everyone's custom to bring wood for the altar so that fuel for the fire would never fail, since it burns unquenched forever. On this day the rebels shut out those who differed with them in religion, but let in, mixed among the weak crowd of ordinary worshippers, many of the sicarii — for so they called the brigands who carried daggers hidden under their cloaks — and having gained these recruits, they attacked their task more boldly. The king's men were overcome by numbers and daring and yielded the upper city to their assault. The rebels then set fire to the house of the high priest Ananias and to the palaces of Agrippa and Berenice; after that they carried fire to the public archives, eager to destroy the bonds of moneylenders and cut off the collection of debts, so as to win over a great number of those who had benefited and, with impunity, incite the poor to rise against the rich. When those in charge of the record office fled, they set it ablaze.
When they had thus burned out the sinews of the city, they moved against their enemies. At this point some of the men of standing and the chief priests slipped away into hiding in underground channels, while others, together with the king's men, fled into the upper palace and quickly shut its gates; among them were the high priest Ananias, his brother Ezekias, and those who had gone as envoys to Agrippa. For that day, satisfied with their victory and with what they had burned, they rested.
The next day — the fifteenth of the month Loos — they attacked the Antonia, and after besieging its garrison for two days, they captured them, cut them down, and burned the fortress. Then they moved on to the palace into which the king's men had fled, and dividing themselves into four divisions, made trial of the walls. None of those inside dared to sally out, given the numbers massed against them, but spreading along the parapets and towers they shot at those who approached, and many of the brigands fell beneath the walls. The fighting went on without pause, day and night, the rebels expecting that those inside would give out from lack of food, and those inside expecting that the besiegers would tire.
Meanwhile a certain Menahem, son of Judas called the Galilean — a most formidable teacher who once, in the time of Quirinius, had rebuked the Jews for submitting to Rome after already submitting to God — took his followers and withdrew to Masada. There he broke open King Herod's armory, armed still more brigands besides the men of his own town, and, using these as his bodyguard, returned to Jerusalem like a king. Becoming leader of the revolt, he took charge of directing the siege. They lacked siege engines, and could not openly undermine the wall while missiles rained down from above; so from a distance they dug a tunnel to one of the towers, propped it up, then set fire to the supporting timber and withdrew. When the props had burned through, the tower suddenly collapsed — but another wall behind it came into view, already built up. For, sensing the plot beforehand — perhaps also because the tower had shifted as it was being undermined — the defenders had built themselves this second rampart. At the sight of it, those who had not expected it, and who were already convinced they had won, were struck with dismay.
Those inside sent word to Menahem and the leaders of the revolt, asking to withdraw under truce; and when this was granted only to the king's men and the local people, some went out. Despondency seized the Romans left behind alone; for they could neither overpower so great a multitude, nor would they stoop to ask for pledges of safety, thinking it a disgrace — and besides, they did not trust that such pledges, if given, would be honored. So, abandoning their camp as indefensible, they fled for refuge to the royal towers called Hippicus, Phasael, and Mariamme. Menahem's men, bursting in where the soldiers had escaped from, killed as many as they caught who had not managed to flee in time, plundered the baggage, and burned the camp. This took place on the sixth of the month Gorpiaeus. On the following day the high priest Ananias, who had been hiding near the drainage channel of the royal palace, was caught and killed by the brigands together with his brother Ezekias; and the rebels surrounded the towers and kept watch, so that no soldier might escape.
As for Menahem, the destruction of the fortified places and the death of the high priest Ananias swelled him with arrogance into cruelty; believing he had no rival in the conduct of affairs, he became an insufferable tyrant. Eleazar's followers rose up against him, agreeing among themselves that, having revolted from Rome out of desire for freedom, they must not now surrender that freedom to a fellow citizen and endure him as a master — even if he did nothing violent, he was, after all, of lower rank than themselves; and if anyone had to take overall command, it belonged to anyone rather than to him. Having agreed on this, they made their attempt against him at the temple, for he had gone up arrogantly to worship, adorned in royal robes and trailing armed zealots behind him. When Eleazar's men rushed at him, the rest of the people too, roused to anger, snatched up stones and pelted the teacher, believing that if he were destroyed the whole revolt would be turned aside.
Menahem's men held out for a little while, but when they saw the whole crowd rushing upon them, they fled each as best he could; those who were caught were killed, and a search was made for those in hiding. Only a few escaped safely, slipping off in secret to Masada, among them Eleazar son of Jairus, a kinsman of Menahem, who later became tyrant of Masada. As for Menahem himself, he fled to a place called Ophlas and was hiding there in disgrace; they took him alive, dragged him out into the open, tortured him with many torments, and killed him — and likewise his subordinate commanders, including Absalom, the most conspicuous agent of his tyranny.
The people, as I have said, had joined in this action hoping for some correction of the whole revolt; but those who killed Menahem had done so not to end the war, but so as to wage it more freely, now that they had nothing to fear from him. In fact, though the people repeatedly urged the soldiers to relax the siege, the rebels pressed on more fiercely, until at last Metilius and his men — Metilius was the Roman prefect — no longer able to hold out, sent word to Eleazar asking for their lives alone under truce, saying they would hand over their weapons and all their other property. Eleazar's men eagerly seized on this plea and sent back to them Gorion son of Nicomedes, Ananias son of Sadduk, and Judas son of Jonathan, to give pledges and oaths. When this had been done, Metilius led his soldiers down.
As long as they remained under arms, none of the rebels attacked them or showed any sign of treachery. But once, in accordance with the agreement, all of them had laid down their shields and swords and, no longer suspecting anything, were withdrawing, Eleazar's men rushed upon them, surrounded them, and cut them down as they neither defended themselves nor begged for mercy, but only cried out the terms of the treaty and the oaths sworn. All of them were thus savagely slaughtered, except Metilius; for he alone was spared, because he begged for his life and promised to become a Jew, even to the point of circumcision. To the Romans the loss was slight, since only a few had perished out of their vast forces, but to the Jews it seemed the prelude to their own destruction. And when they saw that the causes of the war were now beyond remedy, and that the city was stained with so great a pollution, from which it was reasonable to expect some divine vengeance, even if not...
against the vengeance that would come from the Romans, the people mourned in public. The city was filled with dejection, and every moderate citizen was in turmoil, expecting that he himself would pay the penalty for the rebels' act. And indeed the killing had happened to fall on a Sabbath, the day on which, out of reverence, they abstain even from acts of piety.
On that same day and hour, as though by some divine design, the people of Caesarea slaughtered the Jews living among them, so that within a single hour more than twenty thousand were butchered and the whole of Jewish Caesarea was emptied; for Florus seized those who escaped and led them off in chains to the dockyards.
At the blow struck at Caesarea the whole nation was driven wild, and splitting into bands they ravaged the villages of the Syrians and the neighboring cities: Philadelphia, Heshbon's territory, Gerasa, Pella, and Scythopolis. Then, falling on Gadara, Hippos, and the Gaulanitis, in some places they destroyed everything and in others set fires, and advanced on Kedasa belonging to Tyre, on Ptolemais, on Gaba, and on Caesarea. Neither Sebaste nor Ashkelon withstood their onslaught; after burning these they razed Anthedon and Gaza to the ground. Many villages around each of these cities were plundered, and the killing of the men who were caught was beyond counting.
Yet the Syrians killed no fewer Jews than they had lost; they too slaughtered those they seized in the cities, no longer only out of hatred, as before, but now also to forestall the danger they themselves faced. A terrible turmoil gripped the whole of Syria, and every city was split into two camps, since for each side safety lay in striking the other first. Days were spent in bloodshed, and nights, in fear, were harder still; for even when people thought they had cleared their towns of Jews, they still held those who merely lived like Jews under suspicion, and no one could bring himself to kill outright a person of mixed and doubtful loyalty, while they equally feared one who, though counted a foreigner among them, might in fact belong to the other side.
Even men who had long seemed the gentlest were provoked to murder their rivals by greed, for they plundered without fear the property of the slain and carried off the spoils of the dead to their own houses as if from a battlefield, and the man who profited most was honored as though he had triumphed over the greatest number of enemies. One could see the cities full of unburied bodies, corpses of the old lying together with infants, and women stripped even of the covering owed to modesty. The whole province was filled with indescribable disasters, and the dread of what might yet be threatened was greater than the outrages already dared.
Up to this point the assaults of the Jews had been against foreign peoples; but when they overran Scythopolis, they found the Jews living there arrayed against them as enemies. For those Jews, siding with the people of Scythopolis and putting their own safety above their kinship, had ranged themselves alongside their fellow citizens against their own countrymen.
Yet even their excessive zeal fell under suspicion: the Scythopolitans, fearing that these Jews might attack the city by night and, at great cost to themselves, have to answer to their own people for having broken faith, ordered them, if they wished to confirm their loyalty and demonstrate their good faith toward the foreign population, to move with their families into the sacred grove. They did as they were commanded, without suspecting anything. For two days the Scythopolitans held still, luring them into false confidence, but on the third night, watching for the moment when some were off guard and others asleep, they slaughtered them all, more than thirteen thousand in number, and plundered the possessions of every one of them.
It is worth relating also the fate of Simon, who was the son of a certain Saul, a man not without standing, and who, distinguished for strength of body and boldness, used both to the harm of his own people. Advancing day after day, he killed many of the Jews near Scythopolis, and often, single-handed, routing them all, he alone tipped the balance of the battle.
A fitting penalty overtook him for the slaughter of his kinsmen: when the Scythopolitans surrounded the Jews and were shooting them down with javelins throughout the grove, he drew his sword but charged at none of the enemy, for he saw their numbers were beyond reckoning, and instead cried out in great anguish, "Scythopolitans, I suffer what I deserve for what I have done against you, we who by so much slaughter of our own kin proved our loyalty to you. So then, since it is with good reason that we are found untrustworthy as foreigners, and since our own people have been wronged to the utmost, let us die, guilty as we are, by our own hands, for it is not fitting that we die by the hands of enemies."
"This same act would also serve me as a fitting penalty for my crime and as praise for my courage, so that none of my enemies may boast of having killed me or gloat over my fall." Having said this, with eyes full of both pity and rage he looked round upon his own family; he had a wife, children, and aged parents.
First he seized his father by his white hair and ran him through with the sword; after him, his unresisting mother, and then his wife and children, each all but stepping forward to meet the blade, eager to forestall the enemy. Having gone through his whole family, and standing conspicuous over the bodies, he raised his right hand for all to see,
and plunged the sword entirely into his own throat, a young man deserving of pity for the strength of his body and the steadfastness of his soul, though he suffered a fate to match his loyalty toward foreigners. After the disaster at Scythopolis, the rest of the cities rose up each against the Jews within them: the people of Ashkelon killed twenty-five hundred, the people of Ptolemais killed two thousand and imprisoned not a few.
The people of Tyre put many to death and kept most of the rest imprisoned; the people of Hippos and Gadara likewise disposed of the bolder ones and kept the more dangerous under guard, while the rest of the cities of Syria acted each according to the measure of their hatred or fear of the Jewish people. Only the people of Antioch, Sidon, and Apamea spared those living among them and would not consent to kill or imprison any Jews, perhaps in part because their own numbers made them indifferent to any unrest among so few, but more, in my judgment, out of pity for a people they saw attempting nothing revolutionary. The people of Gerasa likewise did no wrong to those who stayed and escorted those who wished to leave as far as the borders.
A plot against the Jews also arose in the kingdom of Agrippa. He himself had gone to Antioch to see Cestius Gallus, leaving one of his companions, named Noaros, a kinsman of King Soaemus, in charge of affairs. Seventy men arrived from Batanea, chosen among their fellow citizens for birth and judgment, asking for a garrison, so that if any disturbance should arise among them too, they would have an adequate force to prevent uprisings.
Noaros sent some of the royal soldiers out by night and had all of them killed, daring the deed against Agrippa's wishes and, driven by boundless greed, choosing to wrong his own countrymen and thereby ruining the kingdom's reputation. He continued to act lawlessly and cruelly against the nation until Agrippa, learning of it, was ashamed to have him killed for Soaemus's sake, but removed him from his post. Meanwhile the rebels, seizing a certain fortress called Cypros, which overlooks Jericho, slaughtered the garrison and razed the fortifications to the ground.
In those same days the mass of the Jews at Machaerus persuaded the Roman garrison to abandon the fortress and hand it over to them. Fearing to have it taken from them by force, the Romans agreed to withdraw under a truce, and having received pledges, they surrendered the fortress, which the men of Machaerus then took and held with a garrison of their own.
In Alexandria there had always been strife between the native population and the Jews, ever since Alexander, finding the Jews most eager to help him against the Egyptians, granted them as a reward for their alliance the right to dwell in the city on equal footing with the Greeks. This honor was maintained for them also by his successors, who even set apart for them a district of their own, so that they might keep a purer way of life with less mixing with foreigners, and allowed them to be styled Macedonians. And when the Romans took possession of Egypt, neither the first Caesar nor any of his successors would consent to diminish the honors the Jews had received from Alexander.
Yet there were constant clashes between them and the Greeks, and although the governors punished many on both sides every day, the strife was only further inflamed. But now, with disorder already stirred up everywhere else, matters among them blazed up all the more. When the Alexandrians held an assembly to decide on an embassy they intended to send to Nero, a great number of Jews streamed together with the Greeks into the amphitheater; and their opponents, catching sight of them, at once cried out that they were enemies and spies.
Then, leaping up, they laid hands on them. The rest fled and scattered, but three men were seized and dragged off to be burned alive. At this the whole Jewish population rose to their defense: at first they hurled stones at the Greeks, then, snatching up torches, rushed toward the amphitheater, threatening to burn the whole populace alive within it. And they would have accomplished this, had not Tiberius Alexander, the governor of the city, checked their fury.
He did not, however, begin by turning to arms for the restoration of order, but sent the leading men among them privately to urge them to stop and not provoke the Roman army against themselves. But the rebellious element mocked his appeal and heaped abuse on Tiberius. When he saw that they would not desist short of some great disaster, he unleashed against them the two Roman legions stationed in the city, together with two thousand soldiers who happened to be present, having arrived from Libya for the destruction of the Jews. He permitted them not only to kill but also to plunder their property and burn their houses.
The soldiers rushed into the quarter called Delta, where the Jewish population was concentrated, and carried out their orders, though not without bloodshed on their own side; for the Jews rallied together, put their best-armed men in front, and held out for a long while, but once they gave way they were destroyed without mercy. Every kind of death befell them, some caught in the open, others crowded into their houses, which the Romans set on fire after first plundering what was inside, sparing neither infants out of pity nor old men out of respect,
but cutting down every age, so that the whole district was flooded with blood and fifty thousand corpses lay piled up; even the remnant would not have survived had they not turned to supplication. Taking pity on them, Tiberius Alexander ordered the Romans to withdraw. The soldiers, accustomed to obey, ceased their killing at a single signal, but the Alexandrian populace, in the excess of their hatred, could barely be called off and were torn away from the bodies only with difficulty.
Such was the disaster that befell Alexandria. Cestius, seeing that the Jews everywhere were now roused to war and that quiet could no longer be expected, took from Antioch the Twelfth Legion at full strength, along with two thousand picked men from each of the other legions, six cohorts of infantry, and four squadrons of cavalry, in addition to the allied contingents supplied by the kings: two thousand cavalry and three thousand archers, all infantry, from Antiochus; from Agrippa an equal number of infantry and somewhat fewer than two thousand cavalry; and Soaemus followed with four thousand men, a third of them cavalry and most of the rest archers. He advanced to Ptolemais. A great many auxiliaries were also gathered from the cities, inferior to the regular soldiers in experience but making up for their lack of skill with zeal and hatred of the Jews.
Agrippa himself was present with Cestius, guiding him on the route and advising him on what would be useful. Taking part of his force, Cestius marched against a strong city of Galilee called Chabulon, which means "of men," and which marks the boundary between the region and Ptolemais. He found it empty of men, for the population had fled to the mountains, but full of goods of every kind. He allowed his soldiers to plunder what they found, and though he admired the beauty of the town, whose houses were built like those of Tyre, Sidon, and Berytus, he set it on fire. He then overran the countryside, plundering everything in his path and burning the surrounding villages, before returning to Ptolemais.
While the Syrians, and especially the men of Berytus, were still occupied with the plunder, the Jews, taking heart, and knowing that Cestius had withdrawn, fell unexpectedly upon those left behind and destroyed about two thousand of them. Cestius, breaking camp from Ptolemais, went himself to Caesarea, but sent part of his army ahead to Joppa, with orders that if they could seize the city they should garrison it, but if the inhabitants got word of their approach in advance, they should wait for him and the rest of the force.
Some of them, pressing on by sea and others by land, took the city easily from both sides at once; the inhabitants had no time even to flee, let alone prepare for battle, and the soldiers fell upon them and killed them all, families and all, then plundered the city and burned it. The number of those slain was eight thousand four hundred. In the same way he sent a considerable body of cavalry into the district of Narbata, bordering on Caesarea, which laid waste the land, killed a great number of the local people, plundered their property, and burned their villages.
Into Galilee he sent Caesennius Gallus, commander of the Twelfth Legion, giving him as large a force as he judged sufficient against the nation. The strongest city of Galilee, Sepphoris, received him with expressions of loyalty, and following its prudent example the other cities remained quiet. But all the rebellious and brigand element fled to the mountain lying at the very center of Galilee, opposite Sepphoris, called Asamon. Against these Gallus led his forces.
As long as they held the high ground, they easily beat off the advancing Romans and killed about two hundred of them; but once the Romans worked around and gained the higher positions, they were quickly overcome, for the light-armed men could not stand against heavy infantry at close quarters, nor escape the cavalry in flight, so that only a few slipped away through the rough terrain, while more than two thousand were killed. Gallus, seeing no further sign of unrest in Galilee,
withdrew with his army to Caesarea. Cestius, meanwhile, broke camp with his entire force and marched into Antipatris. Learning that a considerable body of Jews had gathered at a tower called Aphek, he sent men ahead to engage them. But before coming to blows, the Jews scattered in fear, and the Romans, finding the camp abandoned, burned it along with the surrounding villages. From Antipatris
Cestius advanced to Lydda and took the town empty of men, for the whole population had gone up to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles. He killed fifty of those who did appear, burned the town, and pressed on. Climbing through Bethoron, he pitched camp at a place called Gabao, fifty stadia from Jerusalem. The Jews, seeing the war already
drawing close to their mother city, abandoned the feast and rushed to arms. Trusting greatly in their numbers, they charged out to battle in disorder and with shouting, giving no thought even to the rest day, for the Sabbath was the thing they held most sacred. But the fury that shook them free of their piety made them the stronger in the fight as well; they fell on the Romans with such force
that they broke through their ranks and cut their way through the middle, killing as they went. Had not the cavalry wheeled round to help the part of the phalanx that was giving way, and the infantry that was not yet exhausted done the same, Cestius would have been in danger of losing his entire force. Five hundred and fifteen Romans died, four hundred of them infantry and the rest cavalry; of the Jews, twenty-two
fell. The most valiant of them proved to be the kinsmen of Monobazus, king of Adiabene, Monobazus and Kenedaeus, and after them Niger the Peraean and Silas the Babylonian, who had deserted to the Jews from King Agrippa, in whose service he had been a soldier. Checked in their frontal assault, the Jews withdrew toward the city, but Simon son of Gioras fell on the Romans from behind as they climbed toward Bethoron,
tore savagely into their rearguard, and seized many of their baggage animals, which he brought into the city. Cestius remained in his position for three days, while the Jews held the high ground, watched the passes, and made it clear they would not rest once the Romans began their march. Seeing this, and recognizing that even Rome's forces were not safe with such a countless enemy multitude
holding the mountains all around, Agrippa decided to test the Jews with words, hoping either to persuade the whole body to lay down the war or to detach the dissenters from those who would not agree. He sent, therefore, two men well known to them, Borcius and Phoebus, promising on Cestius's behalf a pledge of safety and on Rome's a secure pardon for what had been done, if they threw down their weapons and came over.
But the insurgents, fearing that the whole populace, hoping for amnesty, would go over to Agrippa, resolved to kill his envoys. Before they could even speak, they killed Phoebus outright; Borcius, though wounded, managed to escape. As for the citizens who protested, they drove them back into the city with stones and clubs. Cestius, seeing this discord among them as his opportunity,
brought his whole force to the assault, routed them, and pursued them all the way to Jerusalem. He encamped at the place called Scopus, seven stadia from the city, and for three days made no attempt on it, expecting perhaps that some within would surrender it to him; meanwhile he sent many of his soldiers out to plunder grain from the surrounding villages. On the fourth day, which
was the thirtieth of the month Hyperberetaeus, he drew up his army and led it into the city. The populace was held under guard by the insurgents, who, terrified by the Roman discipline, gave up the outer districts and withdrew into the inner city and the Temple. Cestius entered and set fire to the district called Bezetha, as well as the New City, and
the so-called Timber Market. He then advanced to the Upper City and pitched camp opposite the royal palace. Had he chosen at that very hour to force his way inside the walls, he would have taken the city on the spot and ended the war then and there. But the camp prefect Tyrannius Priscus and most of the cavalry commanders, bribed with money by Florus, turned him away from the
attempt. Because of this the war dragged on so long and the Jews came to be filled with such irreparable disasters. Meanwhile many of the notable citizens, persuaded by Ananus son of Jonathan, invited Cestius to enter, promising to open the gates to him. He, whether out of anger or distrust, hesitated and delayed, until the insurgents, becoming aware of the
betrayal, threw Ananus's party down from the wall, drove them with stones back into their houses, and themselves stood apart from the towers and hurled missiles at anyone who approached the wall. For five days the Romans made every kind of assault and could achieve nothing, but on the next day Cestius took a large number of picked men and his archers and attacked the Temple from
the north side. The Jews defended it from the portico, and repeatedly beat back those who approached the wall, but at last, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of missiles, they gave ground. The leading Romans then set their shields against the wall, and those behind them, and the ranks following in turn, formed what they call a tortoise, under
which the missiles hurtling down slid off harmlessly, and the soldiers, unharmed, began undermining the wall and preparing to set fire to the Temple gate. Terrible panic seized the insurgents, and already many were fleeing the city as though it were about to fall at once. The populace took heart at this, and wherever the rebels gave way, they themselves came forward to open the gates and
welcome Cestius as a benefactor. Had he pressed the siege a little longer, he would have taken the city immediately. But I think that God, already turned away from them because of the wicked and unwilling to let the Temple meet its end that day, held the war back. So Cestius, without grasping either the despair of the besieged or the mood of the populace, suddenly recalled his soldiers,
and, giving up hope despite having suffered no defeat, withdrew from the city in the most unaccountable fashion. Emboldened by his unexpected retreat, the rebels rushed out against his rear and destroyed a good number of his cavalry and infantry. That night Cestius camped at the position on Scopus, and the next day, moving further off, only drew the enemy on more, for they
pressed against his rear and destroyed them, while others ran along both sides of the road and hurled javelins into his flanks. The men at the rear did not dare turn to face those wounding them from behind, imagining they were pursued by an army beyond counting, and could not bring themselves to check those pressing on their flanks either, being themselves weighed down and afraid of breaking ranks, while they saw the Jews were light and quick in their charges. As a result
they suffered great harm without inflicting any in return. All along the road they were struck down and shaken loose from the column and fell, until many had perished, among them Priscus, commander of the Sixth Legion, Longinus the tribune, and Aemilius Jucundus, prefect of a cavalry squadron. They barely reached Gabao, their former camp, having lost much of their baggage. There
Cestius remained two days, at a loss what to do, but on the third, seeing the enemy grown far more numerous and the whole region around teeming with Jews, he realized that his delay had only worked against him and that staying longer would mean facing still more enemies. To make his flight swifter, he ordered everything that slowed the army's march to be cut loose. So the mules and pack animals were destroyed, all
except those carrying missiles and siege engines, which they kept for their usefulness and, above all, for fear these might fall into Jewish hands; and he led the army on toward Bethoron. The Jews pressed less hard on the open stretches, but once the Romans were funneled into the narrow descent, some blocked their way out ahead while others
drove the rearmost down into the ravine, and the whole mass, spread out along the ridge above the road, covered the column with missiles. There even the infantry found it hard to defend themselves, but the danger was still greater for the cavalry, who could neither ride down the road in formation under fire nor charge the enemy up the slope, while on
the other side lay cliffs and ravines, into which men, losing their footing, fell to their deaths. There was no place to flee to and no way to fight back; helpless, they turned to wailing and the cries of the despairing, answered by the war cries of the Jews, at once jubilant and enraged. They would have wiped out Cestius's entire force had not night intervened,
in which the Romans took refuge in Bethoron, while the Jews surrounded the whole area and kept watch on every way out. There Cestius, giving up any open route, planned a stealthy escape. He picked out about four hundred of his bravest soldiers and stationed them on the rooftops, ordering them to keep calling out the watch-signals used in camp, so that the Jews would believe the whole army was still there;
he himself, taking the rest, quietly advanced thirty stadia. At dawn the Jews, seeing the position empty, rushed upon the four hundred who had deceived them, quickly cut them down with javelins, and set off after Cestius. But he had already gained a good part of the night's start and fled all the more swiftly by day, so that in their fear and panic the soldiers abandoned their siege engines, catapults,
and most of their other equipment, which the Jews later seized and turned against the very men who had abandoned them. They pursued the Romans as far as Antipatris, and then, since they could not overtake them, turned back, carried off the engines, stripped the dead, gathered up whatever spoil remained, and returned to the mother city singing hymns of victory, having lost only a few of their own, but
having killed five thousand three hundred Roman and allied infantry, and four hundred and eighty cavalry. This took place on the eighth of the month Dius, in the twelfth year of Nero's reign. After Cestius's disaster, many prominent Jews abandoned the city like men swimming away from a sinking ship. Costobarus and Saul, brothers, together with Philip son of Jacimus, who was
the camp commander of King Agrippa, fled the city and went over to Cestius. What became of Antipas, who was besieged with them in the royal palace and disdained flight, only to be killed later by the insurgents, we shall relate. Cestius sent Saul and his companions, at their own request, on to Achaea to Nero, both to explain their situation and to lay the blame for the war on Florus,
hoping this would ease the anger directed at himself along with his own danger. Meanwhile the people of Damascus, learning of the Roman disaster, resolved to kill the Jews living among them. Since they had long kept them gathered in the gymnasium for this very purpose, out of suspicion, they thought the deed would be easy; but they were afraid of their own wives, who, with few exceptions, had all
been drawn to the Jewish religion. For this reason their great struggle was to keep the matter hidden from them. Falling upon the Jews, who numbered about ten thousand five hundred, all unarmed, in a confined space, they massacred them within a single hour without fear of resistance. Those who had pursued Cestius, once they returned to Jerusalem, brought over by force those who still favored Rome and by persuasion the rest, and, assembling in the Temple, appointed additional generals
for the war. Joseph son of Gorion and the high priest Ananus were chosen with full authority over affairs in the city, and charged especially with rebuilding its walls. As for Eleazar son of Simon, although he had in his own possession the Roman spoils, the money seized from Cestius, and much of the public treasury besides, they did not entrust him with any duties,
seeing that he was tyrannical by nature and that the Zealots under him behaved like a bodyguard. Yet little by little, through the people's need of the money and Eleazar's own cunning, he worked his way around the populace until they obeyed him in everything. For Idumaea they chose other generals, Jesus son of Sapphas, one of the chief priests, and Eleazar son of Neus, also a chief priest's son; and to
Niger, then governor of Idumaea, a man from Peraea beyond the Jordan, for which he was called the Peraean, they gave orders to submit to these generals. Nor did they neglect the rest of the country: Joseph son of Simon was sent to Jericho, Manasseh to Peraea, and John the Essene to command the toparchy of Thamna, to which Lydda, Joppa, and Emmaus were also assigned. Over
Gophna and Acrabatta, John son of Ananias was appointed governor, and over both parts of Galilee, Joseph son of Matthias, to whose command was also added Gamala, the strongest city in that region. All the other generals administered what had been entrusted to them each according to his own energy or judgment; but Joseph, on coming to Galilee, made it his first concern to win the goodwill of the local people, knowing
that this above all would bring him success, even if he failed in other respects. Recognizing that he would win over the powerful by letting them share in his authority, and the whole populace by having most matters handled through men of their own region whom they knew, he chose seventy of the oldest and most level-headed men from the nation and set them up as rulers over the whole of Galilee, and in each city seven judges for the lesser disputes; for
the more serious matters and capital cases he ordered referred to himself and the seventy. Having established these arrangements for order among the cities, he turned to securing them from outside attack. Knowing that the Romans would first invade Galilee, he fortified the most useful positions: Jotapata, Bersabe, and Salamis, as well as Caphareccho, Japha, and Sigoph, and
He fortified Mount Itabyrion, as it is called, Taricheae, and Tiberias, and in addition, in the district around Lake Gennesaret, the caves in what is called Lower Galilee. In Upper Galilee he fortified the so-called Rock of Achabara, along with Seph, Iamnith, and Meroth; in the Gaulanitis he secured Seleucia, Sogana, and Gamala. Only the people of Sepphoris he allowed to build their own wall unaided, since he saw they were wealthy and eager for the war even without being ordered to it.
In the same way John, son of Levi, fortified Gischala on his own initiative, at Josephus's command; in all the other strongholds Josephus himself was present, laboring alongside the builders and directing the work. He also raised from Galilee a force of more than a hundred thousand young men, whom he armed entirely with old weapons he had collected and refitted.
Then, recognizing that the invincibility of the Roman army rested above all on discipline and constant drill with arms, he gave up hope of achieving the same training, since it was pursued only out of practical need, but he saw that discipline arose from the multiplicity of officers, so in Roman fashion he divided his army and appointed more captains over units. He created ranks among the soldiers, placing them under decurions and centurions, then under tribunes, and above these, commanders of the larger divisions.
He taught them the transmission of signals, the trumpet-calls for advance and retreat, the assaults of the wings and the wheeling maneuvers, and how they must turn to support a wavering flank from the strength of the rest, and share in the suffering of a hard-pressed unit. Whatever contributed to steadiness of spirit or endurance of body, he explained to them; and above all he trained them for war
by describing to them at every turn the discipline of the Romans, and how they would be fighting against men who, through strength of body and steadiness of spirit, ruled almost the whole inhabited world. He said he would test their obedience in matters of war even before battle was joined, by seeing whether they would abstain from their habitual offenses -- theft, banditry, and plunder, and cheating their own countrymen, and
regarding harm done to their closest kin as personal gain. For wars are conducted best among those whose whole fighting force has a good conscience, while men corrupt at home treat not only the enemy attacking them but also God himself as their adversary. Such were the exhortations he continued to give. The force he had ready for battle amounted to sixty thousand infantry and three hundred fifty
cavalry; besides these, the mercenaries in whom he placed his greatest trust numbered about four thousand five hundred, and he kept about him a chosen bodyguard of six hundred men. The cities easily supported the rest of the army, apart from the mercenaries; for each of the enlisting towns, sending out half its recruits to serve, kept back the rest to supply provisions for those in the field,
so that some were assigned to arms and others to labor, and those who sent the grain received in return protection from the men under arms.
While Josephus was administering the affairs of Galilee in this way, a certain scheming man rose up against him from Gischala, son of Levi, named John -- the most cunning and deceitful of all men notorious for such wickedness, poor at first, and for a long time
kept from wrongdoing only by his lack of means, ready to lie, and skilled at winning belief for his lies, regarding deceit as a virtue and practicing it even against his closest friends, a hypocrite of benevolence and, for hope of gain, utterly murderous, always coveting great things, and nourishing his ambitions through petty crimes. He had been a bandit acting alone, and then found companions for his daring, at
first few, but ever increasing in number. He took care never to recruit anyone easily overpowered, but chose out those distinguished for soundness of body, steadiness of spirit, and experience in war, until he had gathered a band of as many as four hundred men, most of them fugitives from the territory of Tyre and its villages; with these he plundered the whole of Galilee and kept the great mass of people, already on edge
over the coming war, in continual turmoil. By now, aspiring to command and reaching for greater things, he was held back by lack of funds. But when he saw that Josephus took great delight in his energetic activity, he persuaded him first to entrust to him the rebuilding of his native city's wall, a task from which he made large profits from the wealthy; then, having devised a most cunning scheme, on the pretext that all the Jews throughout
Syria were careful to use oil not handled by gentiles, he requested permission to send it to them at the border. Buying up four jars for the price of one Tyrian coin -- worth four Attic drachmas -- he sold half a jar at the same price. Since Galilee was especially rich in olive oil, and had at that time produced an abundant crop, by sending large quantities to places in short supply he alone amassed an immense fortune, which he immediately turned against the very man
who had provided him the opportunity for this trade. Supposing that if he brought down Josephus he would himself take command of Galilee, he ordered the bandits under him to press their plundering more vigorously, so that with many disturbances stirred up throughout the country he might either ambush and kill the general when he came out to suppress them, or, if Josephus overlooked the bandits, might slander him to the local people as complicit. He also spread the rumor far and wide that Josephus was betraying affairs to the Romans, and
engineered many such schemes for the man's downfall.
At this time some young men from the village of Dabaritta, who were among the guards stationed in the great plain, ambushed Ptolemy, the steward of Agrippa and Bernice, and stripped him of all the baggage he was carrying, which included a great quantity of costly clothing and a large number of silver cups, and six hundred gold pieces. Unable to dispose of the plunder secretly, they
brought it all to Josephus at Taricheae. He reproached them for their violence against the royal officials, and deposited the goods with Annaeus, the most powerful man in Taricheae, intending to send them back to their owners at the right time -- a decision that brought him into the greatest danger. For those who had seized the plunder, resentful at receiving no share of what had been taken, and also having perceived
Josephus's intention, that he meant to hand over the fruit of their labor to the royal family, ran through the villages by night and denounced Josephus everywhere as a traitor. They filled the neighboring towns with turmoil as well, so that by dawn a hundred thousand armed men had rushed together against him. The crowd, gathered in the hippodrome at Taricheae, shouted out their fury and demanded to
stone him, while others cried out to burn the traitor. John incited the crowd further, and with him a certain Jesus, son of Sapphias, then the leader of Tiberias. Josephus's friends and bodyguards, terrified by the fury of the mob, all fled except for four; but he himself, though already asleep, rose as the fire was being brought near, and, though the four who remained urged him to flee, they
stayed by him. He, undaunted either by his own isolation or by the mass of men standing over him, sprang out before them, tore his clothing, sprinkled dust on his head, twisted his hands behind his back, and fastened his own sword to his neck by its strap. At this the people close to him, especially the Tarichaeans, were moved to pity, but those from the countryside and the neighboring
towns, to whom he seemed to be putting on a show, reviled him and demanded that he produce the public funds at once and confess to his treasonous compact; for from his posture they had already assumed he would deny nothing they suspected, but had done all this display of grief only to win pardon. But for him this show of humility was a preparation for a stratagem, and by his art he set those angry with him at odds with one another over the very charges they
had leveled. Then, when given leave to speak, he said, "I never intended either to send this money back to Agrippa or to keep it for my own profit -- may I never consider one of you an enemy, or gain that harms the common good, a friend to me. But seeing, men of Taricheae, that your city especially needed security and required money to build a wall, and fearing
the people of Tiberias and the other towns, who had their eyes on the plunder, I chose to hold the money quietly, so that I might build you a wall with it. If this does not please you, I will produce what was brought here and let you plunder it; but if my plan for you was a good one, then punish your own benefactor." At this the Tarichaeans applauded him, but those from Tiberias, along with the others, reviled and threatened him; and each
group, abandoning Josephus, fell to quarreling with each other. He, now trusting in those who had become attached to him -- the Tarichaeans numbered about forty thousand -- addressed the whole crowd rather more boldly. After reproaching them at length for their rashness, he said he would fortify Taricheae from the funds now at hand, and would likewise secure the other cities as well; for money would not be lacking, if they were of one mind about whom they should be raising it from, and were not provoked against the man raising it.
At this the rest of the deceived crowd withdrew, still angry, but two thousand rushed at him under arms, and, since he had already reached his lodging, stood before it uttering threats. Josephus now resorted to a second deception: going up onto the roof and quieting their uproar with a gesture of his hand, he said he did not know what they were demanding, since he could not make it out amid the confusion of their shouting; but he would do whatever they ordered, if they would send in a few representatives to confer with him quietly. Hearing this, the notables, along with their leaders, went in. He
dragged them into the innermost part of the house, locked the outer door, and had them flogged until their entrails were laid bare, while the crowd outside waited, supposing that those who had gone in were pleading their case at length. Then, suddenly throwing open the doors, he sent the men out covered in blood, striking such terror into those who had been making threats that they threw down their weapons and fled.
At this John's envy grew still sharper, and he prepared a second plot against Josephus. Feigning illness, he begged by letter that Josephus permit him to make use of the hot springs at Tiberias for his health. Josephus, not yet suspecting the plotter, wrote to the officials in the city
to provide John with lodging and provisions. Having enjoyed these for two days, he then set about the business for which he had really come, and by winning some over with deceit and others with bribes, he tried to persuade them to abandon Josephus. When Silas, whom Josephus had put in charge of guarding the city, learned of this, he wrote to him at once about the plot. Josephus,
on receiving the letter, traveled through the night at speed and arrived at Tiberias by dawn. The rest of the people came out to meet him, but John, though he suspected that Josephus's arrival was directed against him, nonetheless sent one of the notables to him and pretended to be sick, saying that being bedridden had prevented him from coming for his treatment. But when Josephus had gathered the Tiberians in the stadium and was trying to address them
about the matters in his letters, John sent in armed men secretly and ordered them to kill him. The crowd, seeing these men baring their swords, cried out; and Josephus, turning at the outcry and seeing the blade already at his throat, leapt down to the shore. He had been standing on a mound about six cubits high while addressing the people; and as a boat happened to be nearby, he jumped aboard it with two bodyguards and fled out into the middle of the lake.
His soldiers, quickly seizing their weapons, advanced against the plotters. There, fearing that if civil war broke out he would destroy the city for the grudge of a few men, Josephus sent word to his own men to look only to their own safety, and neither to kill anyone nor to expose those responsible. They obeyed the order and kept quiet, but those in the surrounding
countryside, on learning of the plot and the man who had contrived it, gathered against John; but he had already fled to his native Gischala ahead of them. The Galileans streamed in to Josephus from the towns, and, gathering in many tens of thousands under arms, cried out that they were present to move against John, the common enemy, and that they would burn down even the native city that had sheltered him along with him. Josephus, for his part, said he welcomed
their goodwill, but restrained their impulse, preferring to subdue his enemies by cunning rather than to kill them. Taking down by name those from each city who had joined John's revolt -- for the townspeople eagerly pointed out their own -- and threatening through heralds that within five days he would plunder the property and burn the houses, together with the families, of all who had not abandoned John, he detached three
thousand at once, who came and threw down their weapons at his feet; and with those who remained -- about two thousand fugitive Syrians -- John turned again from open schemes to secret plots. He sent messengers secretly to Jerusalem, slandering Josephus for the size of his forces and declaring that he would soon come as tyrant of the capital, unless
he were forestalled. The people, having anticipated this, paid no attention, but the powerful men, out of envy, and some of the magistrates too, secretly sent John money to gather mercenaries, so that he might make war on Josephus; and among themselves they also voted to recall him from his command. They did not, however, think the decree alone would suffice: they sent two thousand five hundred armed men and four distinguished
men -- Jozar son of Nomicus, Ananias son of Sadduki, Simon, and Judas son of Jonathan, all reputed to be most capable speakers -- so that these might turn the people's goodwill away from Josephus: if he came willingly, they were to let him give an account of himself, but if he tried by force to remain, they were to treat him as an enemy. His friends had already sent word to Josephus that an army was coming, but they did not disclose the reason,
since his enemies had planned it in secret. For that reason, since he had taken no precautions, four cities at once went over to those who had come against him -- Sepphoris, Gabara, Gischala, and Tiberias. But he quickly won these back too, without recourse to arms, and, having overcome the four commanders by stratagems, sent the most powerful of their soldiers up to Jerusalem. At this the people were greatly incensed and
rushed, together with these men, to kill those who had sent them, had they not escaped by fleeing in time. As for John, from then on the fear he felt of Josephus kept him confined within the walls of Gischala. A few days later Tiberias revolted again, its people having invited King Agrippa in; and when he failed to arrive by the appointed day, but a few Roman cavalrymen happened to appear that same day, Josephus
News of the revolt reached Tarichaeae at once. But Josephus had sent out all his soldiers to gather grain, and so he could bring himself neither to march out alone against the rebels nor to stay where he was, fearing that if he delayed, the king's men would get into the city first; for the following day, with the Sabbath beginning, would give him no chance to act. He therefore resolved to outmaneuver the rebels by a trick.
He ordered the gates of Tarichaeae closed, so that no one could carry word of his plan to the men he meant to move against, and had every boat on the lake gathered together — three hundred and thirty were found, with no more than four sailors in each — and rowed with all speed toward Tiberias. He kept far enough from the city that it was not easy to tell the boats were empty, and had them ride at anchor riding high on the water, while he himself, taking only seven of his bodyguard and no weapons, went in closer to be seen. His opponents, watching from the walls and still hurling abuse at him, were seized with panic, supposing every boat crammed with soldiers; they threw down their arms, and waving branches of supplication, begged him to spare the city.
Josephus, heaping threats and reproaches on them, said that first they had taken up the war against Rome, then squandered their strength on civil strife, doing exactly what their enemies most wished, and now they were in haste to destroy the very man responsible for their safety, and felt no shame in shutting the city against the one who had built its walls — yet he would nonetheless receive those who came to plead their case and offer pledges to secure the city. At once ten of the most powerful men of Tiberias came down to him.
These he took aboard one of the boats and had it rowed further out; then he ordered fifty more of the council, the best known among them, to come forward, as though he wanted some pledge of good faith from them as well. Then, contriving ever newer pretexts, he called out one group after another as if for the terms of an agreement, and instructed the boat captains, as each boat filled, to sail quickly for Tarichaeae and shut the men up in prison — until he had seized the whole council, six hundred strong, and about two thousand of the common people, and carried them all off by boat to Tarichaeae. The rest cried out that a certain Clitus bore the chief blame for the revolt, and urged him to vent his anger on that man alone. Josephus had resolved to kill no one, but ordered Levi, one of his own guards, to go out and cut off Clitus's hands. Clitus, afraid to go out alone into a crowd of enemies, refused. Then, seeing Josephus fuming aboard the boat and ready to leap out and carry out the punishment himself, Clitus begged from the shore to be allowed to keep one hand. Josephus agreed, on condition that Clitus cut off the other himself; and Clitus drew his sword with his right hand and cut off his left — to such terror had Josephus reduced him.
Thus, with empty boats and seven guards, Josephus took the populace captive and brought Tiberias back under his control. A few days later, finding that Sepphoris had joined in the revolt along with them, he allowed his soldiers to plunder it; but he then gathered up everything taken and gave it back to the townspeople, and did the same for the people of Sepphoris, for having subdued them too, he wanted the plundering to serve as a lesson, and then won them back to goodwill by restoring their property.
So the disturbances in Galilee came to an end, and once the factions had ceased their internal turmoil, they turned to preparations against Rome. In Jerusalem, meanwhile, Ananus the high priest and all the powerful men who were not pro-Roman were repairing the wall and building great numbers of siege engines. Throughout the whole city weapons and armor were being forged, the mass of young men was drilling without order or discipline, and everything was full of turmoil; the moderate citizens fell into deep despondency, and many, foreseeing the disasters to come, wept aloud. Prophetic utterances, unwelcome to those who loved peace, were extemporized to please those who had kindled the war instead, and the condition of the city, even before the Romans arrived, was already like a city doomed to perish.
Ananus, for his part, was concerned to draw the city back gradually from its preparations for war, and to turn the rebels and the folly of the men called Zealots toward what was truly advantageous; but he was overpowered by their violence, and what end he met we shall show later. In the toparchy of Acrabatene, Simon son of Gioras gathered a large following of revolutionaries and turned to plunder, ravaging not only the houses of the rich but torturing their owners as well, and it was already plain, even at this distance, that he was setting himself up as a tyrant. When an army was sent against him by Ananus and the other leaders, he fled with his men to the bandits at Masada, and stayed there, plundering Idumaea all the while, until the deaths of Ananus and his other enemies. As a result the leaders of the nation, because of the great number of the murdered and the ceaseless raids, gathered an army and kept the villages under garrison. Such, then, was the state of affairs in Idumaea.

======== Jewish War — Book 3 ========

When Nero was told of the reverses in Judea, an anxiety and dread stole over him, as was natural, though openly he affected contempt and anger, saying that what had happened was due to the commanders' slackness rather than to any valor on the enemy's part, and thinking it fitting, given the weight of his office, to appear above every misfortune and to seem to hold a spirit superior to any disaster.
Yet the turmoil in his soul was betrayed by the anxious calculations he made over whom he could trust with the task of putting down the uprising in the East, since the Jewish revolt would need to be punished, and the neighboring nations, already infected with the same sickness, would have to be forestalled. Vespasian alone he found equal to the need, a man capable of shouldering a war of such magnitude, one grown old in campaigns since his youth, who had earlier pacified the West when it was troubled by the Germans,
and had won Britain for Rome by arms, a country till then scarcely known, thereby giving his father Claudius the honor of a triumph without exertion of his own. Reading all this as a good omen, and seeing in the man a maturity seasoned by experience, and holding as a great pledge of his loyalty his sons, hostages as it were, whose vigor of age would be an instrument of their father's wisdom — and perhaps too because God was already ordering the whole course of events —
Nero sent Vespasian to take command of the armies in Syria, first flattering and courting him at length with all the attentions that necessity dictates. Vespasian, who was then in Achaea in Nero's company, sent his son Titus ahead to Alexandria to bring up the fifteenth legion from there, while he himself crossed the Hellespont
and went overland into Syria, where he assembled the Roman forces together with a considerable body of allies furnished by the neighboring kings. The Jews, meanwhile, elated by their unexpected successes after the defeat of Cestius, could not restrain their impulse, and, as though fanned on by fortune, pushed the war further afield. At once they gathered every man among them fit for battle and set out against Ascalon, an ancient city
lying five hundred and twenty stadia from Jerusalem, one that had always been an object of hatred to the Jews; for this reason it seemed the nearest target for their first onset. Three men led the raid, foremost alike in courage and judgment: Niger the Peraite, Silas the Babylonian, and with them John the Essene. Ascalon was strongly walled but almost destitute of a garrison,
for it was defended by only one cohort of infantry and a single squadron of cavalry, commanded by Antonius. The Jews, marching with far greater speed than their impulse required, as men rushing on a target close at hand, soon arrived before the city; but Antonius, who was not unaware that their attack was still to come, led his horsemen out ahead of time and, undaunted by either the enemy's numbers or their daring, stoutly withstood their
first onset and drove back those who pressed toward the wall. The Jews, inexperienced men matched against veterans of war, foot soldiers against cavalry, an undisciplined mob against a unified force, carelessly armed against fully equipped heavy infantry, led more by passion than by strategy against an obedient army that executed every maneuver at a nod — pitted against such a foe, they suffered easily; for once their front ranks were thrown into confusion, they were routed by
the cavalry, and as they fell back on those behind them still pressing toward the wall, they became enemies to one another, until, giving way altogether before the charges of the horsemen, they scattered over the whole plain — and it was a broad plain, entirely suited to cavalry. This worked to the advantage of the Romans and caused the greatest slaughter of the Jews; for they overtook those who fled and turned them back, and cut down without number those
caught up in the confusion of the rout, while others they surrounded, driving them wherever they turned, and shot them down with ease. To the Jews their very numbers now seemed like solitude amid such helplessness, while the Romans, few as they were, felt themselves more than sufficient for the fighting even in their success. And while some persisted against their reverses in the hope of a quick escape and a change of fortune,
others, not yet weary in their success, prolonged the battle until late afternoon, until ten thousand Jews had been killed, along with two of their commanders, John and Silas; the rest, for the most part wounded, fled together with their remaining commander Niger to a small town of Idumea called Chaalis. Only a few of the
Romans were wounded in this engagement. Yet such a disaster did not break the Jews' spirit; rather it stirred their daring the more, for scorning the dead lying at their feet, they were lured by their earlier successes into a second blow. Without even pausing to let their wounds heal, and having gathered every man they had, angrier now and far more numerous, they marched again upon
Ascalon. But along with their inexperience and their other disadvantages for war, their earlier fortune still dogged them; for Antonius had set ambushes along the passes, and, falling unexpectedly into these traps and being surrounded by the cavalry before they could form up for battle, they lost more than eight thousand men, while all the rest fled, Niger among them, who displayed great feats of daring
in the flight, but was driven, with the enemy pressing close, into a strong tower at a village called Belzedek. Antonius and his men, unwilling either to wear themselves out around a tower so hard to take, or to let the enemy's commander, the bravest of their foes, escape alive, set fire to the wall. As the tower burned, the Romans withdrew rejoicing, thinking Niger destroyed along with it; but he leapt down from the tower into
the innermost cave of the stronghold and so survived, and three days later, when men searching for him with lamentation, to give him burial, called out, he answered from below. Coming forward, he filled all the Jews with unlooked-for joy, since he had been saved, as they believed, by God's providence to be their general for what lay ahead. Vespasian, meanwhile, gathering his forces from Antioch, the metropolis of Syria, which by size and other
good fortune holds unrivaled third place among the cities of the Roman world, made for Ptolemais, where King Agrippa, with the whole of his own strength, was already waiting to greet his arrival. Approaching this city, the people of Sepphoris in Galilee, the only ones in that region inclined to peace, came out to meet him; they, aware of
both their own safety and the strength of Rome, even before Vespasian arrived had given pledges and received guarantees from Cestius Gallus and had admitted a garrison. Now they received the commander warmly and eagerly offered themselves as allies against their own countrymen; and the general, granting their request, gave them for their immediate security as many cavalry and infantry as he judged sufficient to withstand any raids, should the Jews stir up trouble, for indeed
it seemed no small risk, with the war ahead, to leave Sepphoris exposed — the greatest city of Galilee, fortified on the strongest of sites, and destined to serve as a stronghold for the whole nation. Galilee, divided into two regions called Upper and Lower, is bounded on all sides by Phoenicia and Syria; to the west its limits are marked by Ptolemais with
its territory, and by Carmel, once a mountain of the Galileans, now of the Tyrians; adjoining it is Gaba, a city of horsemen, so called because the cavalrymen discharged by King Herod settled there; to the south lie Samaria and Scythopolis, as far as the waters of the Jordan; to the east it is cut off by Hippos and Gadara, and by Gaulanitis, which also marks
the boundary of Agrippa's kingdom; its northern side is bounded by Tyre and Tyrian territory. Lower Galilee, as it is called, stretches in length from Tiberias to Chabulon, near which on the coast lies Ptolemais its neighbor. In width it extends from the village of Xaloth, lying in the great plain, to Bersabe, which also marks the beginning of the width
of Upper Galilee, as far as the village of Baca, which forms the boundary with Tyrian land. Its length extends to Meroth, from the village of Thella near the Jordan. Though such in size, and surrounded on every side by so many foreign peoples, the Galileans have withstood every trial of war; for they are warlike from infancy and always numerous, and neither cowardice has ever gripped the men nor lack of manpower the land,
since it is entirely fertile, good for pasture, and planted with every kind of tree, so that by its very productivity it invites even those least inclined to labor the soil. Every part of it has accordingly been worked by its inhabitants, and none of it lies idle; rather its cities are close-set, and the multitude of villages everywhere is thick with people because of the land's abundance, so that even the smallest holds above fifteen thousand inhabitants.
In general, though one might judge Galilee inferior to Perea in size, one would prefer it for productive strength; for Galilee is wholly cultivated and continuously fruit-bearing, while Perea, though much larger, is for the most part desert and rugged, too wild for the growth of cultivated fruit; yet its softer parts are fertile in every kind of produce, and its plains are planted
with varied trees, chiefly worked for olive, vine, and palm, watered abundantly by winter streams from the mountains and by ever-flowing springs whenever those streams fail in the dog days. Its length runs from Machaerus to Pella, its width from Philadelphia to the Jordan. It is bounded on the north by Pella, already mentioned, on the west by the Jordan;
on the south its limit is Moabitis, and to the east it is cut off by Arabia and Silbonitis, and further by Philadelphia and Gerasa. Samaria lies between Galilee and Judea, for beginning at the village of Ginea in the plain it ends at the toparchy of Acrabatene, and in nature it is no different from Judea. Both regions
are alike hilly and plain-like, soft and productive for farming, wooded, and full of both wild and cultivated fruit; nowhere naturally lacking water, they receive abundant rain, and every stream in them is unusually sweet, and because of the abundance of good grazing their herds give more milk than elsewhere. The surest proof of their fertility and abundance is the great number of men
that each supports. On their border lies a village called Anuath Borcaeus, which marks the northern limit of Judea, while its southern boundary, measured along its length, is fixed by a village bordering on Arab territory, called by the Jews there Jordan. In width it stretches from the Jordan river to Joppa. In its very center lies the city of Jerusalem, for which reason
some have not inaptly called the city the navel of the land. Nor is Judea deprived of the pleasures of the sea, for it reaches to the coast as far as Ptolemais. It is divided into eleven districts, of which Jerusalem, the royal seat, holds the first place, rising above the whole surrounding region like the head over the body; the rest, after it, are divided by their toparchies: Gophna second, and after it
Acrabatta, then Thamna and Lydda, Emmaus and Pella, Idumea, Engaddi, Herodium, and Jericho; after these come Jamnia and Joppa, which govern their surrounding districts, and beyond these Gamalitica, Gaulanitis, Batanaea, and Trachonitis, which are also part of Agrippa's kingdom. This last region, beginning at Mount Lebanon and the sources of the Jordan, widens as far as
the lake at Tiberias, and extends in length from the village called Arpha to Julias. It is inhabited by a mixed population of Jews and Syrians. Such, then, in the briefest possible compass, is our account of Judea and the country around it. Now the force Vespasian sent to aid the people of Sepphoris — a thousand cavalry and six thousand infantry, under the command of the tribune Placidus —
encamped in the great plain and split in two, the infantry stationed in the city to guard it, the cavalry quartered in the camp outside. Advancing continually from both positions and overrunning the surrounding country, they inflicted great harm on Josephus's men, who remained inactive, plundering the towns from without and cutting down any who ventured out when they took courage. Josephus, however, set out toward the
city, hoping to capture it — the very city he himself had fortified before Galilee revolted, making it, he supposed, impregnable even to the Romans; and so he was disappointed of his hope, being found too weak either to force the Sepphorites or to win them over by persuasion. He only provoked the war against the countryside the more, and neither by night nor by day did the Romans relax the fury of their assault, ravaging the plains and plundering the
property in the countryside, always killing the fighting men and enslaving the weak. All Galilee was filled with fire and blood, and no suffering or calamity went untasted; the only refuge for those pursued were the cities Josephus had fortified. Titus, meanwhile, having crossed from Achaea to Alexandria more swiftly than the winter season allowed,
took over the force assigned to him, and, marching with all speed, arrived at Ptolemais. There he found his father with the two legions he had brought with him, the most distinguished, the fifth and the tenth, and he joined to them the fifteenth, which he himself had brought. Eighteen cohorts followed these; five more came from Caesarea, along with one squadron of cavalry, and five
other squadrons of Syrian cavalry. Of the cohorts, ten had a thousand infantry each, while the remaining thirteen had six hundred infantry and a hundred twenty cavalry apiece. A considerable body of allied troops was also gathered from the kings: Antiochus, Agrippa, and Sohaemus each supplied two thousand archers on foot and a thousand cavalry, while Malchus the Arab sent a thousand
cavalry along with five thousand infantry, most of them archers, so that, counting in the royal contingents, the whole force, cavalry and infantry together, amounted to sixty thousand, not including the camp servants, who followed in great numbers and, owing to their training for war, could hardly be set apart from the fighting men, since in peacetime they were constantly engaged in their masters' drills, and shared the dangers of war, so that not
in skill or in strength inferior to anyone but their own masters. Here one might well admire the Romans' foresight in equipping themselves with a body of household slaves useful not only for the services of daily life but for war as well. And if one looks also at the rest of the army's organization, he will recognize that they hold so vast an empire as the acquisition of their own discipline, not a gift of fortune.
For war is not the beginning of their acquaintance with arms, nor do they sit idle in peacetime and take up their weapons only when necessity strikes; rather, as though grown together with their arms, they never take a holiday from training, and never wait for occasion to force them to it. Their drills fall no short of the rigor of actual combat; each soldier, every single day, trains with the full eagerness of a man at war.
That is why they carry battles so lightly: no disorder scatters them from their accustomed formation, no fear unmans them, no exertion wears them down, and victory over less disciplined enemies follows them always, and surely. One would not be wrong to call their drills battles without bloodshed, and their battles drills with blood. They are not easily overrun even by surprise attack,
and wherever they invade an enemy's land, they never engage in battle before fortifying a camp. And they do not build it carelessly or unevenly, nor does the whole force pitch in haphazardly; if the ground happens to be uneven, they level it, and the camp is measured out for them as a square. A crowd of carpenters follows, along with the tools for construction. The interior they divide
into quarters for the tents, while on the outside the ring of the wall presents the look of a real fortification, adorned with towers set at equal intervals. In the spaces between the towers they place quick-firing bolt-throwers, catapults, stone-throwers, and every kind of missile engine, all kept ready for shooting. Four gates are built into the circuit, one to each quarter, wide enough for the pack animals to enter and, if urgency demands it, wide enough for the troops to sally out at speed.
They lay out the streets within the camp in good order, placing the commanders' tents in the middle, and at the very center of these the headquarters tent, which resembles a temple. It is as though a city were set up on the spot, complete with its own marketplace, a district for the craftsmen, and seats for the centurions and tribunes, where they may sit in judgment if any disputes arise. The whole enclosure, and everything within it, is fortified
faster than one would think possible, given the number and the skill of the workers; and if the need is urgent, a ditch is also thrown up outside, four cubits deep and equally wide. Once fenced in, they settle down to camp by units, each in quiet and good order. Everything else, too, is carried out with the same discipline and safety: gathering wood, foraging for supplies when needed, and drawing water, each unit by its own detail. For no one
eats dinner or breakfast whenever he pleases on his own authority — all eat together. Trumpets announce their hours of sleep, of watch, and of waking, and nothing at all happens without a command. At dawn the rank and file report to their centurions, the centurions in turn go to pay their respects to the tribunes, and with the tribunes all the officers go together to the commander-in-chief.
He gives them the watchword handed down by custom, along with the rest of his orders, to be passed on down to those beneath them. And this same practice they follow even in battle: they wheel about swiftly wherever it is needed, and in their advances and their retreats they fall back in close, unbroken order. When it is time to break camp, the trumpet gives the first signal, and no one stays idle; at a single nod they
strike the tents, and everything is made ready for departure. Then the trumpets sound a second signal that all is prepared. The men, having quickly loaded their gear onto mules and pack animals, stand as if at the starting line, ready to move out — and they set fire to the camp themselves, since it costs them nothing to build another one just like it, and so that it may never be of use to the enemy.
A third time, still, the trumpets signal the departure, hurrying along any who for some reason have been slow, so that no one is left behind out of formation. The herald, standing at the general's right hand, asks three times in their native tongue whether they are ready for war, and each time they shout back loudly and eagerly that they are ready, even anticipating the question, and, filled with a kind of martial spirit,
they raise their right hands together with the shout. Then they advance and march on quietly and in good order, each man keeping his own place just as in battle — the infantry protected by breastplates and helmets, and wearing swords on both sides. The sword on the left is much the longer of the two, for the one on the right is no more than a hand's span in length. The elite infantry stationed around the
general carry a spear and a shield, while the rest of the main body carry a long pike and an oblong shield, and besides these a saw, a basket, a mattock, an axe, a strap, a sickle, and a chain, along with three days' rations — so that the foot soldier falls little short of a pack mule in what he carries. The cavalrymen carry a long sword on the right side and a long lance in
hand, with a shield slung along the horse's flank, and in a quiver at their side hang three or more javelins with broad heads, not much smaller than spears; their helmets and breastplates match those of the infantry exactly. The elite cavalry stationed around the general are armed no differently from those serving in the regular squadrons. By lot, whichever unit is drawn always leads the march. Such, then,
are the marching order and encampments of the Romans, and the range of their weaponry. Nothing in their battles is left to chance or improvised: judgment always precedes every action, and action follows what has been decided. That is why they make so few mistakes, and why, even when they do stumble, they recover from their errors so easily. They consider a deliberate failure better than an accidental success,
reasoning that unearned good fortune tempts men into carelessness, while forethought, even when it fails once, provides good training against failing a second time; and that for goods that fall to a man by chance, the man himself deserves no credit, whereas for grim outcomes that come against his own judgment, at least having planned properly offers some comfort. So in the exercise of arms they train not only the body
but the spirit as well to be courageous, and they train it, too, by fear. For among them the laws punish with death not only desertion but even minor laxity, and their generals are more feared than the laws themselves; yet through the honors they grant to good soldiers they avoid seeming cruel toward those they punish. So great is their obedience to their commanders that in
peacetime the whole army is an ornament, and in the line of battle it acts as a single body. So secure are their formations, so smooth their wheeling maneuvers, so sharp their ears for orders, their eyes for signals, their hands for action, that they are always quick to strike and slowest to suffer harm. Nowhere have they stood their ground and been defeated, whether by numbers, by stratagems, by rough terrain, or even
by fortune itself — for their mastery over fortune, too, is more secure than most. Since, then, deliberation governs their battle order, and so vigorous an army follows what has been decided, what wonder is it that the empire's boundaries are the Euphrates to the east, the Ocean to the west, the richest part of Libya to the south, and the Danube and the Rhine to the north? One might fairly say that the possession is
smaller than the men who possess it. Now I have gone through all this not so much to praise the Romans, as to console those who have been conquered and to deter those inclined toward rebellion; and this account of the training of the Roman army may also serve, for those unfamiliar with it, as instruction for those who take pleasure in learning such things. I now return to the point from which I made this digression. Vespasian, meanwhile, was staying for the time being at Ptolemais with his son Titus, organizing
his forces, while Placidus, who was overrunning Galilee, had already killed a great number of those he caught — the weaker element of the Galileans, worn down by their flight — and, seeing that the fighting men kept escaping together to the cities Josephus had fortified, set out against the strongest of them, Jotapata, thinking he would take it easily by a sudden assault and win great glory for himself with
the high command, and be of use to them for the rest of the campaign — since, once its strongest city fell, the rest would surrender out of fear. But he was badly mistaken in his expectation. The people of Jotapata, sensing his approach, met him outside the city, and, closing unexpectedly with the Romans in large numbers, ready for battle and as eager as men fighting for an endangered homeland and for their wives and children, quickly put them
to flight. They wounded many of the Romans but killed only seven, because the Roman withdrawal was never disorderly and their wounds were superficial, their bodies being guarded on every side, while the Jews, being lightly armed, were bolder at hurling missiles from a distance than at closing with heavily armed men. Three of the Jews fell, and only a few were wounded. Placidus, then, finding himself too weak for his assault on the city, took flight.
Vespasian himself, eager now to invade Galilee in person, marched out from Ptolemais, having arranged the army to move in the customary Roman order. He ordered the light-armed auxiliaries and archers to go on ahead, to repel any sudden enemy attacks and to search out suspicious stretches of woodland that might conceal an ambush. Behind them followed a division of Roman heavy infantry, foot and
horse. With these came ten men from each century, carrying their own gear along with the instruments for surveying the camp, and after them the road-builders, whose task was to straighten the crooked stretches of the highway, level the rough ground, and clear away obstructing timber, so that the army would not be worn out by difficult terrain. Behind these he placed his own baggage and that of the officers under him,
and after that a substantial force to guard the cavalry's baggage. Behind these he himself rode out, with the elite infantry and cavalry and the lancers around him. His own legion's cavalry followed him — each legion has its own hundred and twenty horsemen. After these came the men carrying the siege engines on mules, along with the rest of the machinery. After them
came the legates and the prefects of the cohorts, together with the tribunes, each with elite soldiers around him. Then came the standards surrounding the eagle, which leads every Roman legion — king of all birds, and the most valiant of them — a symbol of empire to the Romans and an omen that whomever they attack, they will conquer. The trumpeters followed behind the sacred emblems, and behind them
came the main body, its column widened to six files. A centurion, as custom dictates, marched alongside them, keeping watch over their formation. The servants attached to each legion all followed together with the infantry, carrying the soldiers' baggage on mules and pack animals. Behind the whole force came the hired laborers, with a rearguard following for their protection — infantry, heavily armed troops, and
a good number of cavalry as well. Marching in this order, Vespasian arrived with his forces at the borders of Galilee, and there, having made camp, he held back his soldiers, who were eager for battle, displaying his army so as to strike terror into the enemy and to give them the chance to change their minds before the fighting began, while at the same time preparing for the siege of their strongholds. His mere appearance as general moved many to abandon their revolt,
and struck terror into all of them. Those camped with Josephus not far from Sepphoris, near the town called Garis, hearing that war was drawing close and that the Romans were all but ready to engage them, scattered in flight before the battle — indeed, before they had even seen the enemy. Josephus was left with only a few men, and, realizing that he lacked
sufficient force to hold off the enemy, and that the spirits of the Jews had collapsed, and that most of them, if they could be trusted to receive terms, would gladly go over to a truce, he had already begun to despair of the whole war, and at that point decided to remove himself as far as possible from the danger. Taking those who had stayed with him, he fled to Tiberias. Vespasian, meanwhile, advanced on the city of Gadara and took it at the first assault, finding it
empty of its fighting men, and, entering it, killed everyone regardless of age, the Romans showing no mercy to any generation, out of hatred for the nation and in memory of their outrages against Cestius. He burned not only the city itself but all the surrounding villages and small towns as well — some of them already entirely abandoned, others he enslaved himself. Josephus, meanwhile,
filled with terror the very city he had fled to for safety. The people of Tiberias would never have imagined he would take refuge there, unless he had utterly despaired of the whole war — and in this judgment of his state of mind they were not mistaken. For he could see where the fortunes of the Jews were heading, and he knew that their only hope of survival lay in changing sides. Yet he himself, though
he expected to be pardoned by the Romans, chose again and again to die rather than betray his homeland and, having disgraced the command entrusted to him, prosper among the very people he had been sent to fight. He therefore decided to write to the authorities in Jerusalem with a precise account of the situation, so that he would neither, by exaggerating the enemy's strength, later be branded a coward, nor, by understating it, perhaps embolden them into false confidence if they reconsidered their position —
so that they might either choose a truce and write back to him quickly, or, if resolved to fight the Romans, send him a force strong enough to match them. Having written this, he sent men in haste to Jerusalem to carry the letter. Vespasian, meanwhile, eager to take Jotapata — for he had learned that a great many of the enemy had taken refuge there, and that it was in any case a strong base of operations for them — sent infantry and
cavalry ahead to level the road, which was mountainous and rocky, difficult even for infantry and impassable for cavalry. In four days these men finished the work and opened a broad highway for the army. On the fifth day — it was the twenty-first of the month Artemisius — Josephus, arriving at Jotapata from Tiberias ahead of the army, revived the
fallen spirits of the Jews. To Vespasian, meanwhile, a deserter brought the welcome news of the man's move, and urged him to hurry against the city, since with its capture he would take all Judea, if only he got Josephus into his hands. Seizing on the report as the greatest stroke of good fortune, and reckoning that by the providence of God the man thought to be the shrewdest of the enemy had walked of his own accord into a prison, he at once sent Placidus with a thousand cavalry, together with the decurion Aebutius, a man distinguished for both action and judgment, with orders to ring the city so that Josephus could not slip away unnoticed.
Vespasian himself followed a day later with his whole force, and, marching until late afternoon, arrived before Jotapata. Bringing the army around to the northern side of the city, he pitched camp on a hill seven stadia away, taking care to be as conspicuous to the enemy as possible in order to overawe them; and such terror did in fact seize the Jews on the spot that not a man dared go outside the wall. The Romans put off an immediate assault, having marched the whole day, but they surrounded the city with a double line of infantry and stationed the cavalry as a third ring outside, blocking every way out. This, by cutting off all hope of escape, only spurred the Jews to daring; for nothing in war fights harder than necessity.
When the assault came the next day, the Jews at first stood their ground and resisted where they were, having camped opposite the Romans in front of the wall. But when Vespasian set his archers and slingers and the whole mass of his long-range troops against them with orders to shoot, while he himself pushed uphill with the infantry toward the point where the wall could be stormed, Josephus, fearing for the city, sprang out, and the whole body of the Jews with him. Falling on the Romans in a mass, they drove them back from the wall and gave proof of many feats of arms and daring. Yet they suffered no less than they inflicted; for as much as despair of survival drove on the Jews, so shame spurred the Romans, and the one side was armed with experience joined to strength, the other with boldness under the generalship of fury. The battle lasted the whole day and was broken off only by night; the Jews had wounded a great many Romans and killed thirteen, while of their own men seventeen fell and six hundred were wounded.
On the following day they sallied out and attacked the Romans again, and fought back far more stubbornly, having grown bolder from their unexpected success in holding out the day before; but they also found the Romans fiercer, for shame set them ablaze with anger, since they counted anything short of quick victory a defeat. Up to the fifth day the Roman assaults went on without pause, while the sallies of the men of Jotapata and the fighting from the walls grew ever more determined; the Jews were not cowed by the strength of the enemy, nor were the Romans discouraged by the difficulty of taking the city.
Jotapata is almost entirely a precipice. On every other side it is cut off by ravines so deep that the sight of those who try to look down fails before it reaches the bottom; it can be approached only from the north, where the city has been built out along the sloping end of the mountain. This side too Josephus had enclosed when he fortified the city, so that the crest above it could not be seized by an enemy. Screened all around by other mountains, the city was completely invisible until one actually arrived at it. Such was the strength of Jotapata.
Vespasian, contending against both the nature of the place and the daring of the Jews, resolved to press the siege more vigorously, and summoned his officers to plan the assault. It was decided to raise an embankment against the approachable part of the wall, and he sent his whole army out to gather material. The mountains around the city were stripped of timber, and along with the wood an immense quantity of stones was collected. Some of the men, to shield themselves against the missiles launched from above, stretched wicker screens over palisades and heaped up the embankment beneath them, suffering little or nothing from the shots off the wall; others tore up the neighboring mounds and brought them earth without pause; and with the work divided three ways, no one stood idle. The Jews for their part hurled great rocks down from the walls onto their shelters, and every kind of missile; even when these did not penetrate, the noise was loud and terrifying, and a hindrance to the workers.
Vespasian then set up his artillery in a circle — a hundred and sixty engines in all — and ordered them to fire on the defenders of the wall. In one great volley the catapults sent their lances whizzing, stones a talent in weight came from the stone-throwers, along with fire and massed showers of arrows, which made not only the wall impossible for the Jews to man but also all the ground within that the missiles could reach; for the crowd of Arab archers, and all the javelin-men and slingers, were shooting at the same time as the engines. Barred from defending themselves from above, the Jews still did not stay quiet. They ran out in raiding parties, like brigands, tore away the shelters of the workmen, struck the men so exposed, and, wherever the workers gave way, broke up the embankment and set fire to the palisades and screens — until Vespasian realized that the separation of the works was the cause of the damage, since the gaps gave the Jews a point of attack, and joined the shelters into one; and once the working parties had been united as well, the Jewish infiltrations were cut off.
With the embankment now rising and all but level with the battlements, Josephus judged it shameful to devise nothing that might save the city, and gathered masons with orders to raise the wall higher. When they declared it impossible to build under so many missiles, he contrived this protection for them: he ordered stout fences of stakes to be fixed up and the fresh-flayed hides of oxen stretched over them, so that the stones from the engines would be caught in their sagging folds, the other missiles would glance off, and the fire would be checked by the moisture. These he set up in front of the builders, and under them, working safely day and night, they raised the wall to a height of twenty cubits, built numerous towers into it, and fitted it with a strong battlement. At this the Romans, who had thought themselves practically inside the city, fell into deep despondency, struck by Josephus's ingenuity and the resolution of the defenders.
Vespasian was stung both by the cleverness of the stratagem and by the daring of the men of Jotapata; for, taking heart again from the new fortification, they were sallying out against the Romans, and every day there were skirmishes between raiding parties, every trick of banditry, plundering of whatever came to hand, and burning of the other works — until Vespasian withdrew his army from battle and resolved to sit down before the city and take it by want of supplies. Either, he reasoned, they would be forced by their privations to beg his mercy, or, if they stayed defiant to the end, they would perish of famine. And he expected to find them far easier to deal with in battle if he waited and then fell upon them again when they were worn out. He therefore gave orders to guard all the ways out of the city.
Those within had grain in abundance, and everything else except salt, but there was a shortage of water, since there is no spring in the city, and its people ordinarily make do with rain — and rain rarely if ever falls in that region in summer. As they were besieged in that very season, a dreadful despondency came over them at the mere thought of thirst, and they were already fretting as though water had failed entirely; for Josephus, seeing that the city was well supplied with everything else and that the men's spirit was high, and wishing to stretch the siege beyond the Romans' expectation, had rationed their drink from the first. They found this rationing harder to bear than actual want; not being free to drink at will only sharpened their craving, and they were as exhausted as if they had already reached the last stage of thirst. Their condition did not escape the Romans, for from the slope opposite they could see them streaming over the wall to one spot to receive their measured water, and, reaching the place with their quick-firing engines, they killed many.
Vespasian now expected that the cisterns would shortly be emptied and the city surrendered to him by necessity. But Josephus, determined to break this hope of his, ordered a large number of men to soak their clothes and hang them around the battlements, so that the whole wall suddenly streamed with water. At this the Romans fell into dejection and dismay, seeing men squander so much water in mockery whom they had supposed to have none even to drink; and the general himself, despairing of taking the city through want, turned back to arms and force. This was exactly what the Jews longed for; having given up hope for themselves and for the city, they preferred death in battle to famine and thirst.
Josephus, however, in addition to this stratagem devised another to keep himself supplied. Along a gully so difficult to cross that it was neglected by the sentries, on the western side of the ravine, he sent men out, and by them dispatched letters to those Jews outside with whom he wished to communicate, and received letters back; and he secured a plentiful stock of every provision that had run short in the city, instructing those who went out to creep past the guards for most of the way and to cover their backs with fleeces, so that if anyone did spot them at night, they would look like dogs. This went on until the sentries detected the trick and closed off the gully.
Then Josephus, seeing that the city could not hold out much longer and that his own survival was doubtful if he remained, began planning an escape together with the leading men. The people found out, and pouring around him in a crowd they implored him not to abandon them when they depended on him alone: if he stayed, there was hope of deliverance for the city, everyone fighting the more eagerly for his sake, and even if it were taken, he would be their consolation. It was not fitting, they said, for him to flee his enemies, or desert his friends, or leap overboard, as it were, from a ship in a storm which he had boarded in calm weather; for he would sink the city with him, since no one would dare stand against the enemy any longer once the man who gave them their courage was gone.
Josephus, suppressing any mention of his own safety, declared that it was for their sake he was planning to go out. If he stayed, he could be of no great use to them if they were saved, and if the city fell, he would merely perish along with them to no purpose; whereas if he slipped clear of the siege, he could help them from outside in the greatest ways: he would speedily gather the Galileans from the countryside and draw the Romans away from their city by a war on another front. He did not see, he said, how he was of any use to them by sitting there now — except to goad the Romans into pressing the siege harder, since they set the highest value on capturing him; but if they learned he had escaped, they would greatly relax their drive against the city. This did not persuade them; it only inflamed the people to cling to him the more. Children, old men, and women with their infants threw themselves down before him wailing; they all clutched his feet and held on, and with cries of lamentation begged him to stay and share their fortune — not, I think, because they grudged him his escape, but because they hoped for their own; for they expected to suffer nothing terrible so long as Josephus remained.
He judged that this would be supplication if he yielded, and a guard set over him if he tried force; and his resolve to leave was largely broken, besides, by pity for their weeping. So he decided to stay, and making a weapon of the city's common despair, he said: "Now is the time to begin the fight, when there is no hope of survival. It is a fine thing to trade life for glory, and to fall doing some noble deed that later generations will remember." And he turned to action. Sallying out with his best fighting men, he scattered the guards and raided as far as the Roman camp itself, tore apart the hide coverings under which the men on the earthworks sheltered, and set fire to the works. The next day he did the same, and the third, and for a good many days and nights after that he never wearied of the fighting.
Vespasian, seeing the Romans suffering from these sallies — for they were ashamed to flee before Jews, and, when the Jews turned, were too slow under the weight of their armor to pursue, while the Jews always did some damage before suffering any and then fled back into the city — ordered his legionaries to avoid these charges and not to engage men who sought death. Nothing, he said, is fiercer than despair, and their onsets would burn out when deprived of a target, as fire does for lack of fuel; and besides, even Romans ought to win with safety, since they were fighting not from necessity but to enlarge their empire. He now beat back the Jews mostly with his Arab archers and the slingers and stone-throwers from Syria, and the host of artillery never rested either. The Jews gave way under the damage these inflicted; but once they got inside the range of the long shots they pressed the Romans hard, fighting without sparing either life or limb, each side relieving its exhausted men with fresh relays.
Vespasian, considering that the length of time and these sallies had turned the siege back upon himself, decided, now that the embankments were nearing the walls, to bring up the ram. This is an immense beam, like the mast of a ship, tipped at its head with a heavy piece of iron shaped into the forepart of a ram, from which it takes its name. It is slung at its middle by ropes from a second beam, as if from the arm of a balance, this beam being supported at either end by fixed posts. Drawn back by a great crowd of men and then driven forward by the same men throwing their weight together, it batters the wall with its projecting iron. And no tower is so strong, no circuit-wall so thick, that even if it withstands the first blows it can hold out against repeated battering.
To this expedient the Roman general now turned, eager to take the city by storm, since sitting before it was costing him dearly with the Jews never quiet. The Romans brought the catapults and the rest of the artillery closer, within range of the men on the wall who were trying to hinder them, and opened fire; the archers and slingers moved up in the same way. With no one daring, for this reason, to mount the ramparts, other troops brought up the ram, protected by a continuous line of wicker screens with a hide covering above, to shield both the men and the machine. At the very first blow the wall was shaken, and a tremendous cry went up from those inside, as though the city had already been taken.
As the Romans kept striking the same spot, and Josephus saw that the wall would soon be brought down, he devised a countermeasure.
Little by little the ram's force weakened. Joseph ordered sacks stuffed with chaff let down by ropes to whatever spot they saw the ram about to strike, so that the blow would be deflected and its force dissipated as the sacks absorbed the impact. This cost the Romans a great deal of time, since whichever way they turned the machine, the men above shifted the sacks to meet it and cushioned the blows so that the wall suffered nothing from the collisions—until the Romans devised a counter-measure, tying sickles to the ends of long poles and cutting the sacks away. With the siege engine now working effectively and the wall, still newly built, already giving way, Joseph and his men turned at last to defense by fire. They lit whatever dry wood they had and rushed out from three sides, setting fire to the Romans' siege engines, their wicker screens, and their earthworks alike.
The Romans came to the rescue badly, both stunned by the defenders' daring and overtaken by the flames before they could act. The wood being dry, and fed further by pitch, bitumen, and sulfur, the fire flew faster than thought, and in a single hour consumed what had cost the Romans immense labor to build.
It was then that a man among the Jews showed himself worthy of mention and remembrance. He was the son of Sameas, called Eleazar, and his home was Saba in Galilee. Lifting an enormous stone, he hurled it from the wall down onto the battering ram with such force that he snapped off the head of the machine; then he leapt down, seized it from the midst of the enemy, and carried it back up to the wall with remarkable boldness. Becoming a target for every enemy soldier and taking their blows on an unprotected body, he was pierced by five arrows, yet paid no attention to any of them until he had climbed the wall and stood there in full view of all as a spectacle of courage—only then, writhing from his wounds, did he collapse together with the ram's head. After him the bravest to distinguish themselves were two brothers, Netiras and Philippus, from the village of Ruma, likewise Galileans, who charged so furiously and with such violent momentum against the men of the Tenth Legion that they broke through their ranks and routed everyone in their path.
After these two, Joseph himself and the rest of the people, taking up fire again, burned the siege engines and the covered approach-works along with the structures built around them, putting to flight both the Fifth and the Tenth Legions. The rest, arriving in time, buried both the engines and all the timber under earth. Toward evening the Romans raised the ram once more and brought it up to the spot on the wall it had already weakened. There one of the defenders shot Vespasian with an arrow in the sole of the foot, wounding him only slightly, since the force of the shot had already been spent by the distance—but it caused enormous panic among the Romans, for at the sight of the blood, those nearby were thrown into confusion, and word ran through the whole army, so that most abandoned the siege and rushed in terror and dread toward the general. Before all others, Titus, fearful for his father, hurried to him, so that the crowd was thrown into disorder both by their devotion to their commander and by the son's anguish. But the father very easily calmed both his frightened son and the army, for rising above his pain and eager to show himself before all who were alarmed on his account, he pressed the war against the Jews all the harder. Every soldier now wanted to risk himself first as if avenging his commander, and with shouts of encouragement to one another they charged the wall.
Joseph's men, though falling one upon another under the catapult bolts and stones, still would not be driven back from the wall, but with fire, iron, and stones struck at those who pressed the ram against the wicker screens. They accomplished little or nothing, however, and were themselves struck down without pause, seen by an enemy they could not see; for lit up all around by their own fire, they made an easy target for the enemy as if in broad daylight, while the enemy's engines, invisible from a distance, made the incoming missiles hard to guard against. The force of the arrow-shooters and catapults drove through many men at once, and the rush of stones hurled by the machine tore away battlements and shattered the corners of towers. No mass of men is so solid that it is not laid flat to its last rank by the force and weight of such a stone. One can judge the power of the machine from what happened that very night: a man standing on the wall among Joseph's followers was struck and his head torn off by the stone, the skull being flung a distance of three stadia. And a pregnant woman, struck in the belly in daylight as she was coming out of her house nearby, had her unborn child flung half a stadium away—such was the force of the stone-thrower.
The rushing sound of the machines was more terrifying than that of the missiles themselves, while the sound of what was actually struck was the corpses—one after another they made a thudding noise as they were flung from the wall, and a terrible wailing of women rose from within, answered from without by the groans of the dying. The whole open ground before the battle ran with blood, and the wall became passable to attackers because of the heaped bodies. The shouting, echoing off the mountains, made the din still more terrifying, and on that night nothing was left that could strike terror to either hearing or sight. A great many of those fighting for Jotapata fell nobly, and a great many more were wounded, and only with difficulty, around the morning watch, did the wall, struck without let-up, at last give way beneath the machines. The defenders barricaded the breach with their own bodies and weapons before the Romans could bring up the scaling engines.
At dawn, Vespasian gathered the army for the capture of the city, after giving them a brief rest from the night's exertions. Wishing to draw off the defenders from the breach, he dismounted his bravest cavalrymen and stationed them in three lines at the fallen section of the wall, fully armored and holding their pikes forward, so that when the scaling engines were brought up they would lead the way in. Behind them he stationed the strongest of the infantry, while the rest of the cavalry he spread out along the whole mountainside opposite the wall, so that none of those fleeing the capture might slip away unnoticed. Behind these he posted the archers in a ring, ordering them to hold their arrows ready to loose, and likewise the slingers and the men at the siege engines; still others he ordered to bring up ladders and carry them to the sections of the wall still intact, so that some defenders, trying to stop them there, would abandon the watch over the breach, while the rest, overwhelmed by the mass of missiles, would give way and let the enemy in.
Joseph, seeing through the plan, posted the elderly and the exhausted on the section of the wall still standing, since they would suffer nothing serious there, and stationed the strongest men at the broken parts of the wall—six men to each section—and cast lots to place himself among those facing the greatest danger. He ordered them to block their ears against the war-cry of the legions, so as not to be terrified by it, and against the hail of missiles to crouch down and cover themselves with their shields from above, falling back a little until the archers had emptied their quivers; but when the scaling engines were brought up, they were to spring forward and meet the enemy through their own gaps in the defenses, each man fighting not as though defending something that could still be saved, but as one avenging a fatherland already lost—picturing before his eyes the old men soon to be slaughtered, the children and wives about to be killed by the enemy, and pouring out in advance, upon those who would do these things, the fury owed to the disasters yet to come.
So he arranged each group. As for the useless crowd of the city—the women and children—when they saw the city girded by a triple line of soldiers (for none of the long-standing watch had been shifted for the assault), and, beyond the breached walls, the enemy with drawn swords, and the mountainside above gleaming with weapons, and the Arab archers with their bows already raised, they raised one last wail of capture, as though the disaster were no longer threatened but already upon them. Joseph, to keep the women from softening the resolve of his men with their lamenting, shut them up in their houses with threats to keep silent, and himself took his post at the breach where the lot had placed him. He paid no attention to those bringing ladders elsewhere, but kept watch, waiting tensely for the volley of missiles.
At once the trumpeters of every legion sounded together, the army raised its terrible war-cry, and as the missiles were loosed from every side on signal, the light itself was cut off. But Joseph's men, remembering his instructions, blocked their ears against the shouting and their bodies against the volleys, and when the engines fired, they dashed out through them before those who had launched them could mount the wall, grappling with the men climbing up and displaying every kind of feat of hand and spirit, striving even in this final extremity to show themselves no worse than men who play the hero when there is no danger to themselves—so that they did not break off from the Romans until either they fell or destroyed their man. But as they grew continually weary from unrelenting defense, with no fresh men to relieve their front-line fighters, while the Romans' exhausted men were replaced by unspent ones who quickly took the place of those driven back, and, urging one another on, closed shoulder to shoulder and locked their shields above into an unbroken mass, they became like a single body with the whole phalanx, and pushing the Jews back, began at last to mount the wall.
Then Joseph, taking necessity as his counselor in his helplessness—and necessity is a fearsome spur to invention when driven by desperation—ordered boiling oil poured down on those locked together under their shields. His men, having it ready at hand, quickly poured it in great quantity from every side onto the Romans, along with the vessels themselves, still seething with heat. This scalded the Romans and threw their ranks into disorder, and they went tumbling down from the wall in terrible agony; for the oil ran with the greatest ease from head to foot beneath their armor over the whole body and fed on their flesh no less fiercely than fire, since by its nature it heats quickly and cools slowly because of its thickness. Enclosed as they were in breastplates and helmets, there was no escaping the burning; leaping and writhing in their agony, they fell from the gangways, and as they turned back upon their own comrades still pressing forward, they were easy prey for the wounds inflicted by those behind them.
Neither did strength fail the Romans in their misfortune, nor cunning the Jews; rather, though the Romans saw the men doused in oil suffering pitifully, they still pressed on against those pouring it, each man reviling the one in front of him as an obstacle to his advance. The Jews, with a second trick, made the approach treacherous for them by pouring boiled fenugreek onto the planking, so that men slipped on it and were swept off their feet; and neither those retreating nor those still advancing could keep their footing, but some, thrown on their backs on the very scaling engines, were trampled by their own comrades, while many fell onto the earthworks below. Those who fell were then struck down by the Jews, for the Romans, having lost their footing for close combat, were now free to devote themselves to hurling missiles. Seeing his soldiers badly mauled in the assault, the general called them back toward evening. Not a few of them fell, and more still were wounded, while of the men of Jotapata six were killed and more than three hundred wounded were carried off. This engagement took place on the twentieth of the month Daisios.
Vespasian, consoling his army over what had happened, and seeing them enraged and in need not of encouragement but of results, ordered the earthworks raised still higher and three towers built, each fifty feet tall, entirely sheathed in iron so that they would stand firm under their own weight and be proof against fire. These he stationed on the earthworks, manning them with javelin-throwers, archers, and the lighter of the missile engines, together with his strongest slingers. Being out of sight because of the towers' height and their parapets, these could shoot down at the defenders on the wall who were plainly visible to them. The defenders, unable easily to dodge missiles falling on them from above nor to strike back at an enemy they could not see, and seeing the height of the towers beyond the reach of a hand-thrown missile and the iron sheathing around them proof against fire, fled from the wall and instead sallied out against those attempting to storm it. Thus the people of Jotapata held out, losing many men every day and unable to inflict any harm in return on the enemy, since they could not keep them off except at the cost of great danger to themselves.
During these same days Vespasian sent Trajan, commander of the Tenth Legion, with a thousand cavalry and two thousand infantry against a town neighboring Jotapata called Japha, which was in revolt and had been emboldened, against expectation, by Jotapata's continued resistance. Trajan found the town hard to take, since besides being naturally strong it was fortified with a double wall, and, seeing its people had come out ready to meet him in battle, engaged them at once and, after they held out only briefly, pursued them in flight. As they fled together into the first wall, the Romans, pressing close on their heels, forced their way in along with them. But when the fugitives tried to rush on into the second wall, their own people shut them out of the city, fearing the enemy would burst in together with them. It was God, it seems, who was granting the Romans the sufferings of the Galileans, for it was he who at that moment delivered up the whole population of the town, shut out by their own countrymen's hands, to destruction at the hands of a bloodthirsty enemy. Crowding in a mass against the gates and calling out by name to those guarding them, they were cut down in the very midst of their pleading. The enemy had closed off their first wall to them, and their own people had closed the second, so that, hemmed in tightly between the two rings of wall, many were run through by one another's swords and many by their own, while countless numbers fell to the Romans without even summoning the courage to defend themselves; for besides being terrified by the enemy, their spirit was broken by the betrayal of their own people. In the end they died cursing not the Romans but their own countrymen, until all perished, twelve thousand in number. Trajan, reckoning the city now empty of fighting men, though some perhaps still remained within...
Trajan, supposing the city held no more fighting men — or if a few remained, that fear would keep them from any daring — left the taking of it to be credited to the commander-in-chief. He sent messengers to Vespasian asking him to send his son Titus to put the finishing touch on the victory. Vespasian, judging that some work still remained, sent his son with five hundred cavalry and a thousand infantry. Titus came to the city with speed, drew up his army,
stationing Trajan on the left wing while he himself took the right and directed the siege. When the soldiers brought ladders against the wall from every side, the Galileans, defending from above, abandoned the rampart after only a brief resistance. Titus and his men leapt in and quickly mastered the city, but against those inside who rallied against them a fierce battle broke out.
In the narrow streets the strong men fell on them, and from the houses the women hurled down whatever came to hand. For six hours they held out fighting, but once the fighting men were used up, the rest of the population, young and old alike, were butchered in the open and in their houses; no male was left alive except infants, and these were enslaved along with the women. The total number killed, both in the city and in the earlier battle, came to fifteen thousand, and the captives to two thousand one hundred thirty. This disaster befell the Galileans on the twenty-fifth of the month Daisios.
Nor were the Samaritans spared their share of calamities. They had gathered on the mountain called Gerizim, which is sacred to them, and though they stayed in place, their assembly and their temper carried the threat of war. Not even the troubles of their neighbors brought them to their senses; against the run of Roman successes they inflated their own weakness in reckless fashion and were poised for an uprising. Vespasian decided to forestall the movement and cut off their impulses before they grew, since the whole of Samaria was already held down by garrisons,
and the number of those who had come together and the order of their array were formidable. He therefore sent Cerealius, prefect of the Fifth Legion, with six hundred cavalry and three thousand infantry. Cerealius judged it unsafe to climb the mountain and join battle, with so many of the enemy above him; instead he surrounded the whole base of the mountain with his force and kept watch over them the entire day. It happened that
the Samaritans, cut off from water, were then afflicted by a fierce heat as well — it was summer, and they were unprepared with supplies — so that some died that very day of thirst, while many, preferring slavery to such a death, deserted to the Romans. From this Cerealius understood that even those still holding together were broken by their sufferings, and he went up the mountain,
and drawing his force up in a ring around the enemy, at first invited them to come over to his side, urging them to save themselves and giving assurance of safety if they threw down their arms. When this failed to persuade them, he attacked and killed them all, eleven thousand six hundred in number. This was done on the twenty-seventh of the month Daisios. Such were the disasters the Samaritans suffered. Meanwhile those at Jotapata held firm, resisting the dangers beyond all expectation,
and on the forty-seventh day the Roman earthworks rose above the wall's height. That same day a deserter went to Vespasian, reporting how few and how weakened the defenders of the city were, worn out by continuous sleeplessness and unceasing fighting, no longer able to withstand a renewed assault, and that they could be taken by stratagem if anyone would attempt it. He said that toward the last watch, when they felt some relief from their hardships and the morning sleep, which grips the exhausted hardest, was upon them, the guards would be found asleep, and he advised attacking at that hour. Titus was suspicious of the deserter, knowing both the Jews' loyalty to one another and their contempt for punishments, since even before this
a man taken from Jotapata had held out under every form of torture and, revealing nothing to the enemy about those within despite their use of fire, had been crucified with a smile at death. Still, the likelihood of the story made the traitor believable, and Titus thought that perhaps the man was telling the truth, and in any case expected no great harm to himself from a trap, so he ordered the man kept under guard while he prepared the army for
the taking of the city. At the appointed hour they advanced quietly to the wall. Titus was the first to mount it, together with one of the tribunes, Domitius Sabinus, leading a few men from the Fifteenth Legion; they killed the guards and entered the city, and after them Sextus Calvarius, a tribune, and Placidus brought in the men under their command.
Once the citadel was taken and the enemy were milling about in the midst of it, and day had already come, still those overpowered had no sense that the city had fallen; for most were dissolved in exhaustion and sleep, and a thick mist that had by chance settled over the city at that hour dulled the sight of those who did rise, until the whole army had poured in, and they came awake to nothing but the realization
of their disaster, and understood, as they were being cut down, that the city had fallen. The Romans, remembering what they had suffered in the siege, showed neither pity nor mercy to anyone, but drove the people down the slope from the citadel, slaughtering them. There even those still able to fight were robbed of any defense by the difficult ground; crowded together in the narrow streets and slipping on the steep incline,
they were swept down and overwhelmed by the flood of war pouring from the heights. This drove many of Josephus's picked men to suicide; seeing that they could kill no Romans, they resolved at least to anticipate death at Roman hands, and gathering at the edge of the city, they killed themselves. As for those who managed to escape the guards' first notice of the capture and climbed
into one of the northern towers, they held out for a while, but surrounded by the mass of the enemy, they at last gave up their hands and cheerfully offered their throats to those standing over them. The Romans could have boasted of an end to the siege without bloodshed on their own side, had not one man fallen at the very moment of capture — a centurion, Antonius, who died by an ambush. Of those who had fled into the caves,
many — and they were a great number — one begged Antonius to give him his right hand as a pledge of safety and help him climb up. Antonius, unguarded, reached out his hand, but the man was quicker and stabbed him from below in the groin with a spear, killing him on the spot. On that day the Romans destroyed the visible mass of the population, but on the following days, searching out
the hiding places, they went after those in the underground passages and caves and dealt with every age except infants and women. The captives gathered numbered one thousand two hundred, and the dead, counting the capture together with the earlier battles, totaled forty thousand. Vespasian ordered the city razed and all its fortifications burned to the ground. Thus Jotapata
was taken, in the thirteenth year of Nero's reign, on the first of the month Panemos. The Romans searched for Josephus, driven both by their own anger and by the commander's own great ambition, since his capture would count as a major part of the war; they searched among the dead and in the hiding places. Josephus, however, when the city was being taken, made use of some divine aid to slip out from the midst of the enemy unnoticed, and let himself down into
a deep pit, off the side of which opened a broad cave invisible from above. There he found forty men of rank hiding, with a store of provisions sufficient to last many days. By day he kept concealed, since the enemy held every position, and by night he climbed up in search of a way to escape and studied the guard posts. But since every place was watched on his account, escape unseen was impossible, and
he went back down into the cave. For two days he remained undiscovered, but on the third a woman among those with him was captured and revealed his hiding place. Vespasian at once sent, with urgency, two tribunes, Paulinus and Gallicanus, ordering them to give Josephus their right hands as a pledge and to urge him to come up. They came and appealed to the man, offering assurances of his safety, but they did not persuade him;
for it was not from the natural gentleness of those making the appeal that he drew his suspicions, but from the likelihood that a man who had done so much would suffer accordingly, and he feared they were summoning him to punishment, until Vespasian sent a third officer, the tribune Nicanor, an old acquaintance and friend of Josephus. Nicanor, coming forward, set out at length the natural kindness the Romans show to those they have once taken, and how Josephus himself
would be admired rather than hated by the generals for his valor, and that the commander was eager not to bring him up for punishment — for that he could have even without his coming forward — but out of a wish to save a noble man. He added that Vespasian would never have sent a friend to entrap him, so as to dress up the vilest of acts, treachery, in the fairest of names, friendship, nor would Nicanor himself, meaning to deceive a friend, have agreed to come.
While Josephus still hesitated even before Nicanor, the soldiers in their fury were eager to burn out the cave, but the commander held them back, ambitious to take the man alive. When Nicanor pressed him further with entreaties, and Josephus learned of the threats of the hostile crowd of soldiers, the memory came back to him of his dreams in the night, through which God had foretold to him both
the disasters coming upon the Jews and what would befall the emperors of Rome. He was, in fact, skilled at interpreting the meaning of dreams and at working out what the divine said ambiguously, and he was not ignorant of the prophecies of the sacred books, being himself a priest and the descendant of priests. Inspired at that very hour by these things, and gathering up the terrifying images of
his recent dreams, he offered God a silent prayer, saying: Since it has pleased you, who created the Jewish nation, to bring it low, and since fortune has passed over entirely to the Romans, and since you have chosen my spirit to declare what is to come, I give myself into Roman hands willingly, and I live; but I call you to witness that I go not as a traitor, but as your servant. Having said this, he yielded to
Nicanor. But the Jews who had fled together with Josephus, when they understood that he was giving way to those urging him, gathered around him in a body and cried out — how bitterly they would have groaned! — "The laws of our fathers, which God who created us gave to the Jews, souls that scorn death! Are you so in love with life, Josephus, that you can bear to see the light as a slave? How quickly you have forgotten yourself! How many have you persuaded to die for freedom! False, then, was your reputation for courage,
and false too your reputation for wisdom, if you hope for safety from those against whom you fought so hard, and if, even should it be secure, you wish to be saved by them. But if the fortune of Rome has poured forgetfulness of yourself over you too, we must see to the honor of our fathers. We will lend you a right hand and a sword. If you die willingly, you die as general of the Jews; if unwillingly,
you will die as a traitor." As they spoke they raised their swords and threatened to kill him if he gave himself up to the Romans. Josephus, fearing their assault and reckoning it a betrayal of God's commands to die before he could deliver his message, began to reason with them on grounds of necessity: "Why," he said, "are we so set on murdering ourselves, comrades? Why do we set at war with each other what is dearest of all, body and
soul? Someone will say I have changed. Well, the Romans at least know this much: it is a fine thing to die in war, but by the law of war — that is, at the hands of the victors. If I turn away from Roman steel, I am truly worthy of my own sword and my own hand; but if mercy for an enemy enters into them, how much more justly ought it to enter into us for ourselves? And indeed it is folly to do this
to ourselves over the very matter for which we stand apart from them. It is a fine thing to die for freedom, I say so too — but fighting, and at the hands of those who take it from us. As things are, they neither meet us in battle nor kill us; equally cowardly is the man unwilling to die when he must, and the man willing to die when he need not. What is it we fear that keeps us from going up to the Romans?
Is it not death? Then shall we, of our own will, inflict on ourselves the very thing we suspect and fear from our enemies? 'But it is slavery,' someone will say. Indeed, we are very free now! 'It is noble to kill oneself,' another will say. No — most ignoble; I count it the act of the most cowardly helmsman, who, fearing a storm, deliberately sinks his ship before the squall arrives. And in truth self-slaughter is
alien to the common nature of all living things, and an act of impiety toward the God who made us. Of all living creatures there is not one that dies by design or by its own hand; for it is a strong law of nature in all of them to want to live — for which reason we count as enemies those who openly try to take this from us, and punish those who do it by stealth. Do you not think God
is angered when a man abuses his gift? For it is from him that we have received our being, and it is to him again that we give back our ceasing to be. Our bodies are mortal for all of us, and made of perishable matter, but the soul is forever immortal, a portion of God lodged within our bodies; and if a man destroys or misuses another man's deposit left in his keeping, he is thought
wicked and faithless — yet if someone casts out from his own body the deposit that is God's, does he think the one he wrongs will fail to notice? And it is judged right to punish slaves who run away, even from wicked masters — shall we, in running away from the best of masters, God himself, not be thought guilty of impiety? Do you not know that those who depart this life by the law of nature and
repay the debt they received from God, when the giver wishes to reclaim it, win eternal glory; their houses and their descendants stand secure; their souls remain pure and obedient, allotted the holiest region of heaven, whence, in the revolution of the ages, they are sent back again to inhabit pure bodies — while those whose own hands have run mad against themselves are received by a darker Hades,
"But God, who is father to all these, punishes for the fathers' outrages upon their children as well. That is why this act is hated by God and punished by our wisest lawgiver. Among us, those who kill themselves are cast out unburied until sunset, though we hold it right to bury even our enemies; among other peoples the law commands that the right hands of such corpses be cut off, the hands with which they made war on themselves, on the ground that as the body is foreign to the soul, so the hand is foreign to the body. It is well, comrades, to think justly, and not to add impiety toward our Creator to our human misfortunes. If it seems good to save ourselves, let us do so — for there is no disgrace in a rescue won by men who have shown their courage through so many exploits. If it seems good to die, it is honorable to die at the hands of our captors. I, for my part, will not go over to the enemy's ranks and become a traitor to myself — that would make me far more foolish than those who desert to the enemy, since they act for their own safety, while I would be acting for my own destruction, and destruction by my own hand. As for the Romans, I pray that they may set a trap for me; for if I die by their hand after receiving their pledge, I shall die cheerfully, carrying off a consolation greater than victory: that I was never taken in by their treachery."
Such were the many arguments Josephus urged to turn them from self-slaughter. But they, their ears barred by despair, since they had long since consecrated themselves to death, only grew more incensed against him, and rushing at him from every side with drawn swords they reviled him for cowardice, each one plainly ready to strike him down at once. He, calling one by name, fixing another with a general's stern gaze, seizing the right hand of a third, and shaming a fourth with entreaty, held the steel of every one of them back from the slaughter by playing on their many different feelings, turning always to face whoever attacked him, like a wild beast surrounded by hunters. Even in their extremity of misfortune, some still felt reverence for their general, and their right hands went slack, their swords slipped from their grip, and many who raised their blades against him let them fall of their own accord.
Yet even in this desperate strait he was not at a loss for a plan; trusting himself for safety to God, who watches over him, he ventured on this: "Since we are resolved to die," he said, "come, let us leave the killing of one another to the lot. Let the man drawn by lot fall by the one who comes after him, and so fortune will pass through us all in turn, and no one will die by his own hand — for it would be unjust for one of us to repent and save himself once the others are gone." This proposal won their trust, and he persuaded them and joined in the drawing of lots himself. Each man, as his lot was drawn, offered his throat readily to the one who followed, thinking that Josephus too would die directly after him — for they judged death together with Josephus sweeter than life. He, however — whether one should call it chance, or the providence of God — was left to the last, along with one other man, and, being anxious neither to be condemned by the lot nor, if left to the very end, to stain his hand with the blood of a kinsman, he persuaded that other man too to live, on pledge of good faith.
Having thus survived both the war against the Romans and the one within his own ranks, Josephus was brought before Vespasian by Nicanor. The Romans all ran together to see him, and as the crowd pressed around the general there arose a confused uproar — some rejoicing at his capture, some threatening him, others forcing their way close to get a look. Those farther off shouted for the enemy to be punished, but those nearer recalled his exploits and were struck with wonder at his changed fortune; and among the officers there was not one who, however angry he had been before, did not relent at the sight of him. Titus especially was moved, both by the man's fortitude amid his misfortunes and by pity for his youth; recalling the man who had fought so long ago and now seeing him lying in the hands of his enemies, he could not help reflecting how much power fortune has, how swift the turn of war, and how nothing human is secure. For this reason he brought over a great many at that time to share his own compassion for Josephus, and it was above all through him, and also with his father, that Josephus found the greatest measure of deliverance. Vespasian nonetheless ordered him kept under close guard, meaning to send him at once to Nero.
On hearing this, Josephus said he wished to speak with him alone. When Vespasian had sent everyone away except his son Titus and two friends, Josephus said: "You suppose, Vespasian, that you have taken merely a prisoner in Josephus; but I come to you as a messenger of greater things. Had I not been sent by God, I knew well the law of the Jews, and how it becomes a general to die. Do you send me to Nero? Why? Those who will succeed Nero will not last until you do. You, Vespasian, will be Caesar and emperor, you and this son of yours. Bind me now more securely, then, and keep me for yourself; for you, Caesar, are master not of me alone, but of land and sea and the whole human race, and I ask for a stronger guard, for my punishment, if I am speaking recklessly even of God." When he had said this, Vespasian at first seemed not to believe him, and supposed that Josephus was contriving this as a stratagem for his own safety; but little by little he was brought to trust it, since God was already rousing him toward supreme command and foreshadowing the sceptre through other signs as well. He also found Josephus truthful in other matters: one of the friends who had been present at that private conversation said he marveled that Josephus had foretold neither the fall of Jotapata to its people nor his own captivity to himself, unless this present talk was nonsense meant to deflect the anger now turned against him. But Josephus said that he had in fact told the people of Jotapata that the city would be taken on the forty-seventh day, and that he himself would be taken alive by the Romans. Vespasian, questioning the prisoners privately about this and finding it true, then began to believe what Josephus had said concerning himself. He did not release Josephus from guard and chains, but he made him gifts of clothing and other valuables, and continued to treat him with kindness and consideration, Titus joining eagerly in doing him honor.
On the fourth of the month Panemus, Vespasian broke camp for Ptolemais, and from there reached Caesarea on the coast, the greatest city of Judea, inhabited for the most part by Greeks. The people there welcomed the army and its general with every mark of goodwill and friendliness, moved partly by loyalty to Rome, but more by hatred of the people they had helped to overthrow; for this reason they gathered in a body clamoring for Josephus to be punished. Vespasian, however, treating this demand as coming from an unreasoning mob, quietly let it drop. Of the legions, he stationed two to winter at Caesarea, judging the city suitable, and sent the tenth and the fifth to Scythopolis, so as not to burden Caesarea with the whole army; for that city too was warm in winter, just as it was stifling with heat in summer, since it lies on the plain by the sea.
Meanwhile a considerable number of men had gathered — those driven from their cities by faction, and those who had escaped from the conquered towns — and they rebuilt Jaffa as a base for themselves, the town having earlier been laid waste by Cestius; and since the countryside had been ravaged by war and offered them no refuge, they resolved to take to the sea instead. Building a great many pirate craft, they preyed upon the shipping lanes of Syria, Phoenicia, and the route to Egypt, making the seas in that region unnavigable for everyone. When Vespasian learned of their combination, he sent infantry and cavalry against Jaffa, and these entered the unguarded city by night. Those inside had sensed the attack beforehand and, too frightened to try to keep the Romans out, fled instead to their ships and spent the night beyond bowshot from shore.
Jaffa has no natural harbor, for it ends in a rough shore, sheer for the most part but curving slightly inward at either extremity like the horns of a crescent; there are deep cliffs and jutting reefs running out into the sea, where the very marks of Andromeda's chains are still shown, testifying to the antiquity of the myth. A north wind beating straight against the shore, and throwing up a towering swell against the receiving rocks, makes the roadstead more treacherous than open sea; and it was against this shore that a violent gale — called by sailors in those parts the "black norther" — fell upon the men from Jaffa toward dawn as they rode at anchor there. It dashed some of the ships against one another where they lay, others against the rocks, and many, forced by fear of the rocky shore and the enemy waiting on it to struggle against the oncoming swell out into open water, were swamped as the towering waves rose over and engulfed them. There was no place to flee and no safety in staying — driven from the sea by the force of the wind, and from the land by the Romans. Loud was the wailing as the ships were smashed together, loud the crash as they broke apart. Some of the crowd were swallowed and destroyed by the waves; many became entangled in the wreckage; and some, thinking the sword a gentler death than the sea, took their own lives before the waters could reach them. Most, however, were swept out by the waves and torn to pieces on the reefs, so that the sea for a great distance ran with blood and the shore was littered with corpses; for even those carried up onto the beach were finished off by the Romans standing ready there. The number of bodies washed ashore came to four thousand two hundred. The Romans took the city without a fight and razed it to the ground. Thus Jaffa was captured by the Romans for the second time within a short span. To prevent the pirates from gathering there again, Vespasian raised a camp on the acropolis and left the cavalry there with a small force of infantry, so that the infantry might stay in place and guard the camp while the cavalry ranged the surrounding country and destroyed the villages and small towns around Jaffa. Following their orders, they overran the countryside day after day, cutting it down and laying it entirely waste.
When news of the disaster at Jotapata reached Jerusalem, most people at first refused to believe it, both because of the sheer magnitude of the calamity and because none of those said to have witnessed it were present — indeed not even a messenger had survived, but rumor of its own accord, true to its nature in matters of gloom, spread word of the city's fall unaided. Little by little, though, through neighboring districts the truth made its way, and it soon stood beyond doubt for everyone. To the actual events, however, false additions were tacked on: it was reported that Josephus too had died at the city's fall. This news filled Jerusalem with the deepest grief. In private houses and among kinship groups, each family mourned its own lost members, but the mourning for the general became a public affair; some wept for him as a friend, others as a kinsman, others as one dear to them, but all wept for Josephus, so that for thirty full days the lamentations in the city never ceased, and a great many flute players were hired to lead the dirges for the people.
But as time uncovered the truth, and it became known that what had happened at Jotapata was indeed as reported, while the report of Josephus's death was found to be fabricated, and that he was in fact alive and in Roman hands, being treated by the commanders with more consideration than a prisoner's fortune would warrant, the city's anger against him, now that he was known to be living, rose in proportion to the goodwill it had shown him before while it believed him dead. By some he was reviled as a coward, by others as a traitor, and the city was full of indignation and abuse against him. Their own reverses only sharpened and inflamed them further at his misfortunes; and failure, which in sensible men breeds caution and guards against repeating the same mistakes, became for them only a further goad to disaster; the end of one misfortune was always, for them, the beginning of the next. If anything, they threw themselves at the Romans with still greater fury, as though avenging themselves on Josephus in the persons of his captors. Such were the disturbances that gripped the people of Jerusalem.
Vespasian, meanwhile, out of regard for the kingdom of Agrippa — for the king himself was urging him to come, wishing at once to entertain the general and his army amid the splendor of his own house, and to use their presence to help quell the disorders troubling his realm — broke camp from Caesarea on the coast and moved to Caesarea Philippi. There he rested his army for as much as twenty days, himself sharing in the feasting and offering thanks to God for his successes.
But when he was informed that Tiberias was moving toward revolt and that Tarichaeae had already broken away — both cities forming part of Agrippa's kingdom — since he had resolved to subdue the Jews on every front, he judged a campaign against them timely, and welcome too for Agrippa's sake, as a way of repaying his hospitality by bringing his cities to order. He therefore sent his son Titus to Caesarea to transfer the army stationed there to Scythopolis, the largest city of the Decapolis and neighbor to Tiberias. There he himself joined his son, and advancing with three legions encamped some thirty stades from Tiberias, at a station in full view of the rebels, called Ennabris. He sent the decurion Valerianus ahead with fifty horsemen to offer the city terms of peace and urge it to come to an agreement, having heard that the populace wanted peace but was being coerced into war by a faction. Valerianus rode up close to the wall, then dismounted along with the horsemen accompanying him, so that they should not seem to be there merely to skirmish; but before they could enter into talks, the most powerful of the insurgents charged out against him in arms, led by a certain Jesus, son of Tuphas, the ringleader of the band of brigands. Valerianus, judging it unsafe to engage against his general's orders, even were victory assured, and reckoning it dangerous besides for a few unprepared men to fight against many who stood ready, and also alarmed by the unexpected boldness of the Jews, fled on foot, and five others likewise abandoned their horses, which Jesus and his men led off into the city in triumph, as though they had been taken in battle rather than by ambush.
Terrified by this, the elders of the people, men of standing, fled to the Roman camp, and bringing the king with them, fell as suppliants before Vespasian, begging him not to overlook them, nor to hold the whole city responsible for the madness of a few; they asked him to spare a populace that had always been well disposed toward Rome, and to punish only those responsible.
...to punish them for the revolt — the very men who had until then been eager to be granted pledges of safety, and had themselves guarded him. The general gave way to these entreaties, although he was furious with the whole city over the seizure of the horses; for he saw that Agrippa too was distressed on the city's account. Once the people had received pledges from him, Jesus and his companions, no longer thinking it safe to remain at Tiberias, fled to Tarichaeae. The next day Vespasian sent Trajan ahead with cavalry to the ridge above, to test the temper of the population and see whether all were disposed to peace. When he learned that the people agreed with the suppliants, he took his army and advanced on the city. The inhabitants opened the gates to him and came out to meet him with acclamations, hailing him as savior and benefactor. But since the army was being slowed by the narrowness of the entrances, Vespasian ordered a breach made in the south wall, and so widened the approach for his men.
He gave orders, however, to abstain from plunder and outrage, as a favor to the king; and for the king's sake he also spared the walls, once the leading citizens had pledged that they would remain loyal for the future. In this way he restored the city, which had suffered greatly from the sedition. He then advanced and pitched camp between Tiberias and Tarichaeae, fortifying the camp more strongly, since he suspected that the war would drag on there. For the whole revolutionary element was streaming together into Tarichaeae, trusting in the strength of the city and in the lake, which the local people call Gennesar. The city itself, like Tiberias, lay under the hillside, and wherever it was not washed on every side by the lake, Josephus had fortified it strongly — though less strongly than Tiberias, since he had strengthened the wall there at the outset of the revolt with an abundance of money and manpower, while Tarichaeae received only the remnants of that generosity. The people there had many boats ready on the lake, both to allow them to escape by water if defeated on land, and, if need be, to fight a naval battle.
While the Romans were building their camp, Jesus and his men, deterred neither by the enemy's numbers nor by their good order, rushed out; and at their first onset the wall-builders scattered, and they tore down a little of the construction. But when they saw the heavy infantry massing, they fled back to their own side before suffering any harm. The Romans pursued and drove them to their boats. Once launched, and as far out as they could still strike at the Romans with missiles, they cast their anchors, and packing their ships close together like a phalanx, they fought a naval battle against the enemy on land.
Vespasian, hearing that a great multitude of them had gathered on the plain before the city, sent his son with six hundred picked cavalry. Titus, finding the enemy's numbers overwhelming, sent to his father asking for a larger force. But seeing that most of the cavalry were eager to attack even before reinforcements arrived, while some were quietly cowed by the sheer numbers of the Jews, he stood where all could hear him and spoke as follows:
"Men, Romans — for it is well, at the start of a speech, to remind you of your race, so that you may know who you are and against whom we are about to fight. Our hands have never yet failed to reach any people on the inhabited earth; the Jews, to speak fairly even of them, have until now not tired of being defeated. And it would be shameful, while they stand firm in adversity, for us to grow slack in prosperity. I am glad to see your open eagerness, but I fear that the enemy's numbers may be working some hidden terror in some of you. Consider again, then, what kind of men will be arrayed against what kind of men: the Jews, however bold and however contemptuous of death, are undisciplined, inexperienced in war, and no more than a mob — they should not be called an army. Of our own skill and discipline, what need to speak? This alone is why we train under arms even in peacetime, so that in war we need not measure ourselves against our opponents' numbers. For what use is our continuous soldiering, if we set ourselves against untrained men as though we were equals? Consider too that you, heavy infantry, fight against light-armed men; you, cavalry, against infantry; you, under a general, against men with no general at all — and just as these advantages multiply your own strength many times over, so they strip away far more from the enemy's numbers. Wars are won not by a multitude of men, however warlike, but by courage, even if it is found among few. Numbers are easily arrayed and can defend themselves, but bloated forces are injured by their own weight more than by the enemy's.
"Among the Jews, then, boldness and rashness and desperation take the lead — passions that are strong in success but are extinguished by the smallest setback. Among us, valor, discipline, and that nobility of spirit which flourishes in good fortune and, even in failure, is never broken to the end, take the lead instead. And you will be fighting for greater stakes than the Jews: for even if for them the war is a risk to their freedom and their homeland, what is greater for us than glory, and the concern not to appear, after gaining mastery of the inhabited world, to set the Jews on equal terms with us as rivals? Consider too that we face no fear of suffering anything irreparable, for many are near at hand to help us; yet the victory is ours to seize, and we ought to act before the allies my father is sending us arrive, so that our success may be undivided, and all the greater. I believe that at this very hour my father, and I, and you as well, are all being judged — whether he is worthy of his past successes, whether I am worthy to be his son, and you worthy to be my soldiers. For victory is his habit, and I could not bear to return to him defeated. And how could you not be ashamed to be beaten while your commander risks danger before you? I will risk it, be assured, and I will be the first to charge the enemy. Do not fall behind me, confident that my onset is being backed by God as my ally, and know for certain that we shall achieve something greater than this battle alone."
As Titus was saying this, a superhuman eagerness fell upon the men; and when Trajan joined them with four hundred cavalry before the engagement began, they were vexed, thinking their victory would be diminished by having to share it. Vespasian also sent Antonius Silo with two thousand archers, ordering them to seize the hill opposite the city and hold back the men on the wall. These did as they were ordered and hemmed in those who tried to sally out from that side to help; Titus himself was the first to drive his horse against the enemy, and with a shout the rest followed him, spreading out to cover as much of the plain as the enemy occupied — so that they seemed far more numerous than they were.
The Jews, terrified by their onrush and good order, held out against the charges only briefly; then, pierced by lances and thrown down by the rush of the cavalry, they were trampled underfoot. As great numbers were slaughtered everywhere, they scattered and fled toward the city, each as fast as he could. Titus pressed on those behind and cut them down, drove his horse through clusters of them who tried to break away, rode down from in front those he outran, and trampled over many who had fallen upon one another in the crush; he cut off every line of flight to the wall and turned them back toward the plain, until, forcing their way through by sheer numbers, they broke through and fled together into the city.
There a bitter internal conflict awaited them once more: the local inhabitants, on account of their property and the city, had not wanted to make war from the start, and now, after the defeat, wanted it even less; but the newcomers, who were numerous, pressed all the more for resistance, and as the two factions raged against each other there was shouting and uproar, as though they were on the very point of turning to arms. Titus, hearing the disturbance — for he was not far from the wall — saw that this was the moment, and cried out: "Fellow soldiers, why do we delay, when God is handing the Jews over to us? Take the victory! Do you not hear the shouting? Those who escaped our hands are now fighting each other. We hold the city, if we act quickly; but speed must be joined with hard effort and resolve, for nothing great is ever won without risk. We must forestall not only the enemy's reconciliation — which necessity will soon bring about between them — but also the arrival of our own reinforcements, so that with so great a multitude defeated, we, so few, may take the city by ourselves alone."
With these words he leaped onto his horse and led the way to the lake, riding through it he was the first to enter the city, and the rest followed after him. Terror at his daring fell upon the men on the walls, and no one held his ground to fight or to block him; abandoning their posts, some of Jesus's men fled through the countryside, while others ran down to the lake and ran straight into the enemy. Some were killed as they boarded boats, others as they tried to reach the boats that had already put out. There was great slaughter throughout the city — of the newcomers, all who had not managed to escape resisted and were killed, but the local inhabitants offered no resistance at all; for in hope of pardon, and conscious that they had not chosen to make war, they held back from fighting, until Titus, having killed those responsible, took pity on the local people and put a stop to the killing.
Those who had taken refuge on the lake, once they saw the city captured, rowed out as far as possible from the enemy. Titus sent one of the cavalry to bring his father the good news of the deed. Vespasian, as was natural, was overjoyed at his son's valor and his success — for it seemed that a very great part of the war had been brought down — and he came at once and ordered the city surrounded and guarded, so that no one should slip out of it unnoticed, and commanded that they be killed. The next day he went down to the lake and ordered rafts built against those who had taken refuge there; these were made quickly, thanks to the abundance of timber and the great number of craftsmen.
The lake is called Gennesar after the region adjoining it. It is forty stades in width and a hundred and twenty more in length, yet its water is sweet and very good to drink; for it is finer than the thick water of marshes, and it is clear throughout, bordered everywhere by beaches and sand. It is also pleasantly tempered for drawing water — milder than a river or a spring, yet colder than one would expect a standing body of water to remain. Its water is no less cold than snow when left exposed overnight — which the local people are in the habit of doing in summer. There are various kinds of fish in it, differing in taste and shape from those found elsewhere. It is divided down the middle by the Jordan.
The Jordan appears to rise at Panium, but in fact it flows underground to that point, hidden, from the place called Phiale. This lies on the road to Trachonitis, a hundred and twenty stades from Caesarea as one goes up, not far off to the right. It is aptly named Phiale — "bowl" — from its round shape, being a circular lake; the water always remains level with its rim, neither receding nor overflowing. That the Jordan actually begins here, though this was long unknown, was proved by Philip, who once ruled as tetrarch of Trachonitis: he threw chaff into Phiale at Panium, where the ancients believed the river was born, and found it carried through and brought up again there. The natural beauty of Panium has since been enhanced by royal extravagance, adorned at Agrippa's expense; and from this cave, where the Jordan's visible stream begins, it cuts through the marshes and pools of Lake Semechonitis, and after traversing a further hundred and twenty stades, passing the city of Julias, it crosses through the middle of Gennesar; then, after running through a long stretch of wilderness, it empties into the Lake Asphaltitis.
Bordering Lake Gennesar is a region of the same name, wonderful in its nature and beauty. Its richness of soil refuses no plant, and the inhabitants have planted every kind, for the mildness of its air suits even the most varied species. Walnut trees, the hardiest of all against winter cold, flourish there in abundance, alongside palms, which thrive on heat, and fig trees and olives close by them, for which a gentler air is required. One might call it an act of ambition on nature's part, forcing together things naturally at odds, and a healthy rivalry among the seasons, each as though laying claim to the region for itself; for it not only nourishes, against all expectation, the different fruits, but preserves them as well. The choicest fruits, the grape and the fig, it supplies without interruption for ten months, while the rest ripen through the whole year on their own trees; for besides the mildness of its climate, it is watered by a spring of great fertility, which the local people call Capernaum. Some have taken it for a branch of the Nile, since it produces a fish resembling the coracinus found in the lake at Alexandria. The region stretches along the shore of the lake of the same name for thirty stades, and is twenty stades in width. Such, then, is the nature of the place.
Once the rafts were ready, Vespasian embarked as much of his force as he judged sufficient against those on the lake, and put out. Those hemmed in had no way to escape to land, since the whole country was now hostile, nor could they fight on equal terms at sea; for their boats, small and built for piracy, were weak against the rafts, and the few men crowded into each one were afraid to come close to the massed ranks of Romans standing on the larger craft. Even so, they circled around the rafts, and sometimes came near them, hurling stones at the Romans from a distance and striking at them at close range as they grazed past. But they suffered far the worse in both kinds of fighting: with their stones they accomplished nothing against men protected by armor except a repeated clatter, for they were throwing at men who were shielded, while they themselves were within range of Roman missiles; and whenever they dared to close in, they suffered harm before they could do any, and went down together with their boats. Of those who tried to break through, the Romans speared many with lances as they came within reach, leaped sword in hand into the boats of others, and caught some, trapped between converging rafts, along with their skiffs. Of those thrown into the water, any who tried to come up again were forestalled either by a missile or by a raft closing in on them;
and those who, in their desperation, tried to climb aboard among the enemy had their heads or hands cut off by the Romans. Their destruction was great and took many forms, everywhere alike, until the survivors, turned back, were driven onto land, hemmed in on every side by the boats. Many, pouring out into the water, were struck down by javelins there in the lake itself, and many others who leaped ashore were killed by the Romans on land.
One could see the whole lake stained with blood and filled with corpses, for not a single man escaped alive. In the days that followed a terrible stench and sight hung over the region: the shores were littered with wrecks and with swollen bodies, and the corpses, rotting and bursting in the heat, fouled the air, so that the disaster was not only pitiable to the Jews but loathsome even to those who had caused it.
Such was the end of that sea battle. The dead, counting those who had fallen earlier in the city, numbered six thousand seven hundred.
After the battle Vespasian took his seat on the tribunal at Tarichaeae and separated the local inhabitants from the foreign rabble, since it was this latter group that seemed to have started the war. He deliberated with his officers whether these people too should be spared.
The officers said that releasing them would prove harmful, since men set free, having lost their homelands, would not stay quiet: they were capable of forcing even those to whom they fled for refuge into war. Vespasian recognized that they did not deserve to be saved and that, if released, they would only turn against those who had freed them, yet he still had to decide how they should be put to death. For he suspected that killing them on the spot would provoke the local people to war, since they would not tolerate the slaughter of so many suppliants in their midst; and he could not bring himself to attack men who had come forward under a pledge of safety.
His friends won him over, arguing that nothing was impious in acting against Jews, and that when honor and expediency cannot both be served, the advantageous course must be chosen. So he nodded his assent and granted them an ambiguous kind of safe-conduct, allowing them to leave, but only by the single road leading to Tiberias.
They quickly believed what they wished to believe and set out along the permitted route with their goods openly displayed as if in safety. But the Romans occupied the whole road as far as Tiberias, so that no one could turn aside, and shut them up inside the city. Vespasian then came in and had them all assembled in the stadium. The old men, together with those judged useless, numbering twelve hundred, he ordered killed. Of the young men he picked out the strongest, six thousand of them, and sent them to Nero at the isthmus. The remaining crowd, some thirty-four thousand in number, he sold as slaves, apart from those he granted to Agrippa -- for he allowed the king to do as he wished with those who came from his own kingdom, and the king likewise sold them.
The rest of the throng, drawn from Trachonitis, Gaulanitis, Hippos, and for the most part from the territory of Gadara, were mostly rebels and fugitives, men for whom the disgrace of peace had made war seem preferable. They were captured on the eighth of the month Gorpiaeus.

======== Jewish War — Book 4 ========

As for the Galileans who had revolted from Rome after the fall of Jotapata, they surrendered once the people of Tarichaeae had been defeated, and the Romans took over all the strongholds and cities except Gischala and the men who held Mount Tabor. Joining these holdouts was Gamala, a city lying across the lake opposite Tarichaeae. It belonged to Agrippa's realm, along with Sogane and Seleucia, and all three lay within Gaulanitis: Sogane belonged to the district called Upper Gaulan, Gamala to the Lower; Seleucia stood by Lake Semechonitis. This lake measures thirty stadia in width and sixty in length; its marshes extend as far as the district of Daphne, a delightful place in every respect, with springs that feed the stream called the Little Jordan, which they send on beneath the temple of the golden calf into the greater Jordan.
Agrippa had won over the people of Sogane and Seleucia to his side with pledges of good faith at the very outset of the revolt, but Gamala would not come over, trusting in the strength of its position even more than Jotapata had. A rugged ridge descending from a high mountain rises in the middle into a kind of spine, and from that height it stretches forward, dropping away as much in front as behind, so that its shape resembles a camel — hence its name, though the local people do not pronounce the word precisely. Along its flanks and its front it breaks off into impassable ravines; only at the tail end does it offer any easier going, where it is cut off from the mountain, and even there the inhabitants had rendered it difficult by cutting a trench across it. Built against the steep slope, the houses stood packed one on top of another in extraordinary fashion, and the city, seeming almost to hang in mid-air, tumbled in upon itself because of the steepness of the slope. It leaned toward the south, and its southern ridge, rising to an immense height, formed the city's citadel; above it, unwalled, a cliff dropped away into the deepest of ravines. A spring lay within the wall, at the point where the town came to an end.
Being a city naturally hard to attack, Joseph fortified it further, strengthening it with tunnels and trenches. Its people, trusting in the natural strength of the site, were bolder than the defenders of Jotapata had been, though far fewer of them were fighting men; and confident in their position, they did not think they needed more, even though the city was crowded with refugees who had fled there for its security. This is why it also held out against the forces Agrippa had sent ahead for the siege, for seven months.
Vespasian now broke camp at Ammathus, where he had been encamped before Tiberias — Ammathus, translated, means "hot springs," for there is in it a spring of hot water good for healing — and marched to Gamala. Given how the city lay, he could not surround it entirely with a ring of guard-posts, but he stationed watches at the points where this was possible and occupied the mountain that overlooked the city. When the legions had fortified their camps above it, as was their custom, work began on siege-ramps at the tail end of the ridge: the eastern section, where the city's highest tower stood, was assigned to the Fifteenth legion, the Fifth worked opposite the middle of the city, and it was left to fill in the trenches and ravines — to the Tenth.
Meanwhile King Agrippa approached the walls and tried to open talks with the men stationed there about surrender, but one of the slingers struck him on the right elbow with a stone. He was quickly surrounded and helped away by his own men, but the incident spurred the Romans on to press the siege harder, both from anger on the king's behalf and from fear for themselves — reasoning that men who would leave no extreme of cruelty untried against foreigners and enemies would show no less savagery toward one of their own kinsmen, a man giving them counsel for their own good.
The ramps were completed quickly, thanks to the sheer number of hands at work and their practiced skill, and the siege engines were brought up. Chares and Joseph, the two most powerful men in the city, drew up their men-at-arms despite their fear, since they did not suppose they could hold out in the siege for long, given that their water and other supplies would not last. Even so, after rousing their men's spirits, they led them out to the wall, and for a short while beat back those bringing up the engines; but under fire from catapults and stone-throwers they withdrew into the city. The Romans then brought their battering rams up on three sides, shook the wall down, and poured in over the ruins with a great blast of trumpets and clashing of weapons, shouting their war cry as they closed with the defenders.
For a while the townspeople held their ground at the first points of entry, blocking the way forward and stubbornly keeping the Romans back; but overwhelmed by superior numbers pressing in from every side, they were driven back toward the upper part of the city, then turned and fell upon the enemy pursuing them, forcing them back down the slope and, trapped in the narrow, difficult ground, cut them down. The Romans, unable either to fight off the men above them or to force their way forward — their own comrades were pressing in from behind — took refuge on the roofs of the houses nearby, which were low, single-story buildings. But the houses quickly collapsed under the crowding, unable to bear the weight; as one house fell it brought down several others beneath it, and those in turn brought down others still lower. This destroyed a great many of the Romans; for out of sheer desperation, even as they watched the roofs sagging beneath them, they kept leaping onto them. Many were buried under the debris; many, trying to escape, were caught by parts of their bodies as they fled; and the dust choked and killed a great many more.
The people of Gamala took this for God's own help, and, careless of the harm it also did to them, pressed the attack, driving the enemy back onto the roofs, and as they slid and stumbled in the narrow alleys, kept killing from above any who fell. The ruins supplied them stones enough, and the enemy's own dead supplied them iron: pulling the swords from the fallen, they used them to finish off men in their death agony. Many, seeing the buildings already collapsing beneath them, threw themselves down and died. And even for those who turned to flee, escape was not easy; for in their ignorance of the streets, and blinded by the thick dust, they could not even recognize one another, and cut each other down or trampled one another underfoot. With difficulty the Romans found their way to the exits and withdrew from the city.
Vespasian, meanwhile, kept staying close to his hard-pressed troops — a terrible anguish had gripped him at seeing the city collapsing on top of his army — and, forgetting his own safety, found himself, without noticing it, drawn little by little to the highest point of the city, where he was left in the very midst of the danger with only a handful of men — for his son Titus was not with him at that moment, having been sent to Mucianus in Syria. To turn and run he judged neither safe nor fitting; so, calling to mind the hardships he had endured from his youth and his own courage, as though seized by some divine inspiration, he locked his men's shields together with his own, body to body and arm to arm, and stood his ground against the battle pouring down on him from above, holding firm without flinching before the mass of the enemy or their missiles, until the enemy, sensing the almost superhuman steadiness of his spirit, slackened their onset. As their pressure grew weaker, he himself withdrew step by step, never turning his back, until he was clear of the wall.
A great many Romans fell in this battle, among them the decurion Aebutius, a man who had proved himself outstandingly brave not only in the engagement in which he fell but on every earlier occasion, and had inflicted great harm on the Jews. A centurion named Gallus, cut off in the confusion with ten soldiers, slipped into a house, and there, overhearing the people inside talking over dinner about what the town council was planning against the Romans or concerning themselves, he and his men (both he and those with him were Syrians) rose up in the night, cut every one of them down, and with his soldiers made his way safely back to the Romans.
Vespasian now set about consoling an army disheartened by an unfamiliar defeat — for they had never before suffered a setback of such magnitude — and even more ashamed at having left their general alone amid the dangers. Of his own danger he said nothing, so as not even to seem to be finding fault with the ordeal; instead he spoke of the common cause, saying they must bear the nature of war bravely, bearing in mind that victory is never won without bloodshed, and that fortune both takes her toll and stands beside us in turn.
"After killing so many tens of thousands of Jews," he said, "we have paid only a small toll to fate in return. Just as it is crass to be carried away by success, so it is unmanly to cower under reverses; for change comes swiftly in either direction, and the best man is the one who stays level-headed even in success, so that his good spirits hold and he can wrestle his way back from failure. What has happened now came about neither through any weakness on your part nor through any valor on the Jews' side; rather, the terrain itself is to blame both for their advantage and for our failure. If any of you were to blame anything, it would be the recklessness of your charge: when the enemy fled up to the higher ground, you ought to have held back, and not chased danger standing directly above your heads, but instead, once masters of the lower town, drawn out those who had fled upward, little by little, into a safe and stable fight. As it was, in your uncontrolled rush for victory, you neglected your own safety. Recklessness in war, and a maddened onrush, is not the Roman way — we win everything through experience and discipline — it is the way of barbarians, and it is exactly what defeats the Jews themselves. You must instead call your own courage back to mind, and feel anger rather than despair at a setback that was undeserved. Let each man seek the best consolation from his own right hand: that way you will avenge the fallen and punish those who killed them. I myself will try, as I did today, to lead you against the enemy in every battle, and to be the last to withdraw."
With words like these he restored the army's spirits. As for the people of Gamala, their success — coming as it did so unexpectedly and on so great a scale — gave them courage for a short while; but reflecting afterward that they had thereby cut off their own hopes of surrender on terms, and realizing that they had no way of escape, since provisions were already running out, they fell into deep despondency and their spirits sank. Even so, they did not neglect what they could do for their own safety: the bravest among them manned the breaches in the wall, while the rest held the parts still standing, keeping watch. When the Romans reinforced their ramps and made ready to renew the assault, many of the townspeople slipped out of the city by way of ravines too rough for guard-posts to be placed, and through underground tunnels. Those who stayed behind, for fear of being caught, wasted away from want, since all the food to be had was gathered up for the men still able to fight.
While the people of Gamala endured such sufferings, Vespasian, as a side-operation to the siege, turned his attention to the men who held Mount Tabor, which lies midway between the great plain and Scythopolis. Its height rises to thirty stadia, and it can barely be climbed even on its northern face; the summit is a plain of twenty-six stadia, entirely walled around. Joseph had raised this great circuit of walls in just forty days, supplied from below with both building material and water — for the settlers there had only rain-water to rely on. Once a great crowd had gathered there, Vespasian sent Placidus with six hundred cavalry against it. For him, scaling the mountain was out of the question, so he tried to draw down the majority with offers of pledges and appeals for peace. They came down, but with a counter-scheme of their own: Placidus spoke gently, hoping to catch them out in the open plain, while they came down pretending to be persuaded, meaning to fall upon him off his guard. But Placidus's cunning won out: when the Jews opened the fighting, he feigned flight, and having drawn his pursuers far out onto the plain, he wheeled his cavalry about, routed them, and killed most of them, then cut off the remainder and blocked their way back up the mountain. Some abandoned Tabor and fled toward Jerusalem; the local inhabitants, whose water had by now run out, took pledges of safety and surrendered both the mountain and themselves to Placidus.
Meanwhile, at Gamala, the more daring of the defenders managed to slip away in flight, undetected, while the weak died of hunger; the fighting men kept up the resistance until, on the twenty-second of the month Hyperberetaeus, three soldiers of the Fifteenth legion crept up during the morning watch to a tower that projected in front of their position and quietly began undermining it. The guards stationed above neither noticed them approaching nor noticed them once they had arrived, for it was night. The soldiers, taking care to avoid noise, rolled out five of the largest stones and slipped clear. The tower suddenly collapsed with a tremendous crash, bringing its guards down with it in the fall; the men on the other watch-posts, thrown into confusion, fled, and the Romans killed many who tried to force their way out — among them Joseph, who was struck down and killed by a man's missile as he tried to escape over the broken section of wall.
Those in the city who were shaken by the noise ran about in a panic, as though the enemy had already broken in everywhere. There too Chares, who lay sick and under treatment, died, his terror joining with his illness to bring about his death. The Romans, still mindful of their earlier reverse, did not force their way in until the twenty-third of the same month. Titus, who had by now arrived, in his anger at the blow the Romans had suffered in his absence, picked out two hundred cavalry, together with a body of infantry, and entered the city quietly. When he had made his way in, the sentries, noticing him, rushed to arms with a shout, and word of the breach quickly spread to those inside as well; some snatched up their children and wives, dragging them along, and fled up toward the citadel, wailing and crying; others, running straight into Titus, fell without a pause; and those who, in their confusion, were prevented from reaching the summit, stumbled instead into the Roman guard-posts. On every side rose the endless groaning of the dying, and blood ran down the slope until it flooded the whole city.
Vespasian now brought his entire force in to reinforce the men chasing those fleeing toward the citadel. The summit was rocky on every side and hard to climb, rising to an immense height, and everywhere hemmed in and cut across by ravines of unfathomable depth. There the Jews harassed the men climbing up with missiles of every kind, and by rolling down boulders on them, while they themselves, by virtue of the height, were hard to reach with any weapon in return. But then, against them, there arose a sudden storm sent by God for their destruction — one that carried the Romans'
and shouting, while those who ran into Titus's path fell without ceasing; and those who were kept from scrambling up to the peak were driven by sheer helplessness down onto the Roman guard-posts. Everywhere the groaning of the dying was endless, and blood, pouring down the slope, drowned the whole city. Vespasian brought up his whole force to support the men chasing the fugitives up to the citadel.
The peak itself was rocky on every side and hard to climb, rising to an immense height, and hemmed in all around by ravines that fell away into the depths. There the Jews harassed the men climbing toward them with missiles of every kind, and especially by rolling down boulders; they themselves, because of the height, were hard for any missile to reach. Then, to their ruin, a violent and seemingly supernatural gale struck head-on, carrying the Romans' missiles into them while turning their own aside and sweeping them off course. Because of the force of the wind the defenders could get no footing to stand on the cliff edges, having nothing steady to hold to, nor could they even see the men climbing up. So the Romans pressed on upward, and once they had surrounded them, some they cut down before they could defend themselves, others while they still held out their hands in surrender; and the memory of all they had lost in the first assault fanned their fury against everyone alike.
Giving up all hope of survival, most of the people, gathering up their children and wives around them, flung themselves over the cliff into the ravine below the citadel, which was extremely deep at that point. As it turned out, the fury the Romans vented on them proved gentler than the despair the captured people inflicted on themselves: some four thousand were slaughtered by Roman hands, but more than five thousand were found to have thrown themselves down. Of all the women, none survived except two, the daughters of a sister of Philip — Philip himself being a distinguished man who had served as tetrarch under King Agrippa. They survived because they escaped notice during the massacre that followed the city's fall; for at that time not even infants were spared, many of them being repeatedly seized and hurled from the citadel. So Gamla was taken on the twenty-third of the month Hyperberetaios, the revolt there having begun on the twenty-fourth of Gorpiaios.
Only Gischala, a small town in Galilee, still remained unconquered. Most of its population wanted peace — they were mostly farmers who depended entirely on hopes for their harvests — but no small band of bandits had infiltrated among them, and some of the townspeople joined in their sickness. The man who drove them into revolt and organized them was the son of a certain Leius, John, a cunning man of the most shifting character, quick to hope for great things and clever at achieving what he hoped for, and plainly devoted to war as a path to power. Under him the rebellious element in Gischala had been arrayed, and because of these men the common people, who might well have sent envoys about surrender, instead awaited the Roman advance as if war were still their lot. Against them Vespasian sent Titus with a thousand cavalry, while he withdrew the tenth legion to Scythopolis.
He himself, with the two remaining legions, returned to Caesarea, giving the men rest from their continual exertions and expecting that, thanks to the abundance of the cities, both their bodies and their spirit would be built back up for the struggles still to come; for he foresaw no small labor still awaiting him at Jerusalem, since that city was the capital and stood over the whole nation, and into it were streaming all who were fleeing the war. Its natural strength, together with the construction of its walls, created anxiety enough on its own; and he judged the spirit and daring of its men, even apart from the walls, hard to deal with. For this reason he kept training his soldiers like athletes preparing for a contest.
When Titus rode up to Gischala, it would have been easy to take the city by immediate assault, but he knew that if it were taken by force the soldiers would slaughter the population without restraint. He was already sated with killing, and he pitied the thought of the greater part of the innocent perishing indiscriminately along with the guilty; so he preferred to bring the city over by terms. And indeed, as the wall was crowded with men, most of them from the corrupted rebel band, he told them he was astonished:
on what did they rely, being the only ones left still bearing arms against Rome after every other city had fallen, when they had seen far stronger cities overthrown by a single assault, while those who had trusted in Rome's pledge of good faith now enjoyed their own property in safety — a pledge he was even now extending to them, bearing no grudge for their obstinacy? Hope of freedom, he said, was forgivable, but persistence when it was hopeless was not; for if they would not be won over by generous words and pledges of good faith, they would soon feel the full weight of Roman arms without mercy, and it would very quickly become clear that their wall, in which alone among the Galileans they placed such confident trust, would buckle under Roman siege engines, proving them stubborn captives.
To this the ordinary townspeople had no chance to reply, nor even to go up onto the wall, for the whole of it had already been seized in advance by the bandits, and men stood guard at the gates so that no one could go out to the negotiations or let any of the cavalry into the city. John himself replied that he welcomed the terms and would either persuade or compel those who refused them; but he asked that Titus grant that one day —
for it was the Sabbath — out of respect for the law of the Jews, under which it was as forbidden for them to take up arms as it was to conclude a treaty of peace. Nor were the Romans ignorant, he said, that the whole cycle of the Sabbath was for them a day free from all work, and that to violate it was no less an impiety for the one who compelled the violation than for those compelled to commit it. And no harm at all, he said, would come to Titus from this postponement;
for what could anyone plan to do by night beyond flight, when it was open to him to surround the town with his camp and keep watch? It would be a great gain for them not to transgress any of their ancestral customs, and it befitted one who was granting unexpected peace to those he was sparing to respect their laws as well. With such arguments he outwitted Titus, aiming not so much at the Sabbath as at his own survival; for he feared that if the city were taken at once he would be caught inside it, and his only hope of life lay in escaping by night.
It was, then, God's own doing — God who was preserving John for the destruction of Jerusalem — not only that Titus was persuaded by the pretext of the postponement, but also that he pitched camp farther from the city, near Kedasa, an inland village of the Tyrians, strong and always full of hatred and hostility toward the Galileans because of its large population, a hostility that its natural strength only encouraged the more.
During the night, when John saw no Roman guard posted around the city, he seized the moment and fled toward Jerusalem, taking with him not only the armed men around him but also a great many of the less active townspeople, together with their families. Up to about twenty stades it was possible for him, hard pressed as he was by fear of capture and of death, to bring along with him the crowd of women and children, but beyond that point they were left behind, and the wailing of those left to fend for themselves was terrible; for the farther each person's own family fell behind, the nearer they imagined the enemy to be, and thinking the men who would take them captive were already upon them, they were struck with terror, and turned at the mere sound made by one another's running, as though those they were fleeing were already there.
Many of them stumbled off the road entirely, and around the highway many were crushed in the rivalry of those pressing ahead of one another. Pitiful was the destruction of the women and children, and some, taking heart, called out with wailing cries to their husbands and kinsmen to wait for them. But John's own order prevailed, as he shouted to them to save themselves and take refuge wherever they could, since they would also be able there to avenge those left behind, should the Romans seize them. So the mass of fugitives scattered, each according to their own strength or speed.
Titus, when day came, arrived at the wall to conclude the agreement. The people opened the gates to him, and coming out with their families they acclaimed him as a benefactor who had freed the city from siege; for they revealed at once John's flight and begged him to spare them and, entering the city, to punish those revolutionaries who remained behind.
He, setting the people's petitions in second place for the moment, sent a detachment of cavalry in pursuit of John. They did not overtake him — he had already made his escape into Jerusalem — but of those who had fled with him they killed some six thousand, and rounded up and brought back women and children numbering close to three thousand. Titus was vexed that he had not been able to punish John at once for his deception, but, having in the great number of captives and the slain a sufficient consolation for his frustrated anger, he entered the city amid acclamations, and after ordering his soldiers to pull down a small part of the wall, as a token that it had been taken by right of conquest, he restrained those who were stirring up trouble in the city by threats rather than punishment;
for he saw that many, out of personal hatreds and private quarrels, would denounce the innocent as guilty if he set out to distinguish those deserving punishment. It was better, he judged, to leave the guilty man hanging in suspense and fear than to destroy along with him someone who did not deserve it; for the guilty man might perhaps even be brought to his senses by fear of punishment, out of respect for the pardon granted for what was past, whereas a punishment inflicted on someone already destroyed could never be undone. Still, he secured the city with a garrison, by which he meant to hold the revolutionaries in check and leave the peace-loving citizens more confident.
So all of Galilee was conquered, after costing the Romans much hard toil on their way toward Jerusalem. As John made his entrance, the whole population poured out, and around each of the men who had escaped with him a vast crowd gathered, asking after news of the disasters abroad. Their still-heaving, gasping breath betrayed the desperation of their flight, yet even in their misery they boasted, claiming they had not fled the Romans but had come to fight them from a position of safety; for it was senseless and useless, they said, to risk their lives recklessly for Gischala and other weak little towns, when they ought instead to husband their weapons and their strength for the capital and guard it together.
In saying this they were hinting at the fall of Gischala, and most people understood their so-called dignified withdrawal for what it really was — flight. But when word of what had happened to the captives was heard, no small confusion seized the population, and they drew heavy conclusions about their own coming ruin from it. John himself was not much abashed by the losses; going around to each group he spurred them on to war with hopes, making Roman strength out to be weak and exaggerating his own force, and mocking the ignorance of those inexperienced in warfare,
claiming that not even if the Romans grew wings could they ever get over the wall of Jerusalem, they who had struggled so hard around the villages of Galilee and worn out their siege engines against the walls there. By such talk most of the young men were further corrupted and roused for war, while among the sober and the old there was not one who, foreseeing what was coming, did not already mourn as though the city were as good as lost.
So the populace was in such confusion, while the population of the countryside had already split off from the factional strife within Jerusalem even before this. For Titus went from Gischala to Caesarea, and Vespasian went from Caesarea to Jamnia and Azotus, brought both under his control, installed garrisons in them, and returned bringing with him a great number of those who had come over willingly to the Roman side. In every city there arose
turmoil and civil war, for as soon as men had breathing room from the Romans they turned their hands against each other. There was bitter strife between those in love with war and those who longed for peace. First the spirit of rivalry took hold within households among people once of one mind, then dearest friends, growing estranged from one another, and each gathering to those who shared his own choice, at last stood arrayed against each other in whole factions.
Faction was everywhere, and the revolutionary element eager for arms got the upper hand over the age and prudence of their elders through sheer youth and daring. At first each group turned to plundering the local inhabitants, then, organizing themselves into companies, to banditry throughout the countryside, until in cruelty and lawlessness they were no different from the Romans toward their own countrymen, and being plundered by Romans came to seem, to the victims, far the lighter fate.
The garrisons in the cities, partly from reluctance to expose themselves to hardship and partly from hatred of the nation, gave little or no help to those being wronged, until, glutted with plunder from the countryside, the chief bandits from every band gathered together, and, having become a single mass of villainy, infiltrated into Jerusalem — a city with no commander-in-chief and one that, by ancestral custom, admitted without question anyone of its own people,
at a time when everyone supposed that all who were pouring in came as allies out of goodwill. This, quite apart from the factional strife, later helped drown the city; for the useless and idle crowd used up in advance the supplies that might have sustained the fighting men, and thereby brought upon themselves, in addition to the war, factional strife and famine as well. Other bandits, too, came in from the countryside into the city, and,
joining forces with those already inside and becoming still more dangerous, no longer left off any atrocity. They did not confine their daring to plunder and robbery but went as far as murder — not by night or in secret or against random victims, but openly, in broad daylight, and beginning with the most eminent men. The first they seized was Antipas, a man of royal blood and one of the most powerful men in the city,
trusted enough to have charge of the public treasury; him they arrested and imprisoned. After him they seized a certain Levias, one of the notables, and Syphas son of Aregetes, whose family was likewise of royal blood, and who was reckoned among the leading men of the countryside. A terrible panic gripped the population, and, as though the city had already been taken by an enemy in war, each person clung only to his own individual safety.
But the chains of those they had seized were not enough for them, nor did they think it safe to keep such powerful men under guard for long; for their households, they reasoned, being far from lacking in numbers, were quite capable of striking back in their defense, and moreover the populace itself might well rise up if stirred by such lawlessness. So they resolved to kill them, and sent a certain John, the most ready of their number for murder, who was called
'son of Dorcas' in the local tongue; with ten men he came together into the prison and, swords drawn, butchered the prisoners there. For so great a crime they told great lies, inventing pretexts — they claimed the men had been negotiating with the Romans about surrendering Jerusalem, and that they had killed traitors to the common freedom, altogether boasting of their crimes as though they had become the city's benefactors and saviors. Matters came to such a pitch
that the people sank into abject humiliation and terror while these men rose to such a pitch of madness that even the election of the high priests lay in their hands. They made void the family lines from which, by hereditary succession, the high priests had always been appointed, and installed men obscure and low-born, so as to have accomplices in their impieties; for men who had come by the highest office undeservedly were bound to obey those who had given it to them. And they set at odds
the men in authority too, with all manner of schemes and slanders, seizing their opportunity in the rivalries the leading men engaged in among themselves as they tried to restrain them, until, gorged past all measure on crimes against men, they turned their outrage even against what was sacred, and with feet still defiled walked into the Holy Place. When the populace at last began to rise up against them — for the eldest of the chief priests, Ananus, a man of the greatest good sense, was urging them on, and perhaps
...and would have saved the city, had he escaped the conspirators' hands. But they made the temple of God their own fortress and their refuge from the people's uprisings, and the sanctuary became their tyrants' den. Mockery mixed with these horrors, more painful still than the acts themselves: testing the people's terror and gauging their own strength, they undertook to fill the high-priesthood by lot
though the succession to that office ran, as we have said, by family line. The pretext for their scheme was an ancient custom, on the ground that the high priesthood had once, long ago, been filled by lot; but the truth of it was the overthrow of a more binding law, a device by which men installed officers of their own through themselves, for the sake of power. So they summoned one of the priestly clans, called Eniachin, and cast lots for a high priest. By chance the lot fell
on the very man whose choice most exposed their lawlessness: one Phanni by name, son of Samuel, of the village of Aphtha - a man not only unconnected with the high-priestly line but who, out of sheer rusticity, did not even clearly know what the high priesthood was. They dragged him from the countryside against his will and dressed him up, as if for a part on a stage, in a mask not his own, putting the sacred vestments on him and instructing him, as the occasion demanded, in what he had to do.
To them this monstrous impiety was a joke and a game, but the other priests, watching from a distance as the law was mocked, were moved to tears and lamented the destruction of the sacred honors. This outrage the people would not endure, but rose as one man, as if to overthrow a tyranny. Indeed those who seemed to stand foremost among them - Gorion son of Joseph and Symeon son of Gamaliel - stirred them up, both in full assemblies and by going about privately to each man, urging that at last they take vengeance on these destroyers of freedom and cleanse the sanctuary of men of blood; and the most respected of the high priests, Jesus son of Gamalas and Ananus son of Ananus, in their meetings repeatedly reproached the people for their sluggishness and roused them against the zealots - for this was the name
these men had given themselves, as though for admirable pursuits, rather than because they had rivaled, and outdone, the worst deeds ever done. Now when the people had gathered in assembly, and all were indignant at the seizure of the sanctuary, at the plundering, and at the killings, but had not yet been roused to strike back, since they judged - rightly - that the zealots would be hard to overcome, Ananus stood up among them and,
looking many times toward the temple, his eyes filling with tears, said: "It would have been good for me to have died before I saw the house of God burdened with such abominations, and its untrodden, holy places crowded with the feet of murderers. Yet here I stand, wearing the high priest's robe and bearing the most honored of all revered titles, still alive, still clinging to life, unwilling even for my old age's sake to accept a glorious death - if indeed I must die alone, giving up, as if in some wilderness, only my own life for God. For what is the good of living among a people numb to its own disasters, among men who have lost all power to feel what is being done to them with their own hands? You let yourselves be robbed and say nothing; you are beaten and stay silent; no one so much as groans aloud for the murdered. Oh, the bitterness of this tyranny!
But why do I blame the tyrants? Were they not nursed by you, by your own long-suffering? Was it not you who, by overlooking the first conspirators while they were still few, made them many, and who, staying quiet while they armed, turned those very weapons against yourselves - when you ought to have crushed their first stirrings, back when they were only hurling abuse at their kinsmen? Instead you paid no heed, and so spurred these criminals on to plunder, and when houses were being sacked no one said a word; so at last they seized the very owners of those houses, and as they were dragged through the middle of the city no one came to their aid. Others they tortured in chains - men you yourselves had betrayed; I will not say how many, or who they were - but no one helped those in bonds, uncharged and untried. It followed naturally that we should see the same men murdered. We watched even that, like a flock of dumb animals always losing its finest victim to the slaughter, and not one of you so much as raised his voice, let alone his hand.
Bear it, then - go on bearing it, watching the holy things trampled underfoot, having set every rung of this ladder of crime beneath these godless men's feet yourselves, and do not now balk at how high they have climbed; for indeed, even now, they would certainly have gone further still, had they had anything greater left to destroy among the holy things. The strongest part of the city is already in their grip - let the temple now be called a citadel, or a fortress, if you will. With such a tyranny entrenched over you, with your enemies looking down on you from the height, what are you deliberating, and on what do you pin your hopes? Will you wait for the Romans, to come and rescue our holy places for us? Have things truly come to such a pass for this city, that even our enemies should have to pity us?
Will you not rise up, most wretched of men, and, turning to face the blows - a thing one can see even in wild beasts - defend yourselves against those who strike you? Will you not, each of you, call to mind your own private disasters, and, setting what you have suffered before your eyes, sharpen your resolve at last to strike back? Has the most precious and most natural of all passions died in you - the love of freedom? Have we become lovers of slavery and of masters, as if we had inherited submission from our forefathers? Yet they fought many great wars for their self-rule, and yielded neither to the power of Egypt nor to that of the Medes rather than do as they were commanded. But why speak of our forefathers? Even this present war against the Romans - I will not stop to argue whether it serves us or the reverse - what pretext does it have, if not freedom?
And shall we, who could not endure the masters of the whole world, put up with tyrants of our own race? And yet, to submit to outsiders one might set down to a fortune that has once defeated us; but to give way to wicked men of our own house is the mark of the base, and of men who choose their servitude. And since I have once mentioned the Romans, I will not hide from you a thought that came to me in the middle of this speech and turned my mind: that even if we should fall under their power - though may that trial never come to pass - we could suffer nothing harsher than what these men here have already done to us. Is it not enough to make one weep, to see the Romans' own offerings standing in the temple, while men of our own blood have stripped its spoils and destroyed the nobility of our mother city, and have murdered men whom even the Romans, had they been the victors, would have spared?
The Romans have never once crossed the boundary set for the profane, nor transgressed a single one of our sacred customs; they have shuddered even at a distance before the holy precincts. Yet men born in this very land, raised under our own customs, and called Jews, walk about in the midst of the holy places with hands still warm from the blood of their own countrymen. Does anyone, then, fear a foreign war, when set beside enemies within our own walls who are far more moderate than we ourselves? Indeed, if names must be fitted honestly to facts, one might well find that the Romans are the guarantors of our laws, and the enemy is within.
But that the plotters against our freedom deserve utter destruction, and that no punishment one could devise would match their deeds, I think you have all come here already convinced, roused to act against them by your own sufferings even before my words. Perhaps many of you are alarmed at their numbers, their daring, and further at the advantage their position gives them. But all this arose, as it were, out of your own neglect, and will only grow if you delay further still; for their numbers swell daily, as every villain deserts to join his like, and nothing so far has checked their daring, holding as they do the higher ground - and they will use it, and with preparation too, if we give them time.
But believe me: if we press upon them, their own conscience will make them the more cowed, and reflection will strip away the advantage of their height. Perhaps the divine power, once outraged, will turn their own missiles back upon them, and these impious men will be destroyed by their own weapons. Let them only see us before them, and they are already undone. And it is a fine thing, even where some danger attends it, to die at the sacred gates, and to give up one's life, if not for wife and children, then for God and for the holy things. I myself will lead you, in counsel and in arm alike, and you will find no plan wanting from me for your safety, nor will you see me sparing my own body."
With these words Ananus roused the people against the zealots, well aware that they were already hard to overcome, given their numbers, their youth, and their high spirit, and still more because of their guilty conscience for what they had done - for he knew they would never yield, hoping for no ultimate pardon for their crimes. Even so, he chose to suffer anything at all rather than stand by while the state fell into such confusion. The people shouted for him to lead them against those he had denounced, and each man stood ready to be first into danger.
While Ananus was enrolling and arraying the men fit for battle, the zealots learned of the undertaking - for informants brought them word of everything the people were doing - and, enraged, burst out of the temple in a body and by companies, sparing none they came upon. Ananus quickly gathered the populace, who outnumbered the zealots but fell short of them in arms and in discipline. On both sides eagerness made up what was lacking: the men from the city had taken up an anger stronger than any weapon, while those from the temple brought a daring that surpassed any numbers.
The one side supposed the city unlivable unless they cut the brigands out of it; the zealots supposed that, if they failed to prevail, no punishment would be spared them. So, driven by their passions, they clashed - at first, in the city and before the temple, hurling stones at one another and shooting missiles from a distance, but once either side broke and fled, the victors turned to their swords. Slaughter was great on both sides, and the wounded were many. The people's fallen were carried off to their homes by their kinsmen, but any zealot who was struck went up into the temple and stained the holy pavement with his blood - so that one might truly say it was their own blood that defiled the sanctuary.
In these skirmishes it was the brigands, always sallying out and back, who kept the upper hand; but the people, growing angrier and ever more numerous, reproaching those who gave ground and, pressing from behind, giving those who turned no room to retreat, threw their whole weight against the enemy. When the zealots could no longer hold against that force and began, little by little, to fall back into the temple, Ananus and his men burst in along with them.
Panic fell on the zealots at the loss of the outer court, and, fleeing into the inner precinct, they quickly barred the gates. Ananus decided against storming the sacred gates - not least because the defenders were hurling missiles down from above - and, besides, he judged it unlawful to bring the people in, even in victory, without their having first undergone purification. So he chose about six thousand armed men by lot from the whole body and posted them as guards along the porticoes; others relieved these in rotation, and every man was bound to take his turn on watch in his proper order, though many men of rank, released by those in command, hired poorer men to stand guard duty in their place.
The ruin of all these men was brought about by John, whom we have said fled from Gischala - a most treacherous man, carrying in his heart a terrible passion for tyranny, who had long been plotting from a distance against the state of affairs. And now, pretending to hold the people's views, he went about with Ananus, joining the leading men in council both by day and by night as they made their rounds of the guard posts, but reported their secrets to the zealots, so that every plan of the people, before it was even properly settled, became known to their enemies through him.
To avoid falling under suspicion he lavished excessive attentions on Ananus and the leaders of the people. But his very eagerness worked against him: his groundless flattery only made him the more suspected, and his being everywhere, uninvited, gave the impression that he was betraying their secrets. For they saw that the enemy was aware of everything they planned, and no one seemed a more likely source for such reports than John.
It was not easy to be rid of him, since he was a capable man in wickedness and, besides, no obscure figure, having also armed and attached to himself many of the council's own members; so instead they resolved to bind him by oaths to good will. John readily swore that he would be well disposed to the people, that he would betray to their enemies neither counsel nor action, and that he would join in putting down the aggressors, by hand and by counsel alike.
Ananus and his party, trusting these oaths, now admitted him to their deliberations without suspicion, and even sent him as an envoy to the zealots to discuss terms - for they were anxious above all that the sanctuary not be defiled through their own doing, and that none of their countrymen should fall within it. But John, exactly as he had sworn to the zealots to favor them and not act against them, went inside, and, standing in their midst, declared that he had many times put himself at risk on their behalf, so that they should remain ignorant of none of the secret plans that Ananus and his party had made against them;
and that now he and all of them together were courting the gravest danger, unless some more-than-human help should come to their aid. For Ananus, he said, meant to delay no longer: he had already persuaded the people to send envoys to Vespasian, urging him to come at once and take the city, and had proclaimed a day of purification against them for the following day, so that the people might close with them either by entering under cover of the rite or by force. He said he could not see how much longer they could hold out on guard, or how they could stand in battle against so many.
He added that he himself had been sent, by God's providence, as their envoy to discuss these terms - terms Ananus was offering only so that he might fall upon them the less suspecting. They must therefore either plead for their lives with the guards in words, or procure some help from outside; for those who warmed themselves with hope of pardon, should they be overpowered, had forgotten their own crimes, or supposed that as soon as the wrongdoers repented, their victims must at once be reconciled to them. But wronged men, he said, often come to hate their wrongdoers all the more, and
...repentance, while for the wronged their anger grows harsher once they have the power to indulge it; and lying in wait for them were the friends and kinsmen of the dead, and a populace so vast and so enraged over the overthrow of the laws and courts that even if some small part of it were inclined to pity, that part would be swallowed up by the much greater number raging in fury.
Such were the various threats John heaped up all at once to intimidate them, though he did not dare speak openly of help from outside — he only hinted at the Idumaeans. And to provoke the leaders of the zealots individually as well, he accused Ananus of savagery and claimed he was threatening them by name. Among them was Eleazar son of Gion, who indeed seemed the most capable of the group both at grasping what needed to be done and at carrying it out, and a certain Zacharias son of Amphicalleus, both of priestly descent.
These two, on top of the general threats, heard also of threats made against themselves in particular, and further that Ananus's faction, in securing power for itself, was calling in the Romans — for John had invented this charge too. For a long while they were at a loss what to do, caught in so sudden a crisis; the people, they were told, were preparing to attack them before long, while the very speed of the plot against them had cut off any hope of outside help, since everything would be done to them before their allies even learned of it.
Even so, they decided to call in the Idumaeans. They wrote a brief letter claiming that Ananus was betraying the capital to the Romans after deceiving the people, that they themselves had revolted for the sake of freedom and were now held under guard in the temple, and that only a little time remained to decide their fate: unless the Idumaeans came quickly to help, they themselves would fall to Ananus and his allies, and the city would fall to the Romans first. They charged the messengers to say most of this by word of mouth to the Idumaean leaders.
Two vigorous men were chosen for the errand, capable speakers and persuasive in argument, and — more useful still — remarkably swift on their feet; for they knew the Idumaeans would need no persuading, being a turbulent and undisciplined people, always primed for upheaval and delighting in change, stirred to arms by the slightest flattery from those in need, and rushing to battle as though hurrying to a festival. Speed was essential, and the two men sent, sparing no effort, both happened to be named Ananias. They duly reached the Idumaean leaders.
The Idumaeans, stunned by the letter and by what the messengers reported, ran through the nation as though possessed, proclaiming the call to arms. The mass mustered faster than the summons could reach them, and all seized their weapons as though fighting for the freedom of the capital itself. Organized into twenty thousand men, they marched on Jerusalem under four commanders: John, James son of Sosas, and with them Simon son of Thakeas and Phineas son of Clusoth.
Ananus knew nothing of the messengers' departure, any more than the guards did, but the Idumaeans' approach did not escape him. Forewarned, he shut the gates against them and kept the walls under close guard. Still, he did not decide on outright war with them, but chose to persuade them with words before resorting to arms. Jesus, the senior chief priest after Ananus, took his stand on the tower facing them and spoke.
"Many and varied troubles have gripped this city, but in none of them have I marveled at fortune as I do now, that it should even cooperate with the wicked in doing the unthinkable. Here you stand, ready to defend the most depraved of men against us, with as much eagerness as would have suited an advance against barbarians answering the capital's own call. Had I seen your ranks made up of men resembling those who summoned you, I would not think your zeal unreasonable — nothing binds goodwill so firmly as kinship of character. But examine them one by one, and each will be found to deserve a thousand deaths. They are the dregs and refuse of the whole city, men who squandered their own estates and trained their madness beforehand in the villages and towns around us, and finally crept unnoticed into the holy city itself — bandits who, through the sheer excess of their crimes, defile even the ground that must not be profaned. You can see them now, drinking themselves senseless on holy things without a shred of fear, and gorging their insatiable bellies on the spoils of the murdered. Your own numbers and the splendor of your weapons would suit a summons from the capital to a shared council, as allies against foreigners. What is one to call this but the mockery of fortune, when a whole armed nation is seen locking shields with a gang of criminals? For a long time I have wondered what could have stirred you so suddenly — surely no one takes up full armor without grave cause, and against kinsmen at that. But when we heard talk of Romans and treachery — words some of you were just now shouting — and that you had come to liberate the capital, we marveled, more than at any of their other outrages, at these villains' brazen invention. Men naturally devoted to freedom, and for that very reason most eager to fight foreign enemies, could be roused against us in no other way than by fabricating a story of betrayed freedom. But you at least ought to weigh who is making these accusations, and against whom, and gather the truth not from invented words but from the plain facts. What could we possibly have suffered that would make us sell ourselves to the Romans now, when it was open to us either never to have revolted in the first place, or, having revolted, to come over to them quickly while the country around us still stood unravaged? As it is, even if we wished to make terms it would not be easy, since the fall of Galilee has made the Romans contemptuous of us, and it would bring us a shame worse than death to court them now that they are already so near. For my own part I would rather have peace than death, but once war is joined and I have taken the field, I would choose a glorious death over life as a captive. Do they claim that we, the leaders of the people, sent secretly to the Romans, or that the people voted it openly? If it was we, let them name the friends who were sent, the servants who carried out the betrayal. Was anyone caught leaving the city? Seized on his return? Have any letters been intercepted? How is it that so many fellow citizens, with whom we mingle at every hour, never noticed, while the few men under guard, who cannot even leave the temple for the city, somehow learned what was being done in secret across the countryside? They have only just discovered it, now that punishment for their own crimes is due; while they went unafraid themselves, was any one of us ever suspected as a traitor? And if they lay the blame on the people, surely the people deliberated in the open, and no one stayed away from the assembly — so the report would have reached you all the sooner and more plainly. And besides, should envoys not have been sent once such terms were voted? Who was appointed? Let them say. No — this is merely the pretext of men facing a painful death, trying to deflect punishments already close at hand. For even if the city's betrayal had truly been fated, only these same slanderers would have dared it, men whose reckless crimes lack only one thing — betrayal. But since you are here, weapons in hand, the most just course for you is to defend the capital and help destroy these tyrants who have overturned the courts, men who have trampled the laws and pronounced judgment at the point of their own swords. They have dragged men of distinction, wholly uncharged, out of the middle of the marketplace, bound and abused them, and put them to death without allowing them so much as a word in their own defense. You may go inside — not under the laws of war — and see with your own eyes the proof of what I say: houses stripped bare by their plunder, the wives and children of the slain dressed in mourning black, wailing and lamentation throughout the entire city. There is no one who has not tasted the assault of these godless men. They have run so far into madness that they have carried their bandits' daring not only from the countryside and outlying towns onto the face and head of the whole nation, but from the city itself into the temple. That has become their base and refuge, the storehouse of their preparations against us — the place revered by the whole world, honored even by foreigners at the ends of the earth by reputation alone, is trampled by the beasts bred here. Already, in their desperation, they boast of setting people against people and city against city, and levying war against the nation from its own vitals. In return for this, the finest and most fitting course — as I have said — is for you to join in destroying these villains, and to avenge the very deception by which they dared call allies those they ought instead to fear as avengers. But if you shrink from such accusations, then at least you may lay down your arms, enter the city as kinsmen would, and take the middle ground between ally and enemy by becoming judges. Consider, though, how much they stand to gain — men who granted not even a hearing to the uncharged — if they are tried by you on charges this well established and this grave. Let them at least receive that favor from your arrival. But if you think it right neither to share our indignation nor to sit in judgment, there remains a third course: leave both sides be, neither trespassing on our misfortune nor joining the plotters against the capital. Even if you deeply suspect that some have indeed dealt with the Romans, you can watch the approaches yourselves, and if any of these charges is ever proven in fact, come then and guard the capital, and punish the guilty once they are caught — for the enemy could hardly outrun you, camped as you would be so close to the city. But if none of this strikes you as fair or reasonable, then do not be surprised at the bars on our gates, so long as you bear arms."
Such were the words of Jesus. But the mass of the Idumaeans paid him no heed; they were enraged that entry was not granted them at once, and their generals bristled at being told to lay down their arms, taking it as a mark of captivity to be ordered by anyone to throw down their weapons. Simon son of Cathla, one of the commanders, with difficulty quieted the uproar among his own men, then stood where the chief priests could hear him and spoke.
"I no longer wonder that the champions of freedom are kept under guard in the temple, when some men are already shutting even the whole nation out of its own common city — preparing, it seems, to receive the Romans, perhaps even to garland the gates for them, while they lecture the Idumaeans from the towers and order them to throw down the arms they carry for freedom's sake. Distrusting their own kinsmen with the guarding of the capital, they make these very kinsmen judges of their quarrels, and while accusing some of killing without trial, they themselves condemn the whole nation to disgrace. The city thrown open to every foreigner for worship, you now wall off from your own people! We were indeed in a great hurry for bloodshed, rushing to make war on our own countrymen — we, who came here in haste for the very purpose of keeping you free! Such, it seems, are the wrongs you too have suffered at the hands of those under guard, and I suppose that is how you have gathered such plausible suspicions against them. And then, holding by force, inside the city, all who care for the common good, and shutting out with such insolent commands the very nations closest to you in kinship, you call yourselves the tyrannized, and you hang the name of tyranny on those you yourselves tyrannize! Who could stomach the irony of such words, set against the plain contradiction of the facts — unless indeed it is the Idumaeans who are shutting you out of the capital now, when it is you who bar them from their ancestral worship! One might justly blame the men besieged in the temple for this much: that having found the courage to punish the traitors — men you call distinguished and uncharged only because you shared in their guilt — they did not begin with you, and cut off in advance the most vital parts of this betrayal. But if they proved too gentle for what the moment required, then we, the Idumaeans, will guard the house of God and fight for our common homeland, warding off as enemies both those who attack from outside and those who betray it from within. Here, before your walls, we will remain under arms, until the Romans grow weary of watching you, or until you come to your senses about freedom and change your minds."
At these words the mass of the Idumaeans roared their approval, and Jesus withdrew, disheartened at seeing the Idumaeans set on showing no restraint, and the city under attack from two sides at once. Yet the Idumaeans themselves were far from easy in their minds. They were angered at the insult of being shut out of the city, and seeing that the zealots' strength, which they had believed so formidable, offered them no help at all, many of them grew troubled and regretted having come. But shame at turning back having accomplished nothing overcame their regret, and so they stayed where they were, camped miserably before the wall.
That night an overwhelming storm broke — violent winds together with the heaviest downpours, unbroken lightning, dreadful thunder, and the monstrous roar of the earth as it shook. It was plain that this convulsion of the whole natural order portended ruin for mankind, and no one could suppose these portents the product of some ordinary mischance. Both the Idumaeans and the people within the city drew the very same conclusion from it, though in opposite directions: the one side thought God was angry at their expedition and that they could not escape punishment for bearing arms against the capital, the other — Ananus's party — thought they had won without a battle, and that God himself was fighting on their behalf.
But they proved poor judges of what was to come, and in reading omens against their enemies they were unwittingly foretelling what was about to happen to their own side. For the Idumaeans, huddling their bodies together and locking their shields over their heads, suffered comparatively little from the rains, while the zealots, tormented more on the Idumaeans' account than by any danger of their own, met together to consider whether they could devise some way to help them. The more hotheaded among them favored forcing the guards at swordpoint, then bursting into the middle of the city and openly throwing the gates open to their allies, reasoning that the guards, thrown into confusion by the unexpected assault, would give way — especially since most of them were unarmed and untrained in war — and that the mass of the people in the city would be hard to rally, penned into their homes as they were by the storm. And even if some danger arose from it, they thought it right to risk anything rather than stand by while so great a host perished shamefully on their account. But the more level-headed among them rejected the use of force, seeing...
they saw that not only was their own guard at full strength, but the wall of the city was carefully watched too, because of the Idumaeans. They supposed that Ananus was everywhere and inspected the watches at every hour. That was true on other nights, but on this one the watch was relaxed — not through any carelessness of Ananus, but so that he himself, and the whole body of the guards, might perish, fate directing the outcome.
That night, as it wore on and the storm grew more violent, fate lulled the guards on the portico to sleep and put it into the zealots' minds to take up saws from the temple stores and cut through the bars of the gates. The noise of the wind and the continuous rolling of thunder helped them go undetected. Slipping unseen out of the temple, they came to the wall and, using the same saws, opened the gate on the Idumaean side.
At first the Idumaeans were thrown into confusion, supposing Ananus's men were attacking them, and every man's hand went to his sword to defend himself. But they quickly recognized who had come and went in. Had they then turned loose on the city, nothing would have stopped the whole populace from being destroyed, so great was their fury. As it was, being eager above all to rescue the zealots from the siege — and being begged besides, by the men who had let them in, not to overlook them in the midst of such dangers, nor to bring a still harsher peril down on their own heads, since if the guards were captured it would be easy for them to move against the city, but if they stirred up the city first they would never afterward master the guards, for the guards would organize against them and block the approaches — the Idumaeans agreed to this and went up through the city toward the temple, while the zealots, on tiptoe, watched eagerly for their arrival.
When they came in, the zealots too took courage and came forward from the inner sanctuary. Joining with the Idumaeans, they fell upon the guards, killing some of those posted for the night watch while they slept; and at the cry of those who were awake, the whole body of guards rose up and, seizing their weapons in a panic, rushed to defend themselves. So long as they supposed only the zealots were attacking, they took heart, confident of overpowering them by numbers; but when they saw others pouring in from outside, they realized the Idumaeans had broken in, and most of them at once, their spirit failing, threw down their arms and gave themselves over to lamentation. A few of the younger men, however, formed a barrier and bravely met the Idumaeans, covering the more sluggish crowd for a long while.
By their shouting they signaled the disaster to those in the city, but none of them dared come to their aid once they learned the Idumaeans had broken in; instead they cried out uselessly in answer and wailed back, and a great keening of women arose as each one feared for some kinsman among the guards. The zealots raised the war-cry together with the Idumaeans, and the storm made the combined shouting of everyone still more terrifying. The Idumaeans spared no one, being by nature most savage killers, and now further embittered by the storm, they vented their rage on those who had shut them out. Men who begged for mercy and men who fought back fared alike; many who reminded them of their kinship and begged them to show respect for the temple they shared were run through with the sword all the same.
There was no room to flee and no hope of safety; pressed together against one another, they were cut down, and most were simply forced over the edge. When there was no longer any place to retreat to, with the killers pressing in, in their helplessness they threw themselves down into the city — enduring, it seems to me, a worse fate by their own choice than the destruction from which they were fleeing. The outer court of the temple was flooded with blood from end to end, and daybreak found eight thousand five hundred corpses there.
Even this did not satisfy the fury of the Idumaeans. Turning on the city, they plundered every house and killed whoever they came upon. The mass of ordinary people they regarded as not worth the trouble, but they hunted down the chief priests, and against these most of their violence was directed. These were quickly caught and put to death, and standing over their bodies, the Idumaeans mocked Ananus for his goodwill toward the people, and mocked Jesus for his speeches from the wall. They went so far in their impiety as to throw the bodies out unburied, even though the Jews take such great care over burials that they take down and bury even those condemned and crucified, before sunset.
I would not be wrong in saying that the death of Ananus marked the beginning of the city's fall, and that from that day the wall was overturned and the fortunes of the Jews were ruined, since on that day they saw the high priest, the very guardian of their own safety, slaughtered in the middle of the city. He was, in every respect, a man of dignity and the utmost justice; and despite the weight of his noble birth, his rank, and the honor he held, he loved treating even the humblest as his equals. He was extraordinarily devoted to liberty and an admirer of democracy, always putting the common good ahead of his private advantage and valuing peace above everything else, for he knew the power of Rome was irresistible. Yet, forced by necessity, he also made provision for the war, so that if the Jews could not come to terms, they might at least hold out with skill.
To sum it up: had Ananus lived, they would certainly have come to terms, for he was a formidable speaker, able to persuade the people, and he was already gaining the upper hand over those who obstructed peace; or, had war continued, under such a general they would have given the Romans a very long struggle. Jesus was joined with him, second to him in comparison but surpassing all the others. But I believe that God, having condemned the city to destruction as polluted, and wishing to purge the sanctuary by fire, cut off those who clung to it and loved it dearly. These men, who shortly before had worn the sacred vestments, led the worship of the whole world, and were reverenced by those who came from every corner of the earth to visit the city, were now seen thrown out naked, food for dogs and wild beasts. I think Virtue herself groaned over these men, lamenting that she had been so thoroughly overcome by vice.
Such, then, was the end that befell Ananus and Jesus. After them, the zealots and the mass of Idumaeans fell upon the people and slaughtered them as though they were a herd of unclean animals. The common sort were destroyed wherever they happened to be caught, but the well-born and the young were seized and locked up in prison, kept bound in the hope that some of them might come over to their side — deferring the killing. But no one gave in; instead, all chose death rather than enroll themselves alongside the wicked against their own country. They endured terrible torments for their refusal, being whipped and racked, and only when their bodies could no longer bear the torture were they at last granted the sword. Those seized during the day were killed by night, and the bodies were carried out and dumped to make room for other prisoners.
So great was the people's terror that no one dared openly weep for a dead relative, or bury him; instead, shut up in their houses, they wept in secret and with great care, watching lest any enemy overhear, for the mourner suffered instantly the same fate as the one he mourned. At night some would gather a little dust in their hands and scatter it over the bodies, and by day, if anyone was bold enough to do the same. Twelve thousand of the well-born young were destroyed in this way.
The men who by now had grown weary of indiscriminate killing began to mock up courts and trials. Having decided to kill one of the most eminent men, Zacharias son of Baris — they were provoked by his intense hatred of wickedness and love of liberty, and he was also rich, so that they hoped not only to plunder his estate but also to remove a man capable of overthrowing them — they summoned by order seventy of the leading citizens to the temple, and, giving them, as though on a stage, the appearance of judges without any real authority, they accused Zacharias of betraying the cause to the Romans and of sending word of the treason to Vespasian.
There was no proof of the charges and no evidence at all, but they themselves declared they were well satisfied, and demanded that this count as confirmation of the truth. Zacharias, seeing that no hope of safety was left him — for he had been summoned by a trick into a prison, not before a court — did not despair of his life without speaking out. Standing up, he laughed the plausibility of the accusations to scorn and refuted, briefly, the charges brought against him. Then, turning his speech against his accusers, he went through all their lawless acts one by one and lamented at length the chaos into which affairs had fallen. The zealots were in an uproar and could scarcely keep their hands from their swords, wanting to carry the farce of the court's pretense through to the end, and also wishing to test the judges further, to see whether, even at their own peril, they would remember justice.
All seventy cast their votes for the acquittal of the accused, choosing to die with him rather than bear the guilt of his execution on their record. At this a shout went up from the zealots against the acquittal, and everyone was furious at the judges for failing to grasp the mockery of the authority granted them. Two of the boldest fell upon Zacharias in the middle of the temple and killed him, and as he fell they jeered at him, saying, "Now you have our vote too, and a surer acquittal," and they threw him at once from the temple down into the ravine below. The judges they drove out of the precinct, striking them with the flats of their swords as an insult, sparing them only from slaughter for this one purpose: that, scattered through the city, they might serve as messengers to everyone of their enslavement.
By now the Idumaeans regretted having come, and were disturbed at what was being done. One of the zealots gathered them and, coming to them privately, laid out for them the lawless acts committed together with those who had summoned them, and went through the wrongs done against the mother city. He told them there was no evidence at all that the chief priests had betrayed the mother city to the Romans, as had been claimed when they were called to arms, but rather that those pretending this were themselves daring the deeds of war and tyranny. It had been right for the Idumaeans to prevent this from the start, but since they had once fallen into complicity in civil bloodshed, they ought at least to set a limit to the wrongdoing and no longer remain, lending their strength to men overturning their ancestral ways.
And if some are still angered that the gates were shut and armed entry was not readily granted them, let them consider that those who shut them out have already been punished: Ananus is dead, and in a single night nearly the whole people has been destroyed. Many of their own kin, he said, he perceived now regretted it, while those who had called them in showed a cruelty without measure, having no shame even before the very men for whose sake they had been spared. In full view of their allies they dared the most shameful acts, and their lawlessness was being laid at the Idumaeans' door, as long as no one restrained them or separated himself from what was being done. It was necessary, then, since the slander of treason had come to nothing and no Roman advance was expected, while a hard-to-overthrow tyranny had been entrenched upon the city, for them to withdraw home, and by refusing to share further in these base men's deeds, to clear themselves of everything into which they had been deceived into taking part."
Persuaded by this, the Idumaeans first released about two thousand of the citizens held in the prisons, who at once fled the city and made their way to Simon, whom we shall speak of shortly; then they departed from Jerusalem and went home. Their withdrawal turned out unexpectedly for both sides: the people, unaware of the Idumaeans' change of heart, took brief courage, feeling relieved of enemies, while the zealots grew still bolder, not as men abandoned by their allies but as men freed from those who had restrained and shamed them out of wrongdoing. There was no longer any hesitation or deliberation in their crimes; they used the swiftest schemes for everything, and carried out their decisions faster even than they conceived them. They killed above all for courage and noble birth, destroying the one out of envy and the other out of fear, for they supposed their only safety lay in leaving none of the powerful alive.
Among many others, Gurion was put to death in this way — a man preeminent in rank and family, democratic in spirit and as full of a free man's pride as any Jew; his outspokenness, more than his other advantages, destroyed him. Nor did Niger the Peraean escape their hands, a man who had proved himself outstanding in the wars against the Romans. Crying out repeatedly and displaying his scars, he was dragged through the middle of the city. When he had been brought outside the gates, despairing of his life, he begged only for burial; but they, having already threatened not to grant him the earth he most desired, carried out the killing.
As he was being put to death, Niger called down upon them the Romans as avengers, and famine and plague besides for their war-making, and above all, one another's hands turned against each other — all of which God ratified against these impious men, and most justly, for not long afterward, falling into civil strife among themselves, they were destined to taste this very madness they had unleashed on each other. Niger's death eased the zealots' fears about their own overthrow, yet there was no part of the people for whom some pretext for destruction was not devised: those who had once quarreled with any of them had long since been destroyed, while those who had given no offense found convenient charges laid against them in the very time of peace — the man who never approached them at all was suspected of arrogance, the man who approached boldly was suspected of contempt, and the man who paid court was suspected of scheming. For both the gravest charges and the most trivial there was but a single punishment, death, and no one escaped it unless he was utterly lowly, either through lack of standing or through fortune.
As for the Romans, all the other commanders, thinking the enemy's internal strife a godsend, were eager to move against the city and urged Vespasian on, as the man with authority over everything, saying that providence was fighting on their side by turning their enemies against one another; the moment was pressing, they said, and the Jews would soon come to terms with them again, either worn down by their own civil disasters or repenting of them.
Vespasian replied that they were badly mistaken in what the situation required, wanting, as if on a stage, to make a display of arms and manpower at needless risk, rather than looking to what was advantageous and safe. For if he moved against the city at once, he said, he would only unite the enemy and turn their strength, still at its height, against himself; but if he waited,
"they would need fewer troops, since the fighting would have used up the enemy's numbers. God, he said, made a better general than himself: he was handing the Jews over to the Romans without effort and granting the army its victory without danger. So while their enemies were destroying themselves with their own hands and suffering the worst of evils, civil strife, it was better to sit back as spectators of the danger than to come to grips with men bent on death and raging against one another. And if anyone thought the glory of a victory would be staler without a battle, he should recognize that a success won in quiet was more profitable than one gained through the hazard of arms; men who accomplished the same ends by self-control and judgment deserved no less credit than those who won distinction by force. Besides, while the enemy dwindled, his own army, given rest from its continuous labors, would be led on with fresh vigor. And in any case this was not the moment for those aiming at a brilliant victory: the Jews were not spending their time building weapons or walls or gathering allies, so that delay would only work against those providing such things; rather, ground down daily by civil war and dissension, they were suffering worse than anything the Romans could inflict on them once captured. Whether one looked to safety or to the greater glory of the achievement, there was no reason to attack men already sick at home: the victory, if won now, would rightly be credited not to the Romans but to the sedition itself."
When Vespasian said this the officers agreed, and at once the wisdom of the plan became evident, for many deserted daily, slipping away from the Zealots. Flight was difficult, however, since guards had blocked every way out and killed anyone caught trying to leave for the Romans, whatever the circumstances. Yet a man who paid money was let go, and only the one who did not pay was treated as a traitor, so that the rich bought their escape while only the poor were left to be slaughtered. Corpses piled up in great heaps along every road, and many who had set out to desert chose instead the destruction that awaited them within the city, since the hope of burial made death in one's own homeland seem the milder fate.
The rebels sank to such depths of cruelty that they would not allow burial either to those killed inside the city or to those lying along the roads, but, as though they had made a pact to overturn the laws of their country along with the laws of nature, they left the corpses to rot and decay under the sun, adding this pollution of the divine to their crimes against men. Death was the penalty even for burying a relative, a penalty shared with deserters, and a man who did this favor for another needed burial himself at once. In short, no decent human feeling was so thoroughly destroyed in that time of disaster as pity; for the very things that should have moved men to compassion instead provoked the criminals to fury, and they turned their rage from the living against the dead, and from the dead against the living. Such was the excess of their terror that survivors envied those already killed as men at rest, and those tortured in the prisons judged even the unburied dead more fortunate by comparison. Every human law was trampled underfoot, and the things of God were mocked, and they jeered at the oracles of the prophets as mere charlatans' tales.
Yet the prophets had foretold much about virtue and vice, and by transgressing these the Zealots brought to fulfillment even the prophecy spoken against their own country. For there was an old saying of certain men... that the city would be taken and the most holy place burned to the ground by the law of war, if ever sedition should seize it and native hands defile the temple of God first. The Zealots, not disbelieving this, made themselves the instruments of its fulfillment.
By now John, aspiring to tyranny, resented being treated as an equal among equals, and gradually, gathering to himself the worse sort of men, broke away from the party's common counsel. Always disregarding the decisions of the others and giving his own orders in a more despotic manner, he made it clear he was aiming at sole rule. Some yielded to him out of fear, others out of goodwill, for he was skilled at winning men over by deceit and by speech, and many judged it safer for their own security that responsibility for what was being dared should rest on one man rather than on many. His effectiveness in both action and counsel provided him no small bodyguard. A great number of those opposing him, meanwhile, held back, for although resentment was strong among men who thought it a hard thing to be subjected to one who had lately been their equal, caution about his monarchy proved the stronger restraint; they had no hope of easily overthrowing him once he had gained full power, and feared he would find a pretext against them for having opposed his rise in the first place. Each of them therefore preferred to suffer anything at all by fighting rather than to be enslaved willingly and perish in the condition of a slave. So the sedition split along these lines, and John set himself up as a rival king against those opposed to him. Yet in their dealings with one another they kept to a wary watch, and there was little or no exchange of missile fire between them; instead they competed against the common people, rivaling one another over which side would carry off the greater plunder. And since the city was battered by three of the greatest evils at once — war, tyranny, and sedition — by comparison the war seemed the milder to the ordinary people; indeed many, fleeing their own countrymen, escaped to the foreigners and found among the Romans the safety they had despaired of finding among their own.
A fourth evil now stirred toward the nation's ruin. There was a very strong fortress not far from Jerusalem, built by the ancient kings both as a refuge for their property in the crises of war and as a place of safety for themselves, called Masada. Those known as the Sicarii, having seized this stronghold, at first only raided the neighboring districts to secure supplies, being restrained by fear from any greater plundering. But once they learned that the Roman army was inactive and that the Jews in Jerusalem were split by their own sedition and tyranny, they turned to bolder ventures. During the festival of Unleavened Bread, which the Jews celebrate as a memorial of deliverance, when after their slavery under the Egyptians they returned to their ancestral land, they slipped past those in their way by night and overran a small town called Engaddi. There they scattered and drove out of the town, before it could take up arms and rally, those capable of resisting, and killed more than seven hundred of those less able to flee — women and children. Then, having stripped the houses and seized the ripest of the crops, they carried it all off to Masada. From there they plundered every village around the fortress and laid waste the whole countryside, with no small number joining them daily from every quarter.
Banditry, which had until then lain quiet, now stirred throughout the rest of Judea's districts as well, just as when the ruling organ of a body inflames, every limb falls sick along with it; for because of the sedition and disorder in the capital, the wicked out in the countryside gained free rein. Each band plundered its own district and then withdrew into the wilderness. Gathering together and conspiring by companies, too numerous for an army but too few for mere brigandage, they fell upon shrines and towns, and those they attacked suffered as if caught in open war, while their own defenses were always too late, since the raiders fled with their plunder like common thieves. There was no part of Judea that did not share in the ruin of the leading city.
All this was reported to Vespasian by deserters. For although the rebels guarded every way out and killed anyone who tried in any way to leave, still there were some who slipped through and, taking refuge with the Romans, urged the general to come to the city's aid and save what remained of its people; because of their goodwill toward Rome, they said, most had already been killed and those who survived were in danger. Vespasian, already pitying their misfortunes, moved against Jerusalem seemingly to besiege it outright, but in truth to free it from siege. Yet first he needed to subdue what remained elsewhere and leave nothing outside to hinder the siege. So he advanced to Gadara, the strong capital of Perea, and entered the city on the fourth of the month Dystrus.
For the leading men of the city had secretly, unknown to the rebels, sent envoys to him about surrender, desiring peace and anxious for their property — many wealthy men lived in Gadara. The rival faction had known nothing of this embassy, and when Vespasian was already close by they learned of it. They saw they could not hold the city themselves, being outnumbered by their enemies within and seeing the Romans not far off, and though they resolved to flee, they were ashamed to do so without bloodshed and without first exacting some punishment from those responsible. So they seized Dolesus — a man first not only in rank and birth in the city but also thought responsible for the embassy — killed him, and in their excess of rage abused his corpse before fleeing the city. As the Roman force drew near, the people of Gadara received Vespasian with acclamations, received pledges of good faith from him, and were given a garrison of cavalry and infantry to guard against the raids of the fugitives; they themselves had torn down their wall before even asking the Romans to do so, so as to give proof that they loved peace by making themselves unable to wage war even if they wished it.
Vespasian sent Placidus with five hundred cavalry and three thousand infantry against those who had fled from Gadara, while he himself returned with the rest of the army to Caesarea. The fugitives, catching sudden sight of the pursuing cavalry before coming to close quarters, crowded together into a village called Bethennabris. There, finding no small number of young men, they armed them, some willingly and some by force, in a haphazard fashion, and rushed out against Placidus's men.
At the first charge these gave a little ground, cunningly drawing the enemy further from the wall; then, once they had them at a convenient distance, they wheeled around and hurled javelins at them. The cavalry cut off those trying to flee, while the infantry vigorously destroyed those still engaged in close fighting. The Jews, for all their display of daring, gained nothing by it; falling upon Romans drawn up in close order, walled in as it were by their armor, they themselves found no gap through which to strike and had not the strength to break the line, while they were pierced by the enemy's missiles, and, like the most savage of beasts, rushed onto the steel; some fell struck in the face by swords, others scattered by the horsemen.
Placidus was intent on cutting off their routes back to the village. Wheeling continually along that side and then turning back, using his javelins with unerring aim, he killed those who came close and, through fear, turned back those still at a distance, until the bravest of them forced their way through and fled to the wall. Uncertainty gripped the guards there: they could not bring themselves to shut out the men from Gadara because of their own kinsmen inside, and yet if they let them in they expected to perish along with them — which is exactly what happened. As the fugitives were pressed against the wall, the Roman cavalry very nearly forced their way in along with them; but even though the defenders managed to close the gates first, Placidus pressed the attack and, fighting bravely until evening, gained control of the wall and of those inside the village. The unresisting mass was destroyed, while the more capable fled; the soldiers plundered the houses and set the village on fire.
Those who had escaped from it roused the people of the countryside, and, magnifying their own disasters and claiming that the whole Roman army was advancing, shook everyone everywhere with terror; gathering in vast numbers, they fled toward Jericho, since this alone still kept alive their hopes of safety, being strong in the number of its inhabitants. Placidus, emboldened by his cavalry and his preceding successes, pursued them, killing all he overtook as far as the Jordan, and then, driving the whole mass to the river, drew up his line facing them, for they were hemmed in by the current, which, swollen by rains, was impassable. Necessity drove men with nowhere left to flee into battle, and stretching themselves out as far as possible along the banks they received the Roman missiles and cavalry charges, which struck down many of them into the stream.
Fifteen thousand perished in this close fighting, while the number forced to leap into the Jordan by compulsion, and those who leapt in of their own accord, was beyond counting. About two thousand two hundred were taken prisoner, along with an immense quantity of plunder — donkeys, sheep, camels, and cattle. To the Jews this blow seemed no less severe, and even greater, than any before it, not only because the whole region through which they fled was filled with slaughter and the Jordan itself became impassable because of the corpses, but because even the Dead Sea was filled with bodies swept down by the river in vast numbers.
Placidus, favored by good fortune, pressed on against the surrounding towns and villages, capturing Abila, Julias, and Besimoth, and all the towns as far as the Dead Sea, stationing in each the deserters best suited for the task. Then, putting his soldiers aboard boats, he seized those who had taken refuge on the lake. And so all of Perea submitted or was taken, as far as Machaerus.
Meanwhile news arrived of the uprising in Gaul, of Vindex's revolt together with the leading men of the region against Nero — events recorded in greater detail elsewhere. This report spurred Vespasian on toward the war, since he already foresaw the civil wars to come and the danger threatening the whole empire, thinking that by first pacifying the East he would ease the fears troubling Italy. So while winter still held, he secured the districts already subdued, garrisoning villages and towns, setting decurions over the villages and centurions over the towns, and rebuilding much of what had been destroyed. At the beginning of spring he took the greater part of his force and led it from Caesarea to Antipatris, where he spent two days settling affairs in the city and on the third advanced,
burning and plundering all the surrounding country. Having subdued the region of the toparchy of Thamna, he moved on to Lydda and Jamnia, and after bringing both under control he installed in each enough settlers from among those who had already come over, and arrived at Emmaus. There, seizing the passes leading to the capital, he fortified a camp, and, leaving the Fifth Legion behind in it, advanced with the rest of his force toward Bethleptenpha.
...toparchy. He destroyed it and the neighboring one by fire, and fortified the surrounding forts of Idumea at strategic points. Then, seizing the two most central villages of Idumea, Bethabris and Caphartobas, he killed more than ten thousand and took more than a thousand prisoners, drove out the rest of the population, and stationed there no small part of his own force, who ranged the whole hill country and ravaged it.
He himself returned with the remainder of the army to Ammaus, and from there, through Samaria and past the town called Neapolis, or Mabartha by the local people, he came down to Korea and camped on the second of the month Daisios. On the following day he arrived at Jericho, where he was joined by Trajan, one of his commanders, bringing the force from Peraea, which had by then subdued the region across the Jordan.
Most of the great multitude from Jericho had escaped their approach in time, fleeing into the hill country opposite Jerusalem, but a considerable number who were left behind were destroyed. They found the city deserted. It lies in a plain, above which rises a bare, fruitless mountain of very great length: on the north it extends to the territory of Scythopolis, and on the south to the region of Sodom and the far end of the Dead Sea.
The whole of it is rugged and uninhabited because of its barrenness. Facing it, on the other side, is the mountain range along the Jordan, beginning at Julias and the northern regions and running south to Somoron, which marks the boundary of Arabian Petra. In this range is also the mountain called the Iron Mountain, extending as far as Moabitis. The land between the two ranges is called the Great Plain, reaching from the village of Ginnabris to the Dead Sea. Its length is twelve hundred stadia and its width one hundred and twenty; it is divided in the middle by the Jordan and contains two lakes, the Dead Sea and the Sea of Tiberias, of opposite character to one another—
the one salty and barren, that of Tiberias sweet and fruitful. In summer the plain is scorched, and because of the extreme dryness the air there breeds disease, for it is entirely without water except for the Jordan. For this reason the palm groves along its banks are more flourishing and productive than those set farther back. Near Jericho, however, there is a spring, abundant and excellent for irrigation, welling up beside the old city which Joshua son of Nun, the general of the Hebrews, was the first to take by force of arms from the land of the Canaanites.
Tradition holds that this spring at first not only blighted the fruits of the earth and the trees but also women's wombs, and was in every way unhealthy and destructive, until it was tamed and made instead the most wholesome and fertile of springs by Elisha the prophet, a disciple and successor of Elijah. Elisha, having been a guest among the people of Jericho, and finding them unusually hospitable toward him, repaid both the people and the land with a lasting favor. He went out to the spring, cast into its flow a clay vessel full of salt, then raised his right hand toward heaven in righteousness
and poured out upon the ground libations of appeasement, asking that the flow be softened and sweeter veins opened, and that a more fertile air be blended with the stream, granting the local people at once abundance of crops and continuance of children, and that the water which produces these should never fail them, so long as they remained just. Having performed many further rites over these prayers according to his skill, he transformed the spring, and
the water which had once been the cause of childlessness and famine among them became from that time on the source of fruitful offspring and plenty. Indeed, its power in irrigation is so great that even if it merely touches a field, the effect is more nourishing than that of waters which linger there a long time. For this reason those who use it lavishly gain little benefit, while the small amount required yields an abundant supply. It waters more land than all
the other springs together—a plain seventy stadia long and twenty wide—and nurtures within it the loveliest and most luxuriant orchards. Among the irrigated palm trees are many varieties differing in taste and quality; the richer of these, when pressed, yield an abundant honey not much inferior to the rest. The land is also good for bees, and produces opobalsam as well, the most valuable of its fruits, along with henna and myrobalanum, so that one would not be wrong to call the place divine, since it produces the rarest and finest things in abundance. For its other fruits, hardly any region of the inhabited world could easily be compared to it—so richly does what is sown there multiply. The cause, it seems to me, is the heat of the air and
the vigor of the waters, the one drawing forth and spreading what grows, the other, by its moisture, rooting each plant firmly and supplying it strength through the summer heat. So scorching is the region that no one can easily go about in it. The water, drawn before dawn and then exposed to the open air, becomes very cold, taking on a nature opposite to its surroundings; in winter, on the contrary, it grows warm
and is most pleasant to those who bathe in it. The surrounding air, too, is so temperate that the local people wear linen while the rest of Judea is covered in snow. It is a hundred and fifty stadia from Jerusalem and sixty from the Jordan. The stretch toward Jerusalem is desert and rocky, while that toward the Jordan and the Dead Sea, though lower-lying, is likewise desert
and barren. But enough has been said, sufficiently, about the region of Jericho and its great prosperity. It is worth also describing the nature of the Dead Sea, which is, as I said, bitter and barren, yet by its buoyancy carries even the heaviest objects thrown into it back up to the surface, and it is not easy even for one who tries to sink to its bottom. Vespasian, indeed, having come to see it out of curiosity,
ordered some men who could not swim to be bound behind the hands and thrown into the depths, and it happened that all of them floated up, as though forced upward by some wind. There is also, in connection with this, a remarkable change of color: three times each day the surface alters its appearance and gives back the rays of the sun in different hues. In many places it casts up black lumps of bitumen,
which float on the surface, resembling in shape and size headless bulls. The workers of the lake row out and, taking hold of the floating mass, haul it into their boats, but once the boat is full it is not easy to cut the bitumen free—by its own tenacity it clings to the boat—until it is dissolved with the menstrual blood and urine of women, the only things to which it yields. It is useful
not only for caulking ships but also for the healing of bodies, and it is mixed into many medicines. The length of this lake is five hundred and eighty stadia, extending as far as Zoar in Arabia, and its width a hundred and fifty. Bordering it is the region of Sodom, once a prosperous land because of its crops and the wealth of its cities, but now
entirely burned. It is said that because of the impiety of its inhabitants it was consumed by lightning, and indeed there remain to this day traces of the divine fire, and the shadows of five cities can still be seen, and ashes still form again even within the fruits, which have the color of things edible but, when plucked by the hand, dissolve into smoke and ash. Thus the things told of the land of Sodom find confirmation
in what can be seen with one's own eyes. Vespasian, meanwhile, walling in on every side those in Jerusalem, raised camps at Jericho and at Adida and stationed garrisons in both, drawn from the Roman and allied forces. He also sent Lucius Annius to Gerasa, giving him a squadron of cavalry and a considerable number of infantry. Taking the city at the first assault, he killed
a thousand of the young men who had not managed to flee in time, took the women and children captive, and allowed the soldiers to plunder their property; then, after burning the houses, he advanced against the surrounding villages. The strong fled and the weaker perished, and all that was left behind was set on fire. And with the war having by now spread over the whole of the hill country and the plain alike, those in
Jerusalem had every way out cut off from them: those who wished to desert were watched closely by the Zealots, while those not yet inclined toward the Romans were held in by the army, which surrounded the city on every side. But when Vespasian had returned to Caesarea and was preparing to march with his whole force against Jerusalem itself, word reached him that Nero had been killed, after reigning thirteen years and eight days. Concerning him,
how he abused his power outrageously, entrusting affairs to the vilest of men, Nymphidius and Tigellinus, unworthy freedmen; and how, plotted against by them, he was abandoned by all his guards, and fled with four faithful freedmen to the outskirts of the city, where he took his own life; and how those who brought him down soon paid the penalty for it; the
war in Gaul and how it ended; how Galba, proclaimed emperor, returned to Rome from Spain, and how, accused by the soldiers of stinginess, he was murdered in the middle of the Roman forum, and Otho was proclaimed emperor in his place; Otho's campaign against Vitellius's generals and its collapse; then the disturbances under Vitellius and the
fighting at the Capitol; and how Antonius Primus and Mucianus destroyed Vitellius and the German legions and put an end to the civil war—all this I have chosen not to relate in detail, since it is tiresome to everyone and has been recorded by many writers, both Greek and Roman. But for the sake of the continuity of events, and so that the history should not be disjointed, I note each of them briefly. Vespasian, then,
at first put off the campaign against Jerusalem, watching to see into whose hands power would fall after Nero. Then, hearing that Galba was emperor, he took no action before writing to him as well about the war, but sent his son Titus to greet him and to receive his instructions concerning Judea. For the same reasons King Agrippa sailed to Galba together with Titus.
Since it was winter, they sailed around by way of Achaia in large ships, but news reached them that Galba had been killed after seven months and as many days, and that Otho had taken over the government, claiming the throne for himself. Agrippa resolved to go on to Rome regardless, undeterred by the change; but Titus, moved by some divine impulse, sailed from Greece
to Syria and reached Caesarea quickly, to rejoin his father. Those preoccupied with the larger crisis, now that Roman rule itself was shaken, set aside the campaign against the Jews, judging that an attack on a foreign people was ill-timed while they feared for their own homeland. Meanwhile another war arose against Jerusalem. There was a son of Gioras,
a certain Simon, a native of Gerasa, a young man inferior in cunning to John, who already held the city, but superior in bodily strength and daring. For this reason, exiled by the high priest Ananus from the toparchy of Acrabetene, which he held, he came to the bandits occupying Masada. At first they regarded him with suspicion, and so allowed him
to enter only the lower fortress, along with the women he brought with him, while they themselves occupied the higher ground. Later, however, because his character resembled their own and he seemed trustworthy, he went out raiding with them and helped plunder the country around Masada. Yet he could not persuade them to attempt greater things, for they, accustomed to the fortress, were afraid to go far from it, as if leaving a den, while he,
aspiring to power and great things, on hearing of Ananus's death withdrew into the hill country, and by proclaiming freedom to slaves and reward to free men, gathered around him the wicked from every quarter. Once his band had grown strong, he overran the villages of the hill country, and as more men continually joined him, he grew bold enough to descend into the lower regions. And when he had by now become a terror to whole cities, many
of the powerful were corrupted by the strength of his position and the steady run of his successes, so that his force was no longer one of slaves and bandits alone, but included not a few ordinary citizens who obeyed him as they would a king. He overran the toparchy of Acrabetene and the territory as far as greater Idumea, for at a village called Ain he built a wall and used it as a fortress for security, while at the ravine
called Pheretae he enlarged many caves and found many more already suited to his purpose, and used them as storehouses for his treasure and receptacles for his plunder. He deposited there, too, the crops he had seized, and many of his companies made their quarters in those caves. It was plain that he was training his force and making preparations against Jerusalem. For this reason the Zealots, fearing his design against them and
wishing to forestall the threat that was being nurtured against them, went out in full force, most of them armed. Simon met them, and drawing up his men for battle, killed a good many of them and drove the rest back into the city. Not yet confident enough in his strength to attack the walls, he undertook first to subdue Idumea, and with twenty thousand heavy infantry he marched against its borders.
The rulers of Idumea, quickly gathering from the country the most warlike men, about twenty-five thousand, and leaving the greater number to guard their own property against the raids of the sicarii of Masada, met Simon at the border. There, engaging him and fighting through the whole day, they came apart neither victors nor vanquished, and he withdrew to
Nain, while the Idumeans dispersed to their homes. Not long after, Simon set out again into their territory with a greater force, and having camped near a village called Tekoa, close to the garrison at Herodium, he sent one of his companions, a certain Eleazar, to persuade them to surrender the fortress. The guards received him eagerly, not knowing the reason for which he had come.
When the man spoke of surrender, they drew their swords and went after him, and with no room left to run he threw himself off the wall into the ravine below. He died on the spot, but the Idumeans, already dreading Simon's strength, decided to reconnoiter the enemy's forces before engaging. One of their commanders, Jacob, readily volunteered for the mission, with treachery in mind.
Setting out from Alurus—for it was there that the Idumean army had then gathered—he came to Simon and arranged to hand over his own home town to him first, taking oaths that he would always be treated with honor, and he promised to help him against the whole of Idumea besides. Simon received him warmly and feasted him, and, buoyed by splendid promises, once he had returned to his own men he first lied to them, claiming Simon's army was many times its true size; then, ingratiating himself with the commanders and, group by group, with the whole body of men, he pressed them to accept Simon and hand over the entire command to him without a fight. While engineering this, he also kept sending messengers to Simon, promising to scatter the Idumeans—a promise he kept.
For when the army was already close, he was the first to leap onto his horse and flee, along with his fellow conspirators. Panic seized the whole force, and before battle was joined they broke ranks and each man withdrew to his own home. Simon, against all expectation, rode into Idumea without shedding blood, and, attacking unexpectedly, took the small town of Hebron first, where he seized a great deal of plunder and looted a vast quantity of produce.
According to the local people, Hebron is older not only than any town in that region but even than Memphis in Egypt—they reckon its age at twenty-three hundred years. They also tell the legend that it was the dwelling place of Abraham, ancestor of the Jews, after his migration from Mesopotamia, and that his children went down from there into Egypt. Their tombs are still shown to this day in that small town, worked in very fine marble with great craftsmanship. Six stadia from the town a huge terebinth tree is also pointed out, and they say the tree has survived from the creation of the world down to the present.
From there Simon advanced through the whole of Idumea, not only sacking villages and towns but ravaging the countryside as well: apart from his regular troops, forty thousand men followed him, so that supplies could not meet the demand of such numbers. To their needs was added his own savagery and his rage against the people, which made the devastation of Idumea all the worse. Just as one can see a whole forest stripped bare in the wake of locusts, so a wasteland was left behind Simon's army.
Some places they burned, others they razed to the ground; everything growing in the countryside they either destroyed by trampling underfoot or consumed by grazing, and the cultivated ground, worn hard by the marching columns, they left harder than the barren land. In short, no trace was left to those who had been plundered that anything had ever stood there.
This roused the zealots once again, though they were too afraid to meet him openly in battle; instead they set an ambush along the roads and seized Simon's wife, along with a good number of her attendants. Then they returned to the city rejoicing, as though they had captured Simon himself, expecting that he would lay down his arms at once and beg for his wife's return. But no pity entered him—only rage over the woman who had been seized. He came to the wall of Jerusalem and, like a wounded animal that cannot reach the one who wounded it, vented his fury on whomever he found.
Any who had gone out beyond the gates to gather vegetables or firewood—unarmed men, old men—he seized, tortured, and killed, so consumed with anger that he came close to tasting the bodies of the dead. Many others he mutilated by cutting off their hands and sent them back into the city, both to terrify the enemy and to try to turn the people against those responsible.
He instructed them to say that Simon swore by God, overseer of all things, that unless they returned his wife to him at once, he would breach the wall and treat everyone in the city the same way, sparing no age and making no distinction between the guilty and the innocent. At this, not only the people but the zealots themselves were terrified, and they sent his wife back to him. For a while, appeased, he took a brief rest from his continual killing.
It was not only in Judea that there was civil strife and war, but in Italy as well. Galba had been killed in the very middle of the Roman forum, and Otho, proclaimed emperor, was at war with Vitellius, who aspired to the throne, for the legions in Germany had chosen him. A battle took place at Bedriacum in Gaul against Valens and Caecina, Vitellius's generals: on the first day Otho had the advantage, on the second the army of Vitellius. After great slaughter, Otho took his own life at Brixellum on learning of the defeat, having held power for two days and three months; his army then went over to Vitellius's generals, and Vitellius himself marched down into Rome with his forces.
Meanwhile Vespasian, setting out from Caesarea on the fifth of the month Daisios, advanced against the parts of Judea not yet subdued. Going up into the hill country he took two toparchies, the one called Gophnitic and the one called Acrabetene, and after them the small towns of Bethel and Ephraim; having posted garrisons in these, he rode as far as Jerusalem on horseback. Many were killed in the taking of these places, and many more taken captive.
Cerealis, one of his commanders, took a detachment of cavalry and infantry and laid waste what is called Upper Idumea; he took the sham little town of Caphethra by storm and burned it, then attacked another called Charabis and laid siege to it. Its wall was very strong, and though he expected to be delayed there a long time, the defenders suddenly threw open the gates, came out bearing olive branches, and surrendered themselves.
Having received their submission, Cerealis moved on against Hebron, another very ancient city, which lies, as I have said, in the hill country not far from Jerusalem. Forcing his way in, he put to the sword every one of military age he found there and burned the town. With everything now subdued except Herodium, Masada, and Machaerus—which were held by the bandits—the Romans now had Jerusalem itself in their sights.
As for Simon, once he had rescued his wife from the zealots he turned back again to what remained of Idumea, and, driving the population from every side, forced most of them to flee to Jerusalem. He himself followed close on the city, and, encircling the wall once more, killed any laborers from the countryside whom he caught approaching. To the people, Simon outside was more terrifying than the Romans, and the zealots within were harsher than either; and among these, in cruelty of invention and daring, the band of the Galileans surpassed the rest. It was they who had raised John to power, and he in turn, in return for the dominance they had won for him, allowed each of them to do whatever he pleased.
Their appetite for plunder knew no limit; they searched the houses of the wealthy, murdered men and outraged women for sport, and, still smeared with blood, gorged on what they had stolen, then, growing bold, gave themselves over unashamed to effeminate excess—braiding their hair, putting on women's clothing, drenching themselves in perfume, and lining their eyes for beauty's sake. Not content with imitating women's dress, they imitated their passions too, and, carried to depraved extremes, devised forbidden forms of lust, wallowing in the city as though it were a brothel and defiling it entirely with unclean deeds.
With faces made womanish, they killed with their right hands, and mincing along in their walk they would suddenly turn into warriors, drawing swords from beneath their dyed cloaks and running through whomever they met. Those fleeing from John, Simon received still more murderously, and any man who escaped the tyrant within the wall was destroyed by the one stationed before the gates. Every road of escape was cut off for those wishing to desert to the Romans.
The force under John was itself torn by faction, and all the Idumeans in it broke away and moved against the tyrant, out of both envy of his power and hatred of his cruelty. Joining battle, they killed many of the zealots and drove the rest into the royal courtyard built by Grapte, a woman related to Izates, king of Adiabene. The Idumeans burst in with them, and from there drove the zealots out into the temple, then turned to plundering John's wealth—for it was in that same courtyard that he himself had been staying, and there he had stored the spoils of his tyranny. Meanwhile the zealots who had been scattered throughout the city gathered in the temple with those who had escaped there, and John made ready to lead them down against the people and the Idumeans.
But these, though the more warlike of the two sides, were less afraid of a direct assault than of the men's desperation—that they might slip out of the temple by night, kill them, and set the city ablaze. So they met together with the chief priests and deliberated on how best to guard against the attack. But God, it seems, turned their counsels to a bad end, and they devised a remedy for their safety worse than destruction itself: in order to bring John down, they resolved to admit Simon, and with entreaties bring in a second tyrant over themselves. The plan went forward, and they sent the high priest Matthias to beg Simon—the very man they had so feared—to enter. Those from Jerusalem who had fled to the zealots joined in the appeal too, longing for their homes and property.
Simon, granting their request with an arrogant nod of consent to become their master, entered as though he would free the city from the zealots, hailed by the people as its savior and protector; but once inside with his forces, he turned his attention to securing his own power, and counted those who had called him in no less his enemies than those against whom he had been summoned. In this way Simon gained control of Jerusalem in the third year of the war, in the month Xanthicus.
John and the mass of the zealots, now shut out from the exits of the temple and having lost their hold on the city—for Simon's men immediately plundered their property—found themselves in desperate straits for safety. Simon assaulted the temple with the people's support, but the defenders, stationed on the porticoes and battlements, beat back the assaults. Many of Simon's men fell and many more were carried off wounded, for the zealots, shooting down from higher ground, made their shots easy and unerring. Taking advantage of their position, they built four huge additional towers so as to shoot from an even greater height: one at the northeast corner, one above the Xystus, a third at another corner opposite the lower city, and the last above the roof of the priests' chambers, where by custom a priest stood each week to announce with a trumpet, at evening, the coming in of the Sabbath, and again its ending, at one time proclaiming rest to the people, at another the resumption of work. On these towers they set up dart-throwers and stone-throwers, along with archers and slingers.
At this point Simon began to press his assaults more cautiously, since the greater part of his men had lost heart, but he still held on thanks to his superior numbers; meanwhile missiles from the engines, carrying farther, killed many of the combatants. At about this same time, grievous troubles also beset Rome. Vitellius arrived from Germany bringing with him, along with his soldiers, another huge crowd besides, and, since the quarters assigned to the troops could not hold them, he turned the whole of Rome into a military camp and filled every house with armed men. These men, unused to seeing such Roman wealth, and surrounded on every side by silver and gold, could barely restrain their greed from turning to plunder and killing anyone who stood in their way. Such was the state of affairs in Italy.
Vespasian, having subdued the areas near Jerusalem, returned to Caesarea and heard of the disturbances in Rome and of Vitellius's proclamation as emperor. This news provoked him to anger, skilled as he was in obeying no less than in commanding well; he thought it beneath him to accept as master a man who had run riot over a leaderless empire, and, deeply pained by the situation, he could not bear to endure the outrage, yet with his homeland being torn apart he could not turn his attention to other wars either. But as much as his anger drove him toward retaliation, so much did the thought of the distance restrain him—fortune, playing many tricks, might well have anticipated him before he could cross over into Italy, especially sailing in winter—and so he kept his seething rage in check for the time.
But his commanders and soldiers, meeting together in their companies, were already openly discussing a change of regime, and cried out indignantly that the soldiers at Rome, living in luxury and unable to bear even the rumor of war, chose emperors as they pleased and proclaimed men to the throne in hope of gain, while they themselves, who had gone through so many hardships and were growing old under their helmets, were handing power to others when they had among themselves a man far more worthy to rule. What juster reward could they ever give in return for their own goodwill toward him, if they let slip the present opportunity?
Vespasian, they said, had as much more right to rule than Vitellius as they themselves had over the men who had proclaimed Vitellius—for they had waged wars no smaller than those fought in Germany, nor had they been defeated in arms by those who had brought the tyrant to power. And there would be no need of a contest, for neither the Senate nor the Roman people would tolerate Vitellius's debauchery in place of Vespasian's self-control, nor choose a most brutal tyrant in place of a good ruler, nor a childless protector in place of a father—for nothing mattered more to the security of peace than legitimate succession of rulers. So then, if it was fitting that rule belong to the experience of age, they had Vespasian; if to the vigor of youth, Titus—for the advantages of both their ages would be blended together. They themselves would furnish not only
their own strength to the men proclaimed, but, holding three legions and the alliances of the client kings, they had preserved everything toward the east and whatever part of Europe was free from fear of Vitellius, as well as the allies in Italy—Vespasian's brother and his other son—of whom many young men of rank would attach themselves to the one, while the other also commanded the garrison of the city.
...had been entrusted to them — no small part of a bid for supreme power. And in any case, if they themselves were slow to act, the senate, they said, would soon appoint some man dishonored by the very soldiers who had kept him safe.

Such was the talk that ran through the ranks in knots of soldiers. Then, gathering together and cheering each other on, they proclaimed Vespasian emperor and begged him to save the empire now in danger. He had long been anxious about the state of affairs as a whole, but he had no intention of ruling himself; he judged himself worthy by his deeds, yet he preferred the safety of a private life to the dangers of splendor. When he refused, the officers pressed him all the harder, and the soldiers crowded around him, swords drawn, threatening to kill him if he would not consent to live as he deserved. After many efforts to fend off the command, when he could not persuade them, he finally yielded to those who had named him.
When Mucianus and the other officers now urged him, as emperor, to lead the rest of the army against every remaining rival, he turned first to the affairs of Alexandria, knowing that Egypt was the greatest part of the empire because it supplied the grain; if he held it, he hoped, should the war drag on, to bring down Vitellius even by force, since the populace of Rome would not endure hunger — and he also wanted to win over the two legions stationed at Alexandria. He also had in mind that the country would serve as a bulwark against the uncertainties of fortune.
For Egypt is hard to invade by land and harborless along its coast: to the west it is fronted by the waterless wastes of Libya, to the south by Syene, which marks the border with Ethiopia, and by the Nile's cataracts, impossible to sail; to the east, the Red Sea, which spreads up to Coptos. Its northern wall is the land stretching to Syria and the sea called Egyptian, all of it without anchorage. Egypt is thus walled on every side. The distance between Pelusium and Syene is two thousand stades, and the voyage up from Plinthine to Pelusium is three thousand six hundred stades. The Nile is navigable as far as the city called Elephantine, beyond which the cataracts already mentioned bar further passage. Even in peacetime the harbor of Alexandria is difficult for ships to approach, for its entrance is narrow and its straight course is bent by submerged rocks. Its left side is fortified with man-made moles, and on the right lies the island called Pharos, which carries a very great tower that beams fire to sailors from three hundred stades away, so that ships can anchor by night far off, given how difficult the approach is. Around this island enormous man-made walls have been built; the sea, dashing against them and breaking on the barriers opposite, roughens the channel and makes the narrow entrance treacherous. Yet the harbor within is perfectly safe, thirty stades across, and into it are brought whatever the country lacks for its prosperity, while its own surplus goods are dispersed to the whole inhabited world.
Vespasian, then, reasonably set his sights on affairs there to secure the whole empire, and at once wrote to Tiberius Alexander, who governed Egypt and Alexandria, informing him of the army's enthusiasm and explaining that he had taken up the burden of empire out of necessity, and was enlisting him as a partner and helper. Alexander read the letter aloud and eagerly swore in the legions and the populace to Vespasian's cause; both obeyed gladly, knowing the man's merit from his command nearby. And so, with authority now entrusted to him, Alexander began preparing matters relating to the government and to Vespasian's arrival.
But rumor outran even his planning and announced the new emperor of the East everywhere, and every city held festival, offering good tidings and sacrifices on his behalf. The legions in Moesia and Pannonia, which shortly before had been stirred by Vitellius's daring bid, now swore allegiance to Vespasian with even greater joy. He himself moved from Caesarea to Berytus, where many delegations met him, both from Syria and from the other provinces, bringing crowns and decrees of congratulation from each city. Mucianus too, the governor of the province, was present, reporting the enthusiasm of the peoples and the oaths sworn city by city.
As fortune everywhere advanced according to his wishes and affairs had for the most part come together favorably, it now occurred to Vespasian to reflect that it was not without divine providence that he had laid hold of power, but that some just fate had brought the mastery of the whole world round to him. He recalled the other signs, many of which had appeared to him everywhere foretelling his rule, and also the words of Josephus, who while Nero still lived had dared to address him as emperor.
He was struck that this man was still a prisoner in his custody, and summoning Mucianus together with his other officers and friends, he first related Josephus's energetic conduct and all that they had suffered at Jotapata because of him, and then the prophecies, which he himself had at the time suspected were fabrications born of fear, but which time and events had proven divine. "It is shameful, then," he said, "that the man who foretold my rule and served as the mouthpiece of God's voice should still endure the status of a captive or the fortune of a prisoner." And calling Josephus to him, he ordered that he be freed. At this act of requital toward a foreigner, the officers found themselves hoping for splendid things concerning their own prospects as well.

Titus, who was with his father, said, "Father, it is right that along with his chains Josephus's disgrace also be removed. He will become as though he had never been bound at all, if instead of releasing his fetters we simply cut them through — for that is what is done in the case of those who were bound without just cause."

This was agreed, and someone came forward and severed the chain with an axe. Josephus, having received this as a reward for his earlier services, now also carried full credibility regarding what was yet to come.
Vespasian, having given audience to the embassies, and having appointed governors for each province justly and through worthy men, arrived at Antioch. Deliberating where to turn, he judged the affairs of Rome more urgent than his drive toward Alexandria, seeing that Egypt was secure while Italy was in turmoil under Vitellius. He therefore sent Mucianus into Italy, entrusting him with a substantial force of cavalry and infantry. Mucianus, fearing to sail because of the depth of winter, led the army on foot through Cappadocia and Phrygia.
Meanwhile Antonius Primus, taking up the third legion of the Moesian forces, of which he happened to be in command there, hastened to give battle to Vitellius. Vitellius sent Caecina Alienus to meet him with a large force, placing great confidence in the man because of his victory over Otho. Caecina, marching swiftly from Rome, caught up with Antonius near Cremona in Gaul; this city lies on the border of Italy. Seeing there the size and good order of the enemy forces, he did not dare to engage, and reckoning retreat too dangerous, he plotted treason instead. Gathering the centurions and tribunes under his command, he urged them to go over to Antonius, disparaging Vitellius's position and extolling Vespasian's strength, saying that with one man lay only the name of power, with the other its substance, and that they themselves would do better to anticipate necessity and turn it to their advantage, forestalling with their judgment a danger they were bound to lose by arms — for Vespasian, he said, was capable of acquiring even what he still lacked without their help, while Vitellius could not even keep what he had, even with it.
With many such arguments he persuaded them, and deserted to Antonius along with his force. But that same night remorse fell upon the soldiers, along with fear of the man they had sent ahead should he prevail; drawing their swords, they set out to kill Caecina, and the deed would have been done had the tribunes not thrown themselves down and begged them off. They held back from killing him, but bound the traitor, intending to send him to Vitellius. On hearing this, Primus at once roused his own men and led them under arms against the mutineers. These drew up in battle order and held out briefly, but then broke and fled into Cremona. Primus, taking his cavalry, cut off their approaches to the city, surrounded the greater part of the crowd before the walls and destroyed them, and having broken in with the rest, gave the town over to his soldiers to plunder. There many foreign merchants perished, and many of the local people, and the whole army of Vitellius besides — thirty thousand two hundred men; of the Moesian forces Antonius lost four thousand five hundred. He freed Caecina and sent him to Vespasian to report what had happened; and when he arrived, Vespasian received him and covered over the disgrace of his treason with honors beyond his hopes.

Meanwhile in Rome, Sabinus took new heart as word came that Antonius was near, and gathering the cohorts of the night watch, seized the Capitol by night. By day many distinguished men joined him, including Domitian, his brother's son — the greatest asset of all for their hopes of prevailing.
Vitellius cared little for Primus, but was enraged at those who had defected with Sabinus, and driven by his innate savagery and thirst for the blood of noble soldiers, he unleashed the force that had come down with him upon the Capitol. Much daring was shown on both sides, from this force and from those fighting from the temple, but in the end the Germans, overwhelming them by numbers, took the hill. Domitian, along with many Romans of rank, escaped by what seemed almost divine intervention; the rest of the crowd was cut down entirely, and Sabinus, led before Vitellius, was put to death. The soldiers plundered the temple's offerings and set it on fire. The next day Antonius entered with his force; Vitellius's men came out to meet him, and, engaging in three places throughout the city, were all destroyed. Vitellius himself came forth drunk from the palace, gorged as if at the last course of a wasteful banquet. Dragged through the crowd and abused with every kind of outrage, he was butchered in the middle of Rome, having held power eight months and five days; had it fallen to him to live longer, I think his empire would have run out before his lust did. Of the rest of the dead, more than fifty thousand were counted.

These events took place on the third of the month Apellaeus. The following day Mucianus entered with his army and stopped Antonius's men from killing further — for even then, searching the houses, they were killing, in their rush of anger, many soldiers of Vitellius and many ordinary citizens as his supposed followers, outpacing careful judgment. Mucianus brought Domitian forward and set him before the people as their leader until his father's arrival. The populace, now free of its fears, acclaimed Vespasian emperor, and celebrated at once both his confirmation and the fall of Vitellius.
When Vespasian had reached Alexandria, the good news from Rome arrived, along with envoys from every part of his own empire offering congratulations; and Alexandria, the greatest city after Rome, proved too small for the crowds.
With his power over the whole empire now ratified and Rome's fortunes saved beyond hope, Vespasian turned his thoughts to what remained of Judea. He himself, however, was eager to sail for Rome once winter had ended, and quickly settled affairs at Alexandria, sending his son Titus with a picked force to destroy Jerusalem. Titus advanced on foot as far as Nicopolis, twenty stades from Alexandria, and from there embarked the army on river boats and sailed up the Nile through the Mendesian district to the city of Thmuis. Disembarking there, he marched on and camped for the night at the small town of Tanis. His second stop was Heracleopolis, and his third Pelusium. There he rested the army for two days, and on the third set out through the passes of Pelusium; advancing one stage through the desert, he camped by the temple of Zeus Casius, and the next day at Ostracine — this stage was waterless, and the local people use water brought in from elsewhere. After this he rested at Rhinocorura, and from there advanced to Raphia, a fourth stage; this city marks the beginning of Syria. The fifth camp he pitched at Gaza, after which he came to Ascalon, then Jamnia, then Joppa, and from Joppa reached Caesarea, having decided to gather the rest of his forces there.

======== Jewish War — Book 5 ========

Titus, having crossed the desert above Egypt as far as Syria in the manner already described, arrived at Caesarea, having decided to organize his forces there first. But while he was still in Alexandria helping his father settle into the command newly entrusted to them by God, it happened that the sedition in Jerusalem, which had already flared up, split into three factions, and one of these turned against the others—
a development one might call, amid the general evil, a kind of good, and the work of justice. The assault of the Zealots on the populace, which set in motion the city's capture, has already been described in full detail—its origin and the extent of the harm it grew to. But one would not be wrong to say that this new outbreak was sedition arising within sedition, and that, like a rabid beast which, for want of prey from outside, turns on its own flesh, so it was with Eleazar son of Simon.
He was the very man who had first led the Zealots to break away from the populace into the temple precinct, professing outrage at John's daily acts of daring—for John never rested from killing—but in truth unwilling to submit to a tyrant who had risen after him. Driven by desire for total control and by ambition for power of his own, he broke away, taking with him Judas son of Chelcias and Simon son of Ezron, men of standing, along with Hezekiah son of Chobar, no obscure figure. Not a few of the Zealots followed each of them, and, seizing the inner court of the temple above the sacred gates, they set up their weapons upon the holy porches. Being well supplied with provisions, they grew bold—for there was no shortage of sacred stores for those who counted nothing impious.
But being few in number relative to their situation, they grew fearful and, keeping to their position, stayed put for the most part. John, for all his advantage in numbers of men, was correspondingly disadvantaged in position, and with the enemy holding the high ground over him, he neither made his attacks without fear nor kept still out of anger; suffering more harm than he inflicted on Eleazar's men, he nonetheless would not let up. Constant sallies and volleys of missiles went on, and the temple was everywhere defiled with slaughter.
Simon son of Gioras, whom the people, in their desperate straits, had brought in as an invited tyrant of their own, in hope of relief, now held the upper city and much of the lower, and pressed his attacks on John's men all the more vigorously, since they too were under attack from above. He was, in effect, closing in on them from below just as those above were closing in on them. And so, with John fighting on two fronts, it came about that he both suffered harm and inflicted it with equal ease: to the extent that he was worsted by being lower than Eleazar's party, to that same extent he had the advantage of height over Simon's. He therefore used his hand-weapons to fend off the attacks from below with force, while checking those hurling javelins down from the temple above by means of his engines—for he had no small number of quick-firing catapults, stone-throwers, and the like.
With these he not only warded off his attackers but also killed many who were performing the sacred rites. For though they had abandoned themselves to every kind of impiety, they still let in those who wished to sacrifice—watching the locals with suspicion and searching visitors closely. Yet those who, despite passing this scrutiny at the entrances and shaming their captors' cruelty, made it inside became mere fuel consumed by the sedition.
For missiles from the engines, carried by their force all the way to the altar and the sanctuary, fell upon the priests and those performing the rites, and many who had hastened from the ends of the earth to that place—sacred and revered by all people, in a single name known to both—fell before their own offerings, and drenched with their own blood that altar honored by both Greeks and barbarians alike; corpses of natives and foreigners, of priests and the profane, were heaped together, and the blood of every sort of body pooled within the sacred courts.
What suffering so great, O most wretched city, have you endured at the hands of the Romans, who came in only to purge with fire the pollutions your own people had brought upon you! For you were no longer God's dwelling place, nor could you remain so, having become a tomb for the bodies of your own people, and having turned the temple into a burial ground of civil war. Yet you might still become better again—if only you will one day appease the God who laid you waste.
But I must restrain even my own feelings, in keeping with the law of the narrative, since this is not the moment for private lamentation but for a recounting of events. I will now go through what followed in the course of the sedition.
With the city's would-be masters divided three ways, Eleazar's men, who guarded the sacred first-fruits, vented their drunken fury against John; those with John plundered the citizens and rose up against Simon; and Simon, in turn, found the city itself his sustenance against his rivals. Whenever John was attacked from both sides at once, he would turn his men about, striking those advancing from the city from the direction of the porticoes, while warding off with his engines those hurling javelins from the temple. But whenever he found himself free of the pressure from above—often, since drink and exhaustion gave his enemies pause—he would sally out with greater numbers and less fear against Simon's men.
And wherever he drove them back within the city, he would set fire to the houses, full of grain and every kind of provision; and Simon, in turn, did the very same thing when John withdrew and he advanced—as if the two of them were deliberately helping the Romans by destroying what the city had prepared for the siege, and cutting the very sinews of their own strength. As a result, everything around the temple was consumed by fire, and the city became a wasteland lying between two camps of its own people; nearly all the grain, which would have sufficed them for many years of siege, was burned up. It was famine, then, that took the city—something that need never have happened, had they not brought it upon themselves.
With the city under attack on every side by these plotters and their rabble, the populace in between was torn apart like some great body. The old and the women, in their helplessness before the evils within, prayed for the Romans and longed for the war from outside as a release from the miseries within. Terrible dread and fear gripped the honest citizens; there was no chance to deliberate a change of course, no hope of a settlement, and no escape for those who wished it, for everything was under guard, and the ringleaders of the brigands, still quarreling over everything else, agreed on one thing only—killing those who deserved to live, treating them as common enemies whether they favored peace with Rome or were merely suspected of wanting to desert. The shouting of the combatants never ceased, by day or by night, but more terrible still were the wails of the mourners, cried out in dread.
Their sorrows gave them endless fresh occasions for lament, yet their own terror stifled the cries; muzzled by fear, they were tormented by groans stifled deep within. No one showed any regard any longer for the living among their own kin, nor any concern for the burial of the dead—both stemming from each person's private despair, for those who took no part in the fighting had given up all effort in everything, since they expected to perish at any moment regardless.
Trampling over the corpses heaped one upon another, the fighters grappled with each other, growing wilder by drawing their frenzy from the bodies underfoot. Constantly devising some new means of ruin against their own people, and doing without restraint whatever was decided, they left untried no path of outrage or cruelty. Indeed, John even put the sacred timber to use in constructing engines of war: for the people and the chief priests had once resolved to shore up the temple and raise it twenty cubits higher, and King Agrippa, at enormous cost and effort, had brought down from Lebanon timber suited to the purpose—beams remarkable both for their straightness and their size. But the war intervened and cut short the project, and John cut up the timber and built towers of a height sufficient for fighting those above him in the temple.
He set these towers up, brought forward behind the enclosure directly opposite the western portico—the one place where such an approach was possible, since all the other sections were separated by steps set some distance back. And so he hoped to master his enemies with engines built from an act of impiety; but God showed his labor to be useless, bringing the Romans against him before he could set a single tower in place. For Titus, once he had gathered part of his forces to himself and ordered the rest to meet him before Jerusalem, marched out from Caesarea.
There were three legions that had previously ravaged Judea together with his father, and, in addition, the twelfth, which had once suffered defeat under Cestius—a legion otherwise distinguished for its valor, and which now, mindful of what it had once suffered, advanced to take revenge with all the greater eagerness.
Of these he ordered the fifth to meet him by way of Emmaus, and the tenth to come up by way of Jericho, while he himself set out with the rest, joined also by far larger contingents of allied kings and numerous auxiliaries from Syria. The full strength of the four legions was likewise restored with troops that Vespasian had selected and sent along with Titus, out of those Mucianus had brought with him to Italy; for two thousand picked men from the forces at Alexandria and three thousand from the guards along the Euphrates accompanied him. Among his friends, the most esteemed for loyalty and judgment was Tiberius Alexander, who had previously governed Egypt for them and now commanded the forces—judged worthy of this, by the welcome he had given to their newly rising power, of being among the first to attach himself, with conspicuous good faith, to a fortune still uncertain; and now, given his seniority and his experience, he served Titus as an advisor in the needs of the war.
As Titus advanced into enemy territory, the allied kings and all the auxiliary forces went ahead, followed by road-builders and camp-surveyors; then came the officers' baggage-train, and behind their armed escorts, Titus himself, with his other picked troops and the lance-bearers; behind his unit came the cavalry. These rode ahead of the siege engines, and after them the tribunes and cohort commanders with their picked men; then, around the eagle, came the standards, with the trumpeters preceding the standards, and after them the main body of infantry, spread six abreast. The servants of each legion came behind, and ahead of them the baggage-train, while last of all came the hired troops, with their own guards bringing up the rear.
Leading his forces forward in good order, as is customary for the Romans, he marched through Samaria into Gophna, a town previously seized by his father and now under garrison. There, after camping one evening, he set out again toward dawn, and after a day's march, made camp at the place the Jews traditionally call the Valley of Thorns, near a village called Gabath Saul, meaning "the hill of Saul," about thirty stadia from Jerusalem.
From there he took with him about six hundred picked cavalry and rode ahead to reconnoiter the city, to gauge its defenses and the temper of the Jews—whether the sight of him, before matters came to blows, would make them lose heart and yield. For he had learned, and it was indeed true, that the populace, cowed by the rebels and the brigands, longed for peace but, being too weak, could not rise up against the insurrection.
So long as he rode straight up the highway leading to the wall, no one showed himself at the gates; but when he turned off the road toward the Psephinus tower, veering his troop of cavalry off to the side, countless numbers suddenly sprang out near the towers called the Women's Towers, bursting out through the gate opposite the tombs of Helena, and cut off the cavalry there. Those still running along the road they blocked by standing to face them, preventing them from joining those who had turned aside, and they cut Titus himself off with only a few companions.
He could not advance, for the ground around the gardens had been dug into trenches from the wall, and was broken up everywhere by cross-walls and many enclosures; and he saw that to retreat to his own men was impossible, given the mass of enemies in between, and that most of those who had fled along the highway did not even realize the king was in danger, but supposing that he had turned back with them, fled on themselves. Seeing that his safety now rested solely on his own courage, he wheeled his horse about, called out to those with him to follow, and plunged into the midst of the enemy,
forcing his way through to break out to his own men. It was here, above all, that one could grasp how the turns of war and the perils of kings are matters of concern to God: for though so many missiles were hurled at Titus, who wore neither helmet nor breastplate—having ridden out, as I said, not as a combatant but as a scout—not one touched his body, but all flew wide, as if by design missing their mark entirely. Slashing with his sword at those beside him,
constantly cutting them down and overturning many who faced him, he drove his horse over the fallen. His enemies raised a shout at Caesar's daring, and urged one another on to charge him, yet wherever he rode against them there was flight and a scattering of the crowd. Those sharing his danger kept close together, struck at from behind and from the side, for each man's one hope of survival was to keep pace with Titus and not fall behind to be surrounded.
Two of those farther back were in fact surrounded, one cut down along with his horse by javelins, and the other, leaping down, killed his horse and was carried off on foot; but with the rest, Titus made it safely back to camp. This unexpected success in their first encounter roused the spirits of the Jews, and the momentary advantage gave them great confidence for what lay ahead.
When, that night, the legion from Emmaus joined him, Caesar set out from there the next day and advanced to the place called Scopus, from which the city already came into view, along with the gleaming mass of the temple—for the place, lying low where it joins the northern side of the city, is aptly named Scopus, "the Lookout."
Seven stadia from the city, he ordered a camp to be fortified for the two legions together, and, three stadia behind them, another for the fifth—for he judged that this legion, worn out by its night march, deserved the safety of a more sheltered position while the others built their defenses. Just as the work of fortification was beginning, the tenth legion also arrived, by way of Jericho, where a detachment of infantry had been stationed to guard the crossing previously secured by Vespasian; it had been ordered to make camp six stadia from Jerusalem, on the mountain called the Mount of Olives, which faces the city to the east, separated from it by a deep ravine called the Kidron. And when those in the city, who had been fighting each other without pause, suddenly found the strife within halted for the first time by the war from outside bursting in on them all at once, the rebels, in astonishment,
When they saw the Romans encamped in three places, the rebels fell into evil agreement among themselves and asked one another what they meant to endure, sitting shut up behind three walls that blocked their very breath, while the war built its own city against them at its ease — and they themselves sat like spectators of fine and fortunate deeds, penned inside the walls, hands and armor set aside. "So we are brave only against each other," they cried, "while the Romans will win the city bloodlessly out of our own quarrel!"
With these words they rallied one another, and snatching up their arms they suddenly ran out against the Tenth Legion, and dashing through the ravine with a tremendous shout fell upon the enemy while they were still fortifying their camp. The soldiers were scattered about the work, and for that reason had set aside most of their weapons — for they had not supposed the Jews would venture a sortie — and were thrown into unexpected confusion just as they were eager to be diverted from their fatigue by the very fighting. Some abandoned the work at once and withdrew, while many ran for their weapons and were struck down before they could turn to face the enemy. The Jews kept gaining more men, emboldened by the success of the first attackers, and, favored by fortune, believed themselves and appeared to their enemies far more numerous than they were.
It is above all men accustomed to order, who know how to fight by discipline and command, whom sudden disorder catches off guard and throws into confusion. So it was that the Romans, caught unprepared by the assault, gave ground. Whenever those under attack turned to face them, they checked the Jews' charge and, since the Jews were less on their guard because of their own impetus, wounded them; but as the sortie kept swelling in numbers, the Romans, growing ever more disordered, were at last driven back from the camp. It seemed then that the whole legion would have been in danger, had not Titus, informed of what was happening, come speedily to its aid. Denouncing them bitterly for cowardice, he turned the fleeing men back, and himself, falling upon the Jews' flank with the picked men he had brought, killed many, wounded still more, and put all of them to flight, driving them down into the ravine.
Battered badly on the descent, once they had made their way through it they turned about again, and with the ravine between them fought it out with the Romans. So they fought until midday; but as the day began to decline a little past noon, Titus, having set the reinforcements who had come with him and the men from the cohorts in array against those still sallying out, sent the rest of the legion back up to the fortification-work on the ridge. To the Jews this looked like flight, and when the man posted as lookout on the wall shook out his cloak, an even fresher crowd sprang forward with such fury that their charge might be likened to the wildest of beasts. None of those drawn up against them held their ground at the encounter; struck as if by a machine, they broke their line and fled toward the mountain. Titus was left in the middle of the slope with only a few men,
and though many of his friends — those who out of respect for their commander had stood their ground, scorning the danger — urged him earnestly to give way before Jews bent on death and not to risk himself ahead of men whose duty it was to stand in front of him, to take thought for his own fortune and not fill the place of a common soldier when he was master of the war and of the world, and not to face so sharp a crisis at a moment when everything hung in the balance — to none of this would he even listen. He stood against those rushing at him, and striking them face to face killed those who pressed him, and falling upon the massed ranks on the slope drove the crowd back. They, terrified by his bearing and his strength, still did not flee straight into the city, but swerving aside from him pressed instead upon those fleeing further up the hill.
These too he attacked on the flank, cutting off their impetus. Meanwhile the men above, fortifying the camp, on seeing those below in flight, were seized again by panic and fear, and the whole legion scattered, believing that the Jews' onset was irresistible and that Titus himself had been routed — for surely, they thought, the rest would never flee while he still stood his ground. And, as though gripped by a panic terror, they were carried off this way and that, until some, catching sight of their commander wheeling about in the midst of the fighting, and fearing greatly for him, shouted the danger to the whole legion. Shame then turned them back, and reproaching one another still more for flight, for having abandoned Caesar, they threw themselves with all their strength against the Jews, and once they had inclined down the slope they drove them together into the hollow.
The Jews, giving ground step by step, kept fighting, but the Romans, having the advantage of higher ground, forced them all together into the ravine. Titus pressed hard upon those before him, and sent the legion back once more to its wall-building, while he himself, with those who had earlier stood by him, held off the enemy — so that, if the truth must be told without adding anything out of flattery or subtracting anything out of malice, Caesar in person twice rescued the whole legion when it was in danger, and secured for it the freedom to build its camp.
When the fighting outside had abated for a little while, the sedition within flared up again. On the fourteenth day of the month Xanthicus, when the feast of Unleavened Bread was beginning — the day on which the Jews believe they were first delivered from the Egyptians — Eleazar's men opened the gates a crack and let in from the people those who wished to worship; but John, using the festival as a screen for his plot, armed the more obscure of his followers — most of whom were ritually unclean — secretly under their clothes, and sent them hurrying in to seize the temple beforehand. Once inside, they threw off their garments and suddenly stood revealed as armed men.
At once the greatest confusion and uproar arose around the sanctuary, the people outside the sedition supposing the assault to be aimed indiscriminately at everyone, the Zealots supposing it aimed at themselves alone. Some abandoned their posts guarding the gates and, leaping down from the battlements before coming to blows, fled into the underground passages of the temple; others of the people, cowering by the altar and crowding around the sanctuary, were trampled underfoot, struck without restraint by clubs and by the sword. Many peaceable men were killed by their personal enemies and rivals out of private hatred and enmity, as though they were opponents of the sedition, and every man who had ever offended one of the conspirators was now recognized as a Zealot and dragged off to be abused. Having inflicted many terrible things on the innocent, they granted a truce to the guilty, and let those who had come forward out of the underground passages go free.
They themselves now held the inner sanctuary and all the stores of weapons within it, and grew bold against Simon. So the sedition, which before had been divided in three, now settled into two factions. Titus, wishing to move his camp nearer the city from Scopus, stationed against those making sorties a chosen force of horse and foot sufficient, he judged, for the purpose, and ordered the whole remaining force to level the ground as far as the wall.
When every fence and enclosure that the inhabitants had set up for gardens and trees had been thrown down, and all the cultivated timber in between cut away, the hollows and ravines of the place were filled in, and the rocky outcrops were leveled with iron tools, until the whole area from Scopus to the tombs of Herod, which adjoin the pool called the Pool of the Serpents, was made level ground.
In those same days the Jews contrived the following ambush against the Romans. The bolder of the rebels went out beyond the towers called the Women's Towers, pretending to have been driven out by those who favored peace, and, feigning fear of the Romans' approach, kept huddling together and crouching before one another. Meanwhile, standing apart on the wall, a crowd that passed for the ordinary people cried out for peace and begged for a pledge of good faith, calling on the Romans and promising to open the gates; and even as they shouted this, they pelted their own comrades with stones, as though driving them away from the gates. Those men in turn pretended to be forcing their way toward the entrances and begging the people within, and repeatedly, as they rushed toward the Romans, they turned back again, giving the appearance of men in disorder.
Among the soldiers their trickery lost nothing of its credibility; rather, holding those they thought they had in hand ready for punishment, and hoping the others would open the city, they set about the business. But Titus was suspicious of the strangeness of this appeal — for indeed, only the day before, when he had invited them through Josephus to come to terms, he had found no reasonable response from them — and so on this occasion he ordered the soldiers to stay in place. Some of those stationed at the earthworks, however, anticipated the order, snatched up their weapons, and ran out toward the gates. At first those who seemed to have been driven out withdrew before them, but once the soldiers had come between the towers flanking the gate, the Jews ran out, encircled them, and pressed upon them from behind; and the men on the wall poured down a dense hail of stones and every kind of missile, killing a good many and wounding still more.
For it was not easy to escape the wall while those behind kept forcing them on, and besides, shame at their blunder and fear of their officers drove them to persist in their mistake. So, thrusting with their spears for a long while and taking many blows from the Jews, though certainly giving back no fewer, they at last drove back those who had encircled them; and the Jews, retreating before them, followed them, still hurling missiles, as far as the tombs of Helena.
Then, exulting in their success with tasteless insolence, they jeered at the Romans for having been taken in by the trick, brandished their shields, leaped about, and shouted for joy. The soldiers, for their part, were met with threats from their officers and the anger of Caesar, who told them that the Jews, who were driven by nothing but desperation, did everything with forethought and calculation, laying ambushes and setting traps, and that even fortune attended their stratagems because of their obedience and their mutual trust and loyalty to one another; whereas the Romans, whose fortune had always depended on their discipline and their obedience to their commanders, were now stumbling before their enemies and being caught through sheer lack of self-control in close combat — the most shameful thing of all — fighting without orders while Caesar himself was present.
He said that the laws of military service would groan mightily over this, and his own father, when he learned of this blow, would groan mightily too, seeing that he himself, grown old in wars, had never suffered such a reverse, while the laws always punished with death even those who had disturbed their ranks in the slightest way — yet now they had seen an entire army behave like deserters. They would soon learn, he said, those who had taken such license, that even victory among the Romans is held in disgrace when won without orders.
Having spoken thus sharply to the officers, he made it plain he meant to apply the law against all of them. The men gave themselves up for lost, as though they were about to die justly at any moment; but the legions, gathering around Titus, pleaded for their fellow-soldiers and begged him to grant to the obedience of all a pardon for the rashness of a few, promising that their future courage would make up for the present lapse. Caesar yielded, moved both by their entreaties and by considerations of advantage: for he judged that punishment against a single man should be carried through to the deed, but punishment against a multitude should stop at words.
So he was reconciled with the soldiers, after admonishing them at length to be wiser in future, while he himself considered how to guard against the Jews' stratagems. In four days, the ground as far as the walls having been leveled, and wishing to bring up the baggage and the rest of the multitude in safety, he drew out the strongest part of his force in a line facing the wall along the northern side, and toward the west, deepening the phalanx to seven ranks, with the infantry drawn up in front and the cavalry behind, each in three files, and the archers stationed in the seventh, middle rank.
With the sorties of the Jews thus barred by so dense a mass, the pack-animals of the three legions and the multitude passed by in safety. Titus himself encamped about two stadia from the wall, opposite the corner where it turned, facing the tower called Psephinus, toward which the circuit of the wall, running down from the north, bends back toward the west; the other division of the army fortified its camp near the tower called Hippicus, likewise two stadia from the city. The Tenth Legion, however, remained in its place on the Mount of Olives.
The city, fortified by three walls except where it was encircled by impassable ravines — for there a single wall sufficed — was itself built upon two hills facing each other, divided by a central ravine, into which the houses on both sides descended in tiers. Of the two hills, the one holding the Upper City was much higher and straighter in its length; because of its strength it was called the Citadel by King David — the father of Solomon, who built the first temple — while we call it the Upper Market. The other hill, called the Acra, and supporting the Lower City, was shaped like a crescent on both sides. Facing it was a third hill,
lower by nature than the Acra and separated from it, originally, by another broad ravine. But in later times, in the days when the Hasmoneans reigned, they filled in the ravine, wishing to join the city to the temple, and also cut down the height of the Acra, making it lower, so that the temple might be visible above it from that side as well. The ravine called the Valley of the Cheesemakers, which, as we have said, separates the hill of the Upper City from that of the Lower, runs down as far as Siloam — for so we call that spring, whose water is sweet and abundant. On the outside, the city's two hills were surrounded by deep ravines, and because of the cliffs on both sides there was no approach to the city from any direction.
Of the three walls, the old one was hard to capture both because of the ravines and because of the hill on which it was built above them; and besides the natural advantage of the site, it had also been strongly constructed, David and Solomon, and the kings who reigned between and after them, having taken great pride in the work. Beginning on the north at the tower called Hippicus and extending to the Xystus, it then joined the council-chamber and reached completion at the western portico of the temple. On the other side, toward the west, beginning from the same point, it ran through the place called Bethso, extended to the Essene Gate, then turned south above the spring of Siloam, from there bent again toward the east to the Pool of Solomon, and, running on to a place called Ophlas, joined the eastern portico of the temple. The second wall began
The third wall began at the gate they called Genath, part of the first wall, and circling the northern quarter alone, rose as far as the Antonia. Its beginning was the Hippicus tower, from which it stretched to the northern district as far as the Psephinus tower, then came down opposite the monuments of Helena — she was the queen of Adiabene, daughter of King Izates — and, running on for a long way through royal caves, bent at a corner tower by the tomb called the Fuller's Tomb, and joining the old circuit, ended at the valley called the Kidron. This was the wall Agrippa built around the newly settled part of the city, which had until then lain completely exposed; for as the population overflowed, it crept out little by little beyond the existing walls. Building up the northern side of the temple next to the hill, they advanced no small distance and came to inhabit even a fourth hill, called Bezetha, which lies opposite the Antonia but is cut off from it by a deep trench — for it had been trenched on purpose, so that the foundations of the Antonia, not adjoining the hill, would be less accessible and less exposed to being overtopped; indeed the depth of the trench added considerably to the height of its towers. The newly built quarter was called in the local tongue Bezetha, which, translated into Greek, would mean 'new city.'
Since the people living there needed protection, Agrippa — the father of the present king and his namesake — began the wall we have described; but fearing that Claudius Caesar might suspect from the scale of the construction some plot of revolution and insurrection, he stopped after laying only the foundations. And indeed the city could not have been taken at all if the wall had been carried through as it was begun. Its stones were twenty cubits long and ten cubits wide, fitted together so that they could neither easily be undermined with iron tools nor shaken loose by engines; the wall itself was ten cubits thick, and its height, one may suppose, would have been still greater had the ambition of its founder not been cut short. Even so, when it was later raised in haste by the Jews, it reached
twenty cubits, with battlements two cubits high and breastworks three cubits high, so that the whole height came to twenty-five cubits. The towers rising above the wall were twenty cubits wide and twenty cubits high, square and solid throughout like the wall itself; and the fitting and beauty of the stones fell in nothing short
of a temple's. Above the solid twenty-cubit height of the towers were costly chambers, and above these upper rooms, and cisterns to catch the rainwater, with broad spiral stairways leading up in each one. The third wall had ninety such towers, the spaces between them two hundred cubits each; the middle wall had fourteen towers,
and the old wall was divided into sixty. The whole circuit of the city measured thirty-three stadia. Wonderful as the entire third wall was, more wonderful still was the Psephinus tower, standing at its northwest corner, where Titus later pitched his camp; for being seventy cubits high, it afforded a view of Arabia at sunrise, and of the sea
as far as the farthest boundary of the Hebrews' territory; and it was octagonal. Opposite this stood the Hippicus, and beside it two others, all built by King Herod within the old wall — towers unmatched in the inhabited world for size, beauty, and strength; for besides his naturally grand spirit and his ambition for the city, the king
indulged his private feelings and honored the memory of the three people dearest to him — a brother, a friend, and a wife — after whom he named the towers, the wife he had, as we have said, put to death out of love, the other two he had lost in war, having fought bravely. The Hippicus, named after his friend, was square, twenty-five cubits in width and in length each way, and thirty
cubits in height, solid throughout without any hollow. Above this solid mass, joined seamlessly to the stonework, was a cistern twenty cubits deep for catching rain; above this a two-storied building twenty-five cubits high, divided into rooms of various design, above which rose turrets two cubits high and breastworks three cubits high, so that the total height came to eighty cubits. The second
tower, which he named Phasael after his brother, had width and length equal, forty cubits each, and its solid mass rose to a height of forty cubits. Above this ran a portico ten cubits high, shielded by parapets and battlements; and in the middle of the portico was built another tower, divided into costly rooms and even a bathhouse, so
that nothing was lacking to make the tower seem a palace. Its summit was crowned all around with battlements and turrets — the text here is corrupt. Its total height was about ninety cubits, and its shape resembled the lighthouse at Pharos which guides sailors into Alexandria, though its girth was far greater; at the time of the siege it served as the stronghold of Simon. The
third tower, the Mariamme — for so the queen was called — was solid up to twenty cubits, and measured twenty cubits in width and the same in length, but had above it living quarters more costly and more elaborate than the others, since the king thought it fitting that the tower named after his wife should be adorned more richly than those named after men, just as the men, he supposed, were stronger than the woman.
Its total height was fifty-five cubits. Great as these three towers were in themselves, they appeared far greater still because of their position; for the old wall on which they stood was itself built on a high hill, and above the hill a still higher summit rose thirty cubits, on which the towers stood, gaining thereby a great deal more
in elevation. The size of the stones, too, was astonishing: they were not made of ordinary rubble, nor of stones a man could carry, but were cut from white marble; each block was twenty cubits long, ten wide, and five thick, and they were fitted together so precisely that each tower seemed to be a single rock that had grown there naturally, and only afterward been shaped by craftsmen's hands into
its form and angles — so completely did the joints of the masonry disappear from view. Adjoining these towers on the north, within the wall, was the king's palace, beyond all description; for it lacked no extravagance or refinement whatsoever. It was walled all around to a height of thirty cubits, at regular intervals, set with ornamented towers and very large banquet halls that could seat a hundred guests,
in which the variety of stone was beyond describing, for much rare stone had been gathered there from every quarter; the ceilings were marvelous for the length of their beams and the brilliance of their ornament, and the number and variety of the rooms surrounding them was countless, and every one of them was fully furnished, most of what lay in each made of silver and gold. There were many colonnades running one into another
in a circuit, each with its own distinct columns, and the open ground before them was everywhere green, with varied plantings and long walkways running through them, and around these deep channels and cisterns everywhere full of bronze fountainwork, through which the water poured out, and around the streams many dovecotes of tame pigeons. But indeed
it is not possible to describe the palace adequately, and the memory of it brings its own torment, recalling all that was consumed by the fire of the rebels; for it was not the Romans who burned these buildings but, as we said before, the conspirators within, at the start of the revolt — the fire began at the Antonia, then spread to the palace and consumed the roofs of the three towers. The temple, as I have said, stood on a strong hill,
and at first the summit of the hill scarcely sufficed for the temple and the altar, for the ground all around was steep and precipitous. King Solomon, who built the temple, walled up the eastern side, and a single portico was set upon the fill; on the other sides the temple stood exposed. In the ages
that followed, as the people continually added fill, the hill was leveled and widened. They also broke through the northern wall and gained as much ground as the whole enclosure of the later temple would come to occupy. Walling the hill about from its base on three sides, and completing a work greater than had been hoped, for which long ages were spent and all the sacred treasures too, which the
tribute sent to God from every part of the world had filled — they built around both the upper enclosures and the lower temple. Its lowest part was walled up from a depth of three hundred cubits, and in some places more; not all the depth of the foundations was visible, for they filled in the ravines to a great extent, wanting to level the narrow streets of the city. The stones were forty cubits
in the building — for the abundance of money and the people's zeal made the undertakings greater than words can express, and what had seemed impossible to hope for was in the end accomplished through persistence and time. Worthy of such foundations, too, were the works raised above them: the porticoes were all double, their columns twenty-five cubits high, monolithic, of the whitest
marble, roofed over with cedar paneling. Their natural richness, their smoothness, and their harmony offered a remarkable sight, though none of them was further adorned on the outside with painting or carving. The streets were thirty cubits wide, and the whole circuit of the porticoes measured six stadia, including the Antonia. The open courtyard was entirely paved
with variegated stone. Passing through this toward the second temple, one came to a stone balustrade, three cubits high, very gracefully worked; on it stood pillars at equal intervals proclaiming the law of purity, some in Greek letters, some in Latin, that no foreigner should pass within the sanctuary — for the second temple was called the Holy Place. Fourteen steps
led up to it from the first court, and above it was square and enclosed by its own wall. Its outer height, though forty cubits, was hidden by the steps; its inner height was twenty-five cubits, since being built on a higher elevation, not all of it was visible from inside, being masked by the hill. After the fourteen steps came a level space
ten cubits wide before the wall, entirely flat. From there other stairways of five steps led up to the gates, of which eight faced north and south, four on each side, and two faced east, of necessity; for since a separate area for the women's worship had been partitioned off on that side, a second gate was required there, cut directly opposite the first.
And from the other quarters there was one gate to the south and one to the north, through which entrance was made into the women's court; for through the others women were not permitted to pass, nor even through their own gate could they cross the partition. This area was open equally to the native women and to those of their people coming from abroad, for worship. The western side had
no gate at all, the wall there being unbroken. The porticoes between the gates, running from the wall inward before the treasury chambers, were carried on very fine and large columns; they were single, and except in size fell short in nothing of those below. Of the gates, nine were
covered all over with gold and silver, the doorposts and lintels alike, but one, outside the sanctuary itself, was of Corinthian bronze, and far surpassed in value the gold- and silver-plated ones. Each gateway had two doors, each door thirty cubits high and fifteen cubits wide. Beyond the entrances,
widening further inward, there were on each side chambers thirty cubits square, tower-like in width and length, rising above forty cubits in height; each was held up by two columns twelve cubits in circumference. All the other gates were of the same size, but the one above the Corinthian gate, opening from the women's court on the eastern side opposite the gate of the sanctuary, was far larger; for its rise was fifty
cubits, its doors forty cubits, and its ornamentation more lavish, with a thick overlay of silver and gold. It was Alexander, the father of Tiberius, who paid for the plating of the nine gates. Fifteen steps led up to the greater gate from the women's partition, since the steps at the other gates were shorter by five. The temple itself, standing in the middle, the holy sanctuary, was reached by twelve steps, and
its front was equal in height and width, a hundred cubits each way, though behind it was narrower by forty cubits; for in front, like shoulders, it projected twenty cubits on each side. Its first gate was seventy cubits high and twenty-five cubits wide, and had no doors at all, displaying the unbounded, unenclosed expanse of the sky; its façades were entirely gilded,
and through it the first chamber was visible in its entirety from outside, being very large, and everything around the inner gate, gleaming with gold, struck the eyes of those who looked on it. The temple within being two stories, only the first chamber stood open before them, rising continuously to a height of ninety cubits, extending fifty cubits in length, and twenty in width.
a curtain of equal length hung before it, a Babylonian tapestry embroidered with blue, fine linen, scarlet, and purple, a marvel of workmanship whose blending of materials was not without meaning: it seemed to be an image of the universe. The scarlet appeared to signify fire, the linen the earth, the blue the air, and the purple the sea—the first two by their color, the linen and the purple by their origin, since the one is produced by the earth and the other by the sea. On this curtain the whole vista of the heavens was worked, except for the signs of the zodiac.
Passing inside, one came to the level part of the sanctuary. Its height was sixty cubits and its length the same, its breadth twenty cubits. This space of sixty cubits was again divided: the first section, cut off at forty cubits, contained the three most admired and celebrated objects in the world—the lampstand, the table, and the altar of incense. The seven lamps represented the planets, for that is how many branches were divided off from the lampstand; the twelve loaves on the table represented the circle of the zodiac and the year; and the altar of incense, through its thirteen spices gathered from the sea, from uninhabited land, and from inhabited land, signified that all things are of God and for God.
The innermost part measured twenty cubits and was likewise separated from the outer section by a curtain. Nothing whatsoever stood inside it; it was inaccessible, undefiled, and unseen by anyone, and it was called the Holy of Holies. Along the sides of the lower sanctuary ran many chambers, three stories high, communicating with one another, with entrances into them from the gate on either side. The upper section had no such chambers, since it was narrower there; it rose to a height of forty cubits and was plainer than the story below. Adding these forty to the sixty of the ground level gives a total height of one hundred cubits.
Its outer face left nothing that could astonish either the mind or the eyes. Covered on every side with massive plates of gold, it flashed back at the first rays of the rising sun a fire so intense that it forced those who tried to look at it to turn away, as though from the sun's own beams. To strangers approaching from a distance it looked like a mountain covered in snow, for where it was not gilded it was of the purest white. On its summit stood sharpened golden spikes, so that no bird could perch there and defile it. Some of the stones used in it were forty-five cubits long, five in height, and six in breadth.
In front of it stood the altar, fifteen cubits high, and fifty cubits square, with horn-shaped projections at its corners. A gently rising ramp led up to it from the south. It was built without the use of iron, and iron never touched it. A handsome balustrade of stone, about a cubit high, ran around both the sanctuary and the altar, separating the people on the outside from the priests. Those with a discharge and lepers were barred from the city altogether; women in their monthly courses were barred from the temple, though even when clean they were not permitted to pass beyond the boundary just mentioned. Men who had not fully purified themselves were kept from the inner court, and among the priests too, those who were not in a state of purity were excluded.
Those of priestly descent who, because of some bodily blemish, could not perform the services still had access, along with the unblemished, to the area within the balustrade and received their share of the offerings by right of birth, though they wore ordinary dress, since only the officiating priest put on the sacred garments. The unblemished priests, when they went up to the altar and the sanctuary itself, wore linen and abstained above all from wine, for fear of transgressing in some part of the service out of drunkenness. The high priest went up with them, though not always—only on Sabbaths, new moons, and any ancestral feast or general festival celebrated during the year.
When he officiated he covered his thighs down to his private parts with a waistcloth, put on a linen tunic beneath, and over it a robe reaching to the feet, of blue, round in shape and fringed. From the fringes hung golden bells alternating with pomegranates, the bells signifying thunder and the pomegranates lightning. The sash that fastened the robe at the chest was worked with a pattern of five bands in gold, purple, scarlet, linen, and blue—the same materials, we noted, that were woven together in the temple's curtains. Over these he wore also a breastplate of mixed material, in which gold predominated, shaped like the breastplate of a cuirass.
Two golden clasps in the form of small shields fastened it, set with two large and beautiful sardonyx stones, on which were engraved the names of the tribes of the nation. On the other side were fixed twelve more stones, arranged three to a row in four rows: sardius, topaz, and emerald; carbuncle, jasper, and sapphire; agate, amethyst, and ligure; onyx, beryl, and chrysolite—and on each of these, again, was engraved the name of one of the tribes.
His head was covered by a linen turban wound about with blue, and around this ran another crown, of gold, bearing in relief the sacred letters—these are four vowels. He did not wear this full array all the time, but put on a plainer one except when he entered the inner sanctuary, which he did alone, once a year, on the day when it is the custom for all to fast before God.
We shall speak again, in more detail, of the city, the temple, and the customs and laws connected with it, for no small account remains to be given of them.
The Antonia stood at the corner of two porticoes of the outer temple court, the western and the northern, and was built upon a rock fifty cubits high, sheer on every side. It was the work of King Herod, in which above all he displayed the greatness of his natural genius. First, from its base the rock was covered over with smooth slabs, both for beauty and so that anyone attempting to climb up or down would slip. Then, in front of the tower's structure, ran a wall three cubits high, and within this the whole mass of the Antonia rose to a height of forty cubits.
Inside, it had the space and arrangement of a palace, for it was divided into every kind of room and use—colonnades, baths, and broad courtyards for troops—so that by having everything necessary it seemed a city, and by its luxury a palace. Being tower-shaped in its overall form, it was set off at each corner by four further towers, three of them fifty cubits high, while the one at the southeast corner rose to seventy cubits, so that from it the whole temple could be seen. Where it joined the temple's porticoes it had stairways down on both sides, by which the guards descended, for a Roman cohort was always stationed there, and at the festivals they took up positions around the porticoes, under arms, to watch the people and prevent any uprising.
For the temple was a fortress guarding the city, and the Antonia guarded the temple; in the Antonia was posted the guard for all three. The upper city, in turn, had its own fortress in Herod's palace. The hill called Bezetha was separated, as I said, from the Antonia, and being the highest of all the hills, it was joined to part of the new city; it alone overshadowed the temple from the north. On the city and its walls it will be enough, for the present, to have said this much, having promised to describe each in more detail later.
The fighting and factious element in the city was, around Simon, ten thousand strong, apart from the Idumaeans, with fifty officers commanding the ten thousand, and Simon in supreme command of the whole. The Idumaeans who joined him numbered about five thousand and had ten leaders of their own, of whom Jacob son of Sosas and Simon son of Cathla were reckoned the foremost. John, who had seized the temple, had six thousand armed men under twenty officers; and joining him at that time too were the Zealots, who had ceased their internal quarrel, two thousand four hundred of them, under their previous commander Eleazar and Simon son of Arinus.
While these two factions warred with each other, as we have said, the populace was the prize fought over by each, and whatever part of the people took no share in their crimes was plundered by both. Simon held the upper city and the great wall as far as the Kidron, and of the old wall the part running from the pool of Siloam eastward down to the palace of Monobazus—the king of the Adiabenes beyond the Euphrates. He also held the spring and the Acra, that is, the lower city, as far as the palace of Helena, mother of Monobazus. John held the temple and the area around it for some distance, together with Ophlas and the ravine called the Kidron.
The ground between these two holdings they had set ablaze in their war against each other and abandoned; for even with the Romans encamped against the walls, the internal strife did not rest. After a brief lull following their first sortie against the besiegers, the sickness broke out again, and once more they separated and fought among themselves, doing everything the besiegers could have wished. Indeed they suffered nothing worse at the hands of the Romans than what they inflicted on one another, and after this the city experienced no new kind of suffering; rather, before its fall it had already met with a harsher fate at its own hands, and those who captured it accomplished something greater still.
For I say that it was the sedition that destroyed the city, and the Romans who destroyed the sedition, which was far stronger than its walls. What is grim in this belongs, in fairness, to its own people; what is just, one might reasonably credit to the Romans. Let each reader judge as he is inclined. While matters inside stood thus, Titus, riding around outside with a picked body of cavalry, surveyed where he might best assault the walls. He was at a loss on every side, for the ravines made approach impossible in one direction, and on the other the first wall appeared too strong for his engines; so he decided to attack near the monument of John the high priest.
There the outer wall was lower, and the second did not join it, since the builders had neglected to fortify that stretch as the new city was not thickly settled there; from that point access was easy, by which he intended to take the upper city and, through the Antonia, the temple as well. While he was going about this reconnaissance, one of his friends, named Nicanor, was shot in the left shoulder. He had come close, along with Josephus, and was attempting to negotiate peace terms with the men on the wall, for he was not unknown to them. Learning through this incident their true disposition, Caesar—seeing that they would not spare even those who approached them offering safety—was provoked to press the siege, and at the same time ordered his legions to devastate the country before the city and gathered timber to raise the earthworks.
He divided the army in three for the works and stationed in the midst of the earthworks the javelin-men and archers, and in front of these the quick-firers, catapults, and stone-throwing engines, so as to keep off enemy sorties against the work and to check those trying to hinder it from the wall. As the trees were cut down, the suburbs were quickly stripped bare, and while the timber was being brought together for the earthworks and the whole army was pressing on with the work, matters on the Jewish side were no less active. The populace, engaged in plunder and murder, took heart at this time, for they supposed they would get some respite once their masters were distracted by the enemy outside, and that they themselves would exact justice from the guilty parties if the Romans should prevail.
John, though those around him were eager to move against the enemy outside, held back for fear of Simon. Simon, however, was not idle, for he was nearer to the siege works, and he set up on the wall the engines he had earlier taken from Cestius and those captured along with the garrison of the Antonia. But most of his men found these of no use for lack of skill in handling them; only a few, taught by deserters, put the engines to poor use, while with slings and bows they struck at the men building the earthworks and, sallying out in formations, closed with them. The workmen were sheltered from missiles by wicker screens stretched above the entrenchments, and from the sorties by the engines set against those who charged out—engines of remarkable design fitted to all the legions, but especially formidable in the tenth, whose quick-firers were more powerful and whose stone-throwers larger, able to overturn not only the sorties but the defenders on the wall as well.
The stones hurled weighed a talent and traveled two furlongs or more, and their impact was irresistible not only to those first struck but to those far behind them as well. At first the Jews kept watch for the stone, for it was white, so that it could be detected not only by its whir but seen by its brightness as well. Watchmen therefore sat on the towers and gave warning, whenever the engine was released and the stone came flying, calling out in their native tongue, "The son is coming!" and the men in its path would part and throw themselves down beforehand, so that by taking this precaution the stone often passed through harmlessly. In response the Romans thought to blacken it, for then, no longer seen in time, it found its mark and destroyed many at a single throw.
Yet even under this punishment they did not let the Romans raise their earthworks unmolested, but used every device and daring, by night and by day, to hinder them. When the works were finished, the engineers measured with lead weight and cord the distance to the wall, throwing the line down from the earthworks, since there was no other way to measure it while under fire from above; finding the siege towers able to reach, they brought them up. Titus, moving the artillery closer so that it would not keep the battering rams from the wall, ordered the assault to begin. As a tremendous crash resounded from three directions at once and suddenly filled the city, a cry went up from those within, and equal terror fell upon the rebels.
Seeing that the danger now threatened them both alike, the two factions decided to make common cause in defending the city. As their leaders shouted to one another that everything they were doing served the enemy's interests, and that even if God did not grant them lasting harmony, at least for the present they ought to set aside their rivalry and unite against the Romans, Simon proclaimed an amnesty allowing the men from the temple to come over to the wall, and John, though distrustful, allowed it as well. Setting their hatred and their private quarrels behind them under this amnesty, they became a single body. Surrounding the wall, they hurled a mass of fire down on the siege engines and kept up an unbroken barrage against the men working the battering rams, while the boldest of them dashed out in companies and tore at the wicker screens protecting the machines, falling on the crews inside them; skill counted for little in this, but daring achieved a great deal. Titus himself constantly came to the aid of his hard-pressed men, stationing cavalry and archers on either side of the engines; he kept off those bringing up fire, drove back the men shooting from the towers, and kept the battering rams working. Even so the wall would not yield to their blows, except that the ram of the Fifteenth Legion managed to dislodge the corner of one tower. The wall itself remained intact, since it did not immediately share the tower's fate — the tower projected well beyond the line and could not easily bring down any part of the circuit wall with it.
After a brief pause in their sorties, the Jews watched for a moment when the Romans, worn out, had scattered to their work and their camps to rest, since weariness and fear seemed to be driving them back. Then they dashed out by the Hippicus tower through a hidden gate, all of them setting fire to the works and pressing on toward the Roman fortifications themselves. At the sound of their shouting, the nearest Romans rallied quickly and those farther off came running. Jewish daring outran Roman discipline, and having routed the first men they met, they pressed on against those who were gathering to oppose them. A fierce battle broke out around the machines, one side struggling to set them ablaze, the other to stop them; the shouting on both sides was a formless roar, and many of those fighting in the front ranks fell. The Jews had the advantage in sheer recklessness, and the fire was already catching the works — everything, engines included, would have been in danger of burning up, had not the picked troops from Alexandria stood their ground, many of them proving braver than anyone expected, distinguishing themselves in this battle beyond even some of the more famous soldiers. At last Caesar himself, taking the strongest of his cavalry, charged into the enemy. He cut down twelve of their front fighters with his own hand, and when the rest of the mass gave way at the sight of their fall, he pursued and drove them all back into the city, rescuing the works from the fire. It happened in this battle that one of the Jews was taken alive; Titus ordered him crucified before the wall, hoping the sight might frighten the rest into submission. After the retreat, John, the commander of the Idumeans, was killed as he stood before the wall talking with a soldier he knew — one of the Arab allies shot him through the chest with an arrow, and he died on the spot, leaving the Idumeans in deep mourning and the rebels in grief, for he had been outstanding both in combat and in judgment.
The following night an unexpected panic fell upon the Romans as well. Titus had ordered three towers, each fifty cubits high, built so that from their platforms, stationed on each of the earthworks, he could drive back the defenders on the wall; but one of these towers happened to collapse on its own in the middle of the night. The tremendous crash that rose from it struck fear into the army, and thinking the enemy was attacking them, they all rushed to arms. Confusion and uproar spread through the legions, and since no one could say what had happened, the men, in growing alarm, scattered in different directions; with no enemy in sight, they frightened one another, and in their haste each man anxiously asked his neighbor for the watchword, as though the Jews had already broken into the camps. They were seized by a panic like men surrounded on every side, until Titus, learning what had happened, had the news passed to everyone, and only then did the disorder gradually die down. As for the Jews, though they held out stubbornly against everything else, the towers did them great harm: from their heights the lighter engines, along with javelin-men, archers, and slingers, kept up a barrage against them, and the defenders, because of the height, could not reach them in return. The towers themselves could not easily be pulled down, being too heavy, nor set on fire, being sheathed in iron. The defenders, forced back out of range, could no longer prevent the battering rams from striking home, and these, hammering away without pause, gradually made progress. Once the wall began giving way under the ram the Jews themselves called Nico — because it conquered everything — the defenders, already worn out from long fighting and from keeping watch through the nights far from the city, and moreover judging, out of laziness and poor planning generally, that this wall no longer mattered since two more lay behind it, lost heart, and most of them withdrew. When the Romans mounted the breach Nico had made, abandoning their posts, all of them fled to the second wall. Those who had gone over the wall opened the gates and let the whole army in. So the Romans took the first wall on the fifteenth day of the siege, the seventh of the month Artemisius, and demolished a large part of it, along with the northern section of the city, which Cestius had also destroyed before them. Titus then moved his camp inside, to the place called the Assyrian Camp, occupying the entire space up to the Kidron valley, keeping just out of range of the second wall, and began his assault at once.
The Jews divided their forces and defended the wall stubbornly: John's men fought from the Antonia fortress, the northern portico of the temple, and the area in front of the tombs of King Alexander, while Simon's forces held the stretch by the tomb of John the high priest, barricading it as far as the gate through which the water was brought in to the Hippicus tower. They repeatedly dashed out from the gates to fight hand to hand, and though driven back from the wall in these clashes — being untrained compared to Roman skill — they held their own in the fighting along the wall itself. Roman experience combined with strength carried the day against them, while Jewish daring was fed by fear and by their natural endurance under hardship. There was still hope of survival on both sides — for the Romans, hope of a quick victory. Weariness touched neither side: assaults, wall fighting, and company sorties went on continually through the whole day, and no form of combat was left untried. Night barely gave them rest before dawn resumed it; sleepless for both sides, the nights were harder than the days, since each feared — the Romans, that the wall would fall at any moment; the Jews, that the Romans would fall upon their camps. Both sides spent the night under arms and were ready for battle at first light. Among the Jews there was rivalry over who would risk himself first to win favor with the commanders, and above all there was reverence and fear of Simon, so that each of his subordinates obeyed him so completely that, had he ordered it, a man would have been ready to take his own life. The Romans, for their part, were spurred to courage by habitual victory, unfamiliarity with defeat, constant campaigning, unbroken training, and the sheer scale of their empire — and above all by Titus, who was always present everywhere with everyone. To show cowardice with Caesar looking on and fighting alongside them seemed shameful, and for the man who fought well there stood the very witness who would also reward him; already it counted as a gain simply to be recognized by Caesar as brave. For this reason many proved, through their eagerness, better than their own strength alone would have predicted.
During these days, when the Jews had drawn up in a strong company before the wall and the two sides were still exchanging javelins at a distance, a certain Longinus, one of the cavalrymen, leapt out from the Roman ranks and plunged into the middle of the Jewish formation. As they scattered before his charge, he killed two of their bravest — striking one in the face as he came to meet him, and, pulling out the spear from the first man, running the other through the side as he turned to flee — then dashed back to his own side from the midst of the enemy, unwounded. He became famous for this feat of courage, and many became eager rivals of his valor. The Jews, careless of their own suffering, thought only of inflicting harm, and death seemed lightest to them if it came together with the killing of an enemy. Titus, on the other hand, cared no less for the safety of his soldiers than for victory, calling reckless impulse mere madness, and holding that the only true courage was that joined with foresight, in which the man who acts suffers no harm; he ordered his men to show their manhood without needless risk to themselves.
Titus himself then brought the battering ram up against the middle tower of the north wall, where a certain trickster among the Jews named Castor was lying in ambush with ten companions, the rest having fled because of the archers. These men crouched behind the parapets for a while, keeping quiet, but when the tower began to give way they rose up, and Castor, stretching out his hands as though begging for mercy, called out to Caesar, pleading in a piteous voice for them to be spared. Titus, believing him out of simple good faith and hoping the Jews were now ready to repent, halted the ram's blows and forbade his archers to shoot the suppliants, ordering them to ask Castor what he wanted. When Castor said he wished to come down under a pledge of safety, Titus replied that he was glad at his good sense, and would be glad if all the rest now felt the same way and were ready to give their pledge to the city. Of the ten men, five joined Castor in pretending to plead for mercy, while the rest shouted that they would never submit to slavery as Romans when they could die free. As they argued at length among themselves, the assault stalled; meanwhile Castor sent word to Simon that he was deliberately delaying, saying that he himself was mocking the Roman command for no small stretch of time. Even as he sent this message he could be seen openly urging on those who refused, calling them to come over to the right side. They, as though in outrage, drew their swords over the parapet and, striking their own breastplates, fell down as though they had cut their own throats. Astonishment seized Titus and those with him at the men's apparent courage, and being unable to see clearly from below what had actually happened, they admired their boldness and pitied their supposed suffering. Just then someone shot Castor with an arrow near the nose; he at once pulled it out and showed it to Titus, complaining that he was being treated unjustly. Angry at the archer, Caesar sent Josephus, who was standing nearby, to give Castor his right hand as a pledge. But Josephus said he would not go himself, since men who begged like this had nothing sound in mind, and he restrained those of his friends who were eager to go. A deserter named Aeneas, however, said he would go himself. When Castor called out that someone should also come to receive the money he was carrying with him, Aeneas ran up all the more eagerly, spreading out the fold of his cloak. Castor then picked up a stone and hurled it at him; Aeneas dodged and it missed him, but it wounded another soldier who had come forward. When Caesar realized the deception, he judged that showing mercy in war only did harm — since a harder attitude was less likely to fall victim to such trickery — and, angry at having been mocked, pressed the battering ram's blows against the tower all the harder. As the tower began to give way, Castor and his men set it on fire, and leaping through the flames into a hidden vault beneath it, they won a further reputation for courage among the Romans, who took it that they had thrown themselves into the fire.
Caesar took this wall on the fifth day after the first, and when the Jews fled from it he passed through with a thousand armed men and his own picked troops, entering by the quarter where the wool-market, the coppersmiths, and the clothes-market of the New City stood, where the narrow streets ran obliquely toward the wall. Now if Titus had either at once demolished more of the wall, or, entering under the law of war, ravaged what he had taken, I think no harm would have mixed with his victory. But as it was, hoping to win the Jews over by restraint when he could have done them damage by refusing to hold back, and wanting an easy way to retreat, he did not widen the breach he had made — for he did not expect that those he intended to treat kindly would plot against him. So when he entered, he allowed no one to be killed among those he captured, nor the houses to be burned; instead, he offered the rebels, if they wished to keep fighting, a safe way out without harming the common people, and promised the people that their property would be preserved — for it mattered to him above all to save the city for himself, and the temple for the city. The common people were ready to accept what he had long been urging on them, but to the fighting men his generosity looked like weakness, and they supposed that Titus was offering these terms only because he was unable to take the rest of the city. Threatening the townspeople with death if any of them so much as mentioned surrender, and cutting down anyone who spoke a word of peace, they attacked the Romans who had entered as well — some meeting them in the narrow streets, others from the houses, others still dashing out through the upper gates beyond the wall. Alarmed at this, the guards on the wall leapt down from the towers and withdrew to the camps. There was an uproar: those inside the city, surrounded on every side by the enemy, and those outside, fearful for the men left behind. As the Jews kept growing in numbers and gained great advantage from their knowledge of the streets, they wounded many and drove the Romans back by sheer pressure. The Romans, for the most part, had no choice but to hold their ground, since the narrowness of the wall's opening made it impossible for them to flee all together, and it seems all who had entered would have been cut down had Titus not come to their aid. Stationing archers at the tops of the narrow streets and taking his own stand at the point of thickest fighting, he held back the enemy with a barrage of missiles, and with him stood Domitius Sabinus, a brave man who also distinguished himself in this engagement.
Caesar himself remained there, shooting continuously and keeping the Jews from advancing, until all his soldiers had withdrawn. Thus the Romans, having taken the second wall, were driven out of it again; the fighting men throughout the city grew bolder in spirit and were elated at their success, confident that the Romans would never again dare to enter the city, and that if they did, they themselves would not be defeated. For God had darkened their judgment because of their lawless deeds, and they could not see how much greater the Roman strength now was than the force they had just driven out, nor the famine creeping up on them — though for the moment there was still food to be had from the public miseries and, as it were, the city's own blood to drink. Want had long since begun to grip the decent citizens, and many were perishing for lack of provisions.
and neither would the Romans dare to force their way in again, nor would they themselves, if the Romans did, be beaten back — so they supposed. For God had darkened their minds because of their crimes, and they could not see how much greater the strength the Romans still had was than the strength that had been driven off, nor could they see the famine creeping up on them. For the time being there was still food to be had from the public misery, and the city's blood to drink; but want had long since been pressing on the decent, and through scarcity of provisions many were breaking down.
The destruction of the common people the insurgents took as a relief to themselves; for they judged that only those deserved to survive who did not seek peace and had chosen to live in defiance of the Romans, and they were glad to see the opposing multitude wasting away like so much foreign rabble. Such was their disposition toward those within. Against the Romans, who tried once more to force an entry, they blocked the way, barricading the breach and defending the broken wall with their own bodies,
and for three days they held out stubbornly. But on the fourth day, when Titus pressed the attack with vigor, they could not bear it and fled, as they had before. He, master of the wall again, at once demolished the whole northern stretch of it, and posting garrisons in the towers along the southern section, turned his mind to attacking the third wall.
Having decided to relax the siege for a little while and give the insurgents a period for deliberation — in case, after the fall of the second wall, they should relent, or in case fear of famine should move them, since, he reasoned, their plunder could not sustain them much longer — he put the respite to good use. For when the day came on which the soldiers' rations were due to be distributed, he ordered the officers to draw up the army in full view of the enemy and pay out the money to each man.
And they, as was customary, uncovered the armor that had until then been kept hidden in its cases and marched forward fully armed, the cavalry leading their horses in all their finery. For a great distance the ground before the city gleamed with silver and gold, and nothing in that spectacle was more delightful to their own side or more terrifying to the enemy. For the whole ancient wall was crowded with people gazing, and the northern quarter of the temple as well; the houses too were seen packed with those leaning out to look, and there was no part of the city that was not covered with the crowd.
A dreadful consternation fell even on the boldest, as they saw the whole force gathered in one place and the splendor of the arms and the discipline of the men. And I think the insurgents would have been won over by that sight, had they not despaired of pardon from the Romans on account of the enormity of the wrongs they had done the people. Since punishment awaited them if they stopped, they judged death in war far preferable. And fate had its way, that the guiltless should perish along with the guilty, and the city along with the faction.
For four days, then, the Romans continued bringing up rations, legion by legion; but on the fifth, when nothing peaceable came from the Jews, Titus divided his forces in two and began building earthworks against the Antonia and against John's monument, intending by the one to seize the upper city, and by the other the temple by way of the Antonia — for without taking that fort, holding the city itself would not be safe. At each of the two points two mounds were raised, one for each legion.
Those working near the monument were harassed by sallies of the Idumaeans and Simon's armed men; those before the Antonia by John's men and the crowd of zealots. These had the advantage not only in hand-to-hand fighting, since they struck from higher ground, but by now had also learned to use the engines — daily practice had gradually bred skill in them. They had three hundred quick-firers and forty stone-throwers, with which they made the building of the earthworks a hard business for the Romans.
Titus, knowing that the city's survival or destruction rested on himself, pressed the siege hard, yet did not neglect to urge the Jews toward a change of heart, mixing persuasion with force. Often, recognizing that argument accomplishes more than weapons, he called on them himself to save themselves by surrendering a city already as good as taken, and he sent Josephus down to speak with them in their ancestral tongue, thinking they might yield to a man of their own people.
Josephus went around the wall, taking care to stay out of range of missiles while still within earshot, and pleaded with them at length to spare themselves and the people, to spare their homeland and the temple, and not to show themselves more indifferent to these things than foreigners were. "The Romans," he said, "who have no share in them, respect the sanctities of their enemies and to this hour have held back their hands; but you, who were raised among these things, will, even if the city is saved, be the very ones left set on its destruction.
You see with your own eyes that your stronger walls have fallen, and that what is left, the wall of those already conquered, is weaker still; and you know that Roman power is irresistible, and that servitude to them is nothing you have not already tasted. If indeed it is a fine thing to fight for freedom, that fight ought to have come at the beginning; but once one has submitted and yielded for so long a time, then to try to shake off the yoke is the act of men in love with a miserable death, not of lovers of freedom. One may rightly scorn masters who are inferior, not those to whom everything is already subject. What is there the Romans have not conquered, except perhaps something useless because of heat or cold? Fortune has passed over to them from every side, and God, who carries dominion around from nation to nation, is now over Italy.
There is a law, too, fixed among beasts as among men, most powerful of all: to yield to the stronger, and to let mastery rest with those who hold the edge in arms. It was for this reason that your ancestors, superior though they were in soul and in body and in every other resource, yielded to the Romans — which they would never have endured, had they not known that God was with them.
And you — trusting in what do you hold out, when the greater part of the city is already taken, and those within, even if the walls still stand, are in a state worse than capture? For the Romans are not ignorant of the famine in the city, which is even now destroying the common people and before long will destroy the fighting men too. Even if the Romans should stop the siege and not fall upon the city sword in hand, you have within you a war that cannot be fought off, one that feeds on you every hour — unless you can also take up arms against hunger and fight alone and master your own suffering."
He added that it was a fine thing, before irreparable disaster, to change course and turn toward safety while it was still possible; for the Romans would bear them no grudge for what had happened, unless they persisted stubbornly to the end. By nature the victor is merciful in the hour of triumph, and sets advantage above anger. What served the Romans' advantage, he said, was neither an empty city nor a desolate land; that was why Caesar even now wished to offer them his right hand. For he would never save anyone by taking the city by force, least of all men who would not listen to persuasion even in their extremity. That the third wall would fall quickly was guaranteed by the walls already taken; and even if the fortification proved unbreakable, famine would fight on the Romans' side against them.
As Josephus was urging this from the wall, many jeered at him, many cursed him, and some threw missiles. When he found that open counsel did not persuade them, he turned to the history of their own people, crying out: "Cowards, forgetful of your own allies, do you make war on the Romans with weapons and hands? Whom else have we ever defeated in that way? When has God, who created us, not avenged the Jews when they were wronged? Will you not stop and see from where you launch this fight, and how great an ally you have defiled? Will you not remember the miraculous deeds of your fathers, and how great wars this holy place once put down for us? I myself shudder to speak of the works of God before unworthy ears; yet hear them still, so that you may know you are at war not only with the Romans but with God himself.
"Necho, king of Egypt at that time — the same man was also called Pharaoh — came down with a vast force and seized Sarah, the queen, mother of our race. What then did her husband Abraham, our forefather, do? Did he avenge the outrage with weapons, though he had three hundred and eighteen captains under him, and under each of them a force beyond counting? Or did he not rather judge them a mere desert without God's presence, and, raising pure hands toward this very ground you have now defiled, enlist him as an ally none could conquer? Before a single evening had passed, the queen was sent back to her husband unstained, while the Egyptian, bowing before ground you have bloodied with kindred murder and trembling at visions in the night, fled, showering the God-beloved Hebrews with silver and gold.
"Shall I speak of our fathers' migration into Egypt? For four hundred years, tyrannized and subjected to foreign kings, though it was in their power to defend themselves with weapons and their own hands, they entrusted themselves instead to God. Who does not know how Egypt was filled with every kind of beast and ruined by every disease, its land barren, its Nile failing, the ten plagues one after another, and how because of all this our fathers were sent on their way under guard, unbloodied, unharmed,
whom God led forth as his own attendants? And when the sacred ark was seized by the Syrians, did not Philistia groan, and Dagon the idol, and every nation of those who had seized it groaned as well, their inward parts rotting and, through them, their very bowels falling away along with their food, until with the same hands that had plundered it they carried it back, propitiating the holy thing with the sound of cymbals and drums and every sort of offering? It was God who commanded these things for our fathers, because, laying aside their hands and their weapons, they entrusted him to judge the matter.
"When Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians, dragging all Asia behind him, encamped around this very city, did it fall by human hands? Were not the hands that should have wielded weapons instead still, occupied in prayer, while an angel of God in a single night destroyed that immense army, so that the Assyrian, rising the next day, found a hundred and eighty-five thousand corpses, and fled with the survivors, unarmed and unpursued by the Hebrews? You know too of the captivity in Babylon, where our people, exiled for seventy years, did not shake themselves free into liberty until Cyrus granted it as a gift to God; escorted forth by him, they restored once more the worship of their ally.
"To speak generally, there is nothing our fathers ever achieved by weapons, and nothing they failed to achieve when they left the matter to God instead. Staying in their place, they conquered, as it seemed good to their judge; fighting, they always stumbled. Take the time the king of the Babylonians besieged this very city: our king Zedekiah, engaging him against the prophecies of Jeremiah,
was himself taken captive, and saw the city, along with the temple, razed to the ground — and yet how much more moderate was that king than your leaders now, and his people than yours! When Jeremiah cried aloud that they were hateful to God because of their offenses against him, and would be taken unless they surrendered the city, neither the king nor the people put him to death for it. But you — to say nothing of what goes on within your own walls, for I could not adequately describe your lawlessness — you curse and stone me for urging you toward safety, provoked by the mere mention of your sins, unable even to bear hearing of deeds you commit with your own hands every day.
"Or take the time when Antiochus, called Epiphanes, sat before this city, having committed many outrages against the divine — our ancestors then went out with weapons, and were themselves cut down in the battle, the city was plundered by the enemy, and the sanctuary lay desolate for three years and six months. And why need I say more? Who enlisted the Romans against this nation, if not the impiety of its own people? Where did our servitude begin, if not in the discord of our ancestors, when the madness of Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, and their rivalry with each other, brought Pompey against the city, and God subjected to the Romans a people unworthy of freedom? Besieged for three months, they surrendered themselves, though they had not sinned against the sanctuary and the laws as you have, and though they had far greater resources for war.
"And you know the end of Antigonus, son of Aristobulus, in whose reign God once more drove the sinning people to capture: Herod, son of Antipater, brought Sossius, and Sossius brought a Roman army, and, surrounded, they were besieged for six months, until, paying the penalty for their sins, they were taken and the city was plundered by the enemy. So it has never been given to this nation to prevail by arms; war and capture go together for it always. For those who dwell on holy ground must, I think, leave everything to God's judgment and despise recourse to human hands only when they have first won over the judge above.
"As for you — what of the things the lawgiver blessed have you done? What of the things he cursed have you left undone? How much more impious are you than those who fell so much sooner? You have not merely disgraced yourselves with hidden sins — theft, I mean, and treachery and adultery — you compete in open plunder and murder, and invent strange new paths of wickedness; and the temple has become the receptacle for it all, and hands of your own kindred have defiled that divine place, which even the Romans venerated from afar, setting aside many of their own customs out of respect for your law. And after this do you expect the ally you have wronged to help you? You are indeed righteous suppliants, calling on your helper with clean hands!
"With hands like yours our king once made supplication against the Assyrian, when God laid low that great army in a single night. Do the Romans act as the Assyrian did, that you should hope for a like deliverance? He, having taken money from our king on condition that he would not sack the city, came down in violation of his oaths to burn the temple; the Romans ask only the customary tribute our fathers paid to theirs. Once they receive it, they neither sack the city nor touch the sanctuaries, but grant you everything else — the free enjoyment of your families and your possessions — and they preserve your sacred laws. It is madness, then, to expect God's help for men who are
...as clearly as he had against the unjust.
And he knows how to defend at once, whenever there is need: he crushed the Assyrians on the very first night they camped against us. So if he had judged our people worthy of freedom, or the Romans worthy of punishment, he would have struck at once, just as he did the Assyrians — when Pompey laid hands on our nation, when Sossius marched up after him, when Vespasian was ravaging Galilee, and now last of all, when Titus was approaching the city.
And yet Pompey the Great and Sossius, far from suffering any harm, took the city by force, and Vespasian rose to kingship out of his war against us. For Titus even the springs run more abundantly, though they had dried up for you before: you know that before his arrival the Siloam failed, and all the springs outside the city, so that water had to be bought by the jar; but now they flow so plentifully for your enemies that they suffice not only for them and their animals, but even for their gardens.
Indeed you have already experienced this same portent once before, at the earlier capture of the city, when the Babylonian I mentioned marched against us and, taking the city, burned it and the temple — though I think none of those who committed impiety then did so on the scale you have. So I believe that the divine has fled from the sanctuary and now stands beside those you are fighting.
Yet a good man will flee a shameless household and hate those in it — and do you still believe that God stays beside your own crimes, he who sees all hidden things and hears what is kept silent? But what is kept silent among you, or what is hidden? What has not become plain even to your enemies? You parade your lawlessness in public and vie with one another day by day over who can become worse, making a display of injustice as though it were virtue.
Even so, a path to safety still remains, if you are willing, and the divine is easily reconciled to those who confess and repent. O men of iron, throw down your weapons! Take pity, even now, on a fatherland already crumbling into ruin. Turn and look at the beauty you are betraying — what a city, what a temple, the gifts of how many nations! Does anyone lead a torch against these things? Does anyone wish these to exist no longer? And what is worthier of being saved than these, you who are unmoved and harder than stones?
And if you cannot look on these things with honest eyes, at least pity your own families — let each of you picture his children, his wife, his parents, whom before long famine or war will consume.
I know that my own mother shares this danger, and my wife, and a family not without distinction, a house once illustrious — and perhaps you think I counsel you for their sake. Kill them, then! Take my blood as the price of your own salvation! I too am ready to die, if after me you will come to your senses.
While Josephus was crying out these things in tears, the rebels neither yielded nor judged a change of course safe — but the common people were moved toward desertion.
Some sold their possessions for next to nothing; others swallowed their gold coins — the most valuable of their treasures — so as not to be caught by the brigands, and then deserted to the Romans, and once they had passed the gold, they had ample means for whatever they needed. For Titus let most of them go free into the countryside, wherever each wished, and this very fact drew them all the more to desertion, since they would be spared the miseries within the city and would not become slaves to the Romans.
But John and Simon's men watched for people leaving even more closely than for the Romans entering, and anyone who gave the mere shadow of suspicion was killed on the spot. For the wealthy, even staying was as good as death, since a man could be put to death on the pretext of desertion, for the sake of his property.
As the famine grew, the recklessness of the rebels grew with it, and both horrors flared up worse each day. Grain was nowhere to be seen openly; they would burst into houses and search them, and if they found any, they tortured the occupants for having denied having it, and if they found none, they tortured them for having hidden it all the more carefully.
The proof of whether the wretched had food or not was their bodies: those who still held themselves together were assumed to have plenty, while those already wasting away were passed over, since it seemed pointless to kill people who were about to die of starvation anyway.
Many secretly traded their whole estates for a single measure of grain — of wheat, if they happened to be wealthier, or of barley, if poorer — then shut themselves up in the innermost recesses of their houses; some, in the extremity of their want, ate the grain unprocessed, while others baked it as necessity and fear dictated.
Nowhere was a table set; instead, people snatched the food half-cooked from the fire and devoured it. The meal was pitiable and the sight of it worthy of tears, as the stronger took more than their share and the weak wept.
Famine overpowers every other suffering, but nothing does it destroy so completely as shame; what would otherwise deserve respect is despised under its power. Wives snatched food from their husbands, children from their fathers, and — most pitiable of all — mothers from their own infants' mouths, and even as their dearest wasted away in their arms, they showed no mercy in stripping from them the very drops of life.
Even so, eating this way did not go unnoticed; the rebels were posted everywhere, ready to seize even this. Whenever they saw a house shut up, they took it as a sign that those inside were taking food, and at once they broke down the doors and burst in, all but squeezing the morsels back up out of people's throats.
Old men were beaten as they clung to their food, and women were dragged by the hair as they tried to conceal what was in their hands. There was no pity for gray hair or for infants; they would lift children clean off the ground, still clinging to their scraps of bread, and dash them to the floor.
Toward those who had gotten ahead of their raid and swallowed down what would have been seized, they turned crueler still, as though wronged. They devised terrible methods of torture in their search for food: stuffing bitter vetch into the private passages of the wretched, driving sharp stakes up through their bowels — a man suffered things horrible even to hear of, merely to confess to one loaf of bread, or to reveal a single handful of hidden barley-meal.
Yet the torturers themselves were not hungry — that at least would have made the cruelty less monstrous, being done from necessity — rather, they were exercising their own recklessness, and stocking up provisions for the days ahead.
As for those who crept out at night past the Roman guard-posts to gather wild greens and grass, the rebels would waylay them just when they thought they had already escaped the enemy, and snatch away what they had brought back. And though these people often begged them, invoking the dread name of God, to share some part of what they had risked their lives to gather, they would not give up so much as a scrap; a man was fortunate merely not to be killed on top of being robbed.
Such was what the lowly suffered at the hands of the guardsmen; but those of rank and wealth were brought before the tyrants themselves. Some of these were destroyed on false charges of plotting, others on the charge of betraying the city to the Romans; the readiest device of all was a suborned informer who claimed they had resolved to desert.
A man stripped bare by Simon would be sent up to John, and a man plundered by John would be handed over in turn to Simon; they toasted each other, so to speak, with the blood of the citizens, and divided between them the corpses of the wretched.
Over dominance, there was rivalry between the two; but in impiety, there was perfect harmony. Whichever of them failed to share the fruits of another's ruin with his rival was thought simply mean, and whichever was denied his share grieved over the loss, as though cheated of some good — the loss, that is, of a share in cruelty.
It is impossible to go through their lawlessness point by point; to put it briefly, no other city has ever suffered such things, and no generation since the beginning of time has been more fertile in wickedness. In the end they even disowned the very race of the Hebrews, so as to seem less impious toward foreigners, and confessed themselves to be what in truth they were — slaves, a rabble, the bastard refuse of the nation.
It was they themselves who overthrew the city; they forced the unwilling Romans to be credited with a grim achievement, and all but dragged the fire, in its slowness, onto the temple. Indeed, watching it burn from the upper city, they felt no grief and shed no tears — it was among the Romans that these feelings were found. But of this we shall speak later, in its proper place, with the facts to prove it.
Meanwhile Titus's earthworks were advancing, although his soldiers were suffering heavy losses from the wall; he also sent a detachment of cavalry with orders to lie in ambush for those who went out through the ravines to gather food.
Among these foragers were some fighting men no longer sustained by plunder, but for the most part they were poor people from the populace, kept from deserting by fear for their families; they had no hope of escaping the rebels' notice if they fled with wives and children, and they could not bear to leave them behind to be slaughtered by the brigands on their account. Hunger made them bold enough to go out, but the only outcome left to them, once they had eluded their own countrymen, was to be captured by the enemy.
When caught, they resisted out of necessity, and once a fight had begun it seemed too late to beg for mercy. So, after being scourged and subjected to every torment short of death, they were crucified opposite the wall.
To Titus this suffering appeared pitiable, since as many as five hundred were being captured each day, sometimes more; yet he saw that it was not safe to release those taken by force, and that guarding so many would itself require a garrison of guards. All the same, he did not stop it — mainly, I think, in the hope that the sight of it might induce the people to surrender, on the understanding that if they did not, they would suffer the same fate.
Out of anger and hatred, the soldiers nailed up those they caught, one in this posture and another in that, for mockery's sake, and so great was their number that space ran out for the crosses, and crosses for the bodies.
So far were the rebels from being moved by this suffering that they turned it, quite to the contrary, into a device against the rest of the populace. Dragging the relatives of deserters up onto the wall, along with any of the common people inclined to trust in surrender, they displayed to them what befell those who fled to the Romans, calling the captured men suppliants, not prisoners.
This held back many of those who had been inclined to desert, until the truth became known; though there were some who fled all the more quickly precisely because they took it for certain punishment, considering death at the enemy's hands a relief compared with famine.
Titus also ordered many of those captured to have their hands cut off, and then sent them back in, so that they would not be taken for deserters and would be believed on account of their misfortune — urging Simon and John to stop, at this point, and not force him to destroy the city, but rather, through a last-minute change of heart, to save their own lives, and so great a homeland, and a temple shared with no other people.
Going around the earthworks, he at the same time urged on the workers, as one who would soon back up his words with deeds.
In response, they blasphemed him from the wall, and his father too, shouting that they scorned death — for they had nobly chosen it over slavery — and that they would do the Romans all the harm they could as long as they had breath; that they cared nothing for a fatherland which, as he himself said, was doomed to perish, and that the world was a finer temple for God than this one, once it too had perished.
Yet even this temple, they said, would be saved by the one who dwelt in it, and having him as their ally, they would mock every threat that lagged behind its fulfillment in action; for the outcome belonged to God. Such were the things they shouted, mingled with abuse.
Meanwhile Antiochus Epiphanes also arrived, with a considerable body of other heavy infantry as well as, around himself, a unit called "the Macedonians" — all of an age, tall, just past boyhood, armed and trained in the Macedonian manner, from which they took their name, though most of them fell short of that lineage.
For it happened that the king of Commagene was, before he tasted a reversal of fortune, the most fortunate of all the kings under Roman rule; but he too demonstrated in his old age that no man should be called blessed before death.
But his son, present there at the height of his powers at that time, said he was amazed that the Romans should hesitate at all to approach the wall; he was himself something of a warrior, reckless by nature, and so formidable in strength that his daring fell short of disaster only by a narrow margin.
When Titus smiled and said that the labor of it was open to all, Antiochus, just as he was, charged toward the wall with his Macedonians.
He himself, thanks to his strength and skill, guarded against the Jewish missiles by shooting arrows at them; but all his young men except a few were cut down, for out of shame at their boast they kept fighting on, determined not to be outdone. In the end many withdrew wounded, reflecting that even true Macedonians, if they meant to conquer, needed the fortune of Alexander.
For the Romans, who had begun on the twelfth of the month Artemisius, the earthworks were finished only with difficulty on the twenty-ninth, after seventeen days of continuous labor. Four enormous ramps were raised: one, against the Antonia, was thrown up by the fifth legion in the middle of the pool called Struthius; the other was raised by the twelfth legion, about twenty cubits away from it.
The tenth legion's work was at a considerable distance from these, on the northern side, near the pool called Amygdalon; and the fifteenth legion's ramp stood about thirty cubits from that one, by the monument of the high priest.
As the ramps were now being brought forward, John, tunneling from inside as far as the earthworks at the Antonia, propped up the mines with timbers and so suspended the ramps above them; he then brought in wood smeared with pitch and bitumen and set it alight.
When the props burned through, the tunnel collapsed all at once, and with a tremendous crash the earthworks caved in upon it. At first, along with the dust, thick smoke rose up, since the fire was being smothered by the falling debris; but once the timber pressing down on it had been consumed, a clear flame burst out.
The Romans were struck with shock at the suddenness of it, and with dismay at the ingenuity behind it; just when they thought themselves on the verge of victory, this event chilled their hope for the future as well, since fighting the fire seemed useless — even if it were put out, the earthworks had already been swallowed up.
Two days later, Simon's men attacked the other earthworks as well; for the Romans, having brought up their siege engines there, were now battering the wall.
A certain Tephtheus from the city of Garis in Galilee, and Magassaros, a servant of the royal household of Mariamme, together with a certain man of Adiabene, son of Nabataeus, called by that name from his fortune and his lameness (agiras meaning "lame"), seized torches and dashed forward ahead of the rest, against the siege engines.
Of these men none showed themselves either bolder or more formidable in the whole course of the war than these who came out of the city; for they rushed at the enemy's ranks as though running to greet friends rather than charging a hostile mass, neither hesitating nor drawing back, but leaping straight through the midst of their foes and setting fire to the siege engines. Though struck by missiles and pressed back with swords from every side, they would not be driven from the danger until they had seized hold of the fire consuming the machines.
As the flame now rose, the Romans came running up from their camps to help, while the Jews from the wall hindered them, grappling with those who tried to put the fire out and sparing none of their own bodies in the struggle. Some men were dragging the siege engines out of the fire even as the wicker screens above them were already burning, while the Jews, reaching through the very flames, seized hold of the red-hot iron rams and would not let them go. The fire spread from these to the earthworks themselves and overtook the defenders before they could react. At this point the Romans, surrounded by the flame and despairing of saving their works, withdrew to their camps, while the Jews pressed after them, their numbers ever growing as reinforcements came out from within, and, emboldened by their success, gave free rein to their fury, advancing all the way to the Roman fortifications and there closing with the guards.
There is a picket that stands in relief before the camp, and there is a fearsome Roman law that condemns to death whoever abandons his post for any reason whatsoever. These men, choosing a death with honor over one with disgrace, stood their ground, and by their example many of those who had turned to flee were shamed into turning back. Meanwhile the arrow-throwers had been set up along the wall and were holding back the crowd still pouring out of the city, men who gave no thought at all to their own safety or protection; for the Jews closed with whomever they met and, hurling themselves recklessly onto the enemy's spearpoints, struck down their foes with their own bodies. Yet they prevailed by their daring far more than by any real advantage in strength, just as the Romans yielded more to their boldness than to the harm they were actually taking. By now Titus had arrived from the Antonia, where he had gone apart to survey ground for further earthworks, and after sharply rebuking his soldiers for endangering their own fortifications when they already held the walls of the enemy, and for themselves enduring, as it were, the fate of the besieged by loosing the Jews upon themselves as if from a prison, he himself went round with a picked force to attack the enemy's flank. The Jews, struck now from the front and turning to face him too, held firm nonetheless.
Once the battle lines had mingled together, dust overwhelmed the eyes and the shouting overwhelmed the ears, and neither side could any longer tell friend from foe. The Jews held their ground no longer so much by strength as by despair of any other safety, while the Romans were spurred on by shame before their reputation and their arms, and by Caesar himself risking danger in the front line; so that, in my judgment, the excess of their fury would even have driven them to sweep away the whole Jewish force, had the Jews not anticipated the turning of the battle and withdrawn into the city in time. With the earthworks destroyed, the Romans were in despair, having lost in a single hour the fruit of long and heavy labor, and many, considering their familiar siege engines gone, gave up hope of ever taking the city.
Titus took counsel with his officers. The more impetuous urged bringing the whole force to bear at once and attempting the wall by main force; for until now, they argued, the fighting had been only in scattered clashes with the Jews, but if the troops advanced in a single mass the Jews would not be able to withstand even the assault, since they would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of missiles. Those inclined to greater caution advised either building the earthworks again, or else, forgoing that, simply sitting down before the city and closely guarding both its exits and the bringing-in of supplies, so as to abandon the city to famine and avoid hand-to-hand fighting with the enemy altogether; for men in despair, they said, are unconquerable, since for them it is a matter of prayer to fall by the sword, while apart from that a still crueler fate awaits them regardless.
Titus himself judged it beneath him to remain wholly idle with so great a force at his disposal, yet thought it pointless to fight men who would in any case destroy one another; and he pointed out that building earthworks was made difficult by the scarcity of timber, while guarding the exits was harder still, since surrounding so vast and difficult a city with his army was no easy matter and was besides risky against sudden sorties. And even were the open routes guarded, the Jews, driven by necessity and aided by their familiarity with the ground, would contrive hidden paths; and if any provisions were smuggled in even secretly, it would only prolong the siege. He feared, moreover, that the length of time involved might diminish the glory of his eventual success; for while time can accomplish anything, it is speed that wins renown. If, then, he wished to combine speed with safety, he must wall in the entire city; only in this way could every exit be blocked, and the Jews, despairing utterly of any deliverance, would either surrender the city
or, weakened by famine, be overpowered with ease; for he himself, he said, would not remain inactive in the meantime either, but would set about the earthworks again, using less exposed methods this time. And if to anyone the undertaking seemed too vast and difficult to accomplish, he should consider that it is not fitting for Romans to attempt anything on a small scale, and that no great achievement comes easily to anyone without toil. Having persuaded his officers with these arguments, he ordered the forces to be distributed for the work.
A kind of superhuman zeal seized the soldiers, and as they divided the circuit of the wall among themselves, rivalry arose not only between the legions but between the individual units within them, and each soldier strove to win the favor of his squad-leader, the squad-leader that of his centurion, the centurion in turn was eager to please his tribune, the ambition of the tribunes reached toward the legates, and Caesar himself presided over the rivalry of the legates; for he went about in person, several times each day, inspecting the work. Beginning from the camp of the Assyrians, where he himself was quartered, he carried the wall down toward the lower New City, then from there through the Kidron valley up to the Mount of Olives; turning south from there, he encompassed the mountain as far as the rock called the Dovecotes and the hill next to it that overlooks the ravine by Siloam,
and from there, bending westward, he descended into the valley of the spring. From there, climbing up past the tomb of the high priest Ananus and taking in the hill where Pompey had once encamped, he turned toward the north, and, advancing as far as a village called the House of the Chickpea-Sellers, and beyond it the tomb of Herod, he brought the line round to the east until it joined his own camp, where it had begun.
The wall thus built came to thirty-nine furlongs in length, and thirteen forts were built along its outer face, whose combined circuits added up to ten more furlongs. The whole was completed in three days, so that a work that should by rights have taken months was finished at a speed that strained belief. Having enclosed the city with this wall and stationed troops in the forts, Titus himself went round inspecting the first watch of the night, entrusted the second to Alexander, and the third fell to the legionary commanders. The guards cast lots for their turns of sleep, and throughout the whole night men made their rounds along the intervals between the forts.
For the Jews, with every avenue closed off, all hope of deliverance was now cut off, and the famine, deepening its hold, devoured the population household by household and family by family. The rooftops were filled with women and infants wasting away, the alleys with the corpses of the old; children and young men, swollen with hunger, wandered the marketplaces like ghosts and collapsed wherever the affliction overtook them. Those still able could not bury their own relatives, and even the strong shrank from the task, both because of the sheer number of the dead and because of the uncertainty of their own fate;
for many died even as they were burying others, and many made their way to the burial grounds before their appointed hour had come. There was no wailing amid these calamities, nor any lamentation, for the famine stifled all such feeling; with dry eyes and grinning mouths those in the agony of death looked on at those who had gone ahead of them into rest, and a deep silence enveloped the city, and a night heavy with death.
And yet more terrible than these horrors were the bandits. Breaking into houses to plunder the dead, they stripped the coverings from the bodies and went out laughing, testing the edges of their swords on the corpses; some of those thrown out they even ran through while still alive, just to try the blade. Those who begged to be granted a sword and a hand to end their suffering they left, in scorn, to the famine instead, and each of the dying, fixing his eyes on the Temple as he expired, looked his last upon it, leaving the rebels alive behind him.
At first the rebels ordered the dead to be buried at public expense, unable to bear the stench; but afterward, when this proved beyond their means, they simply threw the bodies from the walls into the ravines. When Titus, going round these ravines, saw them choked with the dead and a deep, rotting ooze seeping out from the decaying bodies, he groaned aloud, and, raising his hands, called God to witness that this was not his doing.
Such, then, was the state of affairs within the city. As for the Romans, since none of the rebels any longer sallied out—for by now despair and famine were gripping them as well—they passed the time in good spirits, having an abundance of grain and other provisions brought from Syria and the neighboring provinces. Many stood near the wall displaying quantities of food, and by their own satisfaction inflamed the hunger of the enemy all the more. But since the sufferings of the rebels bent them not at all, Titus, pitying the remnant of the people and eager to save at least those who were left, set about building earthworks once more, though timber was now hard to procure for him;
for all the timber around the city had already been cut down in the earlier operations, so the soldiers had to bring in fresh supplies from a distance of ninety furlongs. And it was only against the Antonia now that earthworks were raised, in four sections, each far larger than the earlier ones. Caesar went round the legions, urging on the work and showing the rebels that he already held them in his grasp. But it seems that for these men alone all capacity for remorse had perished,
for they had separated their souls from their bodies and treated both as if they belonged to someone else; no suffering could soften their spirit, nor did any pain touch their flesh, these men who tore at the corpses of the people like dogs and filled the prisons with the sick. Simon, for instance, did not spare even Matthias, the very man through whom he had gained control of the city, but had him put to torture before killing him. This Matthias was the son of Boethus, one of the chief priests,
a man especially trusted and honored by the people; when the populace was being abused by the Zealots, whom by then John had joined, he persuaded the people to let Simon in to help them, entering into no prior agreement with him and expecting nothing base from him. But when Simon came in and made himself master of the city, he counted the very man who had championed his cause an enemy just like all the rest, as though the deed
had sprung from mere simplicity of mind. Brought before him now and accused of favoring the Romans, Simon condemned him to death, without even granting him a hearing, along with three of his sons—his fourth son had managed to slip away beforehand to Titus. Matthias begged to be killed before his children, asking this one favor in return for having opened the city gate to Simon, but Simon ordered him killed last of all. So the father was slaughtered in full view of his slain sons,
led forward directly opposite the Romans; for it was in this way that Simon ordered Ananus, son of Bagadates, the most brutal of his bodyguards, to carry it out, mocking Matthias with the taunt of whether those Romans he had chosen to go over to would come to help him now. He forbade, moreover, that the bodies be buried. After these, a priest named Ananias, son of Masbalus, one of the notables, and Aristeus the secretary of the council, a man of Emmaus, and with them fifteen
other prominent men of the people were put to death. Josephus's father they shut up under guard, and they proclaimed that no one in the city should either speak with him or gather together with anyone else, for fear of treachery, and they killed on the spot, without any inquiry, those who so much as joined in mourning together. Seeing this, a certain Judas son of Judas, one of Simon's officers, entrusted by him with the guard of a tower, moved partly, perhaps,
by pity for those being so cruelly destroyed, but still more by concern for his own safety, called together the ten men he trusted most among those under his command and said, "How long shall we go on enduring these evils? What hope of safety do we have if we remain loyal to a villain? Is not famine already upon us, the Romans very nearly within our walls, and Simon faithless even toward his own benefactors? Is there not already the fear of punishment from him,
while a Roman pledge of good faith stands firm? Come, then, let us hand over the wall and save ourselves and the city. Simon will suffer nothing dreadful if, despairing of himself, he surrenders sooner rather than later." When ten of his men had been won over by this argument, toward dawn he sent the rest of those under him off in various directions, so that none of what had been planned would be discovered, while he himself, about the third hour, called out to the Romans from the tower.
Some of the Romans scorned the offer, some disbelieved it, and most held back, expecting to take the city without risk before long anyway. And while Titus was on his way toward the wall with a body of armed men, Simon, learning of the plot in time, swiftly seized the tower first, arrested the men, and, in full view of the Romans, put them to death before the wall,
mutilating the bodies before throwing them down. Meanwhile Josephus, going about as he did without ever ceasing his appeals, was struck on the head by a stone and fell at once, stunned. The Jews made a rush out to seize the fallen body, and he would soon have been dragged into the city had Caesar not quickly sent men to shield him. While these were fighting, Josephus was carried off, barely conscious of what was happening around him, and
the rebels, believing they had killed the man they most wished dead, cried out for joy. Word of it spread through the city, and despair gripped the people left behind, who were now convinced that the man because of whom they had dared to think of deserting was truly gone. When Josephus's mother heard in prison that her son was dead, she told the guards from Jotapata that she had believed this all along, since she had gained nothing even from his being alive;
but privately, lamenting to her handmaids, she said that this was the fruit she had reaped from bearing a fine son—not even to be able to bury him, the very man from whom she had expected to be buried herself. Yet neither did this false report grieve her for long, nor did it warm the hearts of the rebels for long either; for Josephus quickly recovered from the blow, and, coming forward, cried out that before long he would make them pay for the wound,
and once more called on the people to keep faith with the Romans. His appearance struck courage into the people and dismay into the rebels alike. As for the deserters, some leapt down quickly from the wall out of sheer necessity, while others went out as if to fight, armed with stones, and then fled over to the Romans. But a fate crueler than what they had left behind awaited these men, and
they found the Roman abundance a swifter road to ruin than the famine within had been; for they arrived swollen from deprivation, as if dropsical, and then, gorging their shrunken bodies all at once, burst apart—all except those who, from experience, husbanded their appetites and fed their bodies, unaccustomed as they were to nourishment, only gradually. And even those who survived in this way soon fell prey to a different affliction; for among the
He kept inviting the people, once more, to trust him. At the sight of him courage fell upon the people, and terror upon the rebels.
Of the deserters, some, driven by necessity, leapt quickly from the wall; others went forward as if to fight, hurling stones, and then fled to the Romans. But a fate harsher than the one within followed them there, and they found the surfeit among the Romans a swifter road to ruin than the famine at home. For they arrived swollen from want, as if dropsical, and then, gorging their empty bodies all at once, burst apart — all but those who, through experience, rationed their appetites and gave their bodies, unused to it, food little by little. Yet even those who survived in this way met with a second blow: one of the deserters among the Syrians was caught picking gold coins out of the filth of his own bowels. For the deserters had taken to swallowing coins before they came out, since the rebels searched everyone, and there was a great quantity of gold in the city; a coin that had fetched twelve Attic drachmas before now fetched twenty-five. But once this device was exposed through one man, a rumor spread through the camps that the deserters were arriving full of gold, and the horde of Arabs and the Syrians cut open the suppliants and searched their bellies. I do not think any calamity befell the Jews more terrible than this one: in a single night close to two thousand were ripped open.
When Titus learned of this lawlessness, he came close to surrounding the guilty men with cavalry and cutting them down with javelins, and would have done so had not so vast a number been implicated, far more than could be punished. He called together the commanders of the allies and of the legions — for some of his own soldiers too were charged in the affair — and told them he was angry at both parties alike: that some of the men serving with him should do such things for the sake of uncertain gain, with no shame even for their own weapons, worked as they were in silver and gold; and that the Arabs and Syrians, indulging their passions at will in a war not their own, should then charge the Romans with the guilt of their butchery and their hatred of the Jews, when even now some of his own soldiers were sharing in the ill repute of it. To these he threatened death, should anyone be found daring the same thing again, and he ordered the men of the legions to search out any under suspicion and bring them before him.
But love of money, it seems, held every punishment in contempt, and the desire for gain is planted deep and fierce in men, and no passion rivals greed. Or rather, such things elsewhere have their measure and yield to fear; but here it was God who had condemned the whole people, and who was turning every path to safety into a path to destruction. At any rate, what Caesar had forbidden under threat of death was still ventured against the deserters in secret: before they could be seen by all, the barbarians ran ahead of them and cut them down, watching all the while lest any Roman catch sight of it, then slit them open and drew the vile profit out of their entrails. It was found on few, and hope alone destroyed the many. This calamity did at least bring many of the deserters back inside.
John, once the people had nothing left to plunder, turned to sacrilege. He melted down many of the dedicated offerings of the temple, and many of the vessels needed for the sacred services — mixing bowls, platters, and tables — nor did he spare even the wine-vessels sent by Augustus and his wife. For while the emperors of Rome had always honored and adorned the temple, this Jew now tore down even what foreigners had given it.
He told those around him that men must make free use of sacred things on behalf of the sacred, without fear, and that those who fought for the temple should be fed from it. For this reason he emptied out the sacred oil and the wine which the priests kept in store for the whole burnt offerings, kept there in the inner sanctuary, and distributed it among the people, who anointed themselves with it and drank it without a shudder.
I would not hold back from saying what my feelings compel me to say. I believe that had the Romans delayed in coming against these wretches, either the city would have been swallowed by a chasm, or drowned by a flood, or struck by the thunderbolts that fell on Sodom; for it produced a generation far more godless than those who suffered such fates. Through the madness of these men the whole people perished together.
Why should I recount the calamities one by one? In those days a man named Mannaeus, son of Lazarus, fled to Titus and reported that through a single gate entrusted to his charge, one hundred fifteen thousand eight hundred and eighty corpses had been carried out, from the day Titus had encamped before them, the fourteenth of the month Xanthicus, to the new moon of Panemus. This was the number of the poor alone; he himself did not stand watch there of his own will, but was paid by the public to keep the count, out of necessity. The rest of the dead their families buried, and burial meant only carrying the body out of the city and casting it down. After him, many notable men who deserted reported that in all six hundred thousand of the poor had been thrown out through the gates, and that the number of the rest was beyond counting. When they no longer had the strength to carry the poor out, they said, the bodies were heaped up in the largest houses and the houses shut up. A measure of grain, they said, sold for a talent; and later, once the city had been walled all around and it was no longer even possible to gather weeds, some were driven by need to such extremes that they searched the sewers and old cattle dung and ate the refuse found there, and what had once not even been bearable to look at now became food. The Romans, hearing this, were moved to pity, but the rebels, even seeing it with their own eyes, felt no repentance, and endured it, waiting until it should reach them too; for they had been blinded already by the ruin that stood over both the city and themselves.

======== Jewish War — Book 6 ========

The disasters at Jerusalem grew worse day by day. The rebels, goaded on all the more by their misfortunes, and famine, having already devoured the common people, now preyed on them as well. The heaps of corpses piled up throughout the city were a horrifying sight and gave off a pestilential stench, and they hindered any sortie against the enemy, since men advancing had to trample the bodies underfoot, as if marching across a battlefield already churned up by countless slaughter. Yet those who trod on them felt neither horror nor pity, nor took the outrage done to the dead as an evil omen for themselves; instead, with hands still stained by the blood of their own countrymen, they rushed out to fight the foreign enemy, reproaching, it seems to me, the divine for its slowness in punishing them. For their war was no longer driven by hope of victory but by despair of survival.
The Romans, though they had labored greatly to gather timber, raised their earthworks in twenty-one days, having stripped bare, as already mentioned, the whole country around the city for ninety stadia in every direction. The sight of the land itself was pitiable: places once adorned with trees and pleasure gardens now lay stripped and desolate on every side, their timber cut away. No foreigner who had seen the old Judea and the city's beautiful suburbs, and then looked upon the desolation now before him, could fail to grieve and groan at so great a change. The war had ruined every mark of its former beauty, and no one who had known the place before could have recognized it if suddenly set down there; rather, standing on the very spot, he would still have gone looking for the city.
The completion of the earthworks struck Romans and Jews alike with an equal dread, though from opposite causes. The Jews expected that if these works too were burned, the city would fall; the Romans, for their part, feared that if these were destroyed as well, they would never take the city at all. For timber was scarce, and the soldiers' bodies were worn out by their labors, while their spirits were worn down by one setback after another. Indeed, the disasters within the city weighed more heavily on Roman morale than on that of the besieged. For despite such great suffering, the defenders showed no softening in their fighting; rather, the Romans found their hopes constantly dashed - by the enemy's schemes against the earthworks, by the solidity of the wall against their engines, and by the daring of those they grappled with hand to hand. Worst of all, amid faction, famine, war, and so many evils, they still found the Jews' courage undiminished. They concluded that these men's onslaughts were irresistible and their cheerfulness under disaster unconquerable - for what would such men not endure, if fortune ever favored them, seeing that misfortune itself only drove them to greater strength? For these reasons the Romans kept a stronger guard over the earthworks.
John and his men at the Antonia, looking ahead to what would happen if the wall were breached, took precautions of their own; and before the battering rams could be brought up, they moved first against the works. But they did not succeed in their attempt: advancing with torches, they turned back, their courage cooler than their hope, before they had even reached the earthworks. In the first place, their plan showed no coordination - they dashed out in scattered groups, in fits and starts, hesitant and fearful, in short, nothing like the Jewish way of fighting: gone was the nation's characteristic boldness, the rush and charge of the whole body together, and the refusal to turn back even when struck down. Advancing with less than their usual vigor, they found the Romans, too, drawn up in stronger than customary order. With their bodies and full armor the Romans had fenced in the earthworks on every side so that fire could find no opening anywhere, and each man had steeled his spirit not to leave his post before death. For besides the loss of all their hopes if these works too should be burned, the soldiers felt a fierce shame at the thought that in the end craft would defeat courage, desperation defeat weapons, numbers defeat experience - and that Jews would defeat Romans.
At the same time their artillery joined in, striking down those who darted forward; a man falling became an obstacle to the one behind him, and the danger of advancing further made the rest more hesitant. Those who ran in under the range of missiles were, some of them, terrified before they even came to close quarters by the enemy's discipline and close ranks, others driven back by the jabs of long spears; and in the end, hurling accusations of cowardice at one another, they withdrew without accomplishing anything. This attack took place on the first of the month Panemus.
Once the Jews had withdrawn, the Romans brought up their siege engines, though pelted with stones from the Antonia and with fire and iron and every kind of missile that necessity supplied to the Jews; for though they placed great confidence in their wall and despised the Roman engines, they still tried to prevent the Romans from bringing them up. The Romans, supposing that the Jews' eagerness to keep the Antonia from being struck arose from weakness in the wall, and hoping the foundations were unsound, pressed their efforts all the harder in response. But the part under attack did not give way; some men, though continually under fire and yielding to none of the dangers from above, kept the siege engines working, while others, when their numbers grew too thin and they were being battered by the stones, roofed themselves over with shields and, working with hands and levers beneath this cover, undermined the foundations, and by persistent effort dislodged four stones. Night gave both sides a rest, and during it the wall - already shaken by the battering rams, and undermined at the point where John, in his counter-scheme against the earlier earthworks, had dug his tunnel, which now gave way - suddenly collapsed.
This event, coming unexpectedly, affected the spirits of each side in an unexpected way. The Jews, who might have been expected to lose heart, instead took courage, since the collapse had not caught them unprepared - they had already fortified themselves against it, believing the Antonia would still stand. But the Romans' unexpected joy at the wall's fall was quickly extinguished by the sight of a second wall, which John and his men had built up from within. Still, this assault appeared easier than the last: it seemed simpler to climb up through the rubble of the fallen wall, and this inner wall seemed far weaker than the Antonia itself, and, being hastily built, they supposed it would soon give way. Yet no one dared to climb up, for death was the certain fate awaiting whoever went first.
Titus, believing that the eagerness of fighting men is roused above all by hope and by words, and that exhortation and promises often banish the memory of danger and sometimes even contempt for death itself, gathered the bravest of his men together and tried to move them, speaking as follows.
"Fellow soldiers, to urge men on to dangers that bring them no benefit is itself an inglorious thing to do, and indeed it brings upon the one urging it a charge of cowardice. Exhortation, I think, should be reserved for undertakings that are genuinely hazardous, since anything else is worth doing on its own merits. So then, I myself set before you plainly how hard the climb to that wall will be. But that it is above all fitting for men who aspire to valor to contend with difficulties, that death in glory is a noble thing, and that the courage of those who lead the way will not go unrewarded - this I will explain.
"First, let something that might discourage some of you instead spur you on: the endurance of the Jews, and their capacity to bear hardship. For it would be shameful for men who are Romans and soldiers of mine - who have been trained for war in peacetime and are accustomed to victory in war - to be inferior to Jews in either strength of arm or strength of spirit, and this too when we stand at the very threshold of victory, with God fighting on our side. Our setbacks have come from Jewish desperation; their sufferings grow through your courage and God's cooperation. Faction, famine, siege, and walls falling without the aid of siege engines - what could these be but God's wrath against them and God's help to us? It would not be right for us not only to be outdone by lesser men but also to betray the divine alliance granted to us.
"And is it not shameful that Jews, for whom defeat and enslavement carry little disgrace since they have grown used to it, should hold death in contempt in order to escape it no longer, and should often rush out into our very midst, not in hope of victory but simply to display their courage - while you, who rule nearly the whole earth and sea, for whom not to win is itself a disgrace, and who have not once ventured against the enemy, sit here idle waiting for famine and fortune to do the work against them, though armed as you are, when with only a moment's risk you could accomplish the whole task? Once we have climbed up to the Antonia, we hold the city. And even if there should still be some fighting against those within - which I do not expect - holding the high ground and sitting astride the enemy's very breath will quickly guarantee complete victory.
"For my part, I will set aside for now any praise of death in war, and any talk of the immortality that awaits those who fall in the fury of battle, and instead I will pronounce a curse on those who choose otherwise - on those who die in peacetime from disease, for whom the soul is buried along with the body. For who among good men does not know that souls released from the flesh by the sword in battle are welcomed by the purest of elements, the ether, and set among the stars, appearing to their own descendants afterward as benevolent spirits and kindly heroes - while souls that waste away in diseased bodies, however free from stain or pollution they may be, are swallowed by a darkness beneath the earth and received into deep oblivion, losing at once their life, their bodies, and even the memory of themselves? But if death by necessity is spun out for all men alike, and the sword is a gentler servant to it than any disease, how can it be anything but base to refuse to circumstance what we shall in any case owe to fate? I have said all this as though those who make the attempt could not survive it. But even from the most perilous ventures, survival is possible for men who act with courage. First, what has already fallen is easy to climb; and besides, anything hastily built is easily broken down. You who go in greater numbers, take courage and be to one another both encouragement and support, and your own resolve will quickly break the enemy's spirit. Perhaps the success will even cost you no blood at all, if only you make the beginning: for while they will likely try to stop you as you climb, once you have gotten past them unnoticed and forced your way in, they will no longer be able to hold out, however few of you get there first. As for the one who leads the way, I would be ashamed not to make him an object of envy for the rewards he receives; and while the living will command men who are now his equals, blessings will follow the fallen as well, in the form of highest honors."
While Titus was saying such things, most of the men were afraid at the magnitude of the danger. But among those serving in the cohorts was one named Sabinus, a Syrian by birth, who proved himself best in both strength of arm and strength of spirit. And yet, to judge merely by his physical build, one would not have expected him to be even an ordinary soldier: he was dark-skinned, thin, and his flesh was shrunken close to the bone - but within that slight frame, far too narrow for the strength it held, dwelt a truly heroic spirit. He was the first to stand up. "I offer myself to you eagerly, Caesar," he said. "I will be the first to climb the wall. And I pray that my strength and resolve may keep pace with your fortune; but if I should fail in the attempt, know that I did not fall through misjudgment, but chose death deliberately, for your sake." With these words, holding his shield above his head with his left hand and drawing his sword with his right, he advanced toward the wall at about the sixth hour of the day.
Eleven others followed him, the only men who proved themselves rivals in courage; the man himself pressed far ahead of them all, driven by something like a divine impulse. The guards on the wall hurled javelins down at them, showered them with countless missiles from every side, and rolled down huge stones, which swept some of the eleven away; but Sabinus, meeting the missiles head-on and buried under a hail of projectiles, did not check his charge until he had reached the top and put the enemy to flight. For the Jews, terrified by his strength and force of spirit, and thinking that many more men had climbed up besides him, turned and fled. Here one might justly accuse fortune of begrudging men their virtues and of always thwarting extraordinary achievements. For this man, just when he had won his goal, stumbled, tripped against a rock, and fell forward upon it with a tremendous crash. The Jews, turning back and seeing him alone and fallen, pelted him with missiles from every side. He rose to his knees, and covering himself with his shield, at first defended himself and wounded many of those who came close; but then, overwhelmed by the number of his wounds, his right arm gave way, and at last, before he could breathe his last, he was buried under the missiles - a man who deserved, for his courage, a better fortune, though his fall matched the greatness of his undertaking. Of the others, three who had already reached the top were crushed with stones and killed, while the remaining eight, wounded, were dragged back and carried to the camp. This happened on the third of the month Panemus.
Two days later, some twenty of the sentries who kept watch by night at the earthworks banded together. Pretending to be the standard-bearer of the Fifth Legion, along with two cavalrymen from the squadrons and a single trumpeter, at about the ninth hour of the night they advanced quietly through the ruins toward the Antonia. Cutting the throats of the first guards, who were asleep, they took possession of the wall and ordered the trumpeter to sound the signal. At this, the rest of the guards leaped up in sudden panic and fled before anyone could see how few of the attackers there actually were; for both their fear and the trumpet call gave them the impression that a great number of the enemy had climbed up. When Caesar heard the signal, he armed his forces with all speed and, together with his officers, was himself the first to climb up, with his chosen men beside him. The Jews had fled into the Temple, and the Romans too now poured in through the tunnel which John had dug toward the Roman earthworks. The rebels of both factions, John's and Simon's, spread out and blocked them, sparing no effort of either strength or determination.
...beyond measure: they took the Romans' entry into the sanctuary as marking the end of the city's capture, and the Romans took it, for their part, as the beginning of mastering it. A fierce battle broke out around the entrances, the Romans forcing their way in to seize the temple as well, the Jews pushing them back toward the Antonia.
Arrows and spears were useless to both sides; they drew their swords and grappled hand to hand, and in the crush it was impossible to tell which men were fighting for which side—the combatants were jumbled together in the narrow space, and the shouting, swelled by its sheer volume, carried no meaning. The slaughter on both sides was heavy, and the fighters trampled and shattered the bodies and armor of the fallen as they fought. Wherever the tide of battle happened to press, there were cheers from the side gaining ground and wailing from the side giving way. There was no room either for flight or for pursuit; instead the battle-line, all mixed together, swayed one way and then the other in near-even balance. Men in the front ranks had no choice but to kill or be killed, since there was no way to retreat—those pressing forward from behind on both sides left their own comrades no gap to fall back into, not even within the fighting itself.
The Jews' fury was gaining the upper hand over the Romans' skill, and the whole battle-line was now on the point of giving way—they had been fighting from the ninth hour of the night to the seventh hour of the day. The Jews fought in a single mass, with the danger of the city's capture supplying them courage, while the Romans fought with only part of their force, since the legions had not yet come up; the men then engaged were husbanding their strength for them, judging that for the present it was enough to hold the Antonia.
There was a centurion named Julianus, from Bithynia, no obscure man—among all those whose deeds I recorded in the course of that war, he was the best in skill at arms, in bodily strength, and in steadiness of soul. He was standing beside Titus at the Antonia, and when he saw the Romans already giving ground and defending themselves badly, he leaped forward and, single-handed, drove back the Jews just as they were winning, all the way to the corner of the inner temple.
The whole crowd fled before him, unable to believe that his strength and daring were human. Darting this way and that through the scattering men, he cut down everyone he overtook, and neither Titus nor anyone else present ever beheld a more astonishing or more terrifying sight. But he too, it turned out, was being pursued by fate, which no mortal can escape.
His boots were studded with thick, sharp nails, like every other soldier's, and as he ran over the paved stone he slipped; falling on his back with a tremendous clatter of armor, he made the fleeing men turn around. A cry went up from the Romans on the Antonia, fearing for him, and the Jews closed round him in a mass and struck at him from every side with spears and swords.
He caught much of the iron on his shield, and though he tried again and again to get up he was knocked down by the sheer number of men striking him; even lying there he kept stabbing many with his sword. He was not killed quickly, protected as he was by helmet and breastplate and pulling in his neck to guard every vital spot for a deathblow, until his other limbs were hacked at and, with no one daring to come to his aid, he finally gave out. Titus was overcome with grief to see so brave a man cut down before so many eyes; the ground kept him, eager as he was, from going to help, and terror kept back those who could have. Julianus, then, after a long, hard death, leaving few of his killers unwounded, was at last cut down, leaving behind the greatest renown not only among the Romans and with Titus but among the enemy as well.
The Jews seized his body, then turned on the Romans again and drove them back, shutting them up in the Antonia. Among the Jews, those who distinguished themselves in this battle were Alexas and Gyphtheus of John's company; from Simon's men, Malachias and Judas son of Merto; Jacob son of Sosas, commander of the Idumaeans; and, among the Zealots, two brothers, sons of Ari, Simon and Judes.
Titus ordered the soldiers with him to demolish the foundations of the Antonia and to prepare an easy ascent for the whole army; then he summoned Josephus. He had learned that on that very day—the seventeenth of Panemus—the daily sacrifice called the tamid had lapsed for lack of men to offer it, and that the people were deeply distressed by this. He therefore told Josephus to say to John again what he had said before: that if some fatal passion for fighting possessed him, he was free to go out with as many men as he wished and fight, without dragging the city and the temple down with himself; but that he must stop desecrating the sanctuary and sinning against God, and that he was welcome to carry out the sacrifices that had lapsed, using whichever Jews he chose to select.
So Josephus, positioning himself where not only John but the crowd as well could hear him, delivered Titus's message in Hebrew, and added many pleas of his own: to spare the homeland, to drive back the fire that was already tasting the temple, and to restore the offerings to God.
At this the people fell into gloomy silence, but the tyrant, after heaping abuse and curses on Josephus, added at the end that he would never fear the city's capture, for the city belonged to God.
To this Josephus cried out: "You have indeed kept it pure for God—the sanctuary remains undefiled, and against the ally you hope for you have committed no offense; he is receiving his customary sacrifices! But if someone took away your daily food, you utterly godless man, you would count him an enemy—yet the very God you have robbed of his eternal worship, do you expect to have him as your ally in this war? And do you lay the blame on the Romans, who to this day care for our laws and are forcing the sacrifices you cut off to be restored to God? Who would not groan and lament over the city's astonishing reversal, when foreigners and enemies are correcting your impiety, while you, a Jew raised in the law, prove harsher toward it than they are? But John, there is no shame in repenting of wrongdoing even at the last, and if you wish to save your country a noble example lies before you: Jeconiah, king of the Jews, who, when the Babylonian marched against him on his own account, willingly gave himself up before the city was taken, and endured captivity of his own free will, along with his family, rather than hand over these holy things to the enemy and stand by while the house of God went up in flames. For this reason a sacred tradition celebrates him among all the Jews, and a memory flowing down through the ages, ever fresh, hands him on immortal to those who come after. A noble example, John, even if it carries danger—and I myself pledge you pardon from the Romans as well. Remember that I urge this as your countryman, and promise it as a Jew, and you should consider who is advising you, and from where. May I myself never become so much a captive while I live that I cease to belong to my people or forget my ancestral ways. You grow indignant again, and shout abuse at me—deserving, I admit, of still harsher words, since I am urging something flatly against fate and forcing the men God has condemned to be saved. Who does not know the writings of the ancient prophets, and the oracle now already bearing down on this unhappy city? For they foretold its capture whenever one of its own people should begin the slaughter of kinsmen. And is not the city, is not the whole temple, filled with your own people's corpses? God, then—God himself is bringing the purifying fire, together with the Romans, and is tearing away a city stuffed with so much pollution."
As Josephus spoke these words, his voice broke with sobbing amid his grief and tears. The Romans pitied him for his suffering and admired his resolve, but John's men were only further provoked against the Romans, desiring now to get Josephus himself into their power as well. Still, his words moved many of the nobility; some, afraid of the rebels' guards, stayed where they were, though they had already given up themselves and the city for lost; others watched for their chance, found a safe way out, and fled to the Romans. Among these were the chief priests Josephus and Jesus; three sons of the high priest Ishmael, who had been beheaded at Cyrene; four sons of Matthias; and one son of another Matthias, who had escaped after his father's death—his father having been killed, along with three sons, by Simon son of Gioras, as already related. Many other nobles went over to the Romans along with the chief priests.
Titus received them kindly in every respect, and knowing that living among people of foreign customs would be unpleasant for them, he sent them off to Gophna, advising them to stay there for the time being; once he had leisure after the war, he said, he would restore each man's property. So they withdrew gladly to the little town assigned them, in complete safety. But when they were no longer seen, the rebels once again spread the rumor that the deserters had been killed by the Romans—clearly meaning to frighten the rest away from deserting. And, as before, the trick worked for a while; men were held back from deserting by fear.
But later, when Titus recalled the men from Gophna and had them go around the wall with Josephus so that the people could see them, a great many fled over to the Romans. Gathering in a body and standing before the Romans, they begged the rebels, weeping and wailing, first to receive the Romans into the whole city and save their homeland after all, or failing that, at least to withdraw from the temple and spare it for them—for the Romans, they said, would never dare burn the sanctuary except under the direst compulsion.
But this only made the rebels more contentious: shouting back much abuse at the deserters, they stationed catapults, spear-throwers, and stone-throwing engines at the sacred gates, so that the temple's surrounding precincts came to resemble a mass grave for the sheer number of dead, and the sanctuary itself a fortress. They rushed with their weapons into the holy places, forbidden to enter, their hands still warm with the blood of their own kinsmen, and carried their lawlessness so far that whatever indignation the Jews would have felt had the Romans committed such outrages against them, that same indignation now came from the Romans against Jews who were desecrating what was their own. Indeed, there was not a single soldier who did not gaze at the temple with a shudder and bow before it, praying that the rebels would repent before disaster beyond remedy overtook them.
Titus, overcome with feeling, once more reproached John's men, saying: "Was it not you, you utterly vile men, who set up this stone balustrade in front of the holy places? Was it not you who erected the pillars on it, inscribed in Greek and in our own language, forbidding anyone to cross the barrier? And did we not allow you to kill anyone who crossed it, even if he were a Roman? Why then, you polluted wretches, do you now trample corpses inside it? Why do you drench the temple with the blood of foreigners and of your own people alike? I call to witness the gods of my fathers, and any god who ever watched over this place—though I doubt any still does—I call to witness my own army, the Jews who serve with me, and you yourselves, that I am not forcing you to defile this. If you will only shift the site of your battle, no Roman will approach the holy places or insult them; I will preserve the temple for you, even against your will."
When Josephus relayed this message from Titus, the rebels and the tyrant, supposing that these entreaties came not from goodwill but from cowardice, only grew more contemptuous. Titus, seeing that the men showed neither pity for themselves nor any regard for the temple, turned again, reluctantly, to war. He could not bring his whole force against them, since the ground would not hold it, so he picked out the thirty best men from each century, assigned a thousand to each tribune, put Cerealis in command of them, and ordered them to attack the guard posts around the ninth hour of the night.
He himself had put on his armor and was prepared to go down with them, but his friends held him back because of the sheer danger, and so did the advice of his officers: they told him he would accomplish more by sitting at the Antonia and directing the battle for his soldiers than by going down to risk himself in the front line, since with Titus watching, all the men would fight bravely. Persuaded by this, and telling the soldiers he would stay behind for this one reason—so that he could judge their merits, so that no brave man would go unrewarded and no coward unpunished, and so that the one who held power both to punish and to honor might himself see and witness everything—he sent the men off to carry out the action at the appointed hour, while he himself went forward to a spot on the Antonia with a clear view and waited tensely to see what would happen.
Yet those who were sent did not find the guards asleep, as they had hoped; the guards sprang up and immediately closed with them, shouting. At the noise of the men roused from their beds, the rest inside poured out in a mass. The Romans held off the first onrush; but those coming up behind fell in confusion among their own ranks, and many treated their own comrades as enemies. Recognition by voice was made impossible by the shouting mingled together on both sides, and recognition by sight was taken away by the darkness; men were blinded besides, some by rage, some by fear—so that it was impossible to tell whom one struck when one struck at whoever came in reach.
The Romans, however, since they kept their shields locked together and advanced in formation, suffered less from this confusion, for each man kept the watchword in mind. The Jews, by contrast, were always scattering and making their attacks and retreats without order, so that they often gave one another the impression of being enemies; in the dark, each man took a comrade returning to his side for an advancing Roman. More of them, in fact, were wounded by their own side than by the enemy, until day came and the fighting could at last be told apart by sight; then they drew up in ranks and used their missiles and their defenses in proper order. Neither side yielded or grew weary; the Romans, as though under Titus's own eyes, vied with one another man against man and company against company, each one striving for...
...that day would be his to begin, if only he fought bravely. What drove the Jews to their daring was fear for themselves and for the temple, and the tyrant standing over them, urging some on and whipping others into action with threats. For the most part the fighting stayed within a stade's length, but the balance of it swung back and forth quickly and within a short space, since neither side had room for a long flight or a long pursuit. The uproar from the Antonia kept pace with whatever was happening, as men shouted encouragement to their own side when it had the upper hand and called on it to stand firm when it gave ground. It was like a kind of theater of war: nothing that happened in the battle escaped Titus or the men around him. In the end, having begun at the ninth hour of the night, they broke off after the fifth hour of the day, neither side clearly forcing back the other, but leaving the victory suspended between them, evenly balanced. Many Romans fought with distinction; on the Jewish side, from Simon's men, Judes son of Mareotus and Simon son of Hosaia; from the Idumeans, Jacob son of Achatelas and Simon son of Sosas; from John's men, Gephthaeus and Alexas; and from the zealots, Simon son of Ari.
Meanwhile the rest of the Roman force spent seven days demolishing the foundations of the Antonia and clearing a broad road all the way to the temple. When the legions drew near the first enclosure they began raising earthworks at four points: one opposite the corner of the inner temple, which lay to the north and west; a second opposite the northern exedra, between the two gates; a third opposite the western portico of the outer temple; and the fourth outside, against the north side. The work went forward, but only with great toil and hardship, since they had to bring the timber in from a hundred stades away. They also suffered from ambushes here and there, though their overwhelming strength made them less cautious, and the Jews, now past hoping for their own survival, grew bolder still. Whenever some of the cavalry went out for wood or to gather fodder, they would unbridle their horses during the time it took to collect it and let them graze — and the Jews would dash out in a body and seize them. This kept happening, and Caesar, rightly judging that the losses came more from his own men's carelessness than from Jewish courage, decided to deal more sternly with the rest to make them guard their horses. He ordered one of the soldiers who had lost his horse led away to execution, and the fear of that kept the others watchful from then on — they no longer let the animals out to graze but took them out only as needed, staying close beside them as if grown together with them. The legions, for their part, went on pressing the siege of the temple and pushing the earthworks forward.
A day after they had begun this ascent, many of the insurgents, now running short of plunder and hard pressed by famine, banded together and attacked the Roman guard posts on the Mount of Olives at about the eleventh hour of the day, thinking that they would catch them unprepared, and further, that the men would already be attending to their own needs and so be easy to break through. But the Romans sensed their approach in advance and, rallying quickly from the nearby forts, kept them from leaping the barricade wall or forcing a breach in it. In the fierce clash that followed, both sides performed many acts of courage — the Romans relying on strength combined with skill in war, the Jews on reckless impulse and uncontrollable fury. What drove the one side was a sense of honor, the other necessity: it seemed utterly shameful to the Romans to let Jews slip free once caught as if in a net, while the Jews had only one hope of survival, to force their way through and break the wall. One of the cavalry from a squadron, a man named Pedanius, when the Jews had already begun to give way and were being pressed together down toward the ravine, rode past at an angle and, snatching up one of the fleeing enemy — a young man, powerfully built and in full armor — seized him by the ankle. He leaned so far down from his galloping horse, and showed such strength of arm and body besides, along with sheer skill in horsemanship, that he simply carried the man off as if he were some prize, and brought his captive to Caesar. Titus, marveling at the strength of the one who had made the capture, ordered the one who had been caught punished for his attack on the wall, and himself returned to the fighting around the temple and to pressing on the earthworks.
During this time the Jews, worn down by the constant clashes as the war crept ever nearer, coiling closer around the sanctuary, kept cutting off the parts already infected, like limbs from a rotting body, to stop the disease spreading further. They set fire to the section of the northern and western portico that connected to the Antonia, and then, working with their own hands, tore away about twenty cubits of it, so beginning to burn the sacred building themselves. Two days later, on the twenty-fourth of the month already named, the Romans set the next stretch of portico ablaze, and once the fire had eaten its way along for fifteen cubits, the Jews likewise cut away the roof, never entirely abandoning the work and cutting the section joined to the Antonia loose from the rest. So although they could have stopped the fire spreading, they instead held back until it reached the point they wanted, and so measured out its advance to their own advantage. Around the temple the fighting never let up; the war ran on continuously as men in turns rushed out against each other. Among the Jews at this time was a man short in stature and unimpressive to look at, of no distinction by birth or otherwise — his name was Jonathan — who came forward by the tomb of the high priest John and hurled arrogant taunts of every kind at the Romans, challenging their best man to single combat.
Most of the men drawn up there simply despised him, though some, quite reasonably, were afraid; and a thought not without sense occurred to a few — that it was unwise to grapple with a man courting death, since men who have given up on their own survival let their impulses run unchecked and no longer fear the divine, and that risking a fight against such a man made victory of little worth while a shameful defeat would be dangerous — this was not courage but recklessness. For a good while no one came forward, and the Jew kept mocking them at length as cowards, until a certain Pudens, one of the cavalry of a squadron, a man full of his own conceit and contemptuous of the Romans besides, revolted by the man's words and insolence — and no doubt also, without thinking it through, emboldened by the fellow's small stature — leaped forward. He had the better of the exchange in every other respect, but was betrayed by fortune: as he fell, Jonathan rushed up and cut his throat. Then, standing over the corpse, he brandished his bloodied sword, raised his shield in his left hand, and shouted taunts at the army, boasting over the fallen man and jeering at the watching Romans — until, as he pranced about in his mockery, a centurion named Priscus shot an arrow through him. A cry went up at once from both Jews and Romans, though of very different kinds. Jonathan, spinning from the pain, fell across the body of his enemy — proof, if war ever needed it, of how swiftly retribution can overtake a man whose luck has run beyond reason.
The insurgents up on the temple went on openly resisting the soldiers at the earthworks, defending against them day after day; and on the twenty-seventh of the aforesaid month they contrived the following stratagem. They filled the space between the beams and the ceiling beneath them, in the western portico, with dry wood, and with asphalt and pitch besides; then they pretended to give way, as if worn down. Many of the less cautious Romans, carried away by the impulse of the moment, pressed after the retreating men and set ladders against the portico and scrambled up onto it, while the more sensible ones, suspecting the Jews' flight was too irrational to be genuine, held back. Even so, the portico filled up with those who had climbed up — and at that moment the Jews set the whole thing ablaze. As the flame shot up suddenly on every side, a terrible panic seized the Romans who were outside the danger, and helplessness seized those trapped within it. Surrounded by the fire, some flung themselves backward into the city, others among the enemy, and many, hoping to save themselves, leaped down among their own comrades and broke their limbs; the fire overtook the flight of most, and some found the flame reaching them by way of the sword as well, for it spread out and consumed even those trying to escape by other means over a wide stretch.
Caesar, though angry at the men for having climbed up without orders, was nonetheless moved to pity for them; and since no one could go to their aid, this at least was some comfort to the dying — to see the man for whose sake they were giving up their lives grieving on their behalf. For he could be seen shouting to them, springing forward, and urging the men around him to help however they could. Each man, in his cries and in his bearing, met death cheerfully, carrying it off as though it were some glorious burial garment. Some retreated onto the broad section of the portico wall and so escaped the fire, but were then surrounded by the Jews; for a long while they held out under repeated wounds, but in the end they all fell — the last of them a young man named Longus, who crowned the whole tragic scene, and who, though every one of the fallen deserved to be remembered man by man, proved the best of them all. The Jews, admiring his valor and unable in any case to kill him outright, called on him to come down to them under pledge of safety, while his brother Cornelius, from the other side, urged him not to disgrace his own reputation and that of the Roman army. Persuaded by this, and lifting his sword in plain view of both armies, he took his own life. Among those trapped by the fire, a man named Artorius saved himself by a trick: calling out to a fellow soldier named Lucius, his tent-mate, he shouted at the top of his voice, "I leave you heir to my property, if you come and catch me." Lucius ran up readily to catch him; the one who threw himself down survived, landing on him, but the one who caught him, crushed by the weight, was dashed against the pavement and died on the spot.
This disaster caused the Romans some despair for a time, but it also, in the longer run, left them not without a lesson: it made them more guarded and helped them become more wary of Jewish tricks, the kind that had cost them so much before through ignorance of the terrain and of the character of the men they faced. The portico burned as far as John's tower, which he had built during his war against Simon, above the gates leading out over the terrace; the rest of it the Jews cut away themselves, once the men who had climbed up were already dead. The next day the Romans in turn burned the whole northern portico as far as the eastern one, at the corner where it joined the ravine called the Kidron, which was built up high above it — a spot whose depth alone was enough to inspire dread. Such, then, was the state of affairs around the temple.
Of those perishing from famine throughout the city, the number that fell was beyond counting, and the sufferings that took place defy description. In every house, wherever the least shadow of food appeared, war broke out, and the closest of kin came to blows with one another, snatching away the wretched provisions that kept the soul in the body. Not even the dying were trusted in their want: the brigands searched even the dying as they breathed their last, in case someone was concealing food under his clothes and merely feigning death. Men gaping with hunger reeled about like mad dogs, stumbling against doors as if drunk, and in their desperation would burst into the same houses two or three times within a single hour. Need drove them to gnaw at anything at all, and they forced themselves to collect and eat things not fit even for the filthiest of dumb animals; in the end they did not even refrain from belts and shoes, and stripped the leather from their shields and chewed on it. Some fed on tufts of old hay, for there were those who gathered the fibers and sold the smallest weight of it for four Attic drachmas. But why should I speak of the shamelessness the famine showed even toward lifeless things? I am about to reveal a deed of a kind recorded neither among Greeks nor among barbarians — dreadful to tell, and scarcely believable to hear. For my own part, I would gladly have passed over this calamity, for fear of seeming to later generations to be telling a monstrous tale, had I not had countless witnesses to it among my own contemporaries. And besides, I would be doing my homeland a cold favor if I suppressed, in my account, the sufferings it actually endured.
There was a woman among those living beyond the Jordan, named Mary, daughter of Eleazar, from the village of Bethezuba — which means "house of hyssop" — a woman distinguished by family and wealth, who had fled with the rest of the crowd into Jerusalem and was now caught up in the siege with them. Most of her possessions, everything she had gathered up and brought with her from Perea into the city, the tyrants had already plundered; and whatever remained of her valuables, along with any food she managed to find or think up from day to day, the guards would burst in and seize. A terrible indignation took hold of the woman, and time and again she would curse and abuse the plunderers, trying to provoke them into killing her. But since no one, whether out of anger or out of pity, would put her to death, and since finding any food at all had become exhausting even for others, while everywhere it had grown simply impossible to find any —
— the famine worked its way through her very insides and marrow, and her rage burned hotter still than the hunger. Taking fury as her counselor, together with necessity, she turned against nature itself. She had a child still at the breast; snatching up the infant, she said: "Poor child, in war, famine, and civil strife, for what am I to keep you? Slavery awaits us under the Romans, if we should even live to see them — but famine will overtake that slavery first, and the rebels are crueler than either. Come, be food for me, an avenging spirit to the rebels, and a story for the world — the one thing still missing from the calamities of the Jews." And as she said this she killed her son; then she roasted him and ate half, and covered up and kept the rest. The rebels were on her at once, having caught the forbidden smell, and threatened to cut her throat then and there unless she showed them what she had prepared. She told them she had kept a fine portion for them too, and uncovered the remains of her child. They were seized at once with horror and dread and stood frozen at the sight. She said, "This is my own child, and my own doing. Eat — for I too have eaten..."
I have eaten. Do not become softer than a woman or more tender-hearted than a mother. But if you are pious men and turn away from my sacrifice, then I have already eaten my share — let the rest remain for me as well.
At this the men went out trembling, cowards in this one thing alone, and barely yielding this food to the mother. At once the whole city was filled with the pollution, and each man, picturing the horror before his eyes, shuddered as though he himself had dared it. Those who were starving were eager for death, and counted blessed those who had died before hearing and seeing evils so great.
The horror was soon reported to the Romans as well. Some of them refused to believe it, others pitied the Jews, but most were driven by it to a still fiercer hatred of the nation. Caesar, for his part, defended himself before God on this very matter too, declaring that he had offered the Jews peace, self-government, and amnesty for all their offenses, but that they had chosen sedition over concord, war over peace, and famine over abundance and plenty, and had with their own hands begun to burn down the temple that he had been preserving for them — for that they deserved even such food as this. He said he would nonetheless bury the abomination of this child-eating beneath the ruin of their own homeland, and would not leave standing under the sun, for all the world to see, a city in which mothers were fed in such a way. And yet, he said, such food was more fitting for fathers than for mothers — fathers who, even after such sufferings, still remained under arms.
Even as he said all this he thought of the men's desperation: for it was unlikely, he judged, that men who had already suffered everything a man could suffer would ever recover their senses without going on to suffer still more.
Now that the two legions had finished their earthworks, on the eighth of the month Loos he ordered the battering rams brought up against the western portico of the outer temple. For six days before this the strongest of all the siege-engines had been battering the wall without effect; the great size and close fitting of the stones defeated it, as they did the others. Meanwhile other soldiers were undermining the foundations of the northern gate, and after great labor managed to lever out the stones in front. The gate was held up by the stones behind it and stood firm, until, giving up on their efforts with machines and levers, they brought ladders up to the porticoes. The Jews did not manage to stop them in time, but fell upon the men once they had climbed up and fought them — thrusting some backward off the wall to their deaths, cutting down others as they met them, striking down with their swords many more before they could even set their shields as they stepped off the ladders, and tipping over some ladders still crowded with soldiers, hurling them down from above. Their own losses too were not small. The men who had carried the standards up fought to the last around them, thinking it a fearful disgrace to let them be seized. In the end the Jews captured the standards and killed the men who had climbed up; the rest, dismayed at the fate of the fallen, withdrew. On the Roman side not a single man died without a fight, but among the rebels those who had also distinguished themselves bravely in earlier battles fell now as well, among them Eleazar, nephew of the tyrant Simon.
Titus, seeing that his forbearance toward the temple of a foreign people was only bringing harm and death to his own soldiers, ordered the gates set on fire. At this point two men deserted to him — Ananus of Emmaus, the most murderous of Simon's bodyguard, and Archelaus son of Magadatus — hoping for pardon now that the Jews were losing ground. But Titus reproached them for this very treachery, and having learned of their savagery toward their own people besides, was moved to kill them both, saying they had come over only under compulsion, not by choice, and did not deserve to be spared, since they had leapt clear of their homeland only after it was already in flames because of them. Yet good faith prevailed over his anger, and he let the men go, though he did not rank them equally with the rest.
By now the soldiers had set fire to the gates, and the silver melting on them quickly carried the flame into the woodwork, from which it spread in a mass and caught hold of the porticoes. As the Jews watched the fire ringing them, their spirits failed along with their bodies, and out of sheer shock no one made a move to fight it or put it out — they simply stood parched and stared. Yet even the ruin of their possessions did not dishearten them into caution for what remained; rather, now that the sanctuary itself was burning, they sharpened their fury against the Romans all the more. That day and the following night the fire held sway, for the Romans had not been able to set the porticoes alight all at once, but only bit by bit.
The next day Titus, having ordered part of his force to put out the fire and to clear the ground by the gates for an easier approach for the legions, called his commanders together. When the six most senior men had assembled — Tiberius Alexander, prefect of the whole army; Sextus Cerealis, commander of the Fifth legion; Larcius Lepidus of the Tenth; Titus Frigius of the Fifteenth; along with Fronto Haeterius, camp commander of the two legions from Alexandria, and Marcus Antonius Julianus, procurator of Judea — and after these the procurators and tribunes had also gathered, he put before them the question of the temple.
Some thought the law of war should simply be applied, since the Jews would never stop their rebellions so long as the temple stood, since it was the gathering point for people from everywhere. Others advised that if the Jews abandoned it and no one took up arms upon it, it should be spared, but that if they fought from within it, it should be burned — for then it would be a fortress, no longer a temple, and the impiety would belong to those who had forced it, not to the Romans. But Titus said that even if the Jews fought from it, he would not take revenge on lifeless things in place of men, nor would he ever burn down so great a work, since the loss would fall on Rome, just as its survival would be an ornament to his own command. Emboldened by this, Fronto, Alexander, and Cerealis came round to his view. He then dismissed the council, and having ordered the commanders to let the rest of his forces rest, so that he might use fresher men in the coming assault, he directed the picked men from the cohorts to clear a path through the rubble and to put out the fire.
That day exhaustion and shock kept the Jews' impulses in check, but the next day, having gathered their strength and recovered their courage, they sallied out through the eastern gate against the guards of the outer temple at about the second hour. The guards received their charge staunchly, locking their shields together in front like a wall and closing up their line, but it was plain they would not hold out much longer, overwhelmed as they were by the numbers and fury of the attackers.
Caesar, watching the balance of the fight tip from his post on the Antonia, for he could see it from there, came to their aid with his picked cavalry. The Jews could not withstand the charge, and once the first ranks fell most of them turned and fled; as the Romans fell back they pressed close upon them, and as the Romans wheeled about they fled again, until about the fifth hour of the day those who had been driven back were shut up inside the inner sanctuary.
Titus withdrew to the Antonia, resolved that at dawn the next day he would attack with his whole force and surround the temple. But God, it seems, had long since condemned it to the fire, and the fated day had come round in its cycle — the tenth of the month Loos, the very day on which it had once before been burned by the king of the Babylonians. The flames took their beginning and their cause from the Jews' own men: for when Titus had withdrawn, the rebels, after a brief pause, attacked the Romans again, and a clash broke out between the guards of the temple and those putting out the fire in the inner sanctuary, who routed the Jews and pursued them right up to the temple itself. There one of the soldiers, waiting for no order and fearing no such daring act, moved by some more-than-human impulse, snatched a burning brand and, boosted up by a fellow soldier, threw the fire in through a golden window that gave access, on the north side, to the chambers around the temple.
As the flame rose, a cry went up from the Jews worthy of the calamity, and they rushed together to fight it off, sparing themselves no longer and holding nothing back of their strength, now that the very thing they had been guarding so carefully was slipping away. Someone ran and reported it to Titus. He happened to be resting in his tent after the fighting, and just as he was he leapt up and ran toward the temple to stop the fire. All his commanders followed after him, and the legions, alarmed, followed them in turn; there was shouting and confusion, as was natural with so great a force moving without order.
Caesar, by voice and by gesture, signaled to the fighting men to put out the fire, but they could not hear him shouting, their ears already filled with a greater din, nor did they heed the signs of his hand, some intent on the fighting, others carried away by rage. As the legions poured in, neither exhortation nor threat could hold back their impulse, but fury alone commanded them all; crowding at the entrances, many were trampled by one another, and many, falling among the still-hot and smoking ruins of the porticoes, met the same fate as the defeated. Drawing near the temple, they pretended not even to hear Caesar's orders, and urged the men in front of them to throw in the fire. By now the rebels were helpless to bring any aid; there was slaughter and rout everywhere. Most of the dead were ordinary, unarmed, and powerless people of the city, cut down wherever they were caught; around the altar the bodies piled up in heaps, and blood ran in streams down the temple steps, the corpses of those killed above sliding down with it.
When Caesar found he could not restrain the soldiers in their frenzy, and the fire was gaining the upper hand, he went in with his commanders and viewed the sanctuary of the temple and everything within it — far surpassing, he found, its reputation among foreigners, and fully living up to its renown and glory among his own people. Since the flame had not yet reached inside anywhere but was still feeding on the chambers around the temple, he judged, rightly, that the building could still be saved, and rushed forward himself, trying to urge the soldiers to put out the fire, and ordered the centurion Liberalis, of his own bodyguard of spearmen, to beat back with clubs any who disobeyed. But the men's fury overcame their reverence for Caesar and their fear of the one restraining them, as did their hatred of the Jews and a certain fiercer battle-lust; most of them, besides, were driven by hope of plunder, believing that everything inside was full of treasure, and seeing that all around them was made of gold. But before this, one of the men who had gotten inside, just as Caesar had rushed out to hold back the soldiers, threw fire into the hinges of the gate, in the darkness; and then, as flame suddenly blazed up from within, the commanders withdrew along with Caesar, and no one any longer stopped those outside from setting fire to it. So it was that the temple was burned against Caesar's will.
One might well lament, considering the work itself, all that we have received by sight and by report of its wonders — the skill and scale of its construction, the costliness of every part, and the glory of its holy places — and yet find the greatest comfort in this: that fate is inescapable, for works and places just as for living beings. One might also marvel at the precision of its cycle: it kept, as I have said, the very same month and the very same day on which the temple had earlier been burned by the Babylonians. From its first founding, laid by King Solomon, to its present destruction, which took place in the second year of Vespasian's reign, the sum comes to one thousand, one hundred and thirty years, seven months, and fifteen days; and from its later founding, which Haggai carried out in the second year of King Cyrus's reign, to its capture under Vespasian, six hundred and thirty-nine years and forty-five days.
While the temple was burning, plunder was seized from all who fell in its path, and the slaughter of those who were caught was boundless; no mercy was shown for age, no respect for rank — children and old men, laymen and priests alike were cut down together, and the war swept up every class of person, both those who begged for mercy and those who fought back. The roar of the flame, carried far and wide, mingled with the groans of the falling; and because of the height of the hill and the scale of the burning structure, one might have thought the whole city was ablaze. As for the outcry, nothing more overwhelming or more terrible could be imagined: the war-cry of the Roman legions surging forward, the screams of the rebels ringed by fire and sword, the terror-stricken flight of the people trapped above toward their enemies, and their wailing at their fate. The crowd throughout the city answered the cries of those on the hill with cries of its own; and now many who were wasting away from famine and had lost the power of speech, when they saw the fire on the temple, found strength once more for weeping and lament. Perea and the surrounding mountains echoed back, deepening the roar. Yet more terrible than the noise itself was what lay behind it: one might have thought the temple hill was being shaken to its very roots, so full was it of fire on every side, yet more abundant still was the blood than the fire, and more numerous the slain than the slayers — nowhere could the ground be seen for the corpses, but the soldiers ran over heaps of bodies in pursuit of those who fled. The mass of the rebels, at last, forced their way past the Romans and broke out, with difficulty, into the outer court and from there into the city; the remnant of the ordinary people fled for refuge to the outer portico. Some of the priests at first tore out the spikes of the temple and their sockets, cast in lead, and hurled them at the Romans; but then, seeing this achieved nothing and that the fire was bursting in upon them too,
They withdrew to the wall, eight cubits thick, and there held their ground. But two men of note, though they could have gained safety by going over to the Romans or held out to share the fate of the rest, threw themselves into the fire instead and were burned up together with the temple—Meirus son of Belgas and Joseph son of Daleus.
The Romans, judging it now useless to spare what remained round about while the temple itself was burning, set fire to everything: the remnants of the porticoes and the gates, except two, one on the east and one on the south—and these too they later tore down. They also burned the treasuries, in which lay an immense quantity of money, an immense quantity of clothing, and other valuables; in short, the whole accumulated wealth of the Jews had been stored there, since the rich had moved their household goods into it.
They came also to the one remaining portico of the outer temple, where a mixed crowd of women, children, and common people, some six thousand in all, had taken refuge. Before Caesar could decide anything about them or give an order to his commanders, the soldiers, carried away by rage, set fire to the portico. It happened that some died by throwing themselves out of the flames, and others
perished inside it; of so great a number not one survived. The man responsible for their destruction was a false prophet, who had proclaimed to the people in the city that very day that God commanded them to go up to the temple to receive the signs of their salvation. There were many such prophets at that time, planted by the tyrants to urge the people
to wait for help from God, so that fewer would desert, and so that hope might steady those already gripped by fear and under guard. A man in distress is quickly persuaded; and when the deceiver adds the promise of release from present evils, the sufferer gives himself over entirely to hope. So it was that the wretched people were led astray then by impostors who lied in God's name, while the clear signs that plainly foretold
the coming desolation they neither heeded nor believed, but, as if thunderstruck and possessing neither eyes nor minds, disregarded the warnings of God—once when a star resembling a sword stood over the city, and a comet that lasted a whole year; and again when, before the revolt and the stirring toward war, as the people were gathering for the feast of
unleavened bread, on the eighth of the month Xanthicus, at the ninth hour of night, so great a light shone round the altar and the temple that it seemed to be broad daylight, and this lasted half an hour. To the inexperienced it seemed a good omen, but the sacred scribes judged at once, from what followed, what it meant. And at the same feast a cow, led by someone to
the sacrifice, gave birth to a lamb in the middle of the temple court. And the eastern gate of the inner sanctuary, though made of bronze and very massive, and though it took twenty men, closing it with difficulty toward evening, and though it was fitted with iron-bound bars and had bolts sunk very deep into the threshold, itself a single unbroken block of stone, was seen at the sixth hour of night to have opened of its own accord. The temple
guards ran and reported it to the captain, who went up and, with difficulty, managed to shut it again. To ordinary people this too seemed a most excellent omen: that God had opened for them the gate of blessings. But the learned understood that the security of the sanctuary was loosening of itself, and that the gate was being opened as a gift to the enemy, and among themselves they declared the sign to portend desolation. Not many days after
the feast, on the twenty-first of the month Artemisius, a supernatural apparition was seen, one beyond belief. What I am about to tell would seem a fable, I think, had it not been reported also by eyewitnesses, and had the sufferings that followed not matched the signs. For before sunset, chariots were seen suspended in the air over the whole country, and armed battalions rushing through the clouds
and encircling the cities. And at the feast called Pentecost, the priests, entering the inner sanctuary by night as was their custom for their services, said they first became aware of a movement and a din, and after that of a massed voice saying, "We are departing from here." More frightening still than these was the case of a certain Jesus son of Ananias, a common man from the countryside, who four years before the
war, when the city was enjoying the fullest peace and prosperity, came up for the feast at which it is the custom for everyone to build booths for God, and suddenly began to cry out in the temple: "A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the temple, a voice against bridegrooms and brides, a voice against all the people!" This, by day
and by night, he went about crying through all the alleys of the city. Some of the leading citizens, angered at the ill-omened cry, seized the man and beat him with many blows. But he said nothing in his own defense, nor anything in private to those striking him, and kept uttering the very same cries as before. The magistrates, concluding—rightly, as it turned out—that the man's impulse was something more than human, brought him before the
Roman prefect. There, though torn by scourges to the bone, he neither begged for mercy nor wept, but, twisting his voice into the most plaintive tone he could manage, answered every blow with, "Woe, woe to Jerusalem!" When Albinus—for he was then prefect—asked him again and again who he was, where he came from, and why he cried out such things, he answered not a word to any of it, but kept up his lament over the city without
pause, until Albinus, judging him mad, released him. For all the time up to the war he approached no citizen and was never seen to speak, but daily, as if he had rehearsed a prayer, lamented, "Woe, woe to Jerusalem!" He never cursed any of those who struck him day after day, nor blessed those who gave him food; to everyone alike he gave the same grim
reply. Above all at the festivals he would cry it out, and this he kept up unbroken for seven years and five months, his voice never growing dull nor tiring, until in the siege, having seen the deeds his cry foretold, he fell silent. For as he went about along the wall crying, "Woe again to the city," and to the people, and to the temple, in a piercing voice, and as at the very last he added, "and woe
to me too"—a stone hurled from a catapult struck him and killed him on the spot, and his soul departed still uttering those same cries. Anyone who reflects on this will find that God cares for mankind and gives every kind of warning to his own people of what would bring them safety, but that they perish through folly and evils of their own choosing—for the Jews, after the demolition of the Antonia,
made the temple square, though it was written in their oracles that the city and the temple would be taken once the temple became square. But what incited them to war more than anything was an ambiguous oracle, likewise found in their sacred writings, that at that time someone from their country would rule the world. This they took to refer to themselves,
and many of their wise men were led astray in their judgment of it; but in truth the oracle signified the rule of Vespasian, who was proclaimed emperor on Jewish soil. But it is not possible for men to escape their fate, even when they foresee it. And of the signs, they interpreted some to their liking and dismissed others, until at last, by the capture of their homeland and their own ruin,
they were convicted of their folly. As for the Romans, once the rebels had fled into the city, and while the temple itself and everything around it was burning, they carried their standards into the sanctuary, set them up opposite the eastern gate, and there offered sacrifice to them, and with the loudest acclamations hailed Titus as imperator. And the soldiers were all so glutted with plunder that
throughout Syria the price of a pound of gold fell to half what it had been before. Meanwhile, among the priests still holding out along the wall of the temple, a boy, overcome with thirst, begged the Roman guards for a pledge of safety, confessing his need. Moved to pity by his youth and his distress, they gave him their word; he came down, drank, and, filling the vessel he
had brought with water, made off, fleeing back up to his own people. None of the guards was able to catch him, and they cursed him for his bad faith. But he said he had broken none of the terms: the pledge had been given only for him to come down and get water, not to remain with them, and both of these he had done—so that he was judged to have kept faith after all. The rebels marveled at the boy's cunning,
chiefly on account of his youth. On the fifth day the priests, now starving, came down, and, being brought before Titus by the guards, begged to be granted their lives. He told them that the time for pardon had passed them by, that the one for whose sake he might reasonably have spared them was gone, and that it was fitting for priests to perish along with their temple, and he ordered the men put to death. Meanwhile, those
around the tyrants, seeing that they were being overpowered on every side by the war, and that, walled in as they were, there was no way of escape, called on Titus for a parley. He, both because he was by nature humane and wished, if nothing else, to save the city, and because his friends urged him—for he now supposed the rebels were growing more moderate—took his stand on the western side of the outer temple; for there, above the
colonnade, there were gates, and a bridge joining the temple to the upper city; and this now stood between the tyrants and Caesar. The crowd on each side pressed close together, the Jews around Simon and John poised on the hope of pardon, the Romans around Caesar waiting eagerly to hear their terms. Titus ordered his soldiers to hold their anger and their weapons in check, stationed his interpreter beside him—itself a mark that he held the upper hand—and was the first to speak:
"Have you not by now had your fill of your country's sufferings, men? You who took account neither of our strength nor of your own weakness, and who, by reckless impulse and madness, have destroyed your people, your city, and your temple, and are yourselves now about to perish justly as well—you who, from the very time
Pompey took you by force, never once ceased your revolutionary stirrings, and then at last openly declared war on Rome! Was it trust in numbers? Yet the smallest fraction of Rome's army was more than a match for you. Trust in allies, then? What nation outside our empire was ever going to choose the Jews over the Romans? Strength of body? Yet you know the Germans are our slaves. Strength of
walls? What barrier is greater than the ocean's own wall, wrapped in which the Britons still bow before Roman arms? Endurance of spirit and the cunning of your generals? Why, you knew well enough that even the Carthaginians were conquered. So then, it was Roman generosity that stirred you up against Rome—we who first gave you land to till and set kindred kings over you, who then preserved your ancestral laws, and allowed you to live not only
among yourselves but toward others as well, exactly as you wished; and, greatest of all, we allowed you to collect tribute for your God and to gather offerings, and never reproached or hindered those who brought them—so that you might grow richer at our expense and arm yourselves, with our own money, against us. And then, after enjoying such great benefits, you turned the surfeit of them against those who had granted them, and, like
untamed serpents, spat your venom back at the very hands that fondled you. Well, grant that you despised Nero's indolence: like ruptures or sprains that lie maliciously quiet the rest of the time, you broke out during the worse sickness, and stretched your hopes into shameless, boundless desires. My father came into this country not to punish you for what you did to Cestius, but to warn you; for had he
come intending the destruction of your nation, he should have gone straight for your root and razed this city at once. Instead he laid waste to Galilee and the surrounding country, giving you time to repent. But you mistook his humanity for weakness, and from our mildness nursed your own boldness. Once Nero was gone, you did exactly what the worst of men would do: you took heart from our civil troubles, and when I
and my father had withdrawn to Egypt, you seized the moment to prepare for war, and were not ashamed to trouble men who had become emperors—men you had already tested as humane generals. Indeed, when the empire came to us as a suppliant, and while everyone else under it kept quiet, and the nations beyond it sent embassies and rejoiced with us, the Jews alone remained our enemies, and your embassies went out to those
beyond the Euphrates to stir up revolt; new circuits of walls were built up again; factions and rivalries among tyrants, and civil war—fit only for men so wicked as you. I came against the city myself, against my own will, carrying grim orders from my father. Hearing that the people were peaceably disposed, I was glad. I called on you to stop short of war; for a long time, even while you kept fighting, I spared you; I gave pledges of safety to deserters; I kept faith with those who took refuge with me;
I pitied many prisoners; those who pressed for punishment I chastised only after examination. Was it my own choice to bring siege engines against your walls? I held back my soldiers, who were always thirsting for your blood; after every victory, as if I were the one defeated, I called on you to make peace. When I came near the temple, I again willingly set aside the laws of war, and urged you to spare your own holy places and save the temple for yourselves, granting you
leave to go out unharmed, a pledge of safety, and, had you wished, the chance to fight it out elsewhere. All this you scorned, and burned the temple with your own hands. And now, foulest of men, do you call me to a parley? What is left for you to save, of the sort that has already perished? What safety do you think yourselves worthy of, now that the temple is gone? And yet even now you stand there under arms, and not even in this final extremity do you so much as play the part of suppliants,
wretches that you are—trusting in what? Is not your people dead? Is not your temple gone? Is not your city in my hands, and your very lives in my grasp? Do you then imagine that a hard death is a mark of courage? No—I will not contend against your desperation: throw down your weapons, surrender your bodies, and I grant you your lives, as I would to members of my own household...
a mild master, punishing only what could not be healed and preserving the rest for himself. To this they answered that they could not accept his right hand, since they had sworn never to do so; instead they asked for a way out through the encircling wall, with their wives and children, meaning to go into the desert and leave the city to him. Titus, angered that men in the position of the conquered were offering him terms as though they were the victors, ordered a proclamation made to them that no one was to desert any longer, and no one was to hope for his right hand, for he would spare no one; instead they were to fight with all their strength and save themselves however they could, since he himself would now do everything according to the law of war. To the soldiers he gave leave to burn and plunder the city.
For that day they held back, but on the next they set fire to the archive building, the citadel, the council chamber, and the district called Ophlas, and the fire spread as far as the palace of Helena, which stood in the middle of the citadel. The lanes and houses burned, all of them full of the dead who had perished from famine.
On that same day the sons and brothers of King Izates, together with a number of prominent citizens who had gathered with them, begged Caesar to grant them his right hand. Though he was furious with all who remained, he did not change his character and received the men. For the time he kept them all under guard, but later he had the king's children and kinsmen put in chains and taken to Rome, to serve as a pledge of good faith as hostages.
The rebels, meanwhile, made a rush for the royal palace, where many had deposited their possessions because of its strength; they drove the Romans out of it, and after slaughtering the whole crowd of citizens gathered there, some eight thousand four hundred people, they plundered the money. They also took two Romans alive, one a cavalryman and one a foot soldier. The foot soldier they killed at once and dragged around the city, as though avenging themselves on the whole Roman people in one man's body. The cavalryman said he could suggest something useful for their safety, and so was brought before Simon; but having nothing to say to him, he was handed over to one of the commanders, a certain Ardalas, to be executed. Ardalas bound the man's hands behind him, blindfolded him, and led him out opposite the Romans to behead him; but the man managed to slip free and escape to the Romans before the Jew could draw his sword.
Titus would not allow this man, who had escaped from the enemy, to be put to death; but judging him unworthy to be a Roman soldier because he had let himself be taken alive, he stripped him of his weapons and expelled him from his legion — a punishment that, to a man with any shame, was harder to bear than death.
The next day the Romans drove the brigands out of the lower city and burned everything as far as Siloam. They were glad to see the city consumed, but got no plunder from it, for the rebels had already stripped everything and withdrawn into the upper city. They felt no remorse at all for their crimes; instead they were as boastful as if they had done something good. Looking out at the city in flames, they said with cheerful faces that they were glad to await the end, now that the people had been slaughtered, the temple burned, and the city set ablaze, leaving nothing for the enemy.
Josephus, however, did not tire of pleading with them, even at this last extremity, on behalf of what remained of the city. He said much against their cruelty and impiety, and offered much advice toward saving themselves, but got nothing for it beyond mockery. Since they could neither bring themselves to surrender because of their oath, nor were still able to fight the Romans on equal terms, hemmed in as if in a prison, the habit of killing still moved their hands: scattering among the ruins in front of the city, they lay in wait for those trying to desert. Many were caught, and since hunger had left them too weak even to run, all were butchered and their bodies thrown to the dogs. Every kind of death seemed lighter than famine, so that even those who had already given up hope of mercy from the Romans still fled to them, willingly throwing themselves in the way of the rebels' murderous swords. No spot in the city was free of the dead; every place was filled with corpses of those who had perished by famine or by the civil strife.
The tyrants and the brigand band with them were sustained by one last hope, resting on the underground passages, into which they fled expecting not to be searched out even after the city's complete capture, once the Romans had withdrawn; then they would come out and try to escape. But this was a mere dream to them, for they were never going to escape the notice of God or of the Romans. For the time being, though, trusting in these underground places, they set more fires than the Romans themselves, and those who fled from the burning buildings into the tunnels they killed indiscriminately and robbed; and if they found any food, however soaked in blood, they seized and devoured it. There was already war among themselves over the plunder, and I think that, had they not been overtaken by the city's fall, in their excess of cruelty they would even have tasted the dead.
Caesar, since it was impossible to take the upper city without earthworks, given its steep and precipitous position, distributed the army to the works on the twentieth of the month Loos. The gathering of timber for all the ramparts was difficult, since, as I have said, the country around the city had been stripped bare for a hundred stadia to build the earlier mounds. So the works of the four legions were raised on the western side of the city, opposite the royal palace, while the allied troops and the rest of the crowd worked at the Xystus, the bridge, and Simon's tower, which he had built as a stronghold in his war against John.
During these same days the leaders of the Idumeans met secretly and resolved to surrender themselves; they sent five men to Titus begging him to grant them his right hand. Titus, hoping that the tyrants too would give way once the Idumeans, who made up a large part of the fighting force, had been drawn off, agreed to spare them, slowly but still agreed, and sent the men back.
But as they were preparing to leave, Simon noticed, and at once killed the five who had gone to Titus; the other leaders, the most prominent of whom was Jacob son of Sosas, he arrested and imprisoned. The Idumean rank and file, thrown into confusion by the loss of their leaders, were kept under closer guard, and the wall was watched with still greater care. Even so, the guards could not hold back the deserters, and although a great many were killed, far more still got away. The Romans took in all of them, since Titus, out of leniency, had let his earlier orders lapse, and the soldiers themselves, sated with killing, refrained from it now, hoping for profit instead: leaving only the common people aside, they sold the rest of the crowd, along with their wives and children, each for the lowest price, since there were so many for sale and so few buyers.
Although Titus had proclaimed that no one was to desert alone, so that families might be brought out together, he still accepted these people as well, but set men to examine them and pick out any who deserved punishment. The number of those sold was beyond counting; the common people who survived numbered more than forty thousand, and Caesar let each go wherever he pleased.
In these same days one of the priests, a son of Thebuthi named Jesus, having received an oath of safety from Caesar in exchange for handing over some of the sacred treasures, came out and delivered from the wall of the temple two lampstands like those kept in the sanctuary, together with tables, mixing-bowls, and bowls, all of solid gold and very heavy. He also handed over the veils and the vestments of the high priests, with their precious stones, and many other vessels used in the sacred rites.
Also arrested was the treasurer of the temple, a man named Phineas, who disclosed the tunics and sashes of the priests, a great quantity of purple and scarlet cloth kept for the needs of the veil, along with a large amount of cinnamon and cassia and a mass of other spices, which the priests mixed together and burned as incense to God every day. He also handed over many other treasures and no small amount of sacred ornaments; and for this, though he had been taken by force, he was granted the pardon given to deserters.
When the earthworks had at last been finished, after eighteen days, on the seventh of the month Gorpiaeus, the Romans brought up their siege engines. Of the rebels, some had already given up on the city and withdrew from the wall into the citadel; others hid themselves in the underground tunnels; but many stood their ground, scattered along the wall, and resisted those bringing up the battering engines. The Romans overcame these too, by sheer numbers and force, and above all because they fought with confidence against men already disheartened and worn down. When part of the wall was breached and some of the towers, battered by the rams, gave way, those defending it fled at once, and even greater fear than the danger warranted gripped the tyrants themselves; before the enemy had even crossed over, they were paralyzed and already poised for flight. It was pitiful to see men who had once been so arrogant, so insolent in their crimes, now humbled and trembling, even amid the worst of men.
They rushed to the encircling wall meaning to force back the guards and break through to escape, but when they saw that their old confederates were nowhere to be found — for these had already fled wherever necessity advised — while others came running to report that the whole western wall had been torn down, or that the Romans had already broken in and were close by searching for them, and still others claimed to see the enemy from the towers, though fear was distorting their sight, they fell on their faces and wailed over their own derangement, and, as if the very sinews of flight had been cut from them, they were at a loss what to do.
Here above all one could recognize the power of God against the impious and the fortune of the Romans: the tyrants stripped themselves of their own safety and came down from the towers of their own accord — towers that could never have been taken by force, but only by famine. The Romans, after such labor over the weaker walls, now gained by fortune what their engines could not achieve, for the three towers described above were stronger than any siege device. Abandoning these towers — or rather, cast down from them by God — they fled at once into the ravine below Siloam, and after a little recovery from their terror, made a dash for the encircling wall at that point. But their courage now fell short of what necessity demanded, for their strength had already been broken along with their spirit by fear and disaster, and they were pushed back by the guards; scattering from one another, they plunged down into the underground tunnels.
The Romans, now masters of the walls, planted their standards on the towers and, with clapping and rejoicing, sang the paean of victory, having found the end of the war far lighter than its beginning. Indeed, mounting the last wall without bloodshed, they could hardly believe it, and finding no opponent in sight, they were at a loss what to do. Pouring into the narrow streets with swords drawn, they killed without mercy all they overtook, and set fire to the houses of those who had fled inside, families and all. Often, when they broke in to plunder, they came upon whole families of corpses and rooms full of the victims of famine, and, shuddering at the sight, went out again empty-handed.
Yet they showed no pity for those who had died so, and treated the living no differently: running through anyone in their path, they choked the streets with corpses and flooded the whole city with blood, so much so that many of the fires were even quenched by the bloodshed. The killing ceased toward evening, but through the night the fire raged on, and dawn rose over a burning Jerusalem on the eighth of the month Gorpiaeus — a city that had endured such disasters during the siege that, had it enjoyed an equal share of blessings since its founding, it would certainly have been envied by all, and that deserved its calamities for no other reason than for having produced the generation that brought it down.
Titus, entering the city, marveled both at its other defenses and at its towers, which the tyrants in their derangement had left standing. Seeing the massive height of them, the size of each stone, and the precision of their joints, and how broad and how tall they rose, he said, "We have fought with God on our side, and it was God who cast the Jews down from these strongholds — for what could the hands of men, or their engines, do against towers like these?" He spoke much more of this kind to his friends at the time, and released the tyrants' prisoners, all those found in the fortresses. Later, when he was leveling the rest of the city and demolishing its walls, he left these towers standing as a monument to the fortune that had fought alongside him and given him victory over what could not otherwise have been taken.
Since the soldiers were now growing weary of killing, and yet a great number of survivors kept appearing, Caesar ordered that only armed men still resisting should be killed, and the rest of the crowd taken captive. The soldiers, along with what had been ordered, killed the old and the weak, and drove those in their prime and fit for use into the temple, shutting them up within the enclosure built for the women. Caesar set one of his freedmen to guard them, and his friend Fronto to determine the fate each deserved. Fronto put to death all those denounced by one another as rebels or brigands, and chose out the tallest and handsomest of the young men to keep for his triumph. Of the rest of the crowd, those over seventeen he had bound and sent to labor in the mines of Egypt, while Titus gave away a great many more to the provinces, to be destroyed in the theaters by the sword or by wild beasts; those under seventeen were sold. During the days when Fronto was making these decisions, eleven thousand of them died of want — some because the guards, out of hatred, withheld food from them, others because they refused what was offered; for besides this, there was a shortage of grain for so great a multitude.
The total number of captives taken throughout the entire war came to ninety-seven thousand, and the number who perished during the whole siege to one million one hundred thousand. Most of these were of the same nation but not natives of the city; for people had gathered there from the whole country for the feast of unleavened bread
they had gathered for the feast of unleavened bread when the war suddenly closed around them, so that the cramped space first bred a plague-like destruction among them, and then a still swifter famine.
That the city could hold so many is clear from the count taken under Cestius, who, wanting to show Nero, who despised the nation, how great the city was at its height, urged the chief priests, if it were at all possible, to number the people. So, when the feast called Passover came around, at which they sacrifice from the ninth hour to the eleventh, and no fewer than ten men gather as a kind of company around each victim, for it is not permitted to feast on one alone, while many even come together in groups of twenty, they counted two hundred fifty-five thousand six hundred victims. Reckoning ten diners to each, that comes to two million seven hundred thousand men, all of them ritually clean and holy: for neither lepers nor those with a discharge nor women in their courses nor anyone else defiled was allowed to share in this sacrifice, nor even foreigners who were present for the worship, though a great crowd of these gathers from outside as well.
At that time, then, the whole nation was shut in as if in a prison by fate, and the war encircled the city, packed as it was with people. The number of those who perished, in any case, surpasses every destruction wrought by man or by God: for besides those visibly killed or taken captive by the Romans, when they searched the sewers and tore up the ground, they killed everyone they found, and there too more than two thousand corpses were discovered, some slain by their own hands, some by one another's, but most destroyed by famine.
A dreadful stench from the bodies met those who came upon them, so that many turned back at once, while others, driven by greed, pushed in, treading on the heaped-up corpses; for many valuables were found in the passages, and gain made every path seem permitted. Many prisoners of the tyrants were also brought out to be killed, for even at the last they did not cease from their cruelty.
But God did indeed repay both of them as they deserved. John, starving together with his brothers in the sewers, begged for the right hand of the Romans which he had so often scorned to accept; Simon, after struggling long against necessity, as we shall show in what follows, surrendered himself. The one was kept for the triumph, to be slaughtered; John was kept in chains for life. The Romans burned the outlying parts of the city and razed the walls.
So Jerusalem was taken in this way, in the second year of the reign of Vespasian, on the eighth day of the month Gorpiaeus. Having been taken five times before, this was its second devastation. Asochaeus, king of the Egyptians, and after him Antiochus, then Pompey, and after these Sossius together with Herod, took the city but preserved it. But before all of them, the king of the Babylonians conquered it and laid it waste one thousand four hundred sixty-eight years and six months after its founding. The one who first founded it was a Canaanite ruler, called in the ancestral tongue 'righteous king,' for such indeed he was. For this reason he was the first to serve as priest to God, and the first to build the temple, and he renamed the city Jerusalem, though it had previously been called Salem.
The king of the Jews, David, drove out the Canaanite people and settled his own there, and four hundred seventy-seven years and six months after him it was razed by the Babylonians. From David the king, who was the first Jew to rule there, to the destruction carried out by Titus, is one thousand one hundred seventy-nine years. From the first founding to the last capture is two thousand one hundred seventy-seven years. But neither its antiquity, nor its deep wealth, nor its people spread across the whole inhabited world, nor the great fame of its worship, availed at all to save it from destruction.
Such, then, was the end of the siege of Jerusalem.

======== Jewish War — Book 7 ========

Since the army could find no more people to kill and no more property to plunder—their fury had run out of targets, for they would certainly not have held back from any deed out of consideration for anyone had the means still existed—Caesar now ordered the demolition of the whole city and the temple, leaving standing only the towers that rose highest above the rest, Phasael, Hippicus, and Mariamme, and the section of wall enclosing the city on the west. This he preserved so that it might serve as a camp for the garrison to be left behind, and he preserved the towers so that they might show later generations what kind of city it had been and by what strength the valor of the Romans had captured a stronghold so formidable. All the rest of the circuit of the city the demolition crews leveled so completely that anyone who came upon the site afterward would find no reason to believe it had ever been inhabited. Such was the end to which the folly of the revolutionaries brought Jerusalem, a city celebrated far and wide and famous among all mankind.
Caesar decided to leave behind as a garrison there the Tenth Legion, along with some cavalry squadrons and companies of infantry. Since he had now settled all the business of the war, he wished to commend the whole army for its successes and to give out the rewards due to those who had distinguished themselves. A great platform was accordingly built for him in the middle of what had been the camp, and he took his stand on it with his officers, in the hearing of the entire army, and declared that he owed them great thanks for the goodwill they had continually shown him. He praised, too, the discipline they had maintained through every stage of the war, which, together with their personal courage, they had displayed amid many great dangers, thereby increasing the power of their country through their own efforts and making it plain to all mankind that neither superior numbers of enemies, nor the strength or extent of fortified positions, nor the reckless daring and savage ferocity of opponents, could ever succeed in escaping Roman valor, even when fortune sometimes seemed to fight on their side in various ways.
It was a fine thing, he said, that they had themselves brought to an end a war that had lasted so long; for when they first took it up, they could not have prayed for a better outcome than this, and it was finer and more glorious still that the men they had chosen to lead them and to administer the government of Rome, and had sent home again, were welcomed gladly by all and their judgments accepted, so that everyone remained grateful to those who had made the choice. He said he marveled at them all and loved them all, knowing that none had shown less eagerness than what was possible for him. Still, to those who had fought with particular distinction, showing greater strength, adorning their own record with acts of valor and making his own command more illustrious through their achievements, he said he would grant rewards and honors at once, and that none of those willing to labor harder than others would fail of a just reward. This, he said, would be his chief concern, since he preferred to honor the merits of his fellow soldiers rather than to punish wrongdoers.
He then immediately ordered the officers assigned to the task to read out the names of all who had accomplished some brilliant feat in the war. Calling each by name as they came forward, he praised them as if he himself were overjoyed at their individual achievements, and set golden crowns on their heads, gave golden neck-chains, small golden spears, and standards made of silver, and advanced each man's rank to a higher grade. He also distributed to them generously, out of the spoils, silver and gold, garments, and other plunder. When all had been honored as he judged each deserved, he offered prayers on behalf of the whole army, came down amid loud acclamation, and turned to sacrifices of victory. A great number of oxen stood ready at the altars; these he sacrificed, all of them, and distributed the meat to the army for a feast. He himself spent three days feasting with the officers, after which he dismissed the rest of the army, each man to go wherever it seemed best for him, but assigned to the Tenth Legion the guarding of Jerusalem, no longer sending them back to the Euphrates, where they had previously been stationed.
Remembering that the Twelfth Legion had, under the command of Cestius, given ground before the Jews, he drove it out of Syria altogether—it had formerly been stationed at Raphanea—and sent it instead to the place called Melitene, on the Euphrates, on the borders of Armenia and Cappadocia. Two legions, the Fifth and the Fifteenth, he decided should remain with him until his arrival in Egypt. Then, going down with the army to Caesarea on the coast, he deposited there the mass of the spoils and gave orders that the prisoners be kept under guard in that city, since the winter storms prevented the crossing to Italy.
At the very time when Titus Caesar was pressing the siege of Jerusalem, Vespasian had boarded a merchant ship and crossed from Alexandria to Rhodes. From there he sailed on triremes, visiting every city along the coast, all of which received him with eager welcome, and crossed from Ionia to Greece; from there, by way of Corcyra, he came to the Iapygian promontory, from which point he continued his journey by land.
Titus, meanwhile, moved on from Caesarea on the coast to the city called Caesarea Philippi, where he stayed for a considerable time, presenting spectacles of every kind. Many of the captives perished there, some thrown to wild beasts, others forced in great numbers to fight one another as though they were enemies. It was there too that he learned of the capture of Simon son of Gioras, which had come about in the following manner.
This Simon, while Jerusalem was under siege, had been in the upper city; but once the Roman army had gotten inside the walls and was sacking the whole city, he took along the most trustworthy of his friends, together with stonecutters equipped with the iron tools needed for the work, and food enough to last many days, and with all of them he let himself down into one of the hidden underground passages. As long as the old tunnel continued, they made their way through it; but when they came up against solid ground, they began to dig their own tunnel through it, hoping that by pressing on further they might come up in a place of safety and so make their escape.
But the attempt proved the hope false, for the diggers advanced only a little and with great difficulty, and the food, carefully rationed though it was, was bound to run out. Then Simon, thinking he might astonish the Romans into being deceived, put on white tunics and fastened over them a purple cloak, and rose up out of the ground on that very spot where the temple had formerly stood.
At first those who saw him were struck with amazement and stood rooted where they were; then they came nearer and asked who he was. Simon would not tell them, but ordered them to summon their commander. When they had run and fetched him, Terentius Rufus arrived—for he had been left in command of the army—and having learned the whole truth from Simon, he kept him bound in custody and reported to Caesar that he had been captured.
Thus God brought Simon to justice for the cruelty he had inflicted on his fellow citizens, whom he had ruled with such bitter tyranny, delivering him into the hands of the very enemies who hated him most—not overpowered against his will, but casting himself of his own accord into their punishment, on account of the very charge under which he himself had savagely put many to death, falsely accusing them of going over to the Romans. For wickedness does not escape the anger of God, nor is justice weak; in time it pursues those who transgress against it, and it inflicts a heavier punishment on the wicked precisely because they had supposed themselves free of it by not being punished at once. Simon learned this when he fell into the hands of the enraged Romans; and his emergence from the ground likewise caused a great many of the other rebels to be discovered in the tunnels during those same days.
When Caesar returned to Caesarea on the coast, Simon was brought before him in chains, and Caesar ordered that he be kept for the triumph he was preparing to celebrate in Rome.
While staying there, Titus celebrated his brother's birthday with great magnificence, devoting a large part of the punishment of the Jews to that celebration in his honor: the number of those who died fighting wild beasts, or burned to death, or forced to kill one another in mass combats, exceeded two thousand five hundred. Yet all this seemed to the Romans, though countless thousands of the Jews perished by these various means, still too light a punishment.
After this Caesar came to Berytus, a city of Phoenicia and a Roman colony, and there he made an even longer stay, displaying still greater magnificence in honor of his father's birthday, both in the lavishness of the spectacles and in every other kind of expenditure. The multitude of captives continued to perish in the same way as before.
About this same time it happened that the Jews remaining at Antioch faced accusations and were in danger of destruction of the entire community, as the people of Antioch were thrown into an uproar against them, both because of slanders currently being brought against them and because of things that had occurred not long before—matters I must briefly explain first, so that my account of what followed may be easily understood.
The Jewish people are scattered in great numbers among the native populations throughout the whole inhabited world, but they are mingled most of all with Syria, because of its proximity, and especially in great numbers at Antioch, on account of the size of that city. It was above all the kings who succeeded Antiochus who allowed them to settle there without fear. For Antiochus, called Epiphanes, had sacked Jerusalem and plundered the temple, but those who took over the kingdom after him restored to the Jews of Antioch all the bronze dedications, dedicating them in their synagogue, and granted them equal rights of citizenship with the Greeks.
The kings who came after continued to treat them in the same way, and the Jews grew in numbers and enriched the temple with the costliness and splendor of their votive offerings, and by constantly drawing in a great many Greeks through their religious practices, they made these too, in a certain sense, part of their own community.
At the time when the war had just been proclaimed and Vespasian had recently sailed to Syria, and hatred of the Jews was at its height everywhere, a certain Antiochus, one of the Jews of Antioch, held in particular honor on account of his father—who was in fact the leader of the Jews there—came forward while the people of Antioch were holding an assembly in the theater, and denounced his own father and the others, accusing them of having planned to burn down the whole city in a single night, and handing over as accomplices some foreign Jews he claimed had shared in the plot.
When the people heard this, they could not contain their rage; they at once ordered fire to be brought against those handed over, and all of them were instantly burned alive in the theater. The crowd then rushed against the general body of the Jews, thinking that by destroying them as quickly as possible they would be saving their own city.
Antiochus only inflamed their anger further, offering as proof of his own conversion and of his hatred for Jewish customs the act of sacrificing in the manner prescribed by Greek law; he urged that the others be compelled to do likewise, since anyone who refused would thereby be exposed as one of the conspirators. When the people of Antioch put this to the test, a few submitted, but those who refused were killed.
Antiochus then obtained soldiers from the Roman commander and dealt harshly with his own fellow citizens, forbidding them to rest on the seventh day and forcing them to carry out all the same activities as on other days. He made this compulsion so severe that not only at Antioch was the observance of the Sabbath abolished, but the practice, beginning there, spread for a short time in similar fashion to other cities as well.
Such were the troubles that had already befallen the Jews of Antioch at that time; but a second disaster followed upon these, which I have undertaken to relate here as well. It happened that the great market square, along with the public archives and record office and the royal buildings, caught fire, and the blaze was only with great difficulty prevented from spreading over the whole city. Antiochus laid this act at the door of the Jews.
The people of Antioch, even if they had not previously felt hostility toward the Jews, were, in the panic caused by this disaster, quickly led by the slander—and far more so because of what had gone before—to believe what Antiochus told them, as though they had all but seen with their own eyes the Jews setting the fire. Behaving like men possessed, and in a great frenzy, they all rushed together against those who had been accused.
Only with difficulty were they restrained from this onslaught by a certain legate, Gnaeus Collega, who urged that they leave it to Caesar to be informed of what had happened; for Vespasian had already dispatched Caesennius Paetus to govern Syria, though he had not yet arrived. Collega, conducting a careful investigation, discovered the truth.
None of the Jews accused by Antiochus had had any part whatsoever in the deed; the whole thing had been carried out by certain worthless men who, hard-pressed by debts, calculated that if they burned the market and the public records, they would be rid of the demands made on them. The Jews, then, remained tossed about in cruel fear, still under the threat of an accusation left hanging over them, awaiting what would come.
Meanwhile Titus Caesar received news about his father: that he had been eagerly awaited by all the cities of Italy as he passed through them, and that Rome above all had received him with great eagerness and splendor. At this Titus turned to great joy and gladness, now most happily rid of his anxieties on his father's account. For even while Vespasian was still far off, all the people throughout Italy already regarded him in their minds as though he had arrived, so strong was their longing, which made his coming seem near, and their goodwill toward him was free of any compulsion.
The Senate, remembering the disasters that had befallen them amid the changes of rulers, longed to receive as their leader a man adorned with the dignity of age and the prime achievements of a military career, one whose preeminence they knew would be directed toward nothing but the safety of his subjects. And indeed the people, worn down by the evils of civil strife, were all the more eager for his arrival, believing that then at last they would be securely freed from their misfortunes, and confident that they would recover peace and prosperity together. But it was the soldiers above all who looked to him, for they, more than anyone, knew the magnitude of the wars he had brought to a successful conclusion, and blamed the inexperience of the others—
leaders who had experience of the previous emperors and their cowardice, they longed to be rid of their deep shame, and prayed to receive back the one man who could both save and honor them. Since this goodwill was universal, the men of highest rank could no longer bear to wait, but hurried to meet him far outside Rome. Nor could anyone else endure delay in greeting him, but all poured out together in a body, and it seemed easier and more comfortable for everyone to leave the city than to stay in it — so much so that the city itself, for the first time, became aware of its own emptiness, since those who stayed behind were fewer than those who went out. When word came that he was approaching, and those who had already met him described the graciousness of his reception of each man, all the remaining crowd, together with their wives and children, waited for him along the roads, and as he passed by, each group broke into every kind of shout for the pleasure of the sight and the mildness of his expression, hailing him as benefactor, savior, and the only man worthy to rule Rome. The whole city was as full of garlands and incense as a temple.
With difficulty, forcing his way through the crowd pressing around him, he managed to reach the palace, where he offered sacrifices of thanksgiving to the household gods for his safe return, and urged the people to feast. Gathering by tribe, clan, and neighborhood, they held banquets and poured libations to God, praying that Vespasian might remain at the head of Rome's government as long as possible, and that his power might pass unopposed to his sons and to their descendants after them. So the city of Rome received Vespasian with this eagerness, and at once began to flourish in great prosperity.
Before this time, while Vespasian was still near Alexandria and Titus was pressing the siege of Jerusalem, a large part of the Germans had risen in revolt, and most of the Gauls had joined them, together forming great hopes of shaking off Roman rule. What roused the Germans to take up the revolt and carry the war forward was, first, their nature, which is empty of sound judgment and, on the slightest hope, ready to take reckless risks; and then their hatred of their rulers, since they alone of nations knew themselves forced to serve Rome. Yet it was, above all, the moment itself that gave them courage: seeing the Roman empire thrown into disorder by the constant succession of emperors, and hearing that every part of the world under Roman rule was unsettled and shaking, they thought this the best opportunity that the misfortune and discord of the Romans could have handed them. The men who fed this scheme and inflamed them with such hopes were Classicus and Vitellus, both leaders among them, who had clearly wanted this revolution for a long time, but were emboldened by the moment to reveal their intention; and they were about to put the attempt to a people already eager for it.
When a large part of the Germans had already declared their revolt openly, and the rest were of like mind, as if by divine providence Vespasian sent a letter to Petilius Cerialis, formerly governor of Germany, granting him the consular honor and ordering him to go and take command in Britain. On his way to his assignment, learning of the German revolt, he fell upon them while they were still gathering, gave battle, killed a great number of them, and forced the survivors to abandon their folly and come to their senses. And that man himself, had he not soon after gone to the region, was destined not long afterward to pay the penalty; for as soon as news of the revolt reached Rome, Domitian Caesar, on hearing it, did not hesitate — unlike another man of his age, for he was still altogether young — to take on so great a task, but having inherited his father's courage by nature, and having already made his training more complete than his years suggested, he marched at once against the barbarians. They, at the mere report of his approach, lost heart and surrendered themselves to him, counting it great gain, given their fear, to be brought back under the same yoke without further disaster. So Domitian, having set all Gaul in proper order so that it should never again be easily disturbed, returned to Rome, brilliant and admired for achievements beyond his years yet fitting for his father's son.
In the same days as the German revolt just described, a bold venture by the Scythians also broke out against Rome. The people called the Sarmatians, a Scythian tribe of great numbers, crossed the Danube unnoticed into the land on this side, and with great force and savagery, falling on the Romans while the attack was wholly unexpected, killed many of the soldiers on garrison duty, and slew the consular legate Fonteius Agrippa, who met them and fought bravely; they then overran the whole surrounding country, plundering and carrying off whatever they came upon. When Vespasian learned of these events and the ravaging of Moesia, he sent out Rubrius Gallus to inflict punishment on the Sarmatians. Under him many of them died in battle, and the survivors fled home in terror. Having brought the war to this end, the general also took care for future security, garrisoning the region with more numerous and stronger guards, so that crossing became entirely impossible for the barbarians. Thus the war in Moesia reached so quick a resolution.
Titus Caesar spent some time at Berytus, as we have said before, and then, moving on from there, held lavish spectacles in every city of Syria he passed through, using the Jewish captives to display their own destruction. On his journey he observed a river of a nature worth recording. It flows between Arcea, in the kingdom of Agrippa, and Raphanea, and has a remarkable peculiarity: while it flows, it runs full and swift, but then, for a span of six days, it fails entirely from its source and leaves the place dry to see; then, as though no change had occurred, it flows again as before on the seventh day, and it has always kept exactly to this pattern without fail. For this reason they have called it the Sabbatical river, naming it after the Jews' sacred seventh day.
When the people of Antioch learned that Titus was near, they could not bear, for joy, to remain within the walls, but hurried out to meet him, advancing more than thirty stadia — not only men, but a crowd of women with their children as well, pouring out of the city. And when they saw him approaching, they lined the road on either side, stretched out their right hands in greeting, and turned back with him while calling out every kind of acclamation; but running through all their cheers alike was a constant plea to expel the Jews from the city. To this plea Titus gave no ground at all, but listened to what was said in silence; and since it remained unclear what he thought and what he would do, the Jews were left in great and painful fear. For Titus did not stay in Antioch, but pressed his march at once to Zeugma on the Euphrates, where envoys came to him from Vologeses, king of the Parthians, bringing a golden crown in honor of his victory over the Jews. Having accepted it, he entertained the royal envoys, and from there returned to Antioch.
When the council and people of Antioch made repeated pleas that he come to the theater, where the whole crowd had gathered and was waiting for him, he graciously agreed. But when they again pressed him urgently and begged without ceasing that he expel the Jews from the city, he made a fitting reply:
"Their homeland, to which the Jews ought properly to be banished if they were to be expelled, has been destroyed, and no place would now take them in."
So the Antiochenes turned to a second request, abandoning the first: they asked him to remove the bronze tablets on which the Jews' legal privileges were inscribed. This too Titus refused to grant them, but leaving everything as it stood, he left the Jews of Antioch in possession of their former rights, and set out for Egypt.
On the way, he approached Jerusalem, and setting the wretched desolation now visible against the city's former splendor, calling to mind the scale of the buildings now shattered and their beauty of old, he grieved over the city's ruin — not like a man boasting that he had taken so great and so mighty a city by force, but rather calling down curses again and again on those responsible for the revolt, who had brought this punishment on the city. So plainly did he show that he had no wish that the glory of his own achievement should come at the cost of the punished city's disaster. Even among the ruins, no small part of the city's great wealth was still being found: much of it the Romans dug up themselves, and more still was seized on information given by the captives — gold, silver, and the most valuable of the other furnishings, which their owners had buried in the ground against the uncertain fortunes of war.
Titus, continuing the journey he had set out on toward Egypt, crossed the desert as quickly as possible and reached Alexandria; and having decided to sail for Italy, he sent back, each to where it had come from, the two legions that had accompanied him, the fifth to Moesia and the fifteenth to Pannonia. Of the captives, he selected the leaders Simon and John, along with seven hundred other men chosen for their outstanding height and beauty, and ordered them conveyed to Italy at once, wishing to display them in his triumph.
His voyage went as he wished, and Rome, in receiving him, showed the same eagerness in welcome and greeting as it had for his father; but it was an even more splendid moment for Titus that his own father came out to meet and receive him. The mass of citizens felt an almost divine joy at seeing the three of them now together in one place. Not many days later, they decided to hold one single, joint triumph for their victories, though the Senate had voted each of them his own separately. Once the day appointed for the triumphal procession had been announced, not a soul was left at home out of the countless multitude in the city; everyone had come out and taken up whatever place allowed even standing room, leaving only enough space for the marchers to pass through.
While the entire army was still moving through the night, company by company and unit by unit under their commanders, and gathering by the gate — not the gate of the upper palace, but the one near the temple of Isis, for there the emperors had rested that night — at the very break of dawn Vespasian and Titus came forward, crowned with laurel and wearing the purple robes of their ancestors, and entered the Colonnade of Octavia; for there the Senate, the magistrates of every rank, and the equestrian order awaited their arrival. A platform had been built before the colonnade, with ivory chairs set upon it; they came forward and took their seats, and at once the army acclaimed them, all bearing witness together to their many acts of valor. The emperors themselves were without weapons, dressed in silk garments and crowned with laurel.
Vespasian received their acclamation, and though they still wished to go on, he gave the signal for silence; and when a deep hush had fallen over all, he rose, covered the greater part of his head with his mantle, and offered the customary prayers; Titus prayed in the same way. After the prayers, Vespasian spoke briefly to the whole assembly, then dismissed the soldiers to the breakfast customarily prepared for them by the emperors, while he himself withdrew to the gate that had earned its name from the fact that triumphal processions always passed through it. There they first tasted food, and then, having put on the triumphal robes and sacrificed to the gods stationed by the gate, they sent the triumph on its way through the theaters, so that the crowds might have an easier view.
It is impossible to describe adequately the multitude of those spectacles and their magnificence in everything one might imagine, whether works of art, riches, or rarities of nature; for almost everything that fortunate men throughout history had ever acquired, piece by piece, wonderful and costly items scattered among many owners, all of it was gathered together on that one day and displayed the greatness of Roman power. One could see silver, gold, and ivory in every kind of crafted form, carried not as though in a procession but, one might say, flowing like a river; some of it woven fabrics of the rarest purple, some worked with fine precision into pictures by Babylonian craft; and translucent gems, some set in golden crowns, others fashioned in different ways, were carried past in such numbers that one learned how mistaken it had been to think any of them rare. Statues of their gods were also carried, remarkable in size and no ordinary work of art, and none of them made of any but the most precious material; many kinds of animals were led along as well, each adorned in trappings suited to it.
The crowds of people who carried each of these things were themselves dressed in purple and gold-embroidered garments, and those chosen to march in the procession itself wore ornaments of extraordinary and dazzling costliness. Nor, in addition to this, could one see even the captive throng as an unadorned mass, for the variety and beauty of their clothing stole from the eye the unpleasantness that would otherwise come from their battered bodies. But what caused the greatest wonder of all was the construction of the moving platforms that were carried along; indeed, their size was enough to make one fear for the reliability of their motion, for many of them were built three or four stories high, and the sheer costliness of their construction gave pleasure mixed with astonishment. Many were draped in fabrics interwoven with gold, and wrought gold and ivory
had been fixed on every one of them. Through many tableaux the war, broken up and distributed piece by piece, presented a most vivid picture of itself: one could see a prosperous land being ravaged, whole battle lines of the enemy being cut down, men fleeing and men being led off into captivity, walls of extraordinary size being battered down by siege engines, strongholds of fortresses being taken, the crowded circuits of cities being overrun to their very foundations, an army pouring in behind the walls, every place filled with slaughter, the hands of those too weak to resist raised in supplication, fire being thrown into temples, houses being pulled down over the heads of their owners, and, after much desolation and grief, rivers flowing not over cultivated land or providing drink for men or cattle but through a country ablaze from end to end. For this is what the Jews had condemned themselves to suffer by making war.
The artistry and grandeur of these constructions showed to those who had not witnessed the events as if they were present at them then. On each platform was stationed the commander of the captured city, positioned exactly as he had been when he was taken. Many ships followed as well. The rest of the spoils were carried along in a jumbled mass, but conspicuous above all were the things taken from the temple in Jerusalem: a golden table weighing many talents, and a lampstand, likewise made of gold, though its design differed from those we ordinarily use. Its central shaft was fixed to a base, and from it extended slender branches arranged like the prongs of a trident, each ending in a wrought bronze lamp. There were seven of these, signifying the honor paid among the Jews to the number seven.
After these came the law of the Jews, carried last among the spoils. Following them marched many men bearing images of Victory, all of them fashioned from ivory and gold. Behind this Vespasian rode first, with Titus following, while Domitian rode alongside on horseback, himself splendidly arrayed and mounted on a horse that was a sight to see.
The end of the procession was at the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, where they came and stopped, for it was an ancient custom to wait there until someone announced the death of the enemy's commander. This was Simon, son of Gioras, who had just been led in the procession among the captives; a rope was now thrown around him and he was dragged, amid the blows of those escorting him, to the place in the Forum where it is the Roman custom to execute those condemned to death for crimes. When word came that he was dead and the whole crowd cried out in acclamation, they began the sacrifices, and once they had offered these with the customary prayers and obtained favorable omens, they withdrew to the palace. Some of the guests they entertained themselves at a banquet, while for everyone else lavish provisions for feasting had been prepared according to custom. For on this day the city of Rome was celebrating the victory over its enemies, the end of its civil miseries, and the beginning of its hopes for prosperity.
After the triumphs, and once the rule of the Romans had been most firmly established, Vespasian resolved to build a Temple of Peace. It was completed with astonishing speed, faster than anyone could have imagined. Drawing on the vast wealth fortune had given him, he also adorned it with works of painting and sculpture that had long been celebrated as masterpieces; for into that temple were gathered and deposited all the works of art for the sight of which people had once wandered over the whole inhabited world, longing to see now one masterpiece, now another, wherever each happened to be kept. There he also dedicated the golden vessels from the temple of the Jews, taking pride in them, but he ordered that their law and the purple curtains of the sanctuary be kept, stored away in the palace.
Meanwhile a legate, Lucilius Bassus, was sent to Judea; taking over the army from Cerealius Vetilianus, he first secured the surrender of the fortress at Herodium along with its garrison. After this he assembled the whole of the military force, much of which was scattered in detachments, together with the Tenth Legion, and resolved to march against Machaerus. It was quite necessary to reduce this fortress, lest its strength encourage many into rebellion; for the nature of the place was well suited to give those who held it a firm hope of safety, and to give those attacking it hesitation and fear. The fortified height itself is a rocky hill rising to a very great elevation, which makes it difficult to capture on that account alone, but nature has also contrived to make it virtually unapproachable: it is surrounded on every side by ravines of a depth impossible to gauge, which cannot easily be crossed and are altogether impossible to fill in. The ravine on the west side runs for sixty stadia and ends at the Dead Sea; it is at this point that Machaerus itself has its highest peak towering above. The ravines on the north and south, though smaller than the one just described, are equally impossible to attack. The ravine to the east has a depth of no less than a hundred cubits, and ends at a mountain lying opposite Machaerus.
When King Alexander of the Jews recognized the nature of the site, he was the first to build a fortress on it, which was later demolished by Gabinius in his war against Aristobulus. When Herod became king, he judged it more deserving of care and the strongest possible fortification than any other place, especially because of its proximity to the Arabs, since it lies in a strategic position looking out toward their territory. He therefore enclosed a large area with walls and towers and founded a town there, from which a road led up to the summit itself. He also built a wall around the summit itself and raised towers at each corner, sixty cubits high. In the middle of the enclosure he built a palace, magnificent in the size and beauty of its rooms, and he constructed many cisterns in the most convenient places to hold water and provide an abundant supply, as though competing with nature itself, so that he might surpass by his own artificial defenses the natural impregnability of the place. He also stored there a great quantity of missiles and engines, and devised everything capable of enabling its inhabitants to hold out through the longest siege with contempt for the danger.
In the palace grounds there grew a rue plant of a size worth marveling at, for it fell short of no fig tree in height and thickness. The story went that it had survived since the time of Herod, and it might perhaps have lasted much longer still, had it not been cut down by the Jews who took possession of the place. In the ravine on the north side that surrounds the town there is a place called Baaras, which produces a root bearing the same name. This root resembles flame in color, and toward evening it gives off a radiant glow to those approaching; it is not easily seized, for it shrinks away and will not stay still until someone pours a woman's urine or menstrual blood upon it. Yet even then, death is certain for those who touch it, unless one carries that very root itself suspended from the hand. There is, however, another way of taking it without danger, which is as follows.
They dig a trench all around it, until only the smallest part of the root remains covered. Then they tie a dog to it, and when the dog, straining to follow the one who tied it, rushes forward, the root is pulled up easily, but the dog dies at once, as though offered in the place of the person who intends to remove the plant; for after that, whoever takes it up has nothing to fear. It is sought after at the cost of so much danger for a single power it possesses: what are called demons — that is, the spirits of wicked men that enter the living and kill those who receive no help — this root drives out quickly, the moment it is merely brought near the sick. There are also springs of hot water flowing in that region that differ greatly from one another in taste, some of them bitter, others lacking nothing in sweetness.
There are also many outlets of cold water, not only in the lower ground, where their springs run alongside the hot ones, but — and this is even more remarkable — nearby there is a cave, shallow in depth but sheltered by an overhanging rock, above which two mounds rise a short distance apart, like breasts, one giving off an extremely cold spring, the other an extremely hot one. When these mix, they make a most pleasant bath, a remedy for diseases and especially effective for restoring the sinews. The place also has mines of sulfur and alum.
Bassus, after surveying the site, decided to make his approach by filling in the eastern ravine, and set to work, hastening to raise the earthwork as quickly as possible so as to make the siege an easy matter. Meanwhile the Jews trapped inside separated themselves from the foreign refugees among them, and, regarding them merely as a useless crowd, forced them to remain in the lower town and be the first to face the danger, while they themselves seized and held the upper fortress, both because of the strength of its defenses and out of concern for their own safety, supposing they would obtain a pardon if they handed the place over to the Romans. But first they wished to test, by experience, their hopes of escaping the siege altogether. For this reason they made sorties eagerly every day, and in clashes with those working on the earthworks many of them died, but they also killed many of the Romans. Fortune always gave the greater share of success to one side or the other according to the moment — to the Jews when they fell upon less guarded troops, to the Romans stationed on the earthworks when they anticipated and met the sortie fully prepared.
Yet it was not by such means that the siege was destined to reach its conclusion; rather, an event that occurred by an unforeseen coincidence forced the Jews into surrendering the fortress. Among the besieged was a young man bold in daring and vigorous in action, named Eleazar, who had distinguished himself in the sorties by urging many to go out and hinder the earthworks, and by inflicting great and terrible losses on the Romans in the fighting; to those daring to charge out with him he made the attack seem easy and the withdrawal safe, since he was always the last to retreat. Once, when a battle had been broken off and both sides had withdrawn, he, out of contempt and supposing that none of the enemy would renew the fighting at that time, remained outside the gates conversing with the men on the wall, and everyone's attention was fixed on that exchange.
A certain Rufus, an Egyptian by birth, serving in the Roman camp, saw his opportunity, and, when no one expected it, suddenly ran up with some companions, seized him bodily along with his weapons before those watching from the walls could recover from their shock, and carried the man off to the Roman camp. When the commander ordered him stripped naked and set in the most conspicuous place in view of those looking on from the city, to be scourged, the Jews were thrown into terrible distress over the young man's suffering, the whole city cried out as one, and the lamentation was greater than for the loss of a single man. Seeing this, Bassus began to devise a stratagem against the enemy, and, wishing to intensify their anguish so as to force them to surrender the fortress in exchange for the man's life, his hope was not disappointed.
He ordered a cross set up, as though he were about to hang Eleazar on it at once, and when those in the fortress saw this, an even greater grief fell upon them, and they cried out in prolonged lamentation, declaring the suffering unbearable. Eleazar himself now begged them not to let him endure the most pitiable of deaths while there was a way to secure their own safety by yielding to the strength and fortune of the Romans, since everyone else had already been subdued. Moved by his pleas, and with many inside interceding on his behalf — for he came from a large and very numerous family — they yielded to compassion against their own nature, and quickly sent men to negotiate the surrender of the fortress, asking that they be allowed to depart unharmed once they had recovered Eleazar.
When the Romans and their commander accepted these terms, the crowd in the lower town, learning of the agreement the Jews above had reached on their own, resolved to slip away secretly by night. But when they opened their gates, word of it reached Bassus through those who had made the agreement — whether out of resentment at the others' escape, or from fear that they themselves would be blamed for it. Of those going out, the bravest managed to break through and escape, but of those left behind, more than seventeen hundred men were killed, and the women and children were sold into slavery. Considering himself bound to honor the terms he had made with those who had surrendered the fortress, Bassus released them and gave back Eleazar.
Having settled these matters, he hastened to lead his army toward the forest called Jardes, for it was reported that many who had earlier fled from the sieges of Jerusalem and Machaerus had gathered there. When he arrived at the place and found the report to be true, he first surrounded the entire area with his cavalry, so that any Jews who dared to break out would find flight impossible because of the horsemen, and he ordered the infantry to cut down the woods into which the Jews had taken refuge. Driven by this necessity, the Jews were compelled to attempt some bold action, hoping perhaps even to break through by a desperate struggle, and, massing together with a shout, they charged and fell upon those surrounding them.
The Romans received them with firm resistance, and since both sides fought on, the one out of desperation, the other out of stubborn resolve, the battle dragged on for no little time, but its outcome was not the same for both sides that fought it. Of the Romans, only twelve in all fell, with a few wounded, but of the Jews not one escaped from this battle: numbering no fewer than three thousand, all of them died, including their commander Judas, son of Ari, of whom we spoke earlier, saying that while commanding a unit during the siege of Jerusalem he had escaped notice by slipping away through some of the tunnels.
At about this same time Caesar wrote to Bassus and to Laberius Maximus, who was the procurator, ordering that all the land
of the Jews. He did not settle a city of his own there to hold the territory, but gave land for a settlement to eight hundred men only, discharged from the army, in a place called Emmaus, thirty stadia from Jerusalem. On all Jews, wherever they lived, he imposed a tax of two drachmas each, to be paid every year to the Capitol, just as they had previously paid it to the temple in Jerusalem. That was the condition of the Jews at that time.
By now Vespasian was in the fourth year of his reign when Antiochus, king of Commagene, fell into great misfortune along with his whole household, for the following reason. Caesennius Paetus, then governor of Syria — whether he was telling the truth or acting out of personal hostility toward Antiochus is not entirely clear — sent a dispatch to Caesar claiming that Antiochus and his son Epiphanes had decided to revolt from Rome, having made an agreement with the king of the Parthians, and that it was necessary to act against them before they could strike first and throw the whole Roman empire into war.
Caesar was not inclined to disregard a report of this kind once it reached him, for the proximity of the two kingdoms made the matter worthy of greater concern: Samosata, the largest city of Commagene, lies on the Euphrates, so that if the Parthians had any such design, it would give them both an easy crossing and a secure landing. Paetus, having gained Caesar's trust and authority to act as he saw fit, wasted no time. While Antiochus and his people expected nothing of the kind, he suddenly invaded Commagene, leading the sixth legion together with some cohorts and squadrons of cavalry.
He was joined in the campaign by two allied kings, Aristobulus of Chalcidice and Sohaemus of Emesa. They met no resistance at all in their invasion, for none of the people of the country was willing to lift a hand against them. When word of this reached Antiochus without warning, he had no thought whatever of making war on the Romans. Instead he resolved to leave his whole kingdom just as it was and withdraw quietly with his wife and children, thinking that in this way he would show the Romans he was innocent of the charge brought against him. He went out from the city a hundred and twenty stadia and made camp on the plain. Paetus sent men to seize Samosata, and through them took the city, while he himself with the rest of his force pressed on against Antiochus.
The king, even under this compulsion, would not be moved to take any hostile action against the Romans, but bewailed his fortune and resigned himself to suffer whatever must come, without a fight. His sons, young men experienced in war and outstanding in bodily strength, could not so easily bear the disaster without resistance, and so Epiphanes and Callinicus turned to arms. The battle that followed was fierce and lasted the whole day; the brothers displayed conspicuous courage, and when it broke off at evening their own force had suffered no loss. But Antiochus, even though the battle had gone this way, thought it intolerable to remain, and taking his wife and daughters made his escape with them into Cilicia.
By this act he broke the spirit of his own soldiers, for they took it that he had condemned his kingdom by his flight, and they deserted and went over to the Romans; the despair of the whole army was plain for all to see. So before they were left entirely without allies, Epiphanes and his companions had no choice but to save themselves from the enemy, and a party of ten horsemen in all, with them, crossed the Euphrates, from where they made their way safely to Vologeses, king of the Parthians, and were received there — not treated with contempt as fugitives, but honored in every way, as men who still possessed their former good fortune. As for Antiochus, when he reached Tarsus in Cilicia, Paetus sent a centurion after him and had him put in chains and sent to Rome.
But Vespasian could not bear to have the king brought before him in that condition, judging it right to show more regard for their old friendship than to keep an implacable anger on the pretext of the war. He therefore ordered that while Antiochus was still on the road his chains be removed, and that instead of continuing on to Rome he should for the present take up residence at Sparta, granting him at the same time a large income, so that he might live not merely in comfort but in royal style.
When Epiphanes and his companions learned of this, the great and troubling anxiety they had felt over their father was lifted from their hearts. They too gained hope of reconciliation with Caesar, since Vologeses wrote to Caesar on their behalf — for even in their prosperity they could not bear to live outside the rule of Rome. Caesar granted them safe passage with kindness, and they came to Rome, where, their father having arrived there directly from Sparta, they were received with every honor and remained.
As for the nation of the Alans — that they are Scythians dwelling by the Tanais and the Maeotic Lake we have already shown earlier — at about this time they resolved to break into Media and the country beyond it for plunder, and opened negotiations to that end with the king of Hyrcania, for he is master of the pass which King Alexander closed with iron gates.
Once he had granted them passage, they fell upon the Medes in a body while they suspected nothing, and plundered a populous country full of every kind of livestock, with no one daring to stand against them. Pacorus, the king of that land, fled in terror to the rough country, abandoning everything else, and barely managed to ransom his wife and concubines from their captors by paying a hundred talents.
So with great ease, meeting no resistance, the Alans carried off their plunder and pressed on as far as Armenia, ravaging everything as they went. Tiridates ruled that country; he came out to meet them and gave battle, and in the fighting he very nearly was taken alive, for someone cast a noose around him and would have dragged him off had he not cut the cord with his sword in time and made his escape.
Made still more savage by that encounter, the Alans laid the country waste, and carrying off a great number of people and the rest of their plunder from both kingdoms, withdrew again to their own land.
In Judea, after the death of Bassus, Flavius Silva succeeded to the command, and seeing the whole country already subdued by the war except for a single fortress still holding out, he gathered all the forces in the region and marched against it. The fortress is called Masada. At the head of the sicarii who held it was a capable man named Eleazar, a descendant of that Judas who, as we have shown earlier, had persuaded no small number of Jews not to submit to the census when Quirinius was sent as censor into Judea.
For it was then that the sicarii banded together against those Jews willing to obey Rome, and treated them in every way as enemies, plundering and driving off their property and setting fire to their houses. They claimed such people were no better than foreigners, so basely had they abandoned the freedom for which Jews should fight to the death, choosing instead servitude under Rome and openly professing it. But this was, in truth, only a pretext they used to cloak their own cruelty and greed, as they made plain enough by their deeds.
Some indeed shared with them in the revolt and helped in the war against Rome, and yet suffered still worse outrages from them; and when their pretense of righteousness was exposed as a lie, they only mistreated more harshly those who reproached their wickedness by appeal to justice. That period was somehow prolific in every kind of wickedness among the Jews, so that no deed of vice was left undone, nor could anyone, however he tried to invent something, have found anything more novel to devise. So sick were they, both individually and as a body, that they vied with one another in impiety toward God and in wrongdoing toward their neighbors, the powerful oppressing the masses and the masses eager to destroy the powerful — for the one group lusted to tyrannize, the other to use violence and plunder the property of the wealthy.
The sicarii were the first to begin this lawlessness and this cruelty even against their own kin, leaving no word of outrage unspoken and no deed of destruction untried against those they plotted against. Yet even they were shown to be more moderate than John, who not only killed everyone who gave advice that was just and useful, treating such men as his bitterest personal enemies among the citizens, but also filled his whole country with countless evils — such as a man was bound to do who had already dared to be impious even toward God. He set an unlawful table and abandoned the customary and ancestral purity, so that it should no longer be any wonder that a man so mad in his impiety toward God did not keep faith and fellowship with his fellow men.
Again, what evil did Simon son of Gioras leave undone? Or from what outrage against free men's persons did those who set him up as tyrant hold back? What friendship, what kinship restrained them from daily murders growing ever bolder? For they held it a mean and base kind of wickedness to do harm to strangers, but thought it a brilliant display to show cruelty against their very closest kin. The madness of the Idumaeans rivaled even this frenzy: those most polluted men slaughtered the high priests, so that not even a remnant of reverence toward God should be preserved, and cut away whatever trace of civil order still remained,
and brought in the most complete lawlessness of all, in which the group called the Zealots flourished — men who made their name true to their deeds, for they imitated every work of wickedness, and left nothing unattempted that memory records as having existed before them, though they took their name from what is properly striven for in the name of good, whether mocking those they wronged out of their own brutish nature, or reckoning the greatest evils to be goods. In any case, each of these groups met the end appropriate to it, as God apportioned to them all the punishment they deserved: for every affliction human nature can endure fell upon them, down to the very last moment of life, which they met dying amid manifold torments. Yet one might say they suffered less than what they had done, since in their case exact justice was not fully paid. But it would not suit the present occasion to lament, as they deserve, those who fell victim to that cruelty; so I return again to the remaining part of the narrative.
The Roman commander marched his forces against Eleazar and the sicarii who held Masada with him, and at once made himself master of the whole region, stationing garrisons at its most important points; he threw a wall around the entire fortress, so that none of the besieged could easily escape, and posted men to guard it. He himself pitched camp at the spot he judged most suitable for the siege, where the rocks of the fortress come close to the neighboring hill — though otherwise a difficult place for supplies, since not only was food carried from far off, at great hardship to the Jews assigned to that task, but even water had to be brought into the camp, as the place had no spring nearby.
Having made these preparations beforehand, Silva turned to the siege, which required great skill and hardship because of the strength of the fortress, whose nature was as follows. A rock of no small circuit and considerable height is enclosed on every side by deep ravines, precipitous from an invisible base and inaccessible to any living creature's foothold, except that at two points the rock allows an ascent, though not an easy one.
Of the paths, one comes from the Dead Sea toward the rising sun, and the other from the west, where the going is easier. The former they call the Snake, comparing it to that creature for its narrowness and its constant windings; for it bends around the projections of the cliffs, and after running back on itself again and again, and then gradually lengthening out once more, scarcely gains any ground ahead. Whoever walks it must plant each foot in turn, alternating, and sure destruction lies on either side, for on both sides a chasm gapes beneath, deep enough in its terror to overwhelm the boldest courage.
After going by this path for thirty stadia, one at last reaches the summit, which does not narrow to a sharp point but forms a level plateau. On this the high priest Jonathan first built a fortress and named it Masada; later King Herod devoted great effort to the development of the site.
He raised a wall around the whole circuit of the summit, seven stadia in length, built of white stone, twelve cubits high and eight cubits thick, with thirty-seven towers fifty cubits high standing along it, from which one could pass into chambers built along the whole inside of the wall. The summit itself, rich in soil and softer than any plain, the king left open for cultivation, so that if ever there should be a shortage of food from outside, those who had entrusted their safety to the fortress should not want for that either. He also built a palace there on the western ascent, below the walls of the citadel and inclining toward the north.
The wall of the palace was great in height and strong, with four sixty-cubit towers at its corners. The furnishing of the chambers within, the porticoes, and the baths was elaborate and costly in every way, with columns of single stones standing throughout, and the walls and floors of the rooms adorned with a mosaic of stone. At every place of habitation, both above and around the palace and in front of the wall, he had cut many great cisterns in the rock as reservoirs for water, contriving a supply as ample as that enjoyed by those who have springs at hand.
A hidden road, cut through the rock, led up from the palace to the very top of the summit, invisible to those outside. Nor indeed could the visible roads easily be used by an enemy: the eastern one, as we said before, is impassable by nature, while the western one—
On the west side, at the narrowest point, he built across it a great tower, no less than a thousand cubits from the citadel—a tower that could neither be bypassed nor easily taken; even those who walked to it without fear found it hard to get out of. In this way the fortress was made secure against enemy assault, both by nature and by human craft. But what was stored inside would have astonished one even more with its splendor and its power to last.
Grain lay stored in great quantity, enough to last a long time; there was also much wine and oil, and every kind of pulse, and heaps of dates. Eleazar, when he seized the fortress by treachery together with the sicarii, found all of this still fresh, no worse than goods newly laid in—though nearly a hundred years had passed between the time of its storing and the capture of the place by the Romans. Even the Romans found the remaining produce uncorrupted. One would not be wrong in supposing the cause of this durability to be the height of the air around the citadel, unmixed with any earthy or turbid vapor. There was also found a great quantity of weapons of every kind, stored away by the king, enough to arm ten thousand men, as well as raw iron, bronze, and lead, since this store had been laid in for weighty reasons.
It is said that Herod prepared this fortress as a refuge for himself, fearing a double danger: one from the Jewish populace, in case they should depose him and restore to power the kings who had ruled before him; the other, greater and more serious, from Cleopatra, who then ruled Egypt. For she made no secret of her intention, but repeatedly urged Antony to kill Herod and grant her the kingdom of the Jews. And one might be even more astonished that Antony, in thrall as he was to his passion for her, had never yet obeyed her demands—not that he expected any ill effect from refusing her. It was from fears such as these that Herod had prepared Masada, which he was to leave to the Romans as the last task of their war against the Jews.
For once the Roman commander had, as we said before, already walled off the whole place from outside, and taken the most careful precautions that no one should escape, he set about the siege, having found only one spot capable of receiving an earthwork. Beyond the tower that walled off the road leading from the west to the palace and to the summit, there was a broad spur of rock, jutting out a great distance, three hundred cubits below the height of Masada; they called it the White Rock. Silva climbed up onto it, and once he had secured it, ordered his troops to bring up earth. Working eagerly with a large force, they raised a solid ramp two hundred cubits high. Even so, this height did not seem stable or sufficient as a platform for the siege engines, so on top of it they built a platform of great fitted stones, fifty cubits both in width and height. The construction of the other engines was much like those devised earlier by Vespasian, and later by Titus, for their sieges, and a tower sixty cubits high was built, entirely sheathed in iron; from it the Romans, shooting with many bolt-throwers and stone-throwers, quickly drove back the defenders fighting from the wall and kept them from showing themselves. At the same time Silva had a great battering ram built, and ordering it to strike the wall again and again, at last, though with difficulty, broke through and brought down part of it.
But the sicarii moved quickly and built another wall inside, one that was not going to suffer the same fate from the engines; for they built it to be soft and able to absorb the force of the blows, in the following way. They laid large beams lengthwise, end to end, side by side. These formed two parallel rows set apart by a distance equal to the thickness of the wall, and between the two rows they piled in earth. And so that the earth would not spill out as the mound rose higher, they bound the lengthwise beams together again with other beams laid crosswise. The result looked much like ordinary masonry, but the blows of the engines, striking against a yielding surface, lost their force, and the shaking only made the structure settle and grow firmer. When Silva saw this, he decided he would take the wall by fire instead, and ordered his soldiers to hurl burning torches at it all together. Being made mostly of wood, the wall quickly caught fire, and because it was so loosely packed, it burned right through and sent up a great blaze.
At first, while the fire was just starting, a north wind was blowing that frightened the Romans, for it turned the flame back from above and drove it toward them, and they had almost given up their engines for lost, expecting them to burn as well. Then, suddenly, as if by divine providence, the wind shifted to the south and blew hard the other way, driving the flame against the wall until the whole structure was ablaze right through. The Romans, having enjoyed this help from God, withdrew rejoicing to their camp, resolved to attack the enemy at daybreak, and kept a closer watch by night, lest any of the defenders slip away unnoticed.
But Eleazar himself had no thought of flight, nor was he going to allow anyone else to attempt it. Seeing the wall consumed by fire, and finding no other means of safety or resistance, and setting before his own eyes what the Romans would do to them, their children, and their wives if they took the fortress, he resolved on death for them all. Judging this the best course open to them, he gathered the most courageous of his comrades and urged them to the deed with words like these:
"Long ago, my brave men, we resolved to serve neither the Romans nor anyone else, but God alone—for he alone is the true and just master of men. Now the time has come that demands we prove that resolve true in deed. Let us not now disgrace ourselves before him—we who in the past would not even endure safe slavery, and who now, if we fall alive into Roman hands, would suffer slavery joined with unbearable torments. For we were the first of all to revolt, and we are the last still fighting them. And I believe this too is a gift granted us by God: the power to die nobly and as free men, which was not given to others who were overpowered against all expectation. For us, capture at daybreak is certain, but the choice of a noble death together with those we love best remains free. This the enemy cannot prevent, however much they wish to take us alive, and we for our part can no longer hope to defeat them in battle.

Perhaps we ought to have seen this from the very beginning, when we chose to fight for our freedom and everything turned out harshly, both from our own people and, still worse, from the enemy: we ought to have guessed God's purpose and recognized that the nation of the Jews, once beloved by him, now stood condemned. For had he remained favorable to us, or even only moderately displeased, he would not have looked on while so many people perished, nor abandoned his most holy city to fire and the enemy's demolition. And did we alone, of the whole Jewish nation, hope to survive by holding on to our freedom—as if we had committed no sin against God and had shared in none of the guilt, we who taught the rest? See, then, how he exposes the vanity of our expectations, bringing upon us in our extremity a necessity harsher than our hopes. Even the natural strength of this fortress, impregnable as it is, has done nothing to save us; even with abundant food, a great store of weapons, and every other supply to spare, we have been stripped, manifestly by God himself, of any hope of deliverance. For the fire that was heading toward the enemy did not turn back on the wall we built by mere chance; this is the wrath owed for the many wrongs which, in our madness, we dared to commit against our own countrymen.

For these let us pay the penalty not to our bitterest enemies, the Romans, but to God, by our own hands—a penalty gentler than theirs would be. Let our wives die unviolated, our children untouched by slavery. And after them, let us grant each other the noble favor of a fine burial shroud: the freedom we have kept. But first let us destroy our possessions and the fortress itself by fire; the Romans, I know well, will be grieved to gain neither our persons nor any plunder. Only the food let us leave standing; for once we are dead, it will testify that we were not overcome through want, but chose death before slavery, exactly as we resolved from the beginning."
Such were Eleazar's words. But they did not land the same way on the minds of all present: some were eager to obey, filled with something close to pleasure at the thought that death was a fine thing, while others, softer in spirit, were overcome with pity for their wives and children, and, looking at each other and at their own plainly foreseeable end, showed by their tears how unwilling they were.
Seeing them losing heart and their spirits bending under the weight of the proposal, Eleazar feared that their wailing and tears would soften even those who had heard his words with resolve. So he did not let up his exhortation, but rousing himself and filling himself with great spirit, he turned to loftier arguments about the immortality of the soul, and with a great cry of protest, staring fixedly at those who were weeping, he said:
"How greatly I was deceived in believing I was joining brave men in the struggle for freedom, men resolved to live nobly or else to die. But you are no different from ordinary men, neither in courage nor in daring—you who fear even the death that would free you from the greatest evils, when for this you ought neither to hesitate nor to wait for anyone's advice.

From the very first stirrings of understanding, the teachings of our fathers and our sacred teachings have instructed us, confirmed by the deeds and convictions of our ancestors, that life, not death, is the calamity for men. For death gives the soul its freedom and lets it depart to its own pure home, to be free of every calamity, untouched thereafter; whereas so long as souls are bound within a mortal body and share in its afflictions, in the truest sense of the word, they are already dead. For fellowship between the divine and the mortal is unfitting. Great, indeed, is the power of the soul even while it is bound to the body, for it turns the body into an instrument of perception, moving it invisibly and, through its actions, carrying it beyond the limits of its mortal nature. But once it is released from the weight that drags it down and clings to it toward the earth, and regains its own proper place, then it partakes of blessed strength and power unhindered on every side, remaining invisible to human eyes, just as God himself is. Indeed, even while the soul is in the body it cannot be seen: it arrives unseen and departs again unseen, having a single incorruptible nature of its own, yet becoming the cause of change in the body. Whatever the soul touches lives and flourishes; whatever it leaves withers and dies—so great is the measure of immortality that belongs to it.

Let sleep serve you as the clearest proof of what I say: in sleep, when the body no longer distracts them, souls enjoy their sweetest rest, being left to themselves, and, communing with God by kinship, they range everywhere and foretell many things that are yet to come. Why, then, should we fear death, when we love the rest that comes in sleep? And how is it not senseless, while pursuing freedom in this life, to begrudge ourselves the everlasting kind?

Trained as we are at home in such things, we ought to be an example to others of readiness for death. But if we need confirmation from foreigners as well, let us look to the Indians, who profess to practice wisdom. For those men, good men that they are, endure the span of their lives unwillingly, as a kind of service owed to nature, but hasten to free their souls from their bodies; and though no pressing evil drives or expels them, out of longing for the immortal way of life they announce to the others beforehand that they mean to depart, and no one tries to stop them—rather, everyone counts them fortunate and gives them letters, each for their own dead relatives. Such is their confidence that the fellowship of souls with one another beyond is a sure and truest way of life. And once they have listened to the messages entrusted to them, they give their body to the fire, so as to release the soul from the body in its purest state, and die amid hymns of praise. Their dearest kin send them off to death more easily than other people send their fellow citizens on the longest of journeys; they weep for themselves, but count those departing blessed, now that they are receiving their place among the immortals.

Are we then not ashamed to think worse than the Indians, and through our own cowardice to disgrace the laws of our fathers, laws that all mankind envies? But even if from the start we had been taught the opposite doctrine—that life is the greatest good for men and death a calamity—still the present moment calls on us to bear it bravely, dying by God's will and under compulsion. For it seems that long ago God cast this vote against the whole community of the Jewish nation, that we should be freed from life since we were not going to make right use of it.

So do not blame yourselves for this, and do not give the Romans the credit of having destroyed us all in this war; it was not their strength that brought this about, but a greater cause that made it merely appear they had won. For by what Roman weapons did the Jews living in Caesarea die? They had not even considered revolting from Rome, but while they were in the midst of keeping the Sabbath, the mass of the people of Caesarea fell upon them and slaughtered them together with their wives and children, though they raised no hand in resistance—and this without the least regard even for the Romans themselves, who counted only those in revolt as their enemies. But someone will say that the people of Caesarea always had a quarrel with the Jews among them, and simply seized the occasion to satisfy an old hatred. What, then, shall we say of the people of Scythopolis? They dared to make war on us for the sake of the Greeks, rather than stand with our own kinsmen against the Romans. And much good their goodwill and loyalty toward the Greeks did them! They were butchered by them, whole households at once, and this was the reward they got for their alliance. The very harm they had kept the Greeks from suffering at our hands, they themselves suffered, exactly as they had once wished to inflict it. It would take too long now to go through each case individually; for you know that there is not one city in Syria whose resident Jews...
has never killed the Jews living within it, though we are enemies of Rome more than they are. Yet the people of Damascus, without even being able to invent a plausible pretext, filled their city with the foulest bloodshed, slaughtering eighteen thousand Jews together with their wives and children. As for Egypt, we hear that the number of those killed there with torture comes to something over sixty thousand. Those people, perhaps, died as they did on foreign soil, where they found no strength to match their enemies.
But for us, who took up war against Rome on our own soil, did we lack anything that could have given a firm hope of victory? We had weapons, walls, fortresses built to resist capture, and a spirit unbending before the dangers we faced for freedom — all of these emboldened everyone toward revolt. But these advantages, sufficient for only a short time and raising our hopes, proved to be the beginning of greater evils. Everything was taken, everything fell to the enemy, as though it had all been prepared not for the safety of those who made it but for the greater glory of their conquest.
Those who died in battle deserve to be called fortunate, for they died defending themselves and never surrendering their freedom. But who could fail to pity the multitude who fell into Roman hands? Who would not hurry to die rather than suffer what they suffered? Some of them died under torture, racked by fire and whips; others, half-eaten by wild beasts, were kept alive to be devoured a second time, providing laughter and sport for their enemies. Of those people, the most wretched must be reckoned the ones still alive, who have often prayed for death and cannot obtain it.
And where is that great city now, the mother-city of the whole Jewish nation, fortified by so many rings of walls, defended by so many strongholds and towers of such size, scarcely able to contain the preparations made for war, and holding so many tens of thousands of men who fought for her? Where has she gone, the city we believed had God himself as her founder? She has been torn up root and branch from her foundations, and the only monument left to her is the camp of her killers, still living among her ruins.
Wretched old men sit by the ashes of the sanctuary, and a few women, kept alive by the enemy for the most shameful outrage. Who among us, weighing all this in his mind, could bear to go on looking at the sun, even if he could live free of danger? Who is so much an enemy of his country, or so unmanly and in love with his own life, as not to regret having lived until now?
If only we had all died before we saw that holy city torn down by enemy hands, before we saw the sacred temple so impiously dug out of the ground! But since a hope not ignoble deceived us, that we might perhaps be able to avenge her against our enemies, and that hope has now vanished and left us alone in our extremity, let us hasten to die well. Let us have mercy on ourselves, on our children, and on our wives, while it is still in our power to receive mercy from our own hands.
We were born for death, and so were the children we brought into the world, and even the most fortunate cannot escape it. But outrage and slavery, and the sight of our wives being led away to shame together with their children — these are not evils that nature forces upon men. Rather, men endure them through their own cowardice, when they refuse to die though death lay open to them beforehand. We, who prided ourselves greatly on our courage, revolted from Rome, and now, at the last, when they call us to come over and be saved, we have refused to obey them.
Who, then, can fail to see plainly what their rage will be, if they take us alive? Wretched will be the young men, whose bodily strength will hold out through many torments; wretched too the old, whose age cannot bear such misfortunes. A man will watch his wife dragged off by force; he will hear his child's voice crying out for its father, his own hands bound. But while they are still free and still hold the sword, let them render us one last, noble service. Let us die unenslaved by our enemies, and go out of life as free men, together with our children and our wives.
This is what our laws command us; this is what our wives and children beg of us; God has sent this necessity upon us, and it is the very opposite of what the Romans want — for they are afraid that any of us might die before the city is taken. Let us hasten, then, to leave them, instead of the satisfaction they hope to gain over us, astonishment at our death and wonder at our courage.
While he was still willing to go on urging them, all of them cut him short and rushed to the deed, filled with an irrepressible impulse, and went off as though possessed, each one eager to outstrip the other, thinking it a proof of courage and good judgment not to be seen among the last. So great was the passion that seized them for killing their wives, their children, and themselves. And indeed, contrary to what one might expect, they were not softened as they came to the act itself, but kept the same firm resolve they had held while listening to the speech — the natural affection of love for their families remaining with them all, while reason, having judged what was best, prevailed over their dearest attachments.
For at one and the same moment they embraced their wives and took their children into their arms, clinging to them with final kisses and weeping, and yet, as though carried out by hands not their own, they went through with the plan, holding as their one consolation for the necessity of killing the thought of the evils they would suffer if they fell alive into enemy hands. And in the end, not one was found wanting in the face of so terrible a deed; all of them went through it with those closest to them, wretched in their necessity — men to whom killing their own wives and children with their own hands seemed the lightest of evils.
Unable to bear the pain of what they had done any longer, and thinking it wrong to the dead to outlive them even a little while, they quickly gathered all their possessions into one heap and set fire to it. Then, choosing ten men from among themselves by lot to be the killers of all the rest, each man lay down beside his wife and children as they lay dead, threw his arms around them, and offered his throat ready for the sacrifice to those charged with this miserable task.
When these ten had killed all the others without flinching, they fixed the same rule of lot among themselves, so that the one chosen should kill the other nine and then, last of all, take his own life. All of them trusted each other so completely that neither in the doing nor in the suffering did one differ from another. In the end nine offered their throats, and the last man, the one alone remaining, surveyed the mass of the fallen to see whether, amid so much slaughter, anyone was still left needing his hand; and when he saw that all were dead, he set a great fire to the palace and drove his sword with his whole strength clean through his own body, falling beside his family.
So they died, believing they had left nothing alive to fall into Roman hands. But an old woman and another woman, a relative of Eleazar, who surpassed most women in intelligence and learning, escaped notice by hiding in the underground channels that carried water, along with five children, while the others were absorbed in the killing. In all, the number that perished was nine hundred and sixty, women and children included in the count. This tragedy took place on the fifteenth of the month of Xanthicus.
The Romans, still expecting a fight, armed themselves at dawn and, bridging the approaches from their earthworks with gangways, launched an assault. Seeing none of the enemy, but on every side a terrible desolation, fire within, and silence, they were at a loss to make sense of what had happened, and finally shouted aloud, as if to draw out a volley, to see whether any of those inside would show themselves. The women heard the shouting, came up out of the underground channels, and reported to the Romans exactly what had happened, the one woman explaining clearly everything that had been said and how it had been carried out.
The Romans found it hard to credit her at first, disbelieving the magnitude of the deed; they set about putting out the fire, and quickly cutting a path through it, made their way inside the palace. Coming upon the mass of the slain, they took no pleasure in it as they would over an enemy, but marveled at the nobility of their resolve and the utter disregard for death they had shown in carrying it out, unshaken amid so much suffering.
After the fortress had been taken in this fashion, the general left a garrison there and himself withdrew with his forces to Caesarea. No enemy remained anywhere in the country; the whole land had at last, after the long war, been thoroughly subdued, giving even to many who lived far away a sense of the danger and disorder it had caused.
Some time afterward it also happened that many Jews died around Alexandria in Egypt. Those of the sicarii faction who had managed to escape there were not content simply to be safe; they set about stirring up new troubles again, persuading many of those who had taken them in to claim their freedom, to regard the Romans as no better than themselves, and to hold God alone as master.
When some of the more prominent Jews opposed them, they killed some and pressed the rest, urging them toward revolt. Seeing their recklessness, the leading men of the council no longer thought it safe to overlook it; they gathered all the Jews into an assembly and denounced the madness of the sicarii, declaring them responsible for all the troubles.
They said that even now, since these men had no secure hope of safety even in flight — for they would be put to death at once if recognized by the Romans — they were involving those who had taken no part in their crimes in the disaster that properly belonged to them alone. They urged the people, therefore, to guard against ruin coming from these men, and to clear themselves before the Romans by handing them over. Recognizing the magnitude of the danger, the people were persuaded by what was said, and rushed upon the sicarii with great violence, seizing them.
Of these, six hundred were captured at once; those who fled into Egypt and to Thebes there were before long seized as well and brought back. In their case, there was no one who did not marvel at their endurance and at what one might call either their obstinacy or their strength of purpose. For though every kind of torture and bodily torment was devised against them, for this one purpose alone — that they should acknowledge Caesar as master — not one gave in or was even about to say it, but all of them kept their resolve superior to the compulsion laid upon them, receiving the tortures and the fire as though their bodies felt nothing, while their souls all but rejoiced.
But it was above all the age of the children that astonished those who watched, for not one of them, either, could be compelled to call Caesar master. So far did the strength of their daring surpass the weakness of their bodies. Lupus, who then governed Alexandria, wrote at once to Caesar about this uprising.
Caesar, suspicious of the Jews' unceasing propensity for revolution and fearing that they might again gather together in a body and draw others along with them, ordered Lupus to demolish the temple of the Jews called the temple of Onias. This temple is in Egypt, and it came to be built, and got its name, for the following reason.
Onias, son of Simon, one of the chief priests in Jerusalem, fleeing from Antiochus, the king of Syria, who was at war with the Jews, came to Alexandria; and since Ptolemy received him kindly, because of his own hostility toward Antiochus, Onias told him he could make the Jewish nation his ally, if he would be persuaded by what he had to propose.
When the king agreed to do what he could, Onias asked to be allowed to build a temple somewhere in Egypt and to worship God according to the customs of his fathers. He argued that this would make the Jews still more hostile to Antiochus, who had pillaged their temple in Jerusalem, and would win their goodwill toward Ptolemy himself, drawing many of them to his side, free to practice their religion.
Ptolemy, persuaded by these arguments, gave him a district a hundred and eighty stadia from Memphis, in the nome called Heliopolite. There Onias built a fortress and constructed his temple, not like the one in Jerusalem but resembling a tower, built of great stones and rising to sixty cubits.
He modeled the design of the altar on that of the temple at home and adorned it in the same way with offerings, except for the construction of the lampstand: instead of a lampstand, he had a golden lamp made and hung it by a golden chain, giving off its own light. The whole precinct was walled around with baked brick and had gates of stone.
The king also granted a large tract of land for revenue, so that there would be abundance for the priests and ample means for the worship of God. Onias, however, did not act from a wholly sound motive in all this; he bore a grudge against the Jews of Jerusalem, remembering his anger at having been forced to flee, and thought that by building this temple he would draw the people away from them. There had also been an old prophecy, made some six hundred years before, by a man named Isaiah, foretelling that this very temple would be built in Egypt by a Jewish man.
Such, then, was the manner in which the temple came to be built. Lupus, the governor of Alexandria, upon receiving Caesar's letter, went to the temple, carried off some of the offerings, and closed it. After Lupus died shortly afterward, Paulinus, who succeeded him in the governorship, left none of the offerings behind, threatening the priests severely unless they brought out everything, and did not allow anyone wishing to worship to approach the precinct; he shut the gates and made it entirely inaccessible, so that not even a trace was left in the place of the service once offered to God. The time from the building of the temple to its closing came to three hundred and forty-three years.
The madness of the sicarii, like a disease, also touched the cities around Cyrene. A certain Jonathan, a most depraved man by trade a weaver, made his way there and persuaded a considerable number of the poor to follow him, leading them out into the desert and promising to show them signs and apparitions.
After a thorough search was conducted throughout the whole region, he was caught and brought before the governor. There he tried every device to secure his own release from punishment, and in doing so gave Catullus an opening for wrongdoing. For Jonathan, lying, claimed that the wealthiest of the Jews had put him up to the plot, and Catullus eagerly seized on these accusations, building the affair up into something enormous with grand theatrical flourishes, so that he too might appear to have brought a Jewish war to a successful end.
But worse than this: not only did Catullus believe the charges too readily, he actually became a teacher to the sicarii in the art of lying. He ordered Jonathan to name a certain Jew, Alexander, with whom he had long been at odds and against whom he had openly declared his hatred, and to implicate that man's wife, Berenice, in the charges as well. These two he put to death first, and after them he slaughtered about a thousand men distinguished by their wealth, thinking he could do this safely, since he was appropriating their property for Caesar's revenues.
And so that no Jews elsewhere might be able to expose his injustice, he extended the lie still further, persuading Jonathan and some of those arrested along with him to bring a charge of sedition against the most eminent Jews of Alexandria and of Rome. One of those falsely accused in this conspiracy was Josephus, the author of this history.
The scheme, however, did not turn out as Catullus had hoped. He came to Rome bringing Jonathan and his associates in chains, believing that the false accusations made against himself and through his agency would settle the matter once and for all. But Vespasian, suspecting the truth of the affair, investigated it, and on discovering that the charge brought against these men was unjust, released them from the accusations, Titus having urged this, and inflicted on Jonathan the punishment he deserved: he was burned alive, after first being tortured.
As for Catullus, at that time the emperors' clemency spared him from suffering anything worse than condemnation. But not long afterward he was seized by a disease of many forms, hard to cure, and died a painful death — and it was not only his body that was afflicted, for the sickness of his soul was heavier still. He was thrown into terror by nightmares and cried out repeatedly that he saw before him the ghosts of those he had murdered, standing over him. Unable to control himself, he would leap from his bed as though torture and fire were being applied to him. As the disease steadily worsened, his bowels rotted away and fell out, and so he died — as clear a proof as any that the providence of God inflicts punishment on the wicked.
Here I bring my history to its conclusion, the history which I promised to hand down with complete accuracy to those who wished to learn how this war was fought between the Romans and the Jews. As for how well it has been composed, I leave that to the judgment of my readers; but as to its truthfulness, I would not hesitate to declare with confidence that this alone has been my aim throughout the entire narrative.

======== Antiquities — Book 1 ========

1. The structure and order of the elements of the cosmos. 2. Concerning the lineage of Adam and the ten generations descended from him down to the flood. 3. How the flood came about, and how Noah, saved in an ark with his kin, settled in the plain of Shinar. 4. How the tower, which his sons built in defiance of God, was raised, and how he changed their languages, and how the place where this happened was called Babylon. 5. How Noah's descendants settled the whole inhabited world. 6. That each of the nations was named after those who settled it. 7. How Abraham our forefather, leaving the land of the Chaldeans, took possession of the land then called Canaan, now called Judea. 8. How, when famine struck Canaan, he departed for Egypt, and after spending some time there returned again. 9. The defeat of the Sodomites when the Assyrians campaigned against them. 10. How Abraham, marching out against the Assyrians, won the victory, rescued the Sodomite captives, and recovered the plunder they had taken. 11. How God destroyed the nation of the Sodomites, angered at the sins they were committing. 12. Concerning Ishmael, son of Abraham, and his Arab descendants. 13. Concerning Isaac, who was Abraham's legitimate son. 14. Concerning Sarah, Abraham's wife, and how she ended her life. 15. How, when Abraham married Keturah, the nation of the Trogodyte Arabs was born. 16. Concerning the death of Abraham. 17. Concerning the birth and upbringing of Isaac's sons, Esau and Jacob. 18. Jacob's flight to Mesopotamia out of fear of his brother, and how, after marrying there and fathering twelve sons, he returned again to Canaan. 19. How Isaac died and was buried at Hebron.
This book covers a span of years which, by Josephus's reckoning, is 3,008; by the Hebrews' reckoning, 1,872; by Eusebius's reckoning, 3,459.
Those who wish to write histories, I observe, are moved by no single cause, but by many, and ones widely different from one another. Some, displaying their skill in rhetoric and hunting the reputation it brings, throw themselves into this branch of learning; others, doing a favor to the people whose record it happens to be, have taken up the labor of writing about them beyond their own capacity; and there are those compelled by the sheer necessity of events they happened to witness to set them down in a clear account; many more, since matters of great usefulness lay buried in ignorance, have been driven to bring their history into the open for the common good. Of the causes I have named, the last two apply to me as well. The war we Jews fought against the Romans, its course, and the outcome to which it came — having learned all this by experience — I was compelled to narrate in detail, on account of those who corrupt the truth in writing about it. But this present undertaking I have taken in hand believing it will appear to all the Greeks worthy of study, for it is going to contain our entire ancient history and the constitution of our government, translated from the Hebrew writings.
Indeed I had already resolved earlier, when I was composing the account of the war, to explain who the Jews were from the beginning, what fortunes befell them, under what lawgiver they were trained in piety and in virtue generally, and how many wars, fought over long ages, brought them at last, against their will, into conflict with the Romans. But since the scope of that subject was too great, I separated it out and gave the history its own beginning and its own end apart from that work. As time went on, however — as tends to happen to those who set their minds on great undertakings — hesitation and delay came over me at the thought of carrying so vast a subject into a language foreign and unfamiliar to us. But there were some who, out of eagerness for the history, urged me on toward it, and above all Epaphroditus, a man devoted to every form of learning, but especially delighted by acquaintance with great affairs, since he himself had been involved in weighty matters and varied fortunes, and had shown in all of them a remarkable natural strength and an unshakeable resolve toward virtue.
Persuaded by him — since he always shares the delight of those able to accomplish something useful or noble — and ashamed for myself, lest I should seem to prefer idleness to the labor of achieving the finest things, I was roused to greater eagerness, weighing besides, and not lightly, whether our own ancestors had been willing to share such things, and whether any of the Greeks had shown eagerness to learn about our affairs. I found, then, that the second of the Ptolemies, a king especially devoted to learning and to the collecting of books, was particularly eager to have our law and the constitution founded on it translated into the Greek language, and that Eleazar, second to none in virtue among our high priests, did not begrudge that king this benefit — though he would certainly have refused, had it not been our ancestral custom to keep nothing good hidden.
I thought it fitting, then, for myself to imitate the high priest's generosity of spirit, and to suppose that even now there are many, like that king, equally eager to learn — for that king did not even manage to obtain the whole of our record, but only those who were sent to Alexandria for the translation handed over the contents of the Law alone; countless things besides are set forth in the sacred writings, since a history of five thousand years is contained within them, comprising every sort of unexpected turn of fortune, many vicissitudes of war, acts of valor by generals, and changes of government.
In sum, anyone willing to work through this history from the outset will learn above all this from it: that for those who follow the will of God and do not dare to transgress laws that have been rightly established, all things turn out beyond belief successfully, and happiness is set before them by God as a prize; but to the degree that they depart from exact attention to these things, what was passable becomes impassable, and whatever they eagerly pursue as good turns instead into irreparable disaster.
Now, then, I urge those who take up these books to fix their minds on God, and to judge whether our lawgiver has understood his nature in a manner worthy of him, and has always assigned to him actions fitting to his power, keeping his account of him free of all the unseemly mythology found among others — even though, given the great length of time and the antiquity involved, he had every license for false invention. For he lived two thousand years ago, a span of time so vast that not even the poets ventured to trace back to it the births of their own gods, let alone the deeds or laws of men. As the account proceeds, it will indicate, in its proper order, the precise details found in the records; for that is what I promised to do throughout this work — to add nothing and to leave nothing out.
Since almost everything among us depends on the wisdom of the lawgiver Moses, I must first say a few words about him, so that none of my readers may wonder why an account concerned with laws and deeds has here made itself party to so much natural philosophy. One must understand, then, that he considered it most necessary of all things — for anyone who intended both to order his own life well and to legislate for others — first to contemplate the nature of God, and, having become through his mind a spectator of God's works, thereby to imitate, so far as possible, that best of all models, and to strive to follow it; for a lawgiver could never attain a right mind if deprived of this contemplation, nor would anything written for the sake of virtue benefit its readers, unless they were taught before all else that God, being father and master of all things and overseeing everything, grants a happy life to those who follow him, but surrounds with great disasters those who step outside virtue.
Wishing to instill this teaching, Moses did not begin the establishment of laws for his citizens, as others do, from contracts and mutual rights and obligations, but led their minds up to God and the framing of the cosmos, and persuaded them that we men are the finest of God's works upon earth; and once he had them obedient in matters of piety, he could then easily persuade them of everything else. For other lawgivers, following myths, transferred in their accounts the shame of human failings onto the gods, and thereby gave the wicked ample excuse; but our lawgiver, having shown that God possesses virtue pure and unmixed, held that men ought to strive to share in it, and punished without mercy those who did not think or believe accordingly.
I urge my readers, then, to undertake their examination with this premise in view; for to those who consider it in this light, nothing will appear unreasonable, nothing out of keeping with the majesty of God and his love for mankind — for everything holds a disposition in harmony with the nature of the universe as a whole, the lawgiver at times hinting things skillfully, at other times speaking allegorically with due solemnity, and, wherever it was better to speak directly, declaring these things in plain words. For those, however, who also wish to examine the reasons behind each provision, the inquiry would prove extensive and highly philosophical — one which I now set aside, but which, God granting me time, I shall try to write after completing this work.
I shall now turn to the narrative of events, first recalling what Moses said concerning the framing of the cosmos, which I found recorded thus in the sacred books.
It runs as follows: In the beginning God created heaven and earth. But the earth did not come into view; rather it lay hidden in deep darkness, while a wind swept over it from above, and God commanded that light come to be. When this had happened, he considered the whole mass of matter, and separated the light from the darkness, giving the one the name night and calling the other day, and naming the beginning of light and its cessation evening and dawn. This, then, would be the first day, though Moses called it 'one'; the reason for this I am able to give even now, but since I have promised to set out the explanation of all such matters in a separate work, I put off the account of it until then.
After this, on the second of the days, he set the heaven over the whole, having distinguished it from the rest and judged it worthy to be arranged by itself, fixing around it a crystalline vault and, fittingly for the earth, making it southerly and rain-bearing for the benefit that comes from dew. On the third day he set the earth firm, pouring the sea around it; and on that same day plants and seeds sprang up at once from the ground.
On the fourth he arrayed the heaven with sun and moon and the other stars, prescribing for them motions and courses by which the revolutions of the seasons would be marked. On the fifth day he sent forth living creatures, some swimming in the depths, others moving through the air, binding them together in fellowship and the union of mating, for the sake of increasing and multiplying their kind. On the sixth day he fashioned the race of four-footed animals, making them male and female; and on this day too he formed man. Moses says that the world and everything in it came to be within six days in all, and that on the seventh he rested and took a respite from his works — which is why we too observe leisure from our labors on this day, calling it Sabbath, a word that means 'rest' in the Hebrew tongue.
And indeed Moses began to speak of natural things after the seventh day, describing the formation of man as follows: God fashioned man, taking dust from the earth, and put into him breath and soul. This man was called Adam, which in the Hebrew language means 'red,' since he had come to be from red earth kneaded together — for such is virgin, true earth. God brought before Adam the animals arranged by kind, showing him male and female, and gave them the names by which they are still called today.
Seeing that Adam had no fellowship or companionship with a female — for there was none — and finding it strange, unlike the other animals, which had such companionship, God took one of his ribs while he slept and from it fashioned a woman. And Adam, when she was brought to him, recognized her as having come from himself. In the Hebrew language a woman is called 'essa,' and the name of that particular woman was Eve, which means 'mother of all.'
He says that God also planted a garden toward the east, luxuriant with every kind of plant; and among these were the tree of life and another, the tree of understanding, by which one could discern what was good and what was evil. Into this garden he brought Adam and the woman and bade them tend the plants. The garden is watered by a single river that flows around the whole land in a circle and splits into four branches.
The Phison — the name means 'multitude' — flows toward India and empties into the sea, and is called by the Greeks the Ganges; the Euphrates and the Tigris go down to the Red Sea. The Euphrates is called 'Phoras,' meaning either 'dispersal' or 'flower'; the Tigris is called 'Diglath,' from which comes the sense of something narrow and swift; and the Geon, flowing through Egypt, denotes the river that rises for us from the opposite direction, which the Greeks call the Nile.
God, then, commanded Adam and the woman to eat of the other plants, but to abstain from the tree of understanding, warning them in advance that ruin would come upon them if they touched it. Now at that time all the animals still spoke a common language, and the serpent, living alongside Adam and the woman, was envious of the happiness he supposed they would enjoy if they remained persuaded by God's commands; and thinking they would fall into misfortune if they disobeyed, he maliciously persuaded the woman to taste of the tree of understanding, telling her
that they would gain the knowledge of good and evil, and that once they had it they would live a blessed life, lacking nothing of the divine. In this way he tricked the woman into scorning God's command. She tasted the plant, and enjoying its fruit, persuaded Adam to eat of it as well. At once they understood that they were naked, and, feeling shame at being exposed, they set about devising covering for themselves, for the plant had the property of sharpening perception and understanding. So they covered themselves with fig leaves, and, using these to screen their nakedness, they thought themselves better off than before, now that they had found what they had previously lacked.
When God came into the garden, Adam, who before had been in the habit of coming to converse with him, now withdrew, conscious of his wrongdoing. God was struck by this and asked the reason why Adam, who had formerly delighted in conversation with him, now fled and avoided it. When Adam said nothing, aware in himself that he had transgressed God's command, God said, "I had determined for you a happy life, free from every evil, your soul troubled by no care, with everything conducive to enjoyment and pleasure arising of its own accord by my providence, without labor or hardship on your part — and with these blessings present, old age would not have come upon you so quickly, and your life would have been long. But now you have insulted this plan of mine by disobeying my commands, for it is not out of virtue that you keep silent, but out of a guilty conscience."
Adam tried to excuse himself of the sin and begged God not to be angry with him, laying the blame for what had happened on the woman and saying that he had sinned because she had deceived him; she in turn accused the serpent. God held Adam guilty of yielding to a woman's persuasion and condemned him to hard labor: the earth would no longer yield anything to them of its own accord, but would provide some things only for those who toiled and wore themselves out with work, and would deny them others. Eve he punished with childbirth and the pains of labor, because by the same deception with which the serpent had beguiled her she had led Adam astray and wrapped him in misfortune. He also took away the serpent's voice, angered at its malice toward Adam, and put venom under its tongue, making it an enemy to mankind, and ordained that men should strike at its head, since there the harm it does to men resides and death would come most easily to those who defend themselves there; and he deprived it of legs, making it crawl along the ground, writhing.
Having ordained that they should suffer these things, God moved Adam and Eve from the garden to another place. Two male children were born to them: the first was named Cain, a name that, translated, means "acquisition," and the second Abel, which means nothing. Daughters were also born to them. The brothers took pleasure in different pursuits. Abel, the younger, was concerned with justice, and, believing that God was present at everything he did, gave thought to virtue; his life was that of a shepherd. Cain, on the other hand, was thoroughly wicked, and, looking only to gain, was the first to think of plowing the earth. He killed his brother for the following reason: when it seemed good to them to sacrifice to God, Cain offered the fruits of his farming and of the trees, while Abel brought milk and the firstborn of his flocks.
God took greater pleasure in this offering, being honored by things that grow of their own accord and by nature, rather than by things produced by force through the contrivance of a grasping man. At this Cain, provoked that Abel had been preferred by God, killed his brother, and, having made the body disappear, supposed he would escape notice. But God, aware of the deed, came to Cain and asked about his brother, where he might be — for many days he had not seen him, though at every other time he had seen the two of them together. Cain, at a loss and having nothing to say to God, at first claimed that he too was perplexed at not seeing his brother; but when God pressed him insistently and probed further, he grew angry and said he was not his brother's tutor and guardian, nor of what he did.
At this God directly convicted Cain of being his brother's murderer, saying, "I am amazed that you cannot say what has become of a man whom you yourself have destroyed." He released him, however, from the penalty due for the murder once he had performed a sacrifice and, through it, begged not to incur a heavier wrath; but he pronounced him accursed, and threatened to punish his descendants down to the seventh generation, and cast him out of that land together with his wife. Fearing that in his wandering he would fall prey to wild beasts and perish in that way, God bade him harbor no such gloomy suspicion, but travel the whole earth without fear of coming to any harm from beasts on that account; and, setting a mark on him by which he would be recognized, he ordered him to depart.
After traversing much country, Cain settled with his wife in a place called Naid, and there made his home; there children were also born to him. He took his punishment not as a warning but as an occasion for the growth of wickedness, procuring every pleasure for his body, even if this meant getting it by outrage against his companions; and, increasing his household with a mass of wealth won by plunder and violence, he urged those he met on to pleasure and robbery, becoming their teacher in wicked pursuits. The freedom from care in which men had formerly lived together he did away with by the invention of measures and weights, changing what had been, through their ignorance of such things, an innocent and generous way of life into one of cunning; he was the first to set boundaries to land, and he built a city and fortified it with walls, compelling his household to gather together in one place. This city he named Anocha, after Anoch, his eldest son.
Anoch's son was Jared, and from him came Marouel, whose son was Mathusala, and his son Lamech, who had seventy-seven children by his two wives, Sella and Ada. Of these, Jobel, born of Ada, pitched tents and took up the raising of flocks; Jubal, his brother by the same mother, pursued music and invented psalteries and lyres; and Jubel, one of those born of the other wife, surpassed all in bodily strength and distinguished himself in the arts of war, procuring by these things what conduces to bodily pleasure, and was also the first to devise the working of bronze. When Lamech became father of a daughter, Noema by name, since he understood the divine things clearly and foresaw that he would undergo a punishment greater than that for Cain's fratricide, he made this plain to his wives.
While Adam still lived, it happened that Cain's descendants became utterly wicked, one generation after another growing worse in succession and imitation; for they gave themselves without restraint to warfare and set out on plunder, and if any among them was reluctant to kill, he showed a different kind of recklessness, committing outrage and greed. Adam, the first man made from the earth — for the narrative requires that his own account be given — after Abel had been slain and Cain had fled because of that murder, gave thought to having children, and a powerful desire for offspring took hold of him when he had already completed two hundred and thirty years of life; he lived seven hundred years beyond that and then died. He had, then, other children as well as Seth; but to speak of the others at length would take long, and I shall try to recount only the line descended from Seth. For Seth, having been raised and having come to an age already capable of judging what is good, and himself becoming a man of the highest excellence, left behind descendants who imitated the same virtues.
All of them, being good by nature, inhabited the same land without discord and prospered, with nothing troublesome befalling them even to the end, and they devised the wisdom concerning the heavenly bodies and their arrangement. And so that their discoveries should not be lost to mankind, nor perish before they came to be known, since Adam had foretold that the universe would be destroyed, once by the force of fire and again by the violence and abundance of water, they made two pillars, one of brick and the other of stone, and inscribed their discoveries on both, so that if the brick one should be destroyed by the flooding rain, the stone one would remain and make known to men what was written on it, showing also that a brick one had been set up by them. It remains to this day in the land of Siriad.
For seven generations these men continued to hold God to be lord of all and looked to virtue in everything, but as time went on they turned to the worse, abandoning their ancestral customs, no longer rendering to God the honors that were due, and taking no account of justice toward men; instead they displayed, in their conduct, twice the zeal for wickedness that they had once shown for virtue. In this way they made God their enemy. For many angels of God now consorted with women and begot insolent sons who scorned every good thing, through their confidence in their own strength; the deeds these men are said to have dared are like those the Greeks attribute to the giants.
Noah, displeased at what they were doing and finding their designs distasteful, tried to persuade them to change their thinking and their conduct for the better; but seeing that they would not yield, and were firmly mastered by their pleasure in wickedness, he grew afraid that they would kill him along with his wife and children and the women who lived with them, and so left that land. God, for his part, loved Noah for his righteousness, but condemned not only the wickedness of those men but resolved to destroy the whole of mankind then existing and to make another race free of wickedness; and, cutting short their lives, he made it so that men would no longer live as long as before, but a hundred and twenty years, and turned the mainland into sea. In this way all the rest were destroyed, but Noah alone was saved, God having devised for him a means and a way to safety of the following kind: he built an ark of four stories, three hundred cubits in length, fifty in breadth, and thirty in depth, and went up into it with his wife, his sons and their wives, having placed in it whatever else would be needed to sustain them, and bringing in creatures of every kind, male and female, for the preservation of their species, and others still, seven times that number.
The ark had walls and a roof strong enough that it could not be flooded from any side nor overcome by the force of the water. In this way Noah, together with his household, was saved. He himself was tenth in descent from Adam: he was the son of Lamech, whose father was Mathusala, who was son of Anoch, son of Jared; Jared was born of Malael, and Malael from Caina, son of Anosos, who had several sisters; Anosos was the son of Seth, son of Adam. This calamity occurred in the six-hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, called Dius by the Macedonians and Marsuan by the Hebrews — for so they had arranged the year in Egypt. Moses, however, made Nisan, which is Xanthicus, the first month for the festivals, since it was in this month that he led the Hebrews out of Egypt; this month also came first for him in everything relating to the honors paid to God, though for buying and selling and other business he kept to the original order of months. He says the downpour began on the twenty-seventh of the aforementioned month.
This time was two thousand two hundred and sixty-two years from Adam, the first man to exist. This chronology is recorded in the sacred books, since men of that age noted with great precision both the births and the deaths of illustrious men. When Adam had already reached his two hundred and thirtieth year, his son Seth was born, who lived nine hundred and thirty years. Seth, in his two hundred and fifth year, begot Anosos, who, after living nine hundred and five years, handed over the care of affairs to his son Caina, having begotten him around his hundred and ninetieth year; Anosos lived nine hundred and twelve years in all. Caina, having lived nine hundred and ten years, had a son Malael, born in his hundred and seventieth year; Malael, after living eight hundred and ninety-five years, died, leaving behind his son Jared, whom he had begotten at the age of a hundred and sixty-five. Jared, having lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, was succeeded by his son Anoch, who was born when his father was a hundred and sixty-two; Anoch lived three hundred and sixty-five years and then departed to the divine, so that they have not even recorded his death. Mathusala, Anoch's son, born to him in his hundred and sixty-fifth year, had a son Lamech at about the age of a hundred and eighty-seven, having himself held the leadership for nine hundred and sixty-nine years. Lamech, having ruled seven hundred and seventy-seven years, appointed his son Noah head of affairs; Noah, born to Lamech when he had reached his hundred and eighty-eighth year, took up the leadership of affairs at the age of nine hundred and fifty. These years, added together, fill out the total given above. Let no one examine the deaths of these men, for they extended their lives well into those of their children and grandchildren; let him look only to their births.
When God had given the sign and the rain had begun, the water came down for forty whole days, so that it rose fifteen cubits above the earth. This was the reason why more people could not be saved — they had no means of escape. When the rain stopped, the water only slowly began to subside, over a hundred and fifty days, so that by the seventh month, on its seventh day, it was gradually receding and abating. Then, the ark having come to rest on a certain peak of a mountain in Armenia, Noah, realizing this...
Noah opened the ark, saw a small patch of dry ground around it, and, now in better hope, waited quietly. A few days later, when the water had receded further, he sent out a raven, wanting to learn whether any other part of the earth left bare by the water was now safe for landing. It found the whole surface still under water and returned to Noah. Seven days later he sent out a dove to learn how things stood with the land; it came back covered in mud and carrying an olive branch, and from this he learned that the earth was free of the flood. He waited seven more days, then released the animals from the ark and came out himself with his family, and after sacrificing to God he feasted with his household. The Armenians call this place the Landing-Place, for it was there that the ark came safely to rest, and they still show the remains of it to this day.
This flood and the ark are mentioned by all who have written the histories of foreign peoples, among them Berossus the Chaldean; in his account of the flood he writes something like this: "It is said that a part of the ship still survives in Armenia, on the mountain of the Cordyaeans, and that some people scrape off pieces of the bitumen and carry them away, using what they bring back as charms." Hieronymus the Egyptian, who wrote the history of Phoenicia, mentions these things too, as does Mnaseas and several others. And Nicolaus of Damascus, in the ninety-sixth book of his history, writes of them as follows: "Above the land of the Minyans in Armenia there is a great mountain called Baris, where it is said that many people fled for refuge at the time of the flood and were saved, and that one man, carried on an ark, ran aground on the summit, and the remains of the timbers were preserved for a long time. This could well be the same man that Moses, the lawgiver of the Jews, wrote about."
Noah, fearing that God might flood the earth every year, having decreed the destruction of mankind, burned sacrifices and begged God that from then on things should remain in their original order, and that he would never again bring such a disaster, one that would risk destroying the whole race of living things; instead, having punished the wicked, God should spare those who had been left alive through their goodness and had been judged worthy to escape the calamity — for they would be worse off than the dead, condemned to a harsher fate, if they were not saved completely but were kept back only to face a second flood, having learned the fear and the story of the first one and now facing the destruction of the second. So Noah pleaded that God would receive his sacrifice with favor and never again cast such wrath upon the earth, so that men, devoting themselves to its labors and founding cities, might live happily and lack none of the good things they had enjoyed before the flood, down to a distant old age and a length of life like that of those who had lived before them.
When Noah had made these entreaties, God, who loved the man for his righteousness, promised to bring his prayers to fulfillment. He said that he himself had not destroyed those who perished, but that they had suffered this punishment through their own wickedness; nor, if he had resolved to wipe out the human race once it existed, would he have brought men into life in the first place — it would have been wiser never to have granted them life at all than to give it and then destroy it. "But those who insulted my reverence and virtue forced me to inflict this punishment on them. I will cease from now on to exact vengeance for wrongdoing with such great wrath, and all the more so since you ask it of me. And if I should ever again send a long storm, do not be afraid of the size of the rains, for the water will never again flood the earth. I do, however, urge you to abstain from human bloodshed and to keep yourselves free of murder, punishing anyone who does such a thing, while making use of all the other animals as you wish and as your appetites desire, for I have made you masters of them all, of those on land and in water and of whatever moves through the air above, except for their blood, for in that is the life. I will give you a sign that the rains will cease, by showing you the rainbow in the sky; for among the people there it is held that the bow belongs to God." Having said this and made this promise, God departed.
Noah lived three hundred and fifty years after the flood, and having passed all that time in happiness, he died at the age of nine hundred and fifty years. Let no one, comparing the life we live now and the brevity of our years to the years of the ancients, judge what is said of them to be false, reasoning that because no one today lives so long a span, those men did not reach such a length of life either. For those men were beloved of God and had themselves been made by God, and because their food was better suited to a longer life, it is reasonable that they lived so great a number of years; besides, God granted them a longer life because of their virtue and their useful discoveries in astronomy and geometry, which they could not have safely foretold had they not lived six hundred years — for it is after that many years that the great year is completed. All who have written the ancient histories, both Greek and foreign, bear witness to what I say: Manetho, who compiled the record of the Egyptians, and Berossus, who gathered the history of the Chaldeans, and Mochus and Hestiaeus, and besides these Hieronymus the Egyptian, who wrote the history of Phoenicia, all agree with what I have said, and so do Hesiod, Hecataeus, Hellanicus, Acusilaus, and besides these Ephorus and Nicolaus, who record that the ancients lived a thousand years. On these matters, let each reader judge as he thinks best.
Noah's three sons — Shem, Japheth, and Ham — had been born a hundred years before the flood, and they were the first to come down from the mountains into the plains and settle there, and they persuaded the rest of the people, who were still very much afraid of the plains because of the flood and reluctant to come down from the high places, to take courage and follow their example. The plain in which they first settled them is called Shinar. But when God commanded them, because of their great numbers, to send out colonies, so that they would not quarrel with one another but, farming a great deal of land, might enjoy an abundance of its fruits, they disobeyed God out of foolishness, and so they fell into misfortune and came to recognize their sin. For when they had grown numerous in youthful strength, God again urged them to found colonies; but they, not attributing their prosperity to his favor, but supposing their own strength to be the cause of their abundance, would not obey. To their disobedience of God's will they added the suspicion that they were being urged toward colonization as a plot, so that once divided they would be easier to attack.
And it was Nimrod who incited them to this insolence and contempt of God; he was a grandson of Ham, Noah's son, a bold man and mighty in strength. He persuaded them not to attribute their prosperity to God, but to consider that their own courage was what provided it, and little by little he turned the state of affairs into a tyranny, believing that the only way to make men stop fearing God was for them to keep on relying upon his own power; and he threatened that he would take vengeance on God if he should ever wish to flood the earth again — for he would build a tower higher than the water could reach, and he would avenge the destruction of his ancestors.
The people were eager to follow Nimrod's decrees, considering it slavery to submit to God, and they built the tower, sparing no effort and showing no reluctance for the work; and because of the great number of hands it rose in height faster than anyone would have expected. Its thickness, however, was so great that its height appeared smaller to onlookers than it really was. It was built of baked brick bound together with bitumen, so that it would not be worn away by water. Seeing them driven to such madness, God decided not to destroy them utterly, since they had not been made wiser even by the destruction of the earlier generation, but he threw them into confusion by making them speak different languages, and by this multiplicity of tongues he made them unable to understand one another.
The place where they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion that first arose there regarding their language; for the Hebrews call confusion "babel." The Sibyl also mentions this tower and the differing languages of mankind, speaking as follows: "When all men spoke the same language, some of them built an exceedingly high tower, as though they meant to climb up to heaven by it. But the gods sent winds and overturned the tower, and gave each man his own language; and this is why the city came to be called Babylon." Hestiaeus also mentions the plain called Shinar in the land of Babylonia, speaking as follows: "Those of the priests who survived took the sacred vessels of Zeus Enyalius and came to Shinar in Babylonia."
From that point on they scattered, and because of the difference in their languages they founded colonies everywhere, and each group took possession of whatever land they came upon and to which God led them, until every continent was filled with them, both inland and along the coast, and some even crossed over by ship and settled the islands. Some of the nations still preserve the names given by their founders, others have changed them, and still others have altered their names to a form thought clearer to the peoples living around them. The Greeks are responsible for this: once they grew powerful in later times, they claimed the old glory of these nations as their own, embellishing the peoples with names pleasing and orderly to their own ears, as though the nations had originated from themselves.
Now these were the sons of Noah's sons, to whom, in their honor, the peoples they seized possession of a land gave their names. Japheth, Noah's son, had seven sons. They settled the region beginning from the Taurus and Amanus mountains, and advanced through Asia as far as the river Tanais, and through Europe as far as Cadiz, taking possession of whatever land they came upon, and since no one had settled there before them, they gave the nations their own names. Those now called Galatians by the Greeks, but formerly called Gomarites, were founded by Gomer. Magog founded those named after him the Magogites, called Scythians by the Greeks. Of Japheth's sons, from Javan and Madai: from Madai come the Madaeans, called Medes by the Greeks, and from Javan come Ionia and all the Greeks.
Thobel also founded the Thobelites, who are now called Iberians. And the Meschenians, founded by Meschus, are now called Cappadocians, though a trace of their old name is still shown: there is a city among them, even now, called Mazaca, which makes clear to those able to understand that this was once the name of the whole nation. Thiras named those he ruled Thirians, though the Greeks renamed them Thracians. So many are the nations settled by the sons of Japheth. Gomer had three sons: Aschanax founded the Aschanaxians, now called Rheginians by the Greeks; Riphath founded the Riphathaeans, called Paphlagonians; and Thygramas founded the Thygramaeans, whom the Greeks named Phrygians.
Javan, son of Japheth, likewise had three sons: Elisa founded the Elisaeans, whom he ruled, now called the Aeolians; Tharsus founded the Tharsians — for this was the old name of Cilicia, as shown by the fact that Tarsus, the most notable of their cities and their capital, is so called with a tau in place of a theta. Chethim took possession of the island of Chethima, now called Cyprus, and from it all the islands and most of the coastal regions are called Chethim by the Hebrews. A witness to what I say is one of the cities of Cyprus, which has managed to keep this name: it is called Kition by those who have Hellenized it, but even so it has not entirely escaped the name of Chethim. Such, then, were the nations that sprang from the sons and grandsons of Japheth.
There is a point that the Greeks may perhaps not know, and having stated it I will return to relating the rest of what I set out to tell. The names have been Hellenized for the pleasure of my readers, to suit the elegance of my composition, for this is not the native form of these names among us; rather, they all share one form and one ending — Noah, for instance, is called Noe among us, and this form is kept throughout, whatever the shape of the name.
The sons of Ham took possession of the land from Syria and the Amanus and Lebanon mountains, seizing whatever parts of it faced the sea, and extending their holdings as far as the ocean. Some of their names have vanished entirely, others have changed and been reshaped into other forms and are now hard to recognize, and only a few have kept their names unaltered. Ham had four sons. Time did no harm to the name of Chus, for the Ethiopians he ruled are still called Chusites, both by themselves and by all the peoples of Asia, even now. The memory of the name was also preserved among the Mersaeans, for we all who live there call Egypt Mersa and the Egyptians Mersaeans. Phut too founded Libya, naming its inhabitants Phutites after himself.
There is also a river in the land of the Moors bearing this name, and this is why most of the Greek historians can be found mentioning both this river and the region beside it, called Phute. But the name that now belongs to it has changed, taken from the sons of Mesraim, called Libys; I will explain shortly the reason it also came to be called Africa. Canaan, the fourth son of Ham, settled the land now called Judea and named it Canaan after himself. From these came further sons: Chus had six sons, of whom Sabas founded the Sabaeans, Evilas founded the Evilaeans, now called the Gaetulians, Sabathes founded the Sabathenians, called Astaboreans by the Greeks; Sabactas also founded the Sabactenians.
Ramos settled the Ramaeans and had two sons: Judadas, who settled the Judadaeans, an Ethiopian people in the west, and left them named after himself, and Sabaeus, who settled the Sabaeans. Nimrod, son of Chus, remained among the Babylonians and made himself their tyrant, as I have already shown. Of the eight sons of Mesraim, all together took possession of the land from Gaza to Egypt, though only the name of Philistinus survived for the country: the Greeks call his portion Palestine. Of the others — Loumaeus, Anamia, and Labim, who alone settled in Libya and likewise named the country after himself, and Nedem, Pethrosim, Chesloim, and Chephthom — we know nothing beyond their names, for the Ethiopian war, which I will describe later, uprooted their cities.
Canaan too had sons: Sidonius, who founded a city named after himself in Phoenicia, called Sidon by the Greeks; Amathus, who settled Amathus, still called Amathe by the natives today, though the Macedonians renamed it Epiphaneia after one of their successors; Arudaeus, who held the island of Aradus; and Arucaeus, who held Arce in Lebanon. Of the remaining seven — the Hivite, the Hittite, the Jebusite, the Amorite, the Girgashite, the Sinite, and the Samarite — we have nothing but their names from the sacred books, for the Hebrews destroyed their cities, and this came about through a disaster of the following kind.
After the flood, once the earth had returned to its natural state, Noah turned to farming, and having planted it with vines, when in due season the fruit had ripened and he had gathered the harvest and the wine was ready for use, he offered sacrifice and was making merry. Overcome by drink, he fell into sleep and lay uncovered, in an unseemly posture. His youngest son saw him and, laughing, pointed him out to his brothers, but they covered their father. When Noah learned of it, he prayed for prosperity on his other sons, but on Ham — because of their kinship — he did not himself pronounce a curse; instead he cursed Ham's descendants. So while the others escaped the curse, God pursued Canaan's sons for it. Of this we will speak further in what follows.
To Shem, the third of Noah's sons, five sons were born, who settled Asia as far as the Indian Ocean, beginning from the Euphrates. Elam left behind the Elamites, the ancestors of the Persians. Assouras founded the city of Nineveh and named his subjects Assyrians, who prospered above all others. Arphaxad named those now called Chaldaeans after himself, the Arphaxadaeans, having ruled over them. Aram held the Aramaeans, whom the Greeks call Syrians. Those now called Lydians, then called Ludians, were founded by Ludas. Of Aram's four sons, Uz founded Trachonitis and Damascus, which lies between Palestine and Coele-Syria; Ul founded Armenia; Gether founded the Bactrians; and Mash founded the Mashanaeans, called Spasinu Charax in modern times.
To Arphaxad was born a son, Shelah, and to him Eber, from whom the Jews were originally called Hebrews. Eber had two sons, Joktan and Peleg. Peleg was so named because he was born at the time of the division of dwelling-places, for the Hebrews call division "phalec." Joktan's sons, the sons of Eber, were Elmodad, Saleph, Azermoth, Eirae, Edoram, Uzal, Dacla, Ebal, Abimael, Saphas, Ophir, Euilas, and Jobab; these inhabit the region from the Cophen river in India to the neighboring Seria. So much, then, for the sons of Shem. Now I will turn to the Hebrews.
To Peleg, son of Eber, was born a son, Reu; to him, Serug, to whom Nahor was born as a son; to him, Terah, who became the father of Abram, the tenth generation from Noah, born in the two hundred and ninety-second year after the flood. Terah fathered Abram in his seventieth year; Nahor fathered Terah when he himself was already one hundred and twenty years old; Serug was born to Nahor around the hundred and thirty-second year; Reu fathered Serug at one hundred and thirty years of age; in the same years Peleg also had Reu; Eber, at one hundred and thirty-four years, fathered Peleg, having himself been fathered by Salah when Salah was one hundred and thirty, and Salah had been begotten by Arphaxad in his hundred and thirty-fifth year; Arphaxad was Shem's son, born twelve years after the flood.
Abram had brothers, Nahor and Haran. Of these, Haran, leaving behind a son, Lot, and daughters, Sarah and Milcah, died among the Chaldaeans in a city called Ur of the Chaldaeans, and his tomb is shown there to this day. His nieces were married by his brothers: Nahor married Milcah, Abram married Sarah. Because Terah had come to hate Chaldaea on account of his grief for Haran, the whole family moved to Haran in Mesopotamia, where Terah also died and was buried, having lived two hundred and five years; for by now the span of human life was already being cut short, growing briefer and briefer down to the birth of Moses, after whom the limit of life was set at one hundred and twenty years, God having fixed it at exactly the span that Moses himself came to live.
Now Nahor had eight sons by Milcah: Uz, Buz, Kemuel, Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethuel; these were Nahor's legitimate sons, for Tebah, Gaham, Tahash, and Maacah were born to him by his concubine Reumah. To Bethuel, one of Nahor's legitimate sons, were born a daughter, Rebekah, and a son, Laban.
Abram took Lot, the son of his brother Haran and the brother of his own wife Sarah, as an adopted son, having no legitimate child of his own, and left Chaldaea at the age of seventy-five, at God's command, to move into Canaan. There he settled and left it to his descendants — a man skilled in understanding all things and persuasive to those who heard him, unerring in whatever he conjectured. For this reason, having begun to think more highly of virtue than others did, he resolved to reform and change the prevailing opinion about God that everyone then held.
He was thus the first to dare to declare that God is the one creator of all things, and that whatever else contributes to human welfare does so by his command, each thing supplying its share not by its own inherent power. He inferred this from the changes that befall the land and sea, and from all that happens to the sun, the moon, and everything in the heavens: for if these bodies had power of their own, they would surely provide for their own good order, but since they plainly lack this, it is clear that whatever service they render us for our benefit, they render not by their own authority but by the power of the one who commands them — to whom alone it is right to render honor and thanksgiving.
For these views the Chaldaeans and the other people of Mesopotamia rose up against him, and he resolved to emigrate; by the will and with the help of God he took possession of the land of Canaan. There he settled, built an altar, and offered sacrifice to God.
Our father Abram is mentioned by Berosus, though not by name, in these words: "After the flood, in the tenth generation, there lived among the Chaldaeans a certain righteous man, great and skilled in the things of heaven." Hecataeus has done more than merely mention him, for he composed and left behind a book about him. Nicolaus of Damascus, in the fourth book of his Histories, writes as follows: "Abrames reigned as king, an immigrant who arrived with an army from the land above Babylon called the land of the Chaldaeans. Not long afterward he moved on from that country as well, together with his people, into the land then called Canaan but now Judaea, and his descendants there multiplied greatly — of whom I shall give a full account in another work. Even now the name of Abram is honored in the region of Damascus, and a village is pointed out, named after him, called the Dwelling of Abram."
When famine later struck Judaea, Abram, learning that the Egyptians were prospering, was eager to move among them, both to share in their abundance and to hear what their priests said about the gods — intending either to follow them, if they were found to hold better views, or, being himself of sounder judgment, to bring them over to something better. Taking Sarah with him, and fearing the Egyptians' notorious passion for other men's wives, lest the king should kill him because of his wife's beauty, he devised the following scheme: he pretended to be her brother, and taught her to play along, since it would be to their advantage.
When they arrived in Egypt, things turned out for Abram just as he had suspected: the beauty of his wife was quickly reported abroad, so that Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, not content with what was said of her but eager to see for himself, was on the point of laying hands on Sarah. But God thwarted his unjust desire with sickness and civil disorder; and when he sacrificed to learn how to be rid of it, the priests declared, in accordance with God's anger, that the affliction was upon him because of his wish to violate the wife of a stranger.
Frightened, he questioned Sarah as to who she was and whom she had brought with her, and on learning the truth he begged Abram's pardon; for, thinking her only a sister and not a wife, he had been eager to form a marriage connection with her, not moved by lustful desire to violate her. He presented Abram with great wealth and admitted him into the company of the most learned Egyptians, and from this his reputation for virtue became even more distinguished.
For the Egyptians, being pleased with differing customs and disparaging one another's practices, were consequently ill-disposed toward each other. Abram, meeting with each group and refuting the arguments they made for their own views, showed them to be empty and containing nothing true. Admired by them in these discussions as a man of the greatest understanding, skilled not only in grasping but in persuading others of whatever he undertook to teach, he shared with them the science of arithmetic and passed on to them the knowledge of astronomy — for before Abram's arrival the Egyptians were ignorant of these things, which traveled to Egypt from the Chaldaeans, and from there passed on to the Greeks.
When he came into Canaan, he divided the land with Lot, since their shepherds quarreled over the pasturage; the choice, however, he left to Lot. Abram himself took the hill country left over by Lot's choice and settled in the city of Nabro, which is older than Tanis in Egypt by seven years. Lot took the land lying toward the plain, by the river Jordan, not far from the city of the Sodomites, which was then fertile but is now destroyed by the will of God — the reason for which I will explain in its proper place.
At that time, while the Assyrians held sway over Asia, the Sodomites were flourishing, both in wealth and in a large population of young men. Five kings ruled the country: Bala, Balaias, Sennabar, Symmoboros, and the king of the Balenites, each governing his own portion. The Assyrians marched against them, dividing their army into four parts, and besieged them, each division under its own commander. A battle was fought, the Assyrians won, and they imposed tribute on the kings of the Sodomites. For twelve years the Sodomites remained subject, paying the tribute imposed on them, but in the thirteenth year they rebelled, and an Assyrian army crossed against them under the commanders Amaraphel, Arioch, Chedorlaomer, and Thadal.
These plundered the whole of Syria and destroyed the descendants of the giants, and, reaching Sodom, encamped in the valley called the Pits of Bitumen — for there were pits there at that time, though now, since the city of the Sodomites has vanished, that valley has become the lake called Asphaltitis, of which I will speak again shortly. When the Sodomites engaged the Assyrians and a hard-fought battle followed, many of them were killed and the rest were taken captive, and among them Lot was led away, having come as an ally of the Sodomites.
When Abram heard of their disaster, fear for his kinsman Lot came over him, together with pity for the Sodomites, who were his friends and neighbors. Resolving to help them, he did not delay, but pressed on and, falling on the Assyrians by night on the fifth day near Dan — for so the other source of the Jordan is called — and catching them before they could arm, he killed those who were in their beds, having no warning of the disaster, while those who had not yet gone to sleep, unable to fight because of drunkenness, fled. Abram pursued them and drove them, by the second day, all the way to Hoba in the territory of Damascus, showing that victory does not lie in numbers and multitude of hands, but that the eagerness and courage of the fighters prevail over any number — for he overcame so great an army with three hundred and eighteen of his own servants and three friends.
As many of them as escaped fled home in disgrace. Abram, having saved the captive Sodomites, who had been taken by the Assyrians before he arrived, and his kinsman Lot, turned back in peace. The king of the Sodomites met him at a certain place called the King's Plain, where Melchizedek, king of Solyma, received him — the name means "righteous king"; and such he was by common consent, so much so that for this reason he was also made priest of God. He later called Solyma Jerusalem. This Melchizedek supplied Abram's army with hospitality and provided a great abundance of provisions, and during the feast he began to praise him and to bless God for having delivered his enemies into his hands.
When Abram offered him a tenth of the spoils, he accepted the gift. The king of the Sodomites urged Abram to keep the spoils but asked to have the people back, his own countrymen whom Abram had rescued from the Assyrians. Abram said he would not do this, nor would he take any further profit from that plunder beyond what served as food for the men who had marched with him.
for his household. He did, however, give a share to the friends who had campaigned with him, of whom the first was called Eschol, and the others Enner and Mambre. God, praising Abram's virtue, said, "You will not lose the rewards you deserve for such good conduct." When Abram answered by asking what gratification such rewards could bring him, since he had no one to succeed him — for he was still childless — God announced that a son would be born to him, and a great progeny after him, so numerous that it would match the stars in number. On hearing this, Abram, as God commanded, offered a sacrifice. The manner of the sacrifice was this: he divided, at God's command, a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old goat, and a three-year-old ram alike, and a turtledove and a pigeon, but he did not divide the birds. Then, before the altar was set up, birds of prey swooped down eager for the blood, and a divine voice was heard foretelling that his descendants would be evil neighbors' subjects for four hundred years in Egypt, but that after suffering hardship there they would overcome their enemies, and, prevailing in war over the Canaanites, would possess their land and their cities.
Abram was living near the oak called Ogyges — the place is in Canaan, not far from the city of the Hebronites — and, distressed that his wife had no child, he begged God to grant him offspring, a son. When God urged him to take courage, promising that all else would go well for him, as it had since he was led out of Mesopotamia for his good, and that children would be born to him, Sarah, at God's bidding, gave one of her maidservants, an Egyptian named Hagar, to Abram so that he might father a child by her. But once she had conceived, the maidservant dared to insult Sarah insolently, acting as if she would become mistress herself, on the assumption that authority would pass to the child she was to bear. When Abram handed her over to Sarah for punishment, Hagar, unable to bear the harsh treatment, plotted to run away, and begged God to take pity on her.
As she made her way through the desert, a divine angel met her and told her to return to her masters, for if she showed good sense she would attain a better life; even now, he said, her arrogant and stubborn treatment of her mistress had brought these troubles upon her — if she disobeyed God and pressed further on, she would perish, but if she went back, she would become the mother of a son who would rule that land. Persuaded by this, she returned to her masters and was forgiven. Not long after she bore Ishmael, a name one might render "heard by God," because God had listened to her plea. Abram was already eighty-six years old when this son was born to him; and when he had passed his ninety-ninth year, God appeared to him and announced that he would have a son by Sarah as well. God commanded him to call the boy Isaac, and declared that great nations and kings would spring from him, and that after wars they would possess the whole of Canaan from Sidon to Egypt. God further ordered — wishing that his line should remain unmixed with others — that they circumcise their private parts, and that this be done on the eighth day after birth. I will explain the reason for our circumcision elsewhere.
When Abram inquired also about Ishmael, whether he would live, God indicated that he would live long and become the father of great nations. Abram, giving thanks to God for these things, was circumcised at once, along with all the members of his household and his son Ishmael, who was then thirteen years old, while Abram himself was ninety-nine.
At about this time the people of Sodom, arrogant because of their numbers and the greatness of their wealth, became insolent toward men and impious toward God, so much so that they no longer remembered the benefits they had received from him; they grew hateful of strangers and shunned association with others. Angered at this, God resolved to punish them for their arrogance, to raze their city, and to devastate the land so completely that it would never again put forth so much as a plant or a fruit.
When God had made this decision concerning the Sodomites, Abram, seeing three angels, was sitting by the oak of Mambre near the gate of his own courtyard; taking them for strangers, he rose, greeted them, and, when they had come in to him, urged them to accept his hospitality. When they consented, he at once ordered loaves to be made from fine flour, and, slaughtering and roasting a calf, brought it to them as they reclined beneath the oak. They pretended to eat, and then asked about his wife, where Sarah might be. When he told them she was inside, they said that when they returned they would find her already a mother. At this the woman smiled and said that childbearing was impossible for her, since she was ninety years old and her husband a hundred. At that they no longer concealed themselves, but revealed that they were angels of God, and that one had been sent to announce the birth of the child, the other two to overthrow the Sodomites.
On hearing this, Abram grieved for the Sodomites, and rose and pleaded with God, begging him not to destroy the righteous and good along with the wicked. God replied that there was no good man among the Sodomites — for if there were ten among them, he would forgive them all the punishment due for their sins — and Abram fell silent. The angels then arrived in the city of the Sodomites, and Lot invited them to be his guests, for he was exceedingly kind to strangers, having learned this from Abram's own generosity. But the Sodomites, seeing the young men remarkably handsome in appearance and lodged with Lot, turned to violence and outrage against their beauty. When Lot urged them to restrain themselves and not proceed to shame his guests, but to respect the honor of his household, and said that if their desire was so uncontrollable, he would give them his daughters instead, still they would not be persuaded.
God, then, enraged at their outrages, struck them blind, so that they could not find the entrance to the house, and condemned the Sodomites to a universal destruction. Lot, having been told by God of the coming ruin of the Sodomites, took his wife and his daughters — two of whom were still unmarried, for the suitors had scorned the warning to leave, dismissing what Lot told them as foolishness — and departed. God then hurled a bolt upon the city and, with a like conflagration, burned it to the ground along with its inhabitants, obliterating the land, as I have already related earlier when writing of the Jewish War. Lot's wife, however, as they withdrew, kept turning back to look at the city and, meddling with matters God had forbidden her to concern herself with, was turned into a pillar of salt. I have seen it myself, for it still remains to this day.
Lot himself escaped with his daughters to a small district spared by the fire, still called Zoar to this day — for that is what the Hebrews call "a small thing." There he lived out a wretched existence, deprived of human company and short of food. His daughters, supposing that all mankind had been destroyed, took care to lie with their father unnoticed; they did this so that their family line should not die out. Sons were born: to the elder, Moab, whose name one might render "from his father"; the younger bore Ammon, whose name signifies "son of the people." From them are founded the Moabites, still today a very great nation, and the Ammonites founded by the other; both peoples belong to Coele-Syria. Such, then, was the outcome of Lot's departure from the Sodomites.
Abram meanwhile moved to Gerar in Palestine, bringing Sarah along in the guise of his sister, playing the same part as before out of fear, for he was afraid of Abimelech, the king of that region, who himself, falling in love with Sarah, was prepared to violate her. He was kept from his desire by a severe illness God sent upon him, and when the physicians had given him up for lost, he fell asleep and saw in a dream that he must do the stranger's wife no wrong. Recovering somewhat, he told his friends that God had inflicted this illness upon him in order to avenge the stranger by keeping his wife unmolested — for she was not, in fact, his sister, but his wife bound to him by law — and he promised that he would treat him kindly from then on, now that his fears for his wife had been removed. Having said this, he sent for Abram, on his friends' advice, and told him he need fear nothing further concerning his wife, as though she would suffer any dishonor, for God was watching over him, and in keeping with their bond of friendship he would receive her back unmolested.
Since God was witness, and his wife's conscience as well, Abimelech said he would never have desired her at all had he known she was a married woman, since he had taken her only supposing her to be a sister — a wrong he had not, in fact, committed. He urged Abram to bear him no ill will and to make God favorable toward him, and said that if Abram wished to remain with him he would want for nothing, while if he chose to leave he would be given an escort and everything he might need on his journey. To this Abram replied that he had not lied about his wife's kinship, for she was in truth the daughter of his brother, and that without such a pretense he could not have supposed his stay safe. As for the illness, he said, he had not caused it, though he had been eager for Abimelech's recovery, and he declared himself ready to remain with him. So Abimelech shared with him both land and wealth, and they agreed to deal with one another without deceit, swearing their oath over a well, which they called Beersheba — "the well of the oath" — a name it still bears among the people of that region to this day.
Not long afterward a son was born to Abram by Sarah, just as God had foretold him, whom he named Isaac, meaning "laughter" — for Sarah had smiled when God said she would bear a child, not expecting to give birth at her advanced age. She was ninety years old, and Abram a hundred. The child was born to them both in their final years, and they circumcised him at once on the eighth day, and from that time the Jews have kept the custom of performing circumcision after that same number of days, while the Arabs do so after the thirteenth year — for Ishmael, the founder of their nation, born to Abram by his concubine, was circumcised at that age; concerning him I shall set out the whole account with great care.
As for Ishmael, born to her slave Hagar, Sarah at first loved him no less than a mother loves her own son, for he was being raised with a view to succeeding to the headship of the family; but once she herself had borne Isaac, she thought it wrong that Ishmael, being older and capable of doing harm, should be raised alongside him once their father was dead. She therefore urged Abram to send him away, with his mother, to settle elsewhere. At first he would not agree to what Sarah was so intent upon, thinking it the cruelest thing of all to send away an infant child and a woman without means of support. Later, however, since God too was pleased with what Sarah proposed, he yielded and handed Ishmael over to his mother, the boy not yet able to travel on his own, and told her to take water in a skin and bread and go, guided only by necessity. As she went, her supplies ran out and she was in distress; when the water failed, she laid the child, gasping for breath, beneath a fir tree, so as not to be present when his soul departed, and went on further off. A divine angel met her and pointed out a spring nearby, and told her to look after the boy's upbringing, for great blessings awaited her through Ishmael's survival. She took courage at this promise, and, falling in with shepherds, escaped her hardships through their care.
When the boy had grown to manhood, he took a wife of Egyptian stock, from where his mother herself originally came, and by her twelve sons were born to Ishmael: Nabaioth, Kedar, Abdeel, Massam, Masmas, Idumas, Masmes, Chodam, Theman, Jetur, Naphes, and Kedmas. These occupy the whole region reaching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea, which they named Nabatene. It is they who give their name to the Arab nation and its tribes, both for their virtue and for the honor of Abram.
As for Isaac, his father Abram loved him above all things, being his only son and a gift granted him by God in his old age; and the boy himself invited still greater affection and love from his parents by pursuing every virtue, devoted to caring for them and zealous in the worship of God. Abram placed his own happiness in nothing but leaving his son unharmed when he departed this life. This, however, was not to be granted him according to his own wish, for God, wanting to test his devotion, appeared to him, and, after listing all the blessings he had bestowed upon him — how he had made him superior to his enemies, how his present prosperity, and his son Isaac too, had come to him through God's own care — asked that Isaac be given to him as an offering and a sacrificial victim, commanding that he lead him up to Mount Moriah and, building an altar there, burn him as a whole offering. In this way, God said, Abram would demonstrate his devotion, if he valued what was pleasing to God above even the life of his child.
Abram, judging it wrong to disobey God in anything, and holding that all things that come to those he favors happen through his providence, concealed from his wife both God's command and his own resolve concerning the sacrifice of the boy, and told none of his servants either, for he would have been hindered from carrying out God's service. Taking Isaac with two servants, and loading a donkey with what was needed for the sacrifice, he set out toward the mountain. For two days the servants traveled with him, but on the third, when the mountain came into view, he left his companions in the plain and went on with the boy alone to the mountain on which King David later built the temple. He carried...
and everything else needed for the sacrifice, except the victim. Isaac was twenty-five years old, and as he was building the altar he asked what they meant to sacrifice, since no victim was at hand. Abraham told him that God would provide one, since God was able to supply men with abundance even from what did not exist, and to take away what did exist from those who trusted in it.
So God, he said, would give a victim even to Isaac himself, if he meant to be present at the sacrifice with favor. When the altar was ready, and Abraham had brought up the wood and everything was prepared, he said to his son: "My child, I asked for you with countless prayers from God, and since you came into the world there is nothing I have not lavished on your upbringing, nor anything
by which I thought I would be happier than to see you grown to manhood and, when I died, to leave you as heir of my rule. But since I became your father by God's will, and since it is again his pleasure that I give you back, bear your consecration nobly. For I yield you to God, who has judged himself worthy of this honor from us in return for the favor he has shown me as ally and helper
in everything I have achieved until now. Since you were born only to die not in the common way of life, but sent ahead by your own father's hand as a sacrifice to God, the father of all, by the law of sacrifice, I think it right that you, whom he has judged worthy, should be released from life neither by sickness nor by war nor by any of the other misfortunes that commonly befall men, but should pass, amid prayers and sacred rites, into the hands of that God who will receive your soul
and keep it by himself. You will be to me a guardian and comfort in old age — that is why I raised you with such special care — since I offer you to God in place of yourself." Isaac, being the son of such a father, was bound to have a noble spirit to match, and he received these words with joy. He said it would not have been right for him even to have been born at all, if he meant to reject the judgment of both God and his father, and refuse
to offer himself readily to the will of them both, when even the will of his father alone, had it been the only one urging this, would have made disobedience unjust. So he rushed to the altar and to the slaughter. And the deed would have been carried out, had not God himself stood in the way. For he called out Abraham by name, crying aloud, and stopped him from slaying his son. God, he said, had not commanded the sacrifice of his son out of any desire for human blood,
nor because he wished, having made Abraham a father, to rob him of his son through such an act of impiety, but because he wished to test his disposition, to see whether even under such a command he would obey. Now that he had learned Abraham's eagerness and the depth of his devotion, he was pleased with what Abraham had offered him, and would never fail him or his descendants in every care; his son would live to a very great age,
live in happiness, and hand down a great dominion to good and legitimate children. God foretold, too, that their line would grow into many nations and increase in wealth, that an eternal memory of them would remain with the founders of those nations, and that once they had conquered Canaan by arms they would be the envy of all mankind. Having said this, God brought forth a ram out of nowhere for them to sacrifice. And they, beyond all hope
having recovered the boy and having heard the promise of such blessings, embraced one another, and after the sacrifice returned to Sarah and lived happily in all that they desired, since God worked with them in everything. Not long afterward Sarah died, having lived one hundred and twenty-seven years. They buried her at Hebron, the Canaanites consenting and even publicly heaping up her tomb,
though Abraham bought the plot for four hundred shekels from a certain Ephron of Hebron. There Abraham and his descendants built their family tombs. Later Abraham married Keturah, by whom he had six sons, sturdy in labor and quick of understanding: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. These too had children.
To Shuah were born Sabak and Dadan; to Dadan, Latusim, Assurim, and Luurim. To Medan were born Epher, Ophren, Hanoch, Abida, and Eldaah. For all these sons and grandsons Abraham arranged expeditions of colonists, and they occupied the Troglodyte country and the parts of Arabia Felix that reach to the Red Sea. It is said that this Ophren made war on Libya and took possession of it,
and that his grandsons, settling there, named the land Africa after him. My account is confirmed by Alexander Polyhistor, who writes as follows: "Cleodemus the prophet, also called Malchus, who wrote a history of the Jews, in agreement with Moses their lawgiver, says that Abraham had many sons by Keturah," and he names
three of them: Japhran, Sures, and Japhres. From Sures, he says, Assyria took its name, and from the other two, Japhras and Japher, the city of Ephra and the country of Africa were named. These men, he says, fought alongside Heracles against Libya and Antaeus, and Heracles, marrying the daughter of Japhran, had a son by her named Diodorus, from whom was born Sophon, from whom
the barbarians are called Sophaces. When Isaac was about forty years old, his father Abraham resolved that he should marry, and sent the eldest of his servants to court Rebecca, daughter of Bethuel, the son of Abraham's brother Nahor, binding him with solemn oaths. The oaths were taken in this manner: each placed his hand under the other's thigh, and then they called God to witness what was to come. Abraham also sent
gifts for those in that country, since such things were rare, or wholly unknown, there. Setting out, the servant, because Mesopotamia was hard to travel — in winter from the depth of mud, in summer from lack of water, and also because of bands of robbers there, which travelers could not escape unless they were on guard against them — came at length to the city of Haran, and finding himself in
the outskirts, he met a number of young women going to draw water. He prayed to God that Rebecca, whom Abraham had sent him to court for his son, might, if this marriage was to be accomplished as Abraham wished, be found among them and be made known to him in this way: that when he asked the others for a drink they would refuse, but she would give it to him. With this thought in mind he went to the
well, and asked the young women to give him a drink. When the others turned away, saying they needed the water for their own households and could not spare it for him — for indeed the water was not easily drawn — one of them all rebuked the others for their unkindness to the stranger, saying that they could never share anything with other men if they would not even share water with him, and gave it to him kindly.
He, now full of hope for everything, but wishing to learn the truth, praised her for her noble birth and her kindness, since she had not shrunk even from personal effort to help one in need, and asked whose daughter she was, and prayed that her parents might have joy of so fine a child, and that she might be married, he said, as would delight them, into the household of a good man, to bear him legitimate
children. She did not begrudge him this knowledge either, but told him her family as well: "I am called Rebecca," she said, "and my father was Bethuel; but he is now dead, and Laban is my brother, who together with our mother looks after the whole household and watches over my maidenhood." Hearing this, the servant rejoiced at what had happened and
at what had been said, seeing that God had so plainly favored his journey, and bringing out a necklace and some ornaments, such as are fitting for young women to wear, he gave them to the girl as a reward and gift for the kindness she had shown him in giving him drink, saying it was only right that she, who had proved herself good beyond so many other maidens, should receive such things. He also asked to be lodged with her family, since the night
was already taking from him the chance to travel farther, and, presenting the costly women's ornaments he carried, he said he trusted them no less securely than those to whom he had already given proof of himself. He said he could infer, too, the kindness of her mother and brother from her own character, and that they would not be displeased by it, and that he would not be a burden, since he would pay for their hospitality and use his own means for his expenses. She, as to the kindness of her
parents, told him he had guessed rightly, but reproached him for supposing them so mean-spirited, since they would share everything without payment. She told her brother Laban first, however, and only then, with his consent, said she would bring the stranger home. When this had been arranged, she led the stranger in; Laban's servants took charge of his camels and cared for them, while he himself was brought in to dine with them, and after dinner he said to
the girl's mother: "Abraham is the son of Terah and your kinsman; for Nahor, the grandfather of these children, was Abraham's brother, of the same father and the same mother. He has sent me to you, asking that you give this girl in marriage to his son, who is his legitimate son and the only one he has raised as heir to everything he owns.
Though it was in his power to take the wealthiest of the women there, he did not think it right to marry her, but honoring his own family he has arranged this match instead. Do not scorn his eagerness and his choice, for by God's will everything else has met me on my journey, and I have found this girl and your household. For when I came near the city, I saw
many young women coming to the well, and I prayed that I might chance upon this one — and so it has happened. Confirm, then, this marriage, brought about as it was by a divine sign, and honor Abraham, who has sent me with such earnestness, by consenting to give the girl." They, since the proposal was good and welcome to them, understood it to be the will of God, and gave over the daughter on the terms he asked.
Isaac married her once the matter had come to him, for the sons of Keturah had already gone out to their colonies. Not long after, Abraham also died, a man supreme in every virtue and honored by God as his devotion to Him deserved. He lived in all one hundred and seventy-five years, and was buried at Hebron alongside his wife
Sarah, by his sons Isaac and Ishmael. After Abraham's death, Isaac's wife conceived, and as her womb grew larger she became distressed and inquired of God. He told her that Rebecca would bear twins, that the children would give their names to nations, and that the one who seemed the lesser would come before the greater. Soon afterward, in fulfillment
of God's prediction, twin children were born to her, of whom the elder was unusually hairy from head to foot, while the younger, as he came forth, held onto his brother's heel. The father loved the elder, called Esau after his hairiness — for the Hebrews call hair "esaur" — while Jacob, the younger, was dear to his mother. When famine
struck the land, Isaac resolved to go down to Egypt, since that country was fertile, but at God's command he went instead to Gerar. There King Abimelech received him as a guest and friend, out of regard for his friendship with Abraham, and showed him much goodwill at first, but was prevented, out of jealousy, from letting him remain there entirely. For seeing that God was with Isaac and
favoring him with such great care, he drove him away. Isaac, having experienced this second reversal from the envious Abimelech, withdrew for a time to a place called the Valley, not far from Gerar; but while he was digging a well there, shepherds fell upon him and fought to stop the work, and since he did not wish to contend with them, they seemed to have prevailed. He withdrew and dug another well, and when other
shepherds of Abimelech's again used force, he abandoned that one too and withdrew, wisely securing his own safety. Then, when the digging of a well was at last left unhindered, he named it Rehoboth, a name that means "wide space." Of the earlier wells, one was called Esek, which one might render "strife," and the other Sitnah, meaning "enmity." Isaac's power now grew
through the greatness of his affairs, and Abimelech, thinking Isaac was growing strong at his expense — their living together having already grown suspicious, though without open hostility, until Isaac withdrew — feared that his earlier friendship with Isaac would be of no use to him in defending against retaliation for what had been done, and so made a fresh alliance with him, bringing along one of his generals, Phicol. Having obtained everything
he asked, on account of Isaac's kindness — Isaac preferring an older favor to a fresh grievance, one shown to both himself and his father — Abimelech departed for his own country. Of Isaac's sons, Esau, whom his father favored above all, at the age of forty married Adah, daughter of Elon, and Aholibamah, daughter of Beeri, both leading men among the Canaanites, taking full authority over his own marriage
and consulting his father not at all — for Isaac would never have permitted it, had his opinion been asked, since it gave him no pleasure to form a family connection with the natives of the land. But not wishing to alienate his son, he refrained from ordering him to give up the women, and chose instead to stay silent. When he had grown old, and had lost his sight entirely, he called Esau to him, and
speaking of his old age, said that even apart from his blindness and the affliction of his eyes it kept him from serving God as he wished, and he bade him go out hunting and, having caught whatever game he could, prepare a meal for him, so that afterward he might entreat God to be his ally and helper throughout the rest of his life, saying he did not know when he would die, and wished, before
that time came, to have God grant him this through prayers offered on his behalf. So Esau set out for the hunt. But Rebecca, wishing God's favor to fall on Jacob, and against Isaac's wishes, told Jacob to slaughter some kids and prepare a meal. Jacob obeyed his mother in everything, having learned all this from her; and when
When the meal was ready, Jacob wrapped his arm in the skin of a kid, so that his father would believe from the roughness that he was Esau — for though he resembled his brother in everything else, being his twin, in this alone did they differ. Fearing that if he were caught cheating before the blessings were given, he would provoke his father to do the opposite, he brought the meal to his father.
Isaac, noticing the peculiar quality of his voice, called his son to him. When Jacob held out his arm, wrapped in the goatskin, Isaac felt it and said, "Your voice sounds like Jacob's, but by the thickness of the hair you seem to me to be Esau." Suspecting no trickery, he ate the meal and turned to prayer and supplication to God, saying: "Master of every age and creator of all being, you granted my father great strength in blessings, and you judged me worthy of what I now enjoy, and you promised those born from me that you would always be their kindly helper and the giver of still greater goods. Confirm these promises, then, and do not overlook me because of my present weakness — which makes me plead with you all the more — and in your kindness keep this son of mine safe, and guard him untouched by every evil, granting him a happy life and possession of goods, as many as lie within your power to give, and make him a source of fear to his enemies but honored and cherished by his friends."
While he thought he was praying for Esau, he made these petitions to God. He had just finished when Esau arrived from the hunt. Isaac, realizing the mistake, kept silent, but Esau demanded to receive from his father blessings equal to his brother's. When his father refused, since he had spent all his blessings on Jacob, Esau grieved bitterly over the mistake. Moved by his son's tears, his father declared that he would win renown in hunting and bodily strength, in arms and in every undertaking, and would reap glory from these for all ages, and so would his descendants after him — but he would be subject to his brother.
Jacob, fearing that his brother wished to take revenge on him for the mistake over the blessings, was rescued by his mother: she persuaded her husband to take Jacob to Mesopotamia to marry a kinswoman there. For Esau had already taken Ishmael's daughter Basemath to wife, since Isaac's household bore no goodwill toward the Canaanites; so, being displeased at his son's earlier marriages, and wishing to please them, Isaac took Basemath in especially warmly.
Jacob, sent off by his mother to Mesopotamia to marry the daughter of Laban, her brother — Isaac having permitted the marriage out of deference to his wife's wishes — traveled through Canaan, and because of his hatred for the local people he refused to lodge with any of them, but camped in the open, gathering stones together to rest his head on. In his sleep he saw such a vision appear before him: he seemed to see a ladder reaching from the earth to the sky, and figures descending by it more majestic than human nature allows, and finally, above it, God himself appeared to him clearly, calling him by name and speaking these words:
"Jacob, it was not fitting for the son of a good father, and the grandson of one who won great renown for virtue, to be discouraged by present circumstances, but rather to hope for better things; for an abundance of great goods awaits you in every respect, through my assistance. For I brought Abram here from Mesopotamia when he was being driven out by his kinsmen, and I made your father prosperous; and I will grant you a portion no less than theirs. Take courage, then, and continue on this journey with me as your escort; the marriage you are eager for will be accomplished, and good children will be born to you, and their number will surpass counting, and they will leave behind them still greater sons, to whom I give mastery of this land — to them and to their children, who will fill as much land and sea as the sun beholds. But fear no danger, and have no dread of the multitude of your labors, for I take thought for what will happen to you, both now and much more in time to come."
These things God foretold to Jacob. Overjoyed at what he had seen and heard, he anointed the stones, since so great a promise of good things had been made over them, and he vowed to sacrifice on them if he should return safely after acquiring a livelihood, and to offer God a tenth of what he had gained if he arrived there in this way. He judged the place worthy of honor and named it Bethel, which in the Greek tongue signifies "house of God."
Continuing on toward Mesopotamia, in time he arrived at Haran, and finding shepherds in the outskirts with young men and young women gathered around a well, he stayed with them, since he needed water to drink, and falling into conversation with them he asked whether they happened to know a certain Laban still living among them. They all said they knew him, for he was not a man to go unnoticed, and that his daughter tended flocks together with them, and they wondered that she had not yet arrived; for from her he could learn more precisely whatever he wished to hear about them. While they were still speaking, the girl arrived with the shepherds coming down after her. They pointed Jacob out to her, saying that this stranger had come asking about her father. She, delighted with childlike simplicity at his presence, asked him who he was, where he had come from to them, and by what need he had been brought, and said she hoped it might be in their power to supply whatever he had come needing.
Jacob, moved not by kinship or the goodwill it inspired, but overcome by love for the girl, and struck by her beauty when he saw how she was formed — such as few women of that time possessed — said: "But between me and you, and your father, if indeed you are Laban's daughter, there is a kinship older than either your birth or mine. For Abram and Arran and Nahor were sons of Terah, of whom Bethuel your grandfather is the son of Nahor, while Isaac my father is the son of Abram and of Sarah, daughter of Arran. Closer still, and more recent, is the bond of kinship we hold toward one another: Rebecca my mother is the daughter of the same father and mother as Laban your father, so you and I are cousins. And now I have come here to greet you and to renew the kinship that already exists between us." She, moved by memory — as tends to happen with the young — having already learned from her father about Rebecca, and knowing that her parents longed for word of her, burst into tears out of affection for her father and embraced Jacob. She said that bringing him home would be the most welcome and greatest pleasure to her father and to everyone in the household, since he was cherished in the memory of his sister and was her only remaining tie to her, and that he would prove worth every good thing to him. She urged him to come at once to her father and to follow her as she led the way, and not to deprive her of the greater part of her joy by delaying.
Having said this, she brought him to Laban, and once he was recognized by his uncle he felt no fear, being among friends, and gave them great pleasure by his unexpected appearance. Not many days later Laban said he rejoiced at his presence more than words could show, and asked the reason he had come, leaving behind an aged mother and father who needed his care — for he would supply him with everything and help him in every need. Jacob explained the whole reason to him, saying that Isaac had twin sons, himself and Esau, and that when Esau, through his mother's cunning on Jacob's behalf, was cheated of their father's blessings, he sought to kill him for having taken away the kingdom from God and the goods for which their father had prayed. This, he said, was the reason for his presence there, in obedience to his mother's instruction. "For to all of us brothers are brothers, and my mother values kinship even beyond what is due to them. Making you and God the defense of my journey, I take courage in my present circumstances."
Laban, for the sake of his ancestors and for his mother's sake, promised to share every kindness with him, and said he would show his goodwill toward her, absent though she was, through his care for Jacob; he said he would set him over the flocks and reward him with a share of their increase in place of wages, and that when he wished to return to his own family, he would send him back with gifts and with such honor as was fitting for so close a kinsman to receive. Jacob gladly accepted these terms and said he would willingly endure every labor while staying with him, for the sake of pleasing him, but asked as wages for this marriage to Rachel — both because she deserved honor from him for other reasons, and because she had been the means of his coming to him; for love of the girl had compelled him to raise the matter. Laban, delighted at this, agreed to the marriage, having wished for no better son-in-law to come along; he said he would grant it if Jacob would stay with him for a certain time, for he would not send his daughter off to the Canaanites — he already regretted the marriage connection made there through his sister. Jacob agreed to these terms and committed himself to seven years' time, for that was the period judged fit for him to serve his father-in-law, so that by giving proof of his worth he might be better known for what he was. Laban accepted the agreement, and when the time had passed he prepared the wedding feast. When night fell, without Jacob's suspecting anything, he brought in to him the other of his daughters, the elder of the two and not so fair to look on as Rachel. Jacob lay with her in drunkenness and darkness, and only realizing the wrong the next day, he charged Laban with injustice.
Laban begged pardon for the necessity that had made him act so, saying he had not given him Leah out of malice but had been overcome by a stronger obligation; that this, however, was no obstacle to his marriage to Rachel, but that he would give her to him, since he loved her, after another seven years. Jacob agreed, for his love for the girl allowed him to do nothing else, and when another seven years had passed he took Rachel. Each of the sisters had a maidservant given by their father — Zilpah to Leah, Bilhah to Rachel — not slaves, but subordinate to them.
Leah was tormented by her husband's love for her sister; she expected that if she bore children she would come to be honored, and she prayed to God continually. When a son was born, and because of this her husband turned toward her, she named the boy Reuben, because he had come to her through God's pity — for that is what the name signifies. Three more sons were born to them after a time: Simeon, whose name signifies that God had listened to her; then Levi, as it were a pledge of fellowship; after him Judah, which means thanksgiving. Rachel, fearing that because of her sister's fruitfulness she might receive a lesser share of her husband's favor, gave her own maidservant Bilhah to lie with Jacob. A child was born from her, Dan, whom some might call "God-judged" in the Greek tongue; and after him Naphtali, meaning "contriver," because of her rivalry against her sister's fruitfulness. Leah did the same thing against her sister's achievement, contriving in her turn; she gave her own maidservant, and from Zilpah was born a son, Gad, whom one might call "Fortune"; and after him Asher, which one might call "blessed," from the honor she gained through them.
When Reuben, Leah's eldest son, brought mandrake apples to his mother, Rachel saw them and asked to share in them, having conceived a longing for the fruit. When Leah refused, insisting that Rachel be satisfied, since she had taken from her the honor due from her husband, Rachel, softening her sister's anger, said she would yield her husband to her that evening, for him to sleep with her. Leah accepted the favor, and Jacob slept with Leah, granting Rachel's wish. Children were born to Leah again: Issachar, signifying the one born from wages; Zebulun, meaning pledged through the goodwill toward her; and a daughter, Dinah. Some time later Rachel too bore a son, Joseph, whose name signifies that something further would be added.
For all this time — twenty years — Jacob tended flocks for his father-in-law. After this he asked to take his wives and depart to his own home; but since his father-in-law would not agree, he planned to do it in secret. He tested his wives as to how they felt about the journey, and when they proved eager, Rachel also took the images of the gods, which it was customary for her to worship as ancestral, and joined in the flight together with her sister, along with the children of both and the maidservants with their sons, and whatever possessions they had. Jacob also took away half of the livestock, without Laban's knowledge beforehand. Rachel carried off the images of the gods, though Jacob had taught her to despise such honor paid to gods, so that if they were overtaken and pursued by her father, she might have something to which she could appeal for pardon.
Laban, learning the next day of Jacob's departure and grievously distressed over his daughters, pursued him with an armed force, pressing hard, and on the seventh day found them encamped on a hill. For the time being, since it was evening, he held back. But God, appearing to him in a dream, warned him, once he had overtaken his son-in-law and daughters, to remain calm and to venture nothing against them out of anger, but to make a truce with Jacob, saying that he himself would fight on Jacob's side if Laban, scorning his small numbers, should go against him in battle. Laban, having received such a warning, the next day invited Jacob to a conference and told him of the dream; and when Jacob had come to him, persuaded by it, Laban began to accuse him, charging that...
"He came to me poor and destitute of everything, and I took him in and gave him a full share of my own wealth. I even joined my daughters to him, thinking this would only increase the good will he bore us. But you have shown no respect for your own mother, to whom you are akin, nor for the wives you married, nor for the children of whom I am grandfather. You have treated me by the law of war, carrying off what is mine, persuading my daughters to run away from the father who bore them, and making off with the ancestral gods, honored by my forebears and by me held worthy of the same reverence they received. And this you have done—something not even men at war with their enemies would do—you, my own kinsman, son of my sister and husband of my daughters, a stranger and guest once welcomed at my own hearth."
When Laban had said this, Jacob defended himself, saying that it was not into himself alone but into all men that God had implanted a love of one's homeland, and that after so long a time it was only right that he should come down into it again. As for the plunder you charge me with, he said, you yourself would be found in the wrong by any other judge. For the flocks which you ought to be grateful to us for guarding, and which have grown larger under our care, you unjustly resent us for keeping even the small portion of them we hold. As for my daughters, know that they did not follow me because of any wrongdoing of mine, but out of the just devotion which wives naturally feel toward the men they live with—and it is not so much to me that they cling as to their own children.
This he said in his own defense, to show he had done no wrong; but he in turn brought his own accusation, charging that Laban, though his mother's brother and the man who had joined his daughters to him, had worn him down with harsh demands, keeping him in his service for a full twenty years. What Laban had done under the pretext of the marriages, hard as it was, he called the lighter part; worse still was what came after the marriages, and what an enemy would have fled from suffering. And indeed Laban had dealt very cunningly with Jacob: seeing that God favored him in whatever he set his hand to, Laban would promise to give him a share of what was born—sometimes agreeing it should be the white ones, sometimes the black ones among the offspring.
But as those born in Jacob's name grew numerous, Laban would not keep his word for the present flock, but kept promising to make it good the following year, since he coveted the great increase in wealth—making promises because it seemed unlikely such numbers could occur, then breaking faith once they did occur. As for the household gods, Laban ordered a search be made. When Laban had agreed to the search, Rachel, learning of it, hid the images in the saddlebag of the camel that was carrying her, and sat upon it, claiming that her monthly courses were troubling her. So Laban gave up any further search, never imagining his daughter would come near the images while in such a condition, and he made oaths to Jacob that he would bear no grudge for what had happened, and that Jacob for his part would cherish his daughters. And they sealed their pledges over
a certain range of hills, on which they set up a pillar in the shape of an altar—hence the height is called Galed, from which the region is still now called Gilead. After they had feasted upon the oaths, Laban set off homeward. As Jacob went on toward Canaan, apparitions met him foretelling good hopes for the future, and he named that place the Camp of God. Wishing to know what his brother's disposition toward him was, he sent men ahead to learn everything with precision, for he feared him on account of the old suspicion between them. He instructed the men he sent to say to Esau that Jacob, thinking it wrong to live alongside his brother's anger, had willingly withdrawn from the country, and that now, judging the time sufficient to have reconciled them, he was returning, bringing with him his wives and children along with the wealth he had gained,
putting himself, together with all he held most valuable, into his brother's hands, since he judged it the greatest good to share with his brother what God had given him. This is what the messengers reported. Esau was overjoyed, and went to meet his brother with four hundred armed men. When Jacob learned that he was coming to meet him with so great a company, he was seized with fear, but entrusted his hope of safety to God, and took thought, given his present circumstances, how he himself might come through unharmed and save those with him, should he have to overcome enemies bent on doing him harm. So he divided those with him, sending some ahead and ordering the rest to follow close behind, so that if those sent ahead were overwhelmed by an attack from his brother, those following would have somewhere to take refuge. Having arranged those with him in this manner, he sent some ahead carrying gifts
to his brother; the gifts sent were beasts of burden and a great number of animals of various kinds, which would be precious to those who received them because of their scarcity. Those sent went at intervals, so that by meeting Esau again and again they would seem more numerous, since he expected that his anger, if it still remained, would be softened by the gifts; he had also instructed those sent to speak kind words to Esau when they met him.
Having arranged all this over the course of the whole day, when night came on he moved those who were with him. And after they had crossed a certain torrent called the Jabbok, Jacob, who had been left behind alone, met with an apparition and wrestled with it, the apparition beginning the contest; and he overcame the apparition, which then used a voice and words toward him, urging him to rejoice in what had happened and not to think he had won a small victory, but had overcome a divine angel, and to take this as a sign
of great blessings to come, and that his line would never fail, nor would any man ever surpass him in strength. It told him to be called Israel, which in the Hebrew tongue signifies "the one who withstood an angel of God." This it foretold at Jacob's request, for perceiving it was an angel of God, he asked it to tell him what fate awaited him. And with these words the apparition vanished. Jacob, delighted at these things, named the place Peniel, which signifies "the face of God." And since from the struggle he suffered pain about the broad sinew, he himself abstains from eating it, and because of him it is not eaten by us either. Learning that his brother was already near, he ordered each of the women to go forward in her own group
together with her maidservants, so that from a distance they might watch the doings of the men should Esau wish to fight; but he himself went ahead and bowed before his brother as he drew near, finding in him no treacherous intent toward himself. And Esau, having embraced him, asked about the crowd of children and the women, and after learning the whole of it he asked that he too might now go along with them to their
father. But Jacob pled the weariness of the pack animals, and Esau withdrew to Seir; for there he made his home, having named the place "Hairy" after his own hairiness. Jacob came to the place still now called Tents, from where he went on to Shechem, a city belonging to the Canaanites. When the people of Shechem were holding a festival, Dinah, Jacob's only daughter, went into the
city to see the finery of the local women. Seeing her, Shechem, son of Hamor the king, violated her by force, and being overcome with love for her, he begged his father to obtain the girl for him in marriage. His father consented and went to Jacob, asking that his son Shechem be joined to Dinah in lawful marriage. Jacob, unable to refuse because of the rank of the one asking, yet not thinking it lawful to give his daughter in marriage to a man of another people, asked to be allowed time to deliberate on what was requested of him.
So the king went away expecting Jacob would grant the marriage, but Jacob, having told his sons of their sister's violation and of Hamor's request, asked them to decide what should be done. Most of them, at a loss, kept silent, but Simeon and Levi, the girl's brothers by the same mother, agreed together on a plan of the following kind: since it was the time of the festival and the people of Shechem were given over to relaxation and feasting, they fell by night upon the guards first and killed them in their sleep, then went into the city and slew every male, the king along with them, and his son too, but spared the women. Having done this without
their father's consent, they brought their sister back. Jacob, stunned at the magnitude of what had happened and angry with his sons, was told by God, who stood by him, to take courage, and, after purifying his household, to offer the sacrifices which he had vowed at the sight of the dream when he first set out for Mesopotamia. So while purifying those who followed him he came upon Laban's gods, not knowing
they had been stolen by Rachel, and he buried them in the ground at Shechem under a certain oak; then, setting out from there, he offered sacrifice at Bethel, where he had seen the dream when he was journeying earlier toward Mesopotamia. Going on from there, when he came into the region of Ephrath, he buried Rachel there, who had died in childbirth—alone among his kin not to obtain burial at the honored place in Hebron. Grieving greatly,
he named the child born of her Benjamin, on account of the sorrow her death had caused her mother. These were all of Jacob's children: twelve male and one female. Of these, eight were legitimate—six by Leah and two by Rachel—and four by the maidservants, two by each; I have already given the names of them all. From there he went on to Hebron,
a city situated in the land of Canaan; there Isaac had his home. They spent only a little time together, for Jacob did not find Rebecca still living. And Isaac too died not long after his son's arrival, and was buried by his sons, along with his wife, at Hebron, in the ancestral tomb they had there. Isaac was a man dear to God
and was thought worthy by him of much providential care, second only to his father Abraham, and he lived to a very great age; for he lived to a hundred and eighty-five years, and died in this way, in the practice of virtue.

======== Antiquities — Book 2 ========

1. How Esau and Jacob, being the sons of Isaac, divided the land between them, Esau holding Idumea and Jacob Canaan. 2. How Joseph, the youngest of Jacob's sons, was envied by his brothers because dreams revealed to him the prosperity that awaited him. 3. How this same Joseph, sold into Egypt by his brothers out of hatred for him, rose there to distinction and the highest honor, and had his brothers under his power. 4. His father's migration to him, with his whole household, on account of the famine that arose. 5. All that befell the Hebrews in Egypt, who suffered hardship there for four hundred years. 6. How, under Moses' leadership, they left Egypt. 7. The birth and upbringing of Moses. 8. How the sea, cut off before the Hebrews as the Egyptians pursued them, gave them passage through it. This book covers two hundred and twenty years.
After the death of Isaac his sons divided the land between them, but did not each keep the portion he had received: Esau withdrew from the city of Hebron in favor of his brother, settled in Seir, and ruled Idumea, naming the country after himself, for he was called Adam for the following reason. He had once come back from hunting, worn out and starving from the chase—he was still a boy at the time—and finding his brother had prepared lentils for his own meal, a dish of a very reddish color, he was seized with an even greater craving for it and asked him to give it to him to eat. His brother, using his hunger against him, insisted on buying his birthright in exchange for the food, and Esau, driven by hunger, yielded his birthright to him with an oath. From this, because of the redness of the dish, he was nicknamed Adam by his companions in jest—for the Hebrews call red "adom"—and so he named the country; the Greeks, giving it a more dignified sound, called it Idumea.
He also became the father of five sons: Jaus, Jolam, and Korah by one wife, named Alibama, and of the rest, Aliphaz by Adah, and Raguel by Basemath. These were the sons of Esau. To Aliphaz were born five legitimate sons: Theman, Omar, Zepho, Gatam, and Kenaz; Amalek was illegitimate, born to him by a concubine named Timna. These settled the region of Idumea called Gobolitis, and the district called Amalekitis after Amalek; for Idumea, once it had grown large, both preserved its name as a whole and kept the names derived from its settlers for its several parts.
Jacob, meanwhile, came to enjoy prosperity on a scale granted to hardly anyone else easily: in wealth he surpassed the people of the region, and he was admired and looked up to for the virtues of his sons, for they fell short of no one in courage for deeds of the hand or in endurance of toil, and were also keen of understanding. Indeed, God's providence and care for his prosperity were so great that even out of what seemed grievous to him, he brought about the height of blessing, and made both Jacob himself and his descendants, through the following circumstance, the cause of our ancestors' departure from Egypt.
Jacob, having had Joseph by Rachel, loved him more than his other sons, both for the nobility of his body and for the virtue of his soul, for he excelled in understanding. This attachment aroused envy and hatred toward him among his brothers, made all the sharper by the dreams he had seen, which he reported to his father and to them—dreams that announced his coming prosperity, for men are jealous even of the good fortune of those closest to them. The visions Joseph saw in his sleep were as follows.
Sent out with his brothers by his father to gather the harvest at the height of summer, he saw a vision quite unlike the dreams that usually visited him in sleep. Waking, he laid it before his brothers, expecting them to interpret its meaning for him, saying that on the previous night he had seen his own sheaf of wheat standing still in the place where he had set it down, while theirs ran up to it and bowed down before it, as slaves before their masters. Understanding that the vision foretold strength and greatness for him, and authority over them, they did not explain to Joseph what the dream meant, as though it were not clear to them, but invoked curses that none of what they suspected should ever come to pass for him, and from then on continued to feel even greater hostility toward him.
Rivaling their envy with a determination of its own, the divine sent Joseph a second vision, far more astonishing than the first. He dreamed that the sun, taking with it the moon and the rest of the stars, came down to earth and bowed before him. This vision he related to his father, suspecting no malice on the part of his brothers, and in their presence too, asking him to explain what it meant. His father was delighted with the dream, for he grasped its prediction in his mind and, reasoning wisely, guessed shrewdly at it, and rejoiced at the great things it signified—things that foretold prosperity for the boy, and that a time would come, God granting it, when he would be honored and worthy of reverence by both his parents and his brothers: he took the moon and sun to represent his mother and father, since she nourishes and raises all things and he shapes them and instills their remaining strength, and the stars to represent the brothers, for they too, like the stars, draw their strength from the sun and moon, there being eleven of them, just as there were eleven stars.
Jacob, then, made this interpretation of the vision with good sense, but his sons were deeply grieved by what had been said and took it as meaning that some stranger, not a brother, was going to enjoy the blessings signified by the dreams—blessings which, as one who shared in his birth, it would have been fitting for him to share as well, along with his prosperity. They set themselves to kill the boy, and having confirmed this resolve, once the harvest work was finished, they turned toward Shechem—a region good for pasturing flocks and providing grazing—and there tended their flocks, without disclosing to their father that they had gone there.
Their father, in ignorance, and since no one came to him from the flocks who could tell him the truth about his sons, grew more troubled in his thinking about them, and being fearful, sent Joseph to the flocks to learn how his brothers were and to report what they were doing.
When they saw their brother arriving, they were glad—but not as at the presence of a kinsman sent by their father; rather, as at an enemy delivered into their hands by divine will, and they were already resolved to kill him and not let the opportunity at hand slip by. Reuben, the eldest of them, seeing them so disposed and united in this purpose, tried to hold them back, pointing out the enormity of the crime and the pollution it would bring, saying that though it is wicked and unholy in the sight of both God and men to commit murder even against a man unrelated to oneself, it is far more abominable to be seen to have carried out the slaughter of a brother—one whose killing wrongs the father as well, and drags the mother down into mourning and the loss of a child in a manner contrary to the law of nature.
He urged them, out of shame before these very things, and by reckoning what they themselves would suffer once their good and youngest brother was dead, to refrain from the deed, and to fear God, who was already both spectator and witness of their plot against their brother—God who would be pleased with them if they abandoned the act, yielding to repentance and self-control, but who, if they went forward with the deed, would exact from them without fail the penalty for fratricide, since they would be defiling his providence, present everywhere, lacking in nothing that is done in the wilderness any more than in what is done in cities; for wherever a man is, there one must suppose God is present too. He said also that their own conscience would be their enemy on account of what they dared, a thing from which those who have done evil can never escape, any more than those in whom it dwells as something good.
He added to what he had said that it was not right to kill a brother even if he had wronged them, and that it was a fine thing not to bear grudges against those who are so dear, for whatever they thought he had done wrong. As for Joseph, he said, they were about to destroy one who had done them no wrong at all—one whose youth and helplessness ought rather to win pity and care from them; and the very reason for the murder made the deed far worse in their case, since they had resolved to take his life out of envy for the blessings that awaited him, blessings of which they themselves would enjoy an equal share, being not strangers to him but his own kin. For in supposing that whatever God would give to Joseph was theirs to claim, they were only stirring up his anger further, and it would be reasonable to think the matter would go still worse for them if, by killing the one God had judged worthy of the blessings hoped for, they thereby robbed of them the very God who was to grant them.
Reuben, saying this and much more besides, and pleading with them, tried to turn them from the crime of fratricide; but when he saw that his words had made them no more moderate, and that they were pressing on toward the murder, he advised them at least to make the wrong they intended gentler in its manner. It would have been better, he said, if they had let themselves be persuaded by what he had first urged; but since they were determined to kill their brother, they would not be doing anything very wicked if they followed what he now advised, for what they were bent on doing lay within it too, only in a form lighter, given the circumstances. He asked them not to lay hands on their brother themselves, but instead to throw him into the pit nearby and leave him there to die, thereby gaining the advantage of keeping their own hands unstained.
The young men agreeing to this, Reuben took the boy, bound him with a rope, and lowered him gently into the pit, for it was quite dry. Having done this, he went off in search of places suitable for pasture. Judah, who was also one of Jacob's sons, seeing Arab merchants of the Ishmaelite people carrying spices and Syrian wares to Egypt from Gilead, after Reuben had gone off, advised his brothers to haul Joseph up and sell him to the Arabs; for he said that Joseph, once taken far away, would die among strangers, and that they themselves would thus be rid of the pollution. This plan approved, they drew Joseph up from the pit and sold him to the merchants for twenty minae; he was seventeen years old.
Reuben, coming to the pit by night meaning to save his brothers' victim without their knowledge, had resolved to rescue Joseph, and when he called down and got no answer, fearing they had destroyed him after his own departure, reproached his brothers. When they told him what had been done, Reuben ceased his mourning.
When the brothers had done this to Joseph, they cast about for what they might do to escape their father's suspicion. They took the tunic Joseph had been wearing when he came to them—which they had stripped from him when they lowered him into the pit—and resolved to tear it apart, stain it with the blood of a goat, and bring it to their father, so that Joseph might appear to him to have been destroyed by wild beasts. Having done this, they came to the old man, who by now had grown anxious for news of his son, and told him that they had neither seen Joseph nor learned what misfortune had befallen him, but had found this tunic bloodied and torn, from which they suspected he had fallen victim to wild beasts and perished, since he had set out from home wearing it.
Jacob, who had been holding to a lighter hope, supposing that his son had perhaps simply been carried off into slavery, now abandoned that reasoning, taking the tunic as clear proof of his death—for he recognized it as the very one he had sent him out wearing to his brothers—and from then on he grieved for the boy as for one dead. Being father to only this one son, and deprived of the comfort that other children might give, he remained sunk in his misery, believing, before he had even spoken with his brothers, that Joseph had vanished, destroyed by wild beasts. He sat clothed in sackcloth, weighed down with grief, so that neither could his children's comforting make him easier, nor did his suffering, worn down by sorrow, give him any relief.
Joseph, meanwhile, having been sold by the merchants, was bought by Potiphar, an Egyptian, one of Pharaoh's chief cooks, who held him in every honor, gave him a liberal education, and allowed him a manner of living better than the lot of a slave, entrusting him with the management of his household. Joseph enjoyed these advantages, and did not let go of the virtue that was his even amid this change of fortune, but showed that a resolute mind can master the hardships of life, when it is genuinely present in a person and not merely suited to fair circumstances that last only for a season.
For his master's wife, taken with desire both for his good looks and for his skill in the conduct of affairs, and thinking that if she made this plain to him she would easily persuade him to come to her—counting it good fortune that her mistress should ask this of him, and looking to the outward form of his present servitude rather than to the character that remained steady even through his change of fortune—made her desire clear to him and spoke words to him about lying together. He put off her request, judging it not right to grant her such a favor, since to do so would be an act of injustice and outrage against the very man who had bought him and shown him such honor; instead he mastered his passions and urged her too to give up hope of attaining her desire, telling her that it would be put aside, there being no prospect of it, and that he himself would endure anything rather than be persuaded to this—for even if a slave must do nothing contrary to his mistress's wishes, resistance to commands of this kind would have ample excuse. But her passion, far from being checked by finding Joseph did not respond as she expected, was only inflamed the more, and she was terribly overcome by
Besieged by this affliction, she pressed her second attempt with even greater urgency. A public festival came round, at which custom allowed the women too to go out to the celebration. She pretended illness to her husband, seeking solitude and leisure in which to plead with Joseph, and once she had secured it she addressed him in terms even more insistent than before, saying that it would have been well for him to have yielded to her entreaty from the start, and not to have refused her, given the humiliation she suffered in asking and the sheer force of her passion, under which she, mistress though she was, had been compelled to abase herself below her own rank. Now, showing better judgment, she urged, let him make amends for his previous ingratitude.
If, she said, he had been waiting for a second request, here it now was, made with still greater earnestness: she had feigned illness and preferred private conversation with him to the festival and its public gathering. And if instead he had resisted her first approaches out of mistrust, taking his persistence as a sign that there was no wrongdoing in it, let him now expect the enjoyment of the good things already his, which would grow still greater if he gave himself over to her love and obeyed her; whereas if he turned away from her request, he could expect her vengeance and hatred instead, and he would be choosing the mere appearance of chastity, meant to gratify his mistress, over what would actually serve him. For it would do him no good if she turned to accusing him and lying about him to Petephres, who would trust her words more than his, however true his might be.
As the woman spoke this way, weeping, neither pity moved him to abandon his self-control nor fear compelled him to it. He withstood her pleading and did not yield to her threats, choosing to suffer unjustly and to endure whatever hardship might come rather than to purchase present enjoyment at the cost of something he knew would justly destroy him. He reminded her of her marriage and of her life together with her husband, and urged her to give these more weight than the fleeting pleasure of desire, a pleasure that would leave her afterward with remorse and pain, not over the wrong she had done but from fear of being found out, and with the constant anxiety of keeping the evil hidden. Her partnership with her husband, by contrast, brought an enjoyment free of danger, and besides that, the great confidence that comes from a clear conscience before both God and men.
He told her that she would rule over him all the more by remaining pure and would exercise a mistress's authority over him, rather than being restrained by shame at sharing in his wrongdoing; and that it was far better to take courage from a life known to have been lived well than from wickedness that merely went undetected. Speaking in this vein, and adding still more to the same effect, he tried to check the woman's impulse and turn her passion toward reason. But she pressed her purpose all the more violently, and laying hold of him with her hands, she resolved, having given up on persuasion, to force him.
When Joseph broke free from her in anger, leaving even his cloak behind, for she had kept hold of it as he tore himself loose and rushed out of the chamber, she was overcome with terror that he would report her to her husband, and, smarting with humiliation, she resolved to get ahead of him by lying to Petephres about Joseph first. She judged it both clever and characteristically feminine to punish him for the contempt she felt he had shown her, and at the same time to forestall the accusation against herself.
So she sat there downcast and distraught, feigning in her anger the grief of a woman who had failed to satisfy her desire, as though she had actually attempted seduction. When her husband came in, alarmed at her appearance, and asked the cause of her distress, she launched into her accusation of Joseph. "You should die," she said, "husband, or else punish the wicked slave who wanted to defile your marriage bed, a man who, remembering neither what he is nor how he came into our household, showed no self-control, nor any gratitude for the kindness he received from you. Ungrateful as he would have been even if you had not made him master over everything of ours, he plotted to violate your marriage, and did so at a festival, watching for your absence. Whatever moderation he seemed to show before was only fear of you, not natural decency.
"It was precisely his unmerited and unhoped-for rise to honor that led him to this, as though, because he was allowed to take charge of your property and its management, and was preferred above your older household slaves, he should also lay hands on your wife." Having finished speaking, she showed him the cloak, claiming that Joseph had left it behind when he tried to force her.
Petephres, unable to disbelieve either his weeping wife or what she said and what he saw, and giving more weight to his love for her, did not turn to an examination of the truth. He judged his wife virtuous and condemned Joseph as wicked, throwing him into the prison for criminals, while he thought all the more highly of his wife, crediting her with propriety and self-control.
Joseph, then, having entrusted everything about himself to God, turned neither to defending himself nor to setting out exactly what had happened, but bore his chains and hardship in silence, confident that God, who knew the cause of his misfortune and the truth of it, would make his lot better than that of those who had bound him. And he had proof of God's providence at once: for the keeper of the prison, observing his diligence and trustworthiness in whatever he was assigned, and the nobility evident in his bearing, eased his chains, made his hard lot lighter and more bearable for him, and allowed him a better manner of living than the other prisoners.
Now among those held there, whenever they paused from the toil of their labor to talk together, as fellow-sufferers naturally do, asking one another the reasons for their sentences, the king's cupbearer, a man greatly honored by him but now imprisoned in anger, shared his fetters with Joseph and grew closer to him than the rest, since Joseph seemed to surpass him in understanding. He had seen a dream and told it to Joseph, asking him to interpret it, complaining that on top of the troubles the king had caused him, the divine was now adding the anxiety of dreams as well. He said that in his sleep he had seen a vine grown from three branches, with clusters hanging from each, already large and ripe for harvest; that he himself had pressed them into a cup the king held out, strained the fresh wine, and given it to the king to drink, who received it gladly. Such, he said, was the vision he had seen, and he asked, if Joseph had any share of understanding, to tell him what the vision foretold.
Joseph told him to take courage: within three days he would be released from his bonds, since the king would long for his service and restore him to it. "For the fruit of the vine," he said, "signifies that God gives it to men for their good; it is offered in libation to God himself, and it stands as a pledge of trust and friendship among men, dissolving enmities, taking away suffering and grief, and carrying those who partake of it toward pleasure. This, then, you say the king received from your hands, pressed from three clusters. Know, then, that your vision is a good one, and that it foretells release from your present distress within as many days as the branches from which you gathered the fruit in your sleep.
"Remember, though, once you have experienced this from the one who foretold you these good things, and once you are again in a position of power, do not overlook us, in the circumstances you will be leaving us in, once you have gone off to what we have described. For we have done nothing wrong to have come to be in chains, but it is for virtue and self-control that we are made to endure the lot of criminals, and we never wished, for our own pleasure, to wrong the man who has done this to us." The cupbearer, naturally glad to hear such an interpretation of his dream, waited for the fulfillment of what had been told him.
A slave in charge of the king's bakers, who shared chains with the cupbearer, was encouraged by Joseph's favorable verdict on the other man's vision, for he too had seen a dream, and asked Joseph to tell him what his own vision, seen the past night, meant to reveal to him. It was this: "I dreamed," he said, "that I was carrying three baskets on my head, two full of loaves, and the third full of meat and various delicacies such as are prepared for kings; and that birds swooped down and devoured everything, paying no attention to me as I tried to drive them off." He expected the prophecy to resemble the cupbearer's. But Joseph, weighing the dream in his mind, said to him that he would have wished to be a herald of good things for him rather than of what the dream in fact revealed: it meant that he had only two more days left to live, for that was what the baskets signified, and that on the third day he would be crucified and become food for the birds, with nothing able to defend him.
And indeed the outcome for both men matched exactly what Joseph had told them: for on the very day foretold, the king, celebrating his birthday, crucified the master baker, but freed the cupbearer from his chains and restored him to his former service. Joseph endured hardship in his chains for two full years, receiving no help from the cupbearer, who did not remember what had been foretold, until God released him from prison, contriving his deliverance in this way. Pharaoh, on the same night, saw two dreams, and along with them their interpretation, but on waking he forgot the interpretation while retaining the dreams themselves. Troubled by what he had seen, for the visions had seemed to him ominous, he summoned the wisest men of Egypt the next day, wanting to learn the meaning of the dreams. When they were at a loss, the king grew still more distressed.
Then the cupbearer, seeing Pharaoh's confusion, was struck by the memory of Joseph and his skill in dreams, and coming forward he told the king about Joseph, about the vision he himself had seen in prison and its fulfillment, how, on the same day, the master baker was crucified just as Joseph had foretold him, in accordance with the interpretation of his own dream. He explained that Joseph was held in chains by Petephres, the chief of the cooks, as a slave, but that he himself had said he was one of the few of the Hebrews by birth, and also by his father's reputation. "Summon him, then," he said, "and do not judge him by his present misfortune; you will learn what your dreams reveal to you."
The king, accordingly, ordered Joseph brought into his presence; and those commanded to fetch him came bringing him, having first attended to his appearance as the king had directed. Taking him by the right hand, the king said, "Young man, since my servant has testified that you are now the best and most capable of understanding, grant me too a share of the same good service you gave him, and tell me what the visions of my dreams reveal to me. I want you to hide nothing out of fear, and not to flatter me with a false account meant to please, if the truth happens to be rather grim. I dreamed that, walking beside a river, I saw seven cows, well-fed and remarkable for their size, coming up from the stream toward the marsh, and that other cows, equal to these in number, came to meet them out of the marsh, terribly emaciated and wretched to look at, and that these devoured the well-fed, large cows and yet gained nothing from it, still cruelly wasted by hunger.
"After this vision I woke from my sleep, and, troubled, pondering to myself what the apparition might mean, I fell back asleep and saw a second dream, far more astonishing than the first, which frightened and troubled me even more. I saw seven ears of grain growing from a single root, heavy-headed already and bent down under the weight of their grain and the season for harvest; and near them seven other ears, withered and weak from lack of moisture, which turned to consume and devour the ripe ears, and this filled me with dread."
Joseph, taking this up, said, "This dream, O king, though it appeared in two forms, foretells one and the same outcome for the future. The seeing of the cows, an animal born to labor at the plow, being devoured by inferior ones, and the ears of grain being consumed by the lesser ones, both foretell famine and barrenness for Egypt over as many years as the equal number that were prosperous before them, so that the abundance of those fertile years will be entirely used up by the dearth of an equal number of years following. There will be, in fact, a scarcity of necessities extremely hard to remedy. And here is the sign: the emaciated cows, having consumed the stronger ones, were unable to be satisfied. God, however, does not reveal the future to men in order to cause them grief, but so that, foreknowing it, they may make their experience of what has been foretold easier to bear through their own foresight.
"You, then, by storing up in reserve the good produce of the earlier years, will make the coming disaster imperceptible to the Egyptians." The king, amazed at Joseph's wisdom and understanding, and asking in what way he might make provision, during the years of plenty, for what would come after them, so that the effects of the famine might be lightened, was advised and counseled by Joseph to be sparing with the good produce, and not to allow the Egyptians to use it extravagantly, but to store up whatever they would otherwise consume wastefully in luxury, keeping it for the time of want; he urged him also to lay in supplies, taking the grain from the farmers and giving them only what was sufficient for their sustenance.
Pharaoh, marveling at Joseph on both counts, his judgment of the dream and his counsel, handed over to him the administration of the matter, so that he might do whatever he judged advantageous both for the mass of the Egyptians and for the king himself, considering that the man who had discovered the solution to the problem would also prove its best director. And once this authority had been granted him by the king, Joseph made use of the king's own seal, put on purple, and, driving through the whole land in a chariot, gathered in the grain from the farmers, measuring out to each only what sufficed for seed and sustenance, telling no one the reason for what he was doing.
He had by now reached his thirtieth year, and he enjoyed every honor from the king, who addressed him as Psonthomphanechos, in view of the extraordinary understanding he had shown, for the name signifies "finder of hidden things." And he takes a wife...
He also made a most notable marriage: he took to wife Asenath, still a virgin, daughter of Petephres, one of the priests of Heliopolis, the king himself arranging the match. By her, before the years of scarcity came, he had sons: the elder, Manasseh, whose name means "causing to forget," because in his good fortune he had found forgetfulness of his misfortunes; the younger, Ephraim, whose name means "restored," because he was restored to the freedom of his forefathers.
Egypt passed seven years in the blessed abundance that Joseph's interpretation of the dreams had foretold, and in the eighth year famine took hold. Because the disaster fell on people who had not foreseen it, they were all hard pressed by it and streamed to the king's doors. He referred them to Joseph, and Joseph sold them grain, having become, by common consent, the savior of the people. He opened the market not only to the natives of the land but to foreigners as well, holding that all human beings, by their common kinship, deserved to find relief from those who enjoyed prosperity.
Jacob too, since Canaan was being grievously worn down (for the disaster had struck the whole continent), on learning that the market was open even to foreigners, sent all his sons to Egypt to buy grain. Only Benjamin he kept back, the son born to him by Rachel and full brother to Joseph. So the sons came to Egypt and applied to Joseph for grain, for nothing was done there except by his authority, and it was to men's advantage at that time to court the king, since in doing so they were also courting the honor due to Joseph.
Joseph recognized his brothers, though they had no thought of him, since he had left them a mere boy and had now grown to this stature, his features so altered that he was unrecognizable to them; and the greatness of his rank made it impossible for the thought even to occur to them. He put them to the test, to learn what was in their minds concerning the whole affair. He refused to sell them grain and said they had come as spies on the king's business, gathered from many places and merely pretending kinship; for it was not possible, he said, for the children of a private man to be reared to such stature and such striking looks — that kind of upbringing was difficult even for kings. He did this because he wanted to learn about his father and what had happened to him since Joseph's own departure, and also to learn about his brother Benjamin, for he feared that they might have done away with him too, just as they had dared to do with him.
They were thrown into confusion and fear, thinking the gravest danger hung over them, and giving no thought at all to their brother. Standing to answer the charges, they defended themselves through Reuben, who spoke for them as the eldest. "We have not come here," he said, "to do wrong, nor to work any mischief against the king's business, but seeking safety, and taking refuge, in the troubles that beset our country, in your humanity, which we have heard opens the grain market not only to your own citizens but to foreigners as well, having resolved to offer deliverance to all who need it. That we are brothers and share one blood is plain even from the likeness of our features, which shows no great variation. Our father is Jacob, a Hebrew man, to whom twelve sons were born of four wives; while all of them were alive we were prosperous. But when one of our brothers, Joseph, died, our fortunes turned for the worse: our father has kept long mourning for him, and we too suffer, both from the calamity of his death and from the old man's misery. We have now come for grain, having entrusted the care of our father and the oversight of the household to Benjamin, the youngest of the brothers. You can send someone to our house and learn whether anything we have said is false."
With these words Reuben tried to persuade Joseph to think better of them, but Joseph, on learning that Jacob was alive and that his brother had not perished, threw them into prison for the time being, as though meaning to examine them at leisure. But on the third day he brought them out and said, "Since you insist that you have not come to do mischief against the king's business and that you are brothers and sons of the father you claim, you could persuade me this is so if you were to leave one of your number with me, who will suffer no ill treatment, while the rest of you carry the grain back to your father and then return to me bringing with you the brother whom you say you left behind — that will be proof of the truth."
They were now in still greater distress; they wept and lamented continually to one another over the fate of Joseph, believing that God was punishing them for what they had plotted against him, and that this was why these troubles had befallen them. Reuben rebuked them at length for a repentance that did Joseph no good now, and urged them to bear whatever they might suffer with fortitude, since God was exacting vengeance on Joseph's account. They said these things to each other, not supposing that Joseph understood their language. All of them were downcast at Reuben's words and at their own remorse for what they had done, as were those who had voted for it, judging that they were being punished justly by God.
Seeing them so helpless, Joseph, overcome with feeling, broke into tears, and not wishing to be recognized by his brothers, withdrew; then after an interval he came back to them. He kept Simeon as a hostage for the brothers' return and ordered the rest to go, once they had received their grain, having instructed his steward to put back secretly into their sacks the money they had brought for the purchase of the grain, and to let them carry that away too, without their knowledge. The steward did as he was told.
Jacob's sons, coming to Canaan, reported to their father what had happened to them in Egypt: that they had been suspected as spies of the king, and that when they said they were brothers and had left the eleventh at home with their father, they were disbelieved, so that they had left Simeon with the governor until Benjamin should come to him and so provide proof of what they had said; and they asked their father, without fear, to send the young man with them. None of what his sons had done pleased Jacob, and grieved as he was over Simeon's detention, he thought it senseless to add Benjamin to it as well. He would not yield to their pleading, not even when Reuben offered his own sons in exchange, so that if any harm befell Benjamin on the journey their grandfather might put them to death. His sons were at a loss over these troubles, and were still further disturbed when they discovered the money hidden in the sacks of grain.
When the grain they had brought ran out and the famine pressed harder, necessity forced Jacob's hand, and he resolved to send Benjamin along with his brothers, for they could not go down to Egypt except in fulfillment of their promise. As the suffering grew worse day by day and his sons kept pleading, he did not know what to do about the present situation. Then Judah, a man bold by nature in other matters, spoke to him frankly: he ought not to be afraid for his brother, nor to suspect danger where none existed, for nothing would happen to him whom God did not abandon, and this would hold true of him just as much if he stayed at home; he should not thus condemn them to certain destruction, nor deprive them, out of unreasoning fear for the boy, of the abundant provision Pharaoh offered; he should think also of Simeon's safety, lest by sparing Benjamin the journey he lose Simeon instead; and he urged his father to trust God concerning him, since God would either bring the boy back to him safe or else end their lives together with his. Persuaded, Jacob gave Benjamin over to them, and had them carry to Joseph, along with double the price of the grain, gifts consisting of the produce of Canaan — oil of acorns, myrrh, terebinth resin, and honey.
There were many tears from the father at his sons' departure, and many from the sons themselves as well; he was anxious whether he would get his sons back safe from the journey, they whether they would find their father in good health, not worn down by grief over them. A day was given over to their mourning, and then the old man, exhausted, stayed behind, while they set out for Egypt, their better hope easing the grief of their present trouble.
When they arrived in Egypt they were brought to Joseph's house, and no small fear troubled them, that they might be charged over the price of the grain, as though they had done some wrong. They made a long defense to Joseph's steward, saying that they had found the money in their sacks at home and had now come bringing it back. When the steward said he knew nothing of what they meant, they were relieved of their fear. He released Simeon and had him wait to join his brothers.
Meanwhile Joseph came in from attending on the king, and they brought him the gifts, and when he asked after their father they told him they had found him in good health. Learning that he was still alive, Joseph asked also about Benjamin, whether this was their younger brother — for he had in fact seen him — and when they said he was, Joseph declared that God stood over all as their protector, and, overcome by feeling, was moved to tears, but, not wishing to be recognized by his brothers, took them in to dinner, where they were seated in the same order as at their father's table. Joseph welcomed them all, honoring Benjamin with portions twice the size of those set before the rest.
After dinner, when they had gone to sleep, he ordered his steward to give them their grain, measured out, and again to hide the money secretly in their sacks, and to place in Benjamin's pack, besides, the silver cup he liked to drink from, and leave it there. He did this wishing to test his brothers, to see whether they would stand by Benjamin when he was accused of theft and seemed to be in danger, or would abandon him and go off to their father as though they themselves had done no wrong.
When the servant had carried out these orders, Jacob's sons, knowing nothing of this, set off the next day, having recovered Simeon and rejoicing doubly, both for him and for bringing Benjamin back to their father as they had promised. But horsemen, led by the servant who had placed the cup in Benjamin's pack, rode round and overtook them.
Troubled by the unexpected attack of the horsemen, and asking the reason why they had come after men who only a little before had received honor and hospitality from their master, they called them wretches, who, without even keeping in mind Joseph's hospitality and kindness, had not hesitated to wrong him — carrying off the cup from which he had drunk to their friendship, valuing an unjust profit above their friendship with Joseph and above the risk to themselves if they were caught. They threatened that punishment would follow, since God did not fail to notice them, nor had they escaped with their theft even though they had deceived the servant who waited on them. "We ask now," they said, "why we have come, as though you did not know; you will soon learn, when you are punished." With this and more the servant heaped abuse on them.
They, in their ignorance of what had actually happened, mocked at what was said and marveled at the servant's recklessness in daring to bring such a charge against men who had not even kept the money found in their sacks for the price of the grain, but had brought it back without anyone knowing what they had done — so far were they from any intent to do wrong. Confident that a search would prove more convincing than their denial, they told the men to go ahead with it, and if anyone were found to have taken it, to punish them all; for, conscious of no wrongdoing, they spoke with the boldness of men who thought themselves in no danger. The servant agreed to make the search, but said the punishment would fall only on the one found to have committed the theft. They searched, going through all the others first, and came at last to Benjamin, well aware that they had hidden the cup in his sack, but wishing to make the search appear thorough.
The rest, now free of fear for themselves, gave all their attention to concern for Benjamin, though they were confident that no wrongdoing would be found in him either, and rebuked the pursuers for having delayed them on their journey when they might already have been well on their way. But when, searching Benjamin's pack, they found the cup, the brothers at once broke into wailing and lamentation, tore their garments, and wept for their brother over the punishment about to fall on him for the theft, and for themselves, who would prove false to their father over Benjamin's safety. Their distress was sharpened further by the thought that, having believed themselves already free of trouble, they had been robbed of that relief just when it seemed within reach, and they said that they themselves would be to blame for the troubles that would come upon their brother and for their father's grief over him, since they had forced their unwilling father to send him with them.
So the horsemen took Benjamin and led him to Joseph, with his brothers following. Joseph, seeing him under guard and the others in mourning dress, said, "What thought, you wretches, did you have either for my kindness or for God's providence, that you dared to do such a thing against your benefactor and host?" They gave themselves up for punishment for Benjamin's safety, and, recalling again what they had dared against Joseph, called him more fortunate than themselves — if he were dead, because he was free of life's miseries, and if he were alive, because he was now receiving God's vengeance against them — declaring themselves guilty before their father, since they would now add Benjamin's loss to the grief he still bore for Joseph. Here too Reuben spoke sharply against them. Joseph released the rest, saying that he had no charge against them, and that he would be satisfied with the punishment of the boy alone, for he would not release Benjamin, since...
...it was not right, he said, to punish those who had done no wrong, nor to punish them together with the one who had committed the theft; he promised them safety if they went on their way. The others were seized with terror, stunned into silence by the calamity. But Judah, the one who had persuaded his father to let the boy go, and who was in other respects a man of action, resolved to risk everything for his brother's safety, and said:
"We have dared terrible things against you, general, deeds that deserve punishment, and it would be just for all of us to suffer for them, even though the wrong was done by no one but the youngest alone. Yet, though we had given up hope of saving him through any plea of his own, one hope of escaping this danger remains to us, guaranteed by your own kindness. And now do not look to what we are or weigh the wrong that was done, but take your own nature and your virtue as counselor in place of the anger that even small men feel once they hold power over others, using it not only in great matters but in the smallest as well. Rise above that anger and do not let it master you, so that you kill men who no longer claim their safety as their own but ask to receive it as a gift from you. And indeed this would not be the first time you gave it to us: when we came before to buy grain, you gave us food in abundance to carry home, and saved our households from perishing by famine when they were in danger. It makes no difference whether you let them die for want of the necessities of life, or refuse now to spare men who seem to have wronged you, and so grudge them the splendid kindness you once showed them — the same favor, only given in a different way. For you will be saving the very people you once fed for this purpose, and preserving, by your own gifts, the lives you did not let waste away from hunger; and it is a wonderful and great thing at once to have given us life and to grant us the means by which that life may continue in our need.
I think, too, that God, wishing to give us an occasion to display the virtue in which we surpass others, has brought us into this misfortune, so that you may be seen forgiving even wrongs done against yourself, and not seem kind only to those who need help for some other reason. It is a great thing to do good to people who have fallen into need, but it is more befitting a ruler to save those who owe a penalty for wrongs done to himself; for if letting the guilty go free in small matters of loss wins praise for those who overlook them, then to be without anger in a case like this, where a man's life is forfeit for the wrong he has done, is something added to the very nature of God. And I myself — if he were not our father, who now suffers so bitterly over the loss of his children, as he has shown through his grief for Joseph — would not, so far as we ourselves are concerned, have made this plea for our lives; I would rather, out of regard for your character, have offered to submit to whatever you wished, since it is a fine thing to save one who deserves it, and since these men, having no one left to mourn them, would gladly have accepted whatever fate you chose. But now — for it is not out of pity for ourselves, since though young and not yet having tasted life we are ready to die — but out of consideration for our father, and pity for his old age, we bring you these entreaties, and beg for the lives which our own wrongdoing has handed over to you for punishment. He was never wicked himself, nor did he beget us to be such; being good, he does not deserve to suffer such things. Even now, while we are away, he is worn down with anxiety for us; but if he learns that we have died, and how, he will not endure it, but will all the sooner leave this life on that account, hastening to bring on the disgrace of our ruin before it even reaches him, and making his own release from life a bitter one, rushing to bring himself to numbness before the news comes to others.
Consider this, then: even if our wrongdoing provokes you now, grant to our father, as a favor, what is just concerning it, and let mercy toward him outweigh our wickedness; have pity on him, who will spend his old age in solitude and die when we have perished, and grant this gift in honor of the name of fathers. For in doing so you will honor the one who begot you, and give a gift to yourself as well — already enjoying the name of father, and kept safe from such suffering by God, the father of all, in sharing whose name you too will be thought to act piously, if you take pity on our father for what he will suffer in being robbed of his children. It is in your power, then, either to give or to take away what God has granted us, and to be no different from him in this act of grace; for having received a power that works both ways, it is good to display it in kindness, and though you are equally free to destroy, to forget, as though it did not exist, your power to do so, and to suppose that you have been entrusted only with the power to save — for the more people to whom you extend this, the more you will be seen to be giving of yourself. Save us all, then, forgiving our brother his misfortune; for life would not be worth living for us if he were punished, since we are not permitted to return to our father alone, but must share here in the same ruin of life with him. And we will beg you, general, that if you condemn our brother to die, you punish us along with him as partners in the wrong; for we will not think it right to destroy ourselves out of grief at his death, but to die as men who, like him, have proved wicked. That he sinned while still young, and not yet firm in judgment, and that it is human to pardon such people, I leave to you to weigh, and I will say no more, so that if you condemn us, what was left unsaid may seem to have counted against us and made our fate the harsher, but if you release us, you may be thought, in your own kindness, to have taken those things into account as well — not merely saving us, but granting us a favor by which we will seem the more deserving of having received it, since you will have thought more of our safety than we ourselves have done. So then, if you wish to kill him, punish me instead, and send him back to our father in my place; or if you choose to keep him as a slave, I am more useful to you for your needs, being better suited, as you can see, to bear either fate."
Judah, then, glad to endure anything for his brother's safety, threw himself down at Joseph's feet, hoping by his struggle to soften and calm his anger; and all the brothers fell down as well, weeping, and giving themselves up to die for Benjamin's life. Joseph, overcome by his own feelings and no longer able to bear the pretense of anger, ordered those present to withdraw, so that he might make himself known to his brothers alone; and when the others had gone out, he made himself known to his brothers and said:
"I praise your virtue and your loyalty to our brother, and I find you better men than I expected from what you once plotted against me, now that I see you did all this to test your brotherly love. I do not think that even toward me you were wicked by nature, but that it was by the will of God, who is now bringing about the enjoyment of these blessings, and who will bring about what is still to come, if he continues favorable to us. Since, then, I have learned that our father is alive, beyond even our hope, and see you so devoted to our brother, I no longer remember the wrongs you seem to have done me, and I put aside my resentment of them; I acknowledge that I am grateful to you as fellow agents in what God had planned for our present circumstances. I want you, too, to forget those things, and to rejoice rather that the folly of that time came to such an end, than to be distressed and ashamed over what was done wrong. Do not let it grieve you that you cast an evil vote against me, since the repentance that followed came only because what was planned did not go forward. Rejoice, then, in what has come about through God, and go tell our father this, so that he may not be worn out with anxiety for you and so rob me of the finest part of my happiness by dying before he comes into my sight and shares in what we now enjoy. Take him, then, and your wives and children and all your kindred, and come settle here; it is not right that those dearest to me should live far from the good things that are ours, especially since the famine still has five years left to run."
Having said this, Joseph embraced his brothers; and they wept, and their grief over what they had plotted against him seemed to leave them no sense that any punishment remained undone, given their brother's generosity. For that day they feasted together. And when the king heard that Joseph's brothers had come to him, he was greatly pleased, and, as though touched by good fortune in his own household, provided them with wagons full of grain, and gold and silver, to carry back to their father. Having received still more from their brother — some to carry to their father, some as gifts to keep for themselves, with Benjamin honored above the rest — they set off for home.
When the sons arrived, Jacob learned the truth about Joseph: that he had not only escaped the death he had been mourning, but was alive and in splendid prosperity, sharing the government of Egypt with the king and entrusted with the care of nearly the whole country. None of what was reported seemed incredible to him, considering the greatness of God's work and his goodwill toward him, even though it had been interrupted for a time, and he set out at once for Joseph. When he reached the Well of the Oath, he sacrificed there to God; and being anxious that, because of the prosperity in Egypt, his descendants, growing attached to living there, might never move back into Canaan and take possession of it as God had promised, and fearing too that, since the journey into Egypt had not come about by God's will, his line might be destroyed — and fearing besides that he might die before coming into Joseph's sight — he fell asleep while turning this thought over in his mind.
God stood over him and called him twice by name; and when he asked who it was, God said, "It is not right, Jacob, for God to be unknown to you, the one who has always stood by and helped your forefathers, and after them you yourself. When you were deprived of your birthright by your father, I provided it for you; and by my favor, sent alone into Mesopotamia, you obtained good marriages, brought home a great number of children, and returned with wealth. Your whole family has remained with you through my providence, and Joseph, whom you thought had perished, I brought to the enjoyment of even greater blessings, and made lord of Egypt, so that he differs little from the king himself. I have come now both to guide you on this journey, and to foretell that the end of your life will come in Joseph's hands, and to proclaim a long age of rule and honor for your descendants, and to establish them in the land I have promised."
Encouraged by this dream, Jacob set out for Egypt with greater eagerness, together with his sons and their children. In all they numbered seventy-five.
I did not think it worth listing their names, especially given the difficulty of doing so; but in order to satisfy those who suppose that we are not from Mesopotamia but are Egyptians, I judged it necessary to record their names. Jacob had twelve sons; of these, Joseph had already gone ahead. I will now set out those who came after him, and those born from them. Reuben had four sons: Hanoch, Pallu, Hezron, and Carmi. Simeon had six: Jemuel, Jamin, Ohad, Jachin, Zohar, and Saul. Levi had three sons: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari. Judah had three sons: Shelah, Perez, and Zerah, and two grandsons through Perez: Hezron and Hamul. Issachar had four: Tola, Puvah, Job, and Shimron. Zebulun had three sons: Sered, Elon, and Jahleel. This was the line from Leah, and with her came also her daughter, Dinah — thirty-three in all.
Rachel had two sons: of these, to Joseph were born the sons Manasseh and Ephraim; to Benjamin, the other, ten — Bela, Becher, Ashbel, Gera, Naaman, Ehi, Ros, Muppim, Huppim, and Ard. These fourteen, added to those already counted, make forty-seven. This, then, was Jacob's own line by blood. But from Bilhah, Rachel's maidservant, were born to him Dan and Naphtali. Naphtali had four sons after him: Jahzeel, Guni, Jezer, and Shillem. Dan had one child: Hushim. Added to the number already given, these bring the total to fifty-four. Gad and Asher were sons of Zilpah, Leah's maidservant. Gad had seven sons: Zephon, Haggi, Shuni, Ezbon, Eri, Arodi, and Areli. Asher had a daughter and six sons, named Imnah, Ishvah, Ishvi, Beriah, Heber, and Malchiel. These sixteen, added to the fifty-four, complete the stated number, without counting Jacob himself among them.
When Joseph learned that his father was on his way — for his brother Judah had gone ahead and told him of the arrival — he went out to meet him, and met him near the city of Heroöpolis. His father, overwhelmed by joy that was as unexpected as it was great, very nearly fainted, but Joseph revived him, though he himself could not master the same feeling and was no less overcome than his father. Then, having told his father to travel on at an easy pace, he himself took five of his brothers and hurried ahead to the king, to tell him that Jacob had arrived with his family. The king heard this gladly, and told Joseph to ask them by what manner of life they wished to live, so that he might grant them leave to follow it. Joseph said that they were good shepherds, and gave their attention to nothing else, taking care, by staying together rather than being scattered, both to look after their father and to remain pleasing to the Egyptians by having nothing to do with what the Egyptians themselves did — for the Egyptians were forbidden to associate with flocks. When Jacob came before the king and greeted him...
and offered him his blessings on the kingdom, Pharaoh asked how many years he had already lived. When he answered that he had lived a hundred and thirty years, Pharaoh marveled at the length of his life. Jacob replied that he had lived fewer years than his ancestors, and Pharaoh granted him leave to live with his children at Heliopolis, for it was there that his shepherds kept their flocks as well.
The famine pressed harder on the Egyptians, and their distress grew still more desperate, since the river did not rise to water the land, nor did God send rain, and they themselves had made no provision against it out of ignorance. Joseph sold them grain for money, and when their money ran out they bought grain with their livestock and their slaves, and those who still had some portion of land surrendered it in exchange for food. In this way the king became master of all their property, and the people were resettled, each in a different place, so that the king's title to their land would be secure — except for the priests, whose land remained their own. The calamity enslaved not only their bodies but their very minds, and reduced them, in the end, to an undignified dependence for their food.
When the disaster subsided, and the river had again covered the land and brought forth its fruits abundantly, Joseph went to each city in turn, gathered the people together, and freely granted them the land which, now that they had surrendered it, the king could have kept and worked for himself alone. He urged them to treat it as their own and to farm it diligently, paying the king a fifth of its produce, since it was land the king was giving to them though it belonged to him. Those who had unexpectedly been restored as owners of the land received it with joy and submitted willingly to the terms. By this policy Joseph raised his own standing still higher among the Egyptians, and increased the people's goodwill toward the king as well, and the law requiring the payment of a fifth of the produce remained in force down to later kings.
Jacob lived in Egypt seventeen years, and when he fell ill, with his sons present, he died, having first pronounced blessings on them of future prosperity, and having foretold, by way of prophecy, how each of their descendants would come to settle in Canaan — which did indeed come to pass many years later. He also delivered a eulogy of Joseph, for not holding his brothers' wrong against them but instead treating them with even greater kindness, bestowing on them benefits which some men do not return even to their benefactors. He then commanded his own sons that Joseph's children, Ephraim and Manasseh, be admitted into their own number and share with them in the division of Canaan, a matter we will discuss later. He also asked to be buried at Hebron. He died having lived in all a hundred and forty-seven years, falling short of none of his ancestors in devotion to God, and receiving the reward that is due to men who have proved themselves so good. Joseph, with the king's consent, carried his father's body to Hebron
and buried him there at great expense. His brothers did not wish to return with him, for they feared that, now that their father was dead, he might punish them for their plot against him, since there was no longer anyone whose sake he would spare them for. Joseph persuaded them to harbor no suspicion and to hold nothing against him; he brought them back with him, gave them a great deal of property, and continued to show them every kindness without fail.
He himself died, having lived a hundred and ten years, a man of marvelous virtue, who managed everything by reasoned judgment and used his power with restraint — qualities that accounted for his remarkable good fortune among the Egyptians, a foreigner who had arrived among them, moreover, after the misfortunes we have already described. His brothers too died, having lived out happy lives in Egypt. Their bodies were later carried back
by their descendants and children and buried at Hebron, but Joseph's bones were carried to Canaan only later, when the Hebrews departed from Egypt, for Joseph had bound them by oath to do so. I will now relate how each of these men fared and by what labors they gained possession of Canaan, but first I must explain the reason that drove them out of Egypt.
The Egyptians, a people given to luxury and idleness, and little inclined to hard work, and prone besides to every kind of pleasure, and especially to greed, came to feel a bitter hatred toward the Hebrews, born of envy at their prosperity. For seeing that the race of the Israelites was flourishing, and that, through their virtue and their natural aptitude for labor, they were already numerous, wealthy, and distinguished, they concluded that these people were growing strong at their expense. They had also, over so long a time, forgotten the benefits they owed to Joseph, and now that the throne had passed to another house, they treated the Israelites with savage contempt and devised all manner of hardships for them. They ordered them to cut many canals to divide the river's flow, and to build walls and embankments for their cities to hold the river back from flooding and forming marshes, and to raise up
pyramids as well, and in this way wore our people down, forcing them at the same time to learn every kind of skill and to become inured to hard labor. They endured these hardships for four hundred years, the Egyptians straining to destroy the Israelites through toil, and the Israelites forever striving to prove themselves stronger than what was imposed on them. While matters stood thus, a further cause arose that made the Egyptians all the more eager to bring about
the destruction of our race. One of the sacred scribes — for such men are skilled at declaring the truth about things to come — announced to the king that at that time a child would be born to the Israelites who would humble the power of Egypt and exalt the Israelites, who, raised in virtue, would surpass all men and win a glory that would never be forgotten. Alarmed by this,
the king, acting on the scribe's advice, ordered that every male child born to the Israelites be thrown into the river and destroyed, and commanded Egyptian midwives to watch over the labor pains of the Hebrew women and observe their deliveries, for it was by these midwives that he ordered the women to be attended, since their kinship with the Egyptians would make them unlikely to disobey the king's will. Any who dared, out of contempt for the decree, to save a child in secret he ordered put to death along with their whole family. Terrible, then, was the suffering of those who endured it — not merely because they were being robbed of their children, and because, as parents, they were themselves made instruments in the destruction of what they had borne, but because the very thought that their whole race was doomed to extinction — the newborn perishing and they themselves soon to die out — made their misfortune bitter and beyond consolation. And so
they remained in this state of suffering. But no one could ever prevail over the purpose of God, however many devices he might contrive against it. For the very child of whom the sacred scribe had spoken was reared without the king's guard ever discovering him, and the man who had made the prophecy proved right about what would come of him. It happened in this way. Amram, a man of good birth among the Hebrews,
fearing for the whole nation, lest it should fail for lack of a rising generation, and being greatly distressed on his own account too — for his wife was pregnant — found himself at a loss, and turned to entreat God, begging him to take some pity at last on men who had not transgressed in their worship of him, and to grant them relief from the sufferings they were undergoing at that time, and from the despair
of losing their race altogether. God, taking pity on him and moved by his supplication, appeared to him in a dream and urged him not to despair of the future, telling him to keep in mind their devotion to him, for which he would always grant a due reward, since he had already granted their ancestors the blessing of becoming so great a people from so few.
"Abraham alone," God said, "came from Mesopotamia into Canaan and prospered in every way, and though his wife was at first barren, in time, by his own wish, she became fit for childbearing and bore him sons; he left to Ishmael and his descendants the land of the Arabs, to the sons of Keturah the land of the Trogodytes, and to Isaac
the land of Canaan. Consider, too, what feats of courage he performed in war with my aid, though you seem to have forgotten this, ungrateful as you are. And Jacob became known even to peoples not his own, both for the greatness of the prosperity in which he lived and for the sons he left behind him — he who arrived in Egypt with just seventy persons in all, and you have already grown to more than
six hundred thousand. Now know that I am providing for your common good and for your own honor as well. For this child, whose birth the Egyptians fear so greatly that they have condemned to destruction every Israelite child now being born, will be yours. He will escape the notice of those set to watch for his destruction, and, being raised in an extraordinary manner, he will free the Hebrew race from its bondage under the Egyptians, and his memory, for as long
as time itself shall last, will be honored among men — not only among the Hebrews but among foreign nations as well — this being a favor I grant to you and to your descendants. His brother, too, will be such a man that he and his descendants will hold my priesthood for all time to come." When this vision had made these things known to him, Amram,
once he awoke, told it to Jochebed, his wife, and their fear grew even greater on account of the dream's prediction, for they were now anxious not merely for the child but for the great prosperity that had been foretold for him. Yet the birth itself lent credence to what God had foretold, for the woman's labor escaped the notice of the guards, thanks to how easy her pains were
and because her labor came upon her without violence. For three months they kept the child with them undetected. Then Amram, fearing that the secret would be discovered and that he himself, falling under the king's wrath, would perish along with the child, and that God's promise would thereby come to nothing, decided it was better to entrust the child's rescue and safekeeping to this course rather
than to trust that they would go on escaping notice, which was, after all, uncertain — a risk not only to the child, secretly reared as he was, but to himself as well. He believed that God would provide every safeguard needed to ensure that nothing he had said would prove false. Having decided this, they wove a basket of papyrus, made to resemble a cradle, of a size large enough to hold the infant with room to spare, and then, coating it with pitch — for pitch
naturally keeps water from seeping through such woven material — they placed the child inside, and setting it down on the river, left his safety in God's hands. The river caught it up and carried it along, while Miriam, the child's sister, sent by her mother, walked along the bank beside it to see where the current would carry the basket. There God showed that
human wisdom counts for nothing, but that whatever he wills to accomplish always comes to a good end, and that those who plot another's destruction for their own safety are mistaken and labor hard in vain, while those who face danger by the will of God are found to prosper unexpectedly, rescued from the very midst of disaster. Something of this sort happened also in the case
of this child, and it revealed the power of God. Thermuthis was the daughter of the king. While she was playing by the banks of the river and saw the basket being carried along by the current, she sent swimmers to fetch the cradle to her. When those sent for it arrived with it, and she saw the child, she fell deeply in love with him for his size and his beauty; for God
took such great care over Moses that even those who had voted, on account of his birth, to destroy every other child of the Hebrew race, judged him worthy of nourishment and attention. Thermuthis ordered that a woman be brought to nurse the child. But he would not take the breast, turning away from it, and did the same with many other women, until
Miriam, who happened to be present at these events — not in a way that would seem contrived, but as if merely watching — said, "It is useless, O queen, for you to summon these women to nurse the child; they have no kinship with him at all. But if you had one of the Hebrew women brought, he might perhaps take the breast of one of his own people." Thinking she spoke well, the queen ordered her to see to this and to fetch one of the nursing women.
Miriam, given this authority, went and brought the child's mother, unknown to anyone. And the child took eagerly to the breast, and at the queen's request, the mother was entrusted with nursing the child altogether. It was from these very circumstances that she gave him the name he bears: for the Egyptians call water "mo," and "uses" those saved from
the water; combining the two words, they gave him this name accordingly. And by common consent, in keeping with God's prediction, he proved himself the finest of the Hebrews, both in greatness of spirit and in his contempt for hardship — for Abraham was his ancestor seven generations back. He was the son of Amram, who was the son of Kohath, whose father was Levi, son of Jacob, who was born to Isaac, who was the son of Abraham.
His intelligence, though, did not grow in step with his age — it far outstripped that measure — and in his childhood games he showed a maturity beyond his years, and what he did even then gave promise of the greater deeds he would accomplish as a man. When he was three years old, God caused him to shoot up to a marvelous height, and none was so indifferent to beauty as not
to be struck with wonder at Moses' good looks when he saw him; indeed, it often happened that people traveling along the road, on meeting him being carried past, would turn to look at the child's face, abandon whatever business they were engaged in, and give their full attention to gazing at him, for the charm of his childhood beauty was so abundant and so unaffected that it held all who saw it. Being such a child, Thermuthis, having no child of her own by lawful birth, adopted him as her son,
Once Thermuthis brought Moses to her father and showed him to him, telling him how she had thought of the succession, in case it should not be God's will that he have a legitimate child of his own. "I have raised," she said, "a child divine in form and noble in spirit, one I received as a marvelous gift from the river's grace, and I have resolved to make him my own son, and successor to your kingdom."
So saying, she placed the infant in her father's hands. He took him and, pressing him affectionately to his chest as a favor to his daughter, set his diadem on him. But Moses threw it to the ground, pulled it off as infants do, and trampled it underfoot. This seemed to portend something for the kingship. The sacred scribe who had foretold his birth as bringing low the rule of the Egyptians rushed to kill him, and crying out fiercely said, "This, O king, is that child whom God told us must be killed if we are to be free of fear. He confirms the truth of the prophecy by standing on your rule and trampling your diadem underfoot. Kill him, then, and free the Egyptians of the fear he brings, and strip the Hebrews of the hope his life gives them."
But Thermuthis snatched the child away before he could act, and the king was reluctant to kill him, God having so arranged things, since it was his providence that watched over Moses' safety. He was therefore raised with great care, and the Hebrews placed all their hope for the future in him, while the Egyptians regarded his upbringing with suspicion. But since there was no manifest cause for which the king might kill him, seeing that he was no kin by the adoption or by any other tie, and since there was more benefit to Egypt in the confidence his foreknowledge of the future inspired, they refrained from putting him to death.
Moses, then, having been born and raised in the manner described, and having come to an age at which his virtue was plain to the Egyptians, gave them occasion, in bringing about their humiliation and the Hebrews' advancement, to make use of him in the following way. The Ethiopians, who border Egypt, invaded their territory and carried off and drove away Egyptian property. The Egyptians, in anger, marched against them to avenge the insult, but were defeated in battle; some fell, others fled home in disgrace.
The Ethiopians pursued them, and taking their failure to conquer the whole of Egypt as a sign of weakness, pressed on further still, and having tasted its riches would no longer hold back. Since the neighboring regions did not dare to make a stand as they advanced, they pushed on as far as Memphis and the sea, no city being able to resist them. Pressed hard by this disaster, the Egyptians turned to oracles and divination. When the god counseled them to make use of the Hebrew as an ally, the king ordered his daughter to hand over Moses to become his general.
She, having made him swear he would do no harm, handed him over, judging the alliance a great benefaction, and reproaching the priests, who had once urged that he be killed as an enemy and now, needing his help, felt no shame in it. Moses, urged on by both Thermuthis and the king, gladly took up the task. The sacred scribes of both nations rejoiced — the Egyptians thinking they would defeat their enemies through his valor and destroy Moses by that same stratagem, the Hebrews thinking the Egyptians would flee before them because Moses was leading them.
He, moving before the enemy could even learn of his advance, took up the army and led it not along the river but overland. There he gave a marvelous display of his ingenuity: since the land was hard to travel because of the multitude of serpents — for it alone breeds them in abundance and with a fierceness and appearance found nowhere else, some of them even winged, which do harm unseen from the ground and, rising up, attack those who have not foreseen them — he devised a wonderful stratagem for the safety and unharmed passage of the army. He had baskets woven like chests out of papyrus, filled them with ibises, and carried them along.
This creature is the deadliest enemy of snakes: they flee its approach, and if they stand their ground they are seized as if by deer and swallowed; ibises are tame, and fierce only toward the race of snakes. I pass over writing further about this now, since the Greeks are not unacquainted with the ibis's form. So when he entered the land that bred these beasts, he fought off the nature of the serpents by releasing the ibises against them and using them as his vanguard.
Marching in this manner, he came upon the Ethiopians before they had even learned of it, and engaging them in battle he defeated them, stripped them of the hopes they had held against the Egyptians, advanced overthrowing their cities, and inflicted great slaughter on the Ethiopians. Having tasted success through Moses, the Egyptian army did not tire of the effort, so that the Ethiopians now faced the danger of enslavement and utter ruin. At last they were driven together into Saba, the royal city of Ethiopia, which Cambyses later renamed Meroe after his own sister of that name, and there they were besieged.
The place was very difficult to besiege, since the Nile surrounds it, and it is encircled also by two other rivers, the Astapus and the Astaboras, which make the crossing hard for anyone attempting it. The city, lying within as an island, is inhabited behind a strong encircling wall, having the rivers as a defense against its enemies and great earthworks between the wall and the water, so that it cannot be flooded even when the rivers run violently swollen — a feature that also made the city impossible to capture for those who had managed to cross the rivers.
Moses, chafing at the army's inactivity, since the enemy did not dare come to close quarters, found himself in this situation: Tharbis, daughter of the Ethiopian king, watched Moses leading his army up close to the walls and fighting nobly, and admired the ingenuity of his undertakings. She supposed him the cause of the Egyptians' success, who had already despaired of freedom, and of the Ethiopians' present peril, they who had been so proud of their earlier triumphs over the Egyptians. She fell violently in love with him, and as her passion grew stronger she sent the most trusted of her household servants to him to discuss marriage.
He accepted the proposal on condition that the city be handed over, and gave sworn pledges that he would indeed take her as his wife and, once master of the city, would not break the agreement. The deed followed swiftly on the words. After the destruction of the Ethiopians, Moses gave thanks to God, completed the marriage, and led the Egyptians back to their own land.
But those whom Moses had saved conceived a hatred for him because of it, and thought it right to press more urgently their schemes against him, suspecting that his success might lead him to revolt against Egypt, and telling the king about the slaughter he had wrought. The king himself had already harbored the same suspicion, out of envy of Moses' generalship and fear of his own humiliation, and, pressed further by the sacred scribes, was prepared to move against Moses' destruction. But Moses, learning of the plot beforehand, withdrew secretly, and since the roads were watched, made his escape through the desert,
going where the enemy had no reason to suspect he might be found, and though without provisions, made his way scorning the hardship through sheer endurance, until he came to the city of Midian, which lies on the Red Sea and is named after one of the sons born to Abraham by Keturah. There he sat down beside a well, worn out by weariness and toil, and rested at midday not far from the city.
There an incident befell him, arising from the local custom, that established his virtue and gave him occasion for advancement. Since the region was short of water, the shepherds would take possession of the wells first, so that the water would not be used up by others before the flocks had drunk their fill. To the well came seven maiden sisters, daughters of Raguel, a priest held in great honor among the people there. They tended their father's flocks, since this service was customary there even for women among the Troglodytes, and having arrived first they drew up water enough from the well into the troughs made to hold it for their flocks.
But when shepherds came up and stood over the maidens, meaning to seize the water for themselves, Moses thought it a terrible thing to look on while the girls were wronged and to let the violence of men prevail over the maidens' right. He drove off those who wished to take advantage and gave the girls the help they needed. The girls, so benefited, went to their father, told him of the shepherds' insolence, and urged that the stranger's kindness not go unrewarded or unrepaid.
He welcomed his daughters warmly for their concern for their benefactor, and ordered that Moses be brought before him to receive his rightful thanks. When Moses came, Raguel related his daughters' account of the help he had given, and, marveling at his character, said he would not let such a kindness be laid up among the ungrateful, but was able to repay the favor and even exceed the measure of the good deed by the greatness of his recompense.
He made him his son, gave him one of his daughters in marriage, and appointed him overseer and master of the flocks, for in those days the whole wealth of such peoples consisted in livestock. Moses, having received such things from Iethegalos — for this was Raguel's surname — lived there tending the flocks.
Some time later, while pasturing his flocks toward the mountain called Sinai, the highest of the mountains in that region and best suited for grazing, since good grass grows there, and because it was reputed to be a dwelling place of God it had never before been grazed, no shepherd daring to enter it, there a wondrous portent met him. A fire, feeding on a thorn bush, passed over the surrounding foliage and its bloom without harming them, and destroyed none of the fruit-bearing branches, even though the flame was great and very fierce.
He was afraid at the very sight of this extraordinary thing, and was struck with still greater astonishment when the fire uttered a voice, calling him by name and speaking to him — words that gave him the courage to venture into a place where no man had ever before come, because it was holy. The voice bade him withdraw as far as possible from the flame, be content with what he had seen, since he was a good man and the descendant of great men, and inquire no further. It went on to foretell to him at length the glory and honor he would have among men, with God at his side, and bade him take courage
and go to Egypt to become general and leader of the multitude of the Hebrews, and to free his kinsmen there from their humiliation. "For they shall inhabit," it said, "this fertile land which Abraham, your ancestor, once inhabited, and shall enjoy every good thing, with you and your wisdom leading them to it. And once you have led the Hebrews out of Egypt, offer thank offerings," it commanded, "when you have come to this very place, and complete them here." So much was proclaimed to him out of the fire.
Moses, astonished both by what he had seen and still more by what he had heard, said, "To distrust your power, Master — which I myself worship and know to have been made manifest to my ancestors — I judge more mad than my own good sense would allow. And yet I am at a loss how a private man, with no strength at his disposal, could either persuade my own people by mere words to abandon the land they now inhabit and follow me to the land I have in mind, or, even should they be persuaded, how I could compel Pharaoh to permit their departure, when it is by their toil and labor that he increases his own prosperity."
God counseled him to take courage about all these things, promising that he himself would be present, and that wherever words were needed he would supply persuasion, and wherever deeds were needed he would furnish strength; and he bade him cast his staff to the ground, to receive from it assurance of what was promised. When he did so, a serpent crept forth and, coiling itself in rings as if in pursuit of vengeance, reared its head; then it became a staff once more. After this he was ordered to put his right hand into his cloak. Obeying, he drew it out white, its color like chalk; then it returned to its natural state.
Bidden also to take water from nearby and pour it on the ground, he saw its color turn to blood. Marveling at these things, he was told to take courage, and to know that he would have the greatest of helpers at his side, and to use these signs so as to be believed by all, since, being sent by me, he said, you will do everything according to my commands. "I command you, without further delay, to hasten to Egypt, pressing on night and day, and not to prolong this time any further for the Hebrews suffering ill-treatment in slavery."
Moses, unable to disbelieve what the divine had promised, having been both witness and hearer of such assurances, prayed to him, and asked also to be allowed to test this power in Egypt, and begged not to be denied knowledge of his name — since he had already shared in his voice, and even in his sight — but to be told also how to address him, so that in offering sacrifice he might call on him by name and invite him to be present at the rites. And God revealed to him his own name, which had never before come to men, and about which it is not lawful for me to speak. To Moses, however, these signs occurred not only then, but constantly, whenever he had need of them.
From all these things, trusting the more in their truth because he attributed them to the fire, and believing he would have God as a gracious ally, he hoped both to save his own people and to bring disaster on the Egyptians. And learning that Pharaoh, the king of Egypt under whom he himself had fled, was dead, he asked Raguel to allow him, for the sake of his kinsmen, to go to Egypt, and
So he took Zipporah, whom he had married, the daughter of Raguel, and the sons she had borne him, Gershom and Eliezer, and set out for Egypt. Of these names, Gershom means, in the Hebrew tongue, that he had gone into a foreign land, while Eliezer means that with the help of his ancestral God he had escaped the Egyptians. When he came near the border, his brother Aaron met him, God having so commanded, and Moses told him what had happened on the mountain and the commands God had given him. As they went on, the most eminent of the Hebrews, having learned of his coming, came out to meet him, and since it was not easy for Moses to persuade them by argument, he showed them the signs before their eyes. Astonished at what they saw beyond all expectation, they took heart and grew confident about the whole enterprise, believing that God was watching over their safety.
When Moses had won over the Hebrews and found them ready to obey whatever he commanded, longing as they were for freedom, he went before the king, who had only recently taken up his rule. He set out how much he had done for the Egyptians when they were despised by the Ethiopians and their land plundered, using strategy and hard labor as though the danger were his own, and yet had received unjust repayment for it. He then laid out, point by point, what had happened to him on Mount Sinai, the voice of God, and the signs shown him as pledges of the commands laid upon him, and he urged the king not to disbelieve these things and so stand in the way of God's purpose.
The king mocked him, whereupon Moses let him see, in fact, the signs that had occurred on Mount Sinai. The king, enraged, called him a scoundrel, saying that he had first fled the servitude owed the Egyptians and now had come back by a trick, undertaking to overawe them with wonders and sorceries. So saying, he ordered the priests to produce for him the same sights, since the Egyptians were skilled in such matters too, and since he himself, being no less experienced, could show that what seemed marvelous in it was, when referred to a god, something even the unlearned could match. When they let their staffs go, they became serpents. Moses, unshaken, said, "O king, I do not myself despise Egyptian wisdom, but I say that what I do surpasses their magic and skill by as much as the divine differs from the human. I will show that my acts come not by trickery and the deception of true belief, but appear by the providence and power of God." So saying, he cast his staff to the ground and bade it turn into a serpent; it obeyed, and going about it devoured the staffs of the Egyptians, which had seemed to be serpents, until it had consumed them all. Then, changed back into its own form, it was taken up again by Moses.
The king was no more struck by this deed than before; indeed, growing angrier and declaring that nothing would be gained against him by Egyptian wisdom and cleverness, he ordered the man set over the Hebrews to allow them no relief from their labor, but to force them to still greater hardship than before. So he no longer supplied them straw for their brickmaking as he had before, but made them toil by day at their work and gather the straw by night. And since the hardship was thus doubled, they held Moses to blame, as though their labor and misery had grown harsher on his account. But he yielded neither to the king's threats nor to the Hebrews' complaints, but steeled his soul against both, set on his task of securing freedom for his people.
Coming before the king, he tried to persuade him to release the Hebrews to go to Mount Sinai and there sacrifice to God, for this, he said, was what God had commanded, and urged him not to oppose what God willed, but, holding God's favor above all else, to grant them their departure, lest, unaware, he become the one who hindered it and so bring on himself the sufferings that befall one who resists God's commands. For upon those who provoke the divine anger, terrors spring from every quarter, and neither earth nor air remains friendly to them, nor do their children's births follow the course of nature, but all things turn hostile and hateful. He declared that the Egyptians would experience these things, and along with them the departure of the Hebrew people from their land, whether the Egyptians willed it or not.
When the king scorned Moses' words and paid them no further heed, terrible sufferings overtook the Egyptians, each of which I shall set out, both because nothing like them had ever before befallen the Egyptians, so that the experience is worth recounting, and because I wish to show that Moses spoke no falsehood in anything he foretold them, and because it is useful for people to learn caution, so as to do nothing by which they might displease the divine or provoke it to anger and be punished for their wrongdoing.
For the river, at God's command, ran with blood, becoming undrinkable, and since they had no other spring of water, it was not only its color that was so changed, but it also brought pain and bitter suffering to those who tried it. Such it was for the Egyptians, but for the Hebrews it remained sweet and drinkable, in no way altered from its natural state. At this marvel the king, at a loss and fearing for the Egyptians, allowed the Hebrews to depart; but once the affliction eased he changed his mind again and would not permit their departure.
Since he showed such ingratitude and, even after his relief from disaster, no longer wished to be prudent, God brought upon the Egyptians another blow: a countless multitude of frogs fed upon their land, and the river too was full of them, so that when people tried to draw water for drinking they got it fouled by the discharge of the creatures dying and rotting in it. The whole country was full of the foul slime bred by them as they were born and died, and they overran people's houses, being found among their food and drink and swarming over their beds; and the smell was harsh and foul from the frogs dying, living, and decaying all together. Driven to distraction by these evils, the Egyptians made the king command Moses to take the Hebrews and be gone, and the moment he had said this the multitude of frogs vanished, and the land and the river returned to their natural state.
But Pharaoh, once the land was freed of the affliction, forgot its cause and kept the Hebrews back, and as though wishing to learn the nature of yet more sufferings, he would no longer let Moses and his people go, granting it, if at all, out of fear rather than good sense. So once more the divine power pursued his deceit with the onset of another evil: an unbounded swarm of lice broke out upon the Egyptians, bred from within their own bodies, by which they perished miserably, unable to rid themselves of the plague by washing or by any application of remedies. Troubled by this terror, and fearing at once destruction for his people and the disgrace of such a loss, the king of the Egyptians was forced by his own baseness to show only half-hearted prudence: he granted the Hebrews themselves leave to depart, but once the plague eased he demanded that they leave their children and wives behind as hostages for their return.
This only provoked God the more, since Pharaoh supposed he could deceive his providence, as though it were Moses, not God, who was punishing Egypt on the Hebrews' behalf. So God filled their land with wild beasts of every sort and kind, such as none had ever before set eyes upon, by which they themselves perished and the land was robbed of the care its farmers gave it; and whatever escaped destruction by the beasts was consumed by disease among the people who survived. Yet even so Pharaoh would not yield to God's will, but while agreeing that the women might leave with the men, he insisted that the children be left behind. So the divine power was at no loss to torment his wickedness with troubles more varied and worse than those that had gone before: their bodies broke out horribly in sores as their insides rotted, and great numbers of the Egyptians perished in this way.
Even this affliction did not bring the king to his senses, so hail fell -- such as the air over Egypt had never before suffered, nor like the winter storms known elsewhere, but heavier than what falls on the peoples who dwell in the north beneath the Bear -- and it came down at the height of spring and shattered their crops. Then a swarm of locusts fed on the sowing that the hail had spared, so as to destroy, down to the last measure, all the Egyptians' hopes of a harvest from the land.
These misfortunes already recounted would have been enough to bring to understanding and a sense of what was to their advantage anyone who was merely foolish, without malice; but Pharaoh, acting not so much from folly as from wickedness, though he perceived the cause well enough, set himself in rivalry against God and willingly became a traitor to the better course. He ordered Moses to lead the Hebrews away with their wives and children, but to leave their livestock behind, since their own had perished. When Moses said that this demand was unjust, since they needed the livestock to offer sacrifices to God, and time was spent over this dispute, a deep darkness devoid of any light was spread over the Egyptians, under which, their sight shut off and their breath choked by its thickness, they died pitifully and lived in dread of being swallowed up by the cloud.
Then, when this had dispersed after three days and as many nights, and Pharaoh still had no change of heart about letting the Hebrews go, Moses came to him and said, "How long will you resist the will of God? For he commands that the Hebrews be set free, and there is no other way for you to be rid of these evils than by doing this." The king, enraged at these words, threatened to cut off his head if he came to trouble him again about the matter. Moses said he would himself speak no more of it, but that Pharaoh himself, along with the leading men of Egypt, would beg the Hebrews to leave. So saying, he departed.
God, having declared that he would compel the Egyptians with one more blow to release the Hebrews, ordered Moses to instruct the people to have a sacrifice ready, prepared on the tenth day of the month of Xanthicus for the fourteenth -- the month called Pharmuthi by the Egyptians, Nisan by the Hebrews, and Xanthicus by the Macedonians -- and to take the Hebrews away with all their goods packed for the journey. He therefore kept the Hebrews ready for departure, having arranged them by kindred groups, gathered together as one.
When the fourteenth day arrived, all of them, prepared for their departure, sacrificed and purified their houses with the blood, using bundles of hyssop, and after the meal burned what remained of the meat, ready as they were to set out. From this comes the custom by which we still today offer this sacrifice, calling the festival Passover, which means "passing over," because on that day God passed over the Egyptians and struck them with the plague. For the destruction of the firstborn fell upon the Egyptians that very night, so that many of those who lived about the palace gathered and urged Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go. He summoned Moses and ordered them to depart, supposing that once they had left the country Egypt would cease to suffer, and the Egyptians honored the Hebrews with gifts, some to hasten their departure, others out of the friendship of neighbors.
So they went out, while the Egyptians wept and repented of how harshly they had treated them, and made their way toward the city of Letopolis, which was then uninhabited -- for Babylon was founded there later, when Cambyses was subduing Egypt. Making their departure in haste, they came on the third day to a place called Baal-zephon, by the Red Sea. Having no supply of anything from the land because of the wilderness, they lived on loaves made from dough mixed with flour and only lightly baked by a brief heat, and used these for thirty days, for what they had brought from Egypt could not last them longer, even though they rationed the food and used it only as much as necessity required, not to satisfaction. This is why, in memory of that time of want, we keep a festival for eight days called the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
The whole multitude of those who migrated, counting women and children together, was beyond reckoning, but those of military age numbered about six hundred thousand. They left Egypt in the month of Xanthicus, on the fifteenth day by the moon, four hundred and thirty years after our forefather Abraham had come into Canaan, but two hundred and fifteen years after Jacob's migration into Egypt. Moses was by now eighty years old, and his brother Aaron three years older. They also carried with them the bones of Joseph, as he had charged his sons to do.
The Egyptians repented of having let the Hebrews go, and since the king took it hard, believing that all this had come about through Moses' sorcery, they resolved to go after them. Taking up arms and equipment, they set out in pursuit, meaning to bring them back if they caught them, for, they reasoned, the Hebrews were no longer bound to God, since their departure had already been granted, and they supposed they would easily overpower them, unarmed as they were and worn out by their journey. Inquiring from everyone which way they had gone, they hastened their pursuit, even though the country was difficult to travel, not only for an army but even for a single traveler.
Moses had led the Hebrews by this route so that, should the Egyptians repent and wish to pursue them, they might pay the penalty for their wickedness and for breaking their sworn word, and also because of the Philistines, who, out of an old enmity, were hostile toward them, and whom he wished, in leaving, to escape notice by any means he could, since their land bordered on Egypt. For this reason he did not lead the people by the road toward Philistia, but through the wilderness, by a long and toilsome route, meaning to enter Canaan that way -- and also because of God's commands, which ordered him to lead the people to Mount Sinai and there offer sacrifices. He had already overtaken the
The Egyptians came upon the Hebrews and prepared for battle, and by sheer weight of numbers drove them into a narrow space; for six hundred chariots followed them, along with fifty thousand cavalry and two hundred thousand infantry. They blocked the roads by which they supposed the Hebrews would try to escape, hemming them in between impassable cliffs and the sea; for a mountain runs down to the sea there, impossible to cross because of the roughness of its paths, and it cuts off any flight. At the point where the mountain opens toward the sea the Egyptians blocked the Hebrews' way by pitching camp squarely across the mouth of the pass, so as to deny them any exit into the open plain.
The Hebrews could not hold out under siege for lack of provisions, they saw no way open for flight, and they were short of weapons even had they resolved to fight; they fell into the certain expectation of perishing, unless they surrendered themselves to the Egyptians of their own accord. They blamed Moses, forgetting all the signs God had worked for their freedom, and in their want of faith they were ready to stone the very prophet who kept urging them on and promising them deliverance, and had resolved to hand themselves over to the Egyptians. There was mourning and wailing among the women and children, who had before their eyes their own destruction, hemmed in as they were by mountains and sea and enemies, with no way of escape to be found from any quarter.
But Moses, though the people raged against him, did not himself grow weary in his care for them, nor did he lose trust in God, who had furnished everything else he had foretold for their freedom and would not, even now, allow them to fall under their enemies' power, whether to be enslaved or destroyed. He stood among them and said: "It would be unjust to distrust men who have served us well up to now, on the ground that they will not prove the same toward what is to come; and to despair now of God's providence, from whom all that has happened to you through me has come to pass, beyond even your own expectation, for your deliverance and release from slavery, would be an act of madness.
"On the contrary, now that you find yourselves, as you think, without resource, you ought all the more to hope in God as your helper, since it is his doing that you have now been shut up in this narrow place, so that, delivering you from a plight where you believe there is no safety for yourselves and your enemies believe there is none for you either, he may display both his own power and his providence for you. For it is not on small matters that the divine grants its aid to those it favors, but on matters where human hope can see no way toward anything better. Trust, then, in such a helper, whose power can make small things great and can condemn to weakness even the mightiest strength, and do not be terrified by the Egyptians' array, nor despair of deliverance because the sea lies before you and the mountains behind allow no path of flight;
for even these, if God wills it, could become plains for you, and the sea dry land." Having said this, he led them toward the sea while the Egyptians looked on; for they were in plain sight, and being worn out by the toil of the pursuit, the Egyptians supposed it best to put off the battle until the next day. But when Moses had come to the shore, he took his staff and implored God, calling on him as ally and helper, and said: "You yourself are not unaware that it is beyond human strength or human contrivance for us to escape our present plight; but if there is any safety at all for the army that at your bidding left Egypt, it is yours to provide it.
We, having given up all other hope and device, take refuge in yours alone; and whatever may come from your providence able to snatch us from the Egyptians' wrath, we look for it. May it come quickly, revealing your power to us, and raising this people, fallen into despair, out of their dejection into good courage and confidence of deliverance. We are not without resource in what seems impossible, for the sea is yours, and yours the mountain that encloses us; at your command this can open, and that sea become dry land, and it is ours to escape even through the air, should it seem good to your might that we be saved in that way." Having called on God with these words, he struck the sea with his staff. And the sea, struck by the blow, drew back and withdrew into itself, leaving the ground bare and offering the Hebrews a way of escape.
Moses, seeing the manifestation of God and the sea withdrawn from its own bed to make way for them, was the first to step into it, and ordered the Hebrews to follow, making their way along a road opened by God's own hand, rejoicing at the danger now facing their enemies and giving thanks for a deliverance so unexpected, come from God himself. And when they no longer hesitated but pressed on eagerly, feeling that God was with them, the Egyptians at first thought them mad, rushing to their own manifest destruction; but when they saw them advancing unharmed for the most part, meeting no obstacle and no difficulty, they set out in pursuit, supposing that the sea would remain calm for them as well, and putting their cavalry in front, they went down into it. The Hebrews, while the Egyptians were still arming and spending time on this, had already reached the far shore unscathed, having made their escape;
and this made them the bolder in facing pursuit, since they now had nothing further to suffer. The Egyptians did not realize that the road had been made for the Hebrews alone, not for common use, and made only until those in danger should reach safety, not meant to serve those bent on their destruction as well. So when the whole Egyptian army was within the seabed, the sea rushed back again, and, driven by winds, came pouring down and closed in on the Egyptians on every side; rain fell from the sky, harsh thunder broke out with flashing lightning, and thunderbolts came down as well. In short there was nothing among all the disasters that come upon men through God's wrath that did not converge on them then; for a black and moonless night also overtook them.
And so they all perished in this way, so completely that not even a messenger of the disaster returned to those left behind. As for the Hebrews, they could not contain themselves for joy at their unlooked-for deliverance and at the destruction of their enemies, believing themselves now surely freed from those who had forced them into slavery, and now having such clear proof of God's help. Having thus escaped the danger themselves, and moreover having seen their enemies punished as no other men are recorded to have been before them, they spent the whole night in hymns and games, and Moses composed a song to God, containing his praise and thanksgiving for his favor, set in hexameter verse.
Now I have set down each of these things just as I found them in the sacred books; let no one be surprised at the strangeness of the account, if a way of deliverance through the sea was found for men of ancient times who had done no wrong, whether by God's will or by chance, since even for those around Alexander, king of Macedonia, men of only yesterday and the day before, the Pamphylian Sea withdrew and, when they had no other road, gave them a way through itself by which to overthrow the Persian empire, God so willing; and this is agreed by all who have written the history of Alexander's deeds. On these matters, then, let each judge as he thinks fit.
On the following day the weapons of the Egyptians were carried to the Hebrews' camp by the current and the force of the wind driving that way, and Moses, judging that this too had come about through God's providence, so that they should not lack weapons either, gathered them and, having armed the Hebrews with them, led them to Mount Sinai to sacrifice there to God and to render the thank-offerings of the people, just as he had been told to do.

======== Antiquities — Book 3 ========

Contents of Book Three: (1) How Moses, having taken the people out of Egypt, led them to Mount Sinai after they had endured much hardship on the march. (2) How the Amalekites and their neighbors made war on the Hebrews and were defeated, losing a great part of their army. (3) That Moses gladly welcomed his father-in-law Jethro when he came to him at Sinai. (4) How Jethro advised him to organize the people under commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds, since until then they had been undisciplined, and how Moses carried out each of these measures according to his father-in-law's advice. (5) How Moses went up onto Mount Sinai, received the laws from God, and gave them to the Hebrews. (6) Concerning the tent which Moses built in the wilderness in honor of God, so that it seemed to be a temple. (7) What the vestments of the priests and of the high priest were, the manner of the purifications, and the festivals, and how each of the festivals was arranged. (8) How Moses set out from there and led the people to the borders of the Canaanites, and sent men to survey their land and the size of their cities. (9) That when the men who had been sent returned after the fortieth day and reported that they were not a match for the Canaanites but had only found their strength reduced, the people were thrown into confusion and despair, and set out to stone Moses, having resolved to return to Egypt to be slaves again. (10) And how Moses, indignant at this, foretold that God, angry with them, would impose forty years of wandering in the wilderness, and that they would neither return to Egypt nor take possession of Canaan. This book covers a period of two years.
Though their deliverance had come about so astonishingly, the Hebrews were grievously distressed once again as they were led toward Mount Sinai, for the land was entirely desert, unable to provide them food, and so short of water that it was scarcely to be found at all; it could supply not only no human need but could not even sustain any other creature, for the soil is loose and dry, with no moisture in it capable of producing any crop. Since the land was of this kind, they were forced to march on, having no other way to go. On the general's orders they carried water from the country they had already passed through, and when this ran out they drew water laboriously from wells, on account of the hardness of the ground, and what they found was bitter, not fit to drink, and even that was scarce.
Traveling in this fashion, they arrived toward evening at a place called Mar, so named because of the badness of its water — for "mar" means "bitterness." Worn out there by the constant marching and by lack of food, which had by then failed them completely, they made camp; there was a well there, and for that reason they stayed longer, even though it could not supply so large an army, yet finding it in that region gave them some small comfort, since they had heard from their scouts that there was nothing ahead as they went on. But that water was bitter and undrinkable, unbearable not only for the people but for the pack animals as well.
Seeing them despondent, and the matter beyond dispute — for the army was not a select force able to meet the pressure of necessity with courage, but its natural resolve was undermined by the crowd of children and women, too weak to be reached by reasoned argument — Moses found himself in worse straits still, taking the calamity of everyone as his own personal burden. Indeed the people ran to no one else but to him, the women pleading on behalf of their infants and the men on behalf of the women, begging him not to overlook them but to provide some means of deliverance.
He therefore turned to entreating God to change the water from its present foulness and make it drinkable for them. When God consented to grant this favor, Moses took the top of a branch lying at his feet, split it down the middle along its length, then threw it into the well, and told the Hebrews that God had heard his prayers and had promised to provide them water such as they desired, if they would carry out his commands not reluctantly but eagerly. When they asked what they should do to make the water change for the better, he ordered the men in their prime to stand around it and draw it out, saying that what remained would be drinkable once the greater part had first been emptied out. So they set to the labor, and the water, stirred and cleared by the continual disturbance, at last became fit to drink.
Setting out from there, they arrived at Elim, a place that looked good from a distance, being planted with palms, but on approach proved wretched; for the palms, no more than seventy in number, grew poorly and low to the ground, because the whole area lacked water and was dry sand throughout. Even the twelve springs there produced no moisture worth relying on to water them usefully — being unable to gush or rise, they gave only a few trickles, and when the people dug through the sand nothing came of it; and even the drops they caught in their hands they found useless, because they were muddy. The trees bore weak fruit for lack of the water needed to nourish and encourage them.
They therefore blamed the general and cried out against him, saying that they were suffering this hardship and this ordeal of misery because of him; for it was now the thirtieth day of their march, and having used up all the provisions they carried and finding nothing to replace them, they despaired of their whole situation. With their minds fixed on the present evil, and prevented by it from remembering what God and the virtue and wisdom of Moses had already accomplished for them, they were furious with the general and set out to stone him as the one most responsible for the calamity now upon them.
But he, though the crowd was so inflamed and moved bitterly against him, trusting in God and in his own conscience of the care he had taken for his kinsmen, came forward into their midst; and while they were shouting at him and still holding stones in their hands — being naturally winning to look at and most persuasive in addressing crowds — he began to check their anger, urging them not to let their memory of past kindnesses vanish because of their present difficulties, nor, because they were now suffering, to cast out of their minds the favors and gifts of God, great and astonishing as they had been, but rather to expect deliverance from their present helplessness through God's providence — who, in testing their virtue, how much endurance they had and how well they remembered what had been done for them before, was likely, if they failed to hold fast to those memories because of their present troubles, to be putting them through this present hardship as a trial.
"They are being shown," he said, "to be lacking both in endurance and in memory of their blessings — showing such contempt for God and for the purpose for which they left Egypt, and treating in this way his own servant, who has never once deceived them in anything he has said or in what he has bidden them do at God's command."
He recounted everything in turn: how the Egyptians had been destroyed for trying by force to hold them against God's will; how the same river had been blood to the Egyptians, undrinkable, but sweet and drinkable to the Hebrews; how, when the sea had opened a way for them, they had gone off by that unprecedented, distant new road and thereby been saved themselves while watching their enemies perish; how, when they were short of weapons, God had put them in abundant supply of these as well; and all the other ways in which, when they had seemed on the very brink of destruction, God had saved them beyond expectation, by whatever power was his to use. They should not, he said, give up on God's providence even now, but wait for it without anger, reasoning that his help was not slow merely because it did not arrive at once, or because it came only after some hardship had first been endured; rather they should understand that God was not delaying out of neglect, but was testing their courage and their love of freedom, so as to learn whether they were indeed noble enough to bear want of food and scarcity of water for its sake, or whether they preferred instead to be slaves, like cattle, to their masters, who feed them lavishly only for their own service.
He said that he feared, not so much for his own safety — for he would suffer no wrong in dying unjustly — but for them, lest by the very stones with which they were stoning him they should be judged as condemning God himself. With this he calmed them, checked their impulse to throw the stones, and turned them to repentance for what they had been about to do. Yet, considering that what they had suffered was not unreasonable given their extremity, he judged it necessary to go and entreat and beseech God; and going up to a certain height, he asked for some means and relief from want for the people, saying that their safety lay in God's hands and in no one else's, and asking pardon for what the people were now doing under compulsion, since the human race is by nature prone to discontent and quick to find fault whenever it meets with misfortune. And God promised to provide for them and to supply the relief they longed for.
Having heard this from God, Moses came down to the people; and when they saw him rejoicing at God's promises, they too turned from their dejection to a more cheerful mood. Standing among them, he said he had come bringing them, from God, relief from their present distress.
And shortly afterward a multitude of quail — a bird nourished by the Arabian Gulf as by no other region — flew in over the intervening sea, and, worn out by the flight and flying closer to the ground than other birds, came down among the Hebrews. They caught them and relieved their want with this food, which God had devised for them, and Moses turned to prayers of thanks to God, who had made good on his promise of help so swiftly.
Immediately after this first source of food, God sent them a second as well. While Moses held up his hands in prayer, dew came down, and as it froze onto his hands, Moses suspected that this too had come to them as food from God; he tasted it and was delighted, and though the people did not understand, thinking it was snow and that this was simply the season for it, he taught them that the dew was not, as they supposed, falling from the sky in the ordinary way, but for their safety and nourishment, and by tasting it himself he led them to believe this. Following the general's example, they took pleasure in the food; in sweetness and flavor it resembled honey, in appearance the resin bdellium, and in size the seed of coriander.
They were extremely eager to gather it. The order given was that everyone alike should gather an assaron of it each day — this is a unit of measure — since the food would not run out for them, so that the weak would not be left without means of gathering it because the stronger took more than their share in collecting it. Yet those who gathered more than the prescribed measure gained nothing extra for their trouble, for they found no more than an assaron in it; and whatever was left over until the next day was of no use at all, having spoiled and become full of worms and bitterness — so miraculous and extraordinary was this food.
It protects those who live on it from want of other food; and indeed that whole region still receives this rain even now, just as at that time the divine sent down this sustenance as a favor to Moses. The Hebrews call this food "manna," for "man," in our language, is a question meaning, "What is this?" And they continued to rejoice over what had been sent down to them from heaven, and they made use of this food for forty years, for as long as they were in the wilderness.
Setting out from there, they came to Rephidim, worn out with thirst to the utmost, having met with only a few springs in the previous days and now finding the ground entirely without water. They were in a bad state and again grew furious with Moses. He, deflecting the crowd's fury for a short while, turned to prayer, entreating God, just as he had given them food in their want, likewise now to provide them drink, since the benefit of the food was itself being ruined by the absence of anything to drink.
God did not delay the gift for long, but promised Moses that he would provide a spring and abundance of water from a source they would not expect, and instructed him to strike with his staff the rock which they saw lying there and to draw from it the abundance of what they needed — for God took care that the water should not appear to them by toil or labor.
Having received this from God, Moses came to the people, who were waiting and looking toward him, for they could already see him coming down from the height. When he arrived, he told them that God would free them from this hardship too and would grant them an unhoped-for deliverance, saying that a river would flow for them out of the rock.
They were astonished at this report, thinking it strange that men already worn out by thirst and travel should now be required to hew at rock; but Moses struck it with his staff, and as it gaped open, abundant, perfectly clear water gushed out. They were astounded at the marvel of what had happened, and at the very sight of it their thirst already began to ease; they drank the stream, sweet and pleasant, exactly what a gift of God's giving should be. They marveled at Moses, so honored by God, and repaid God's providence toward them with sacrifices. An inscription preserved in the Temple records that God had foretold to Moses that water would be given forth from the rock in just this way.
Since the name of the Hebrews was already famous everywhere, and word of them, spreading about, put the natives in no small fear, they sent embassies to one another urging resistance and calling for an attempt to destroy the men. Those who took the lead in this were the inhabitants of Gobolitis and Petra, who are called Amalekites, and are the most warlike...
These were among the most warlike of the peoples in that region, and their kings sent messages to one another and to their neighbors urging war against the Hebrews. They said that a foreign army, one that had fled the slavery of Egypt, now lay in wait for them, and that it was not safe to overlook it; rather, before it grew strong and gained resources and itself began hostilities against them, they should take courage from the fact that the Hebrews had done them no harm and destroy them while it was still safe and prudent to do so—exacting a reckoning from them for the wilderness and for what had happened there, rather than waiting until the Hebrews laid hands on their cities and their goods. Those who try to crush an enemy's power while it is still beginning, they said, show better judgment than those who wait and merely block it once it has grown greater; for the latter seem only to grudge the enemy his surplus, while the former allow him no opportunity at all to act against them.
With such messages passing among the neighboring peoples and between themselves, they resolved to march against the Hebrews for battle. Moses, who expected no hostility, found himself thrown into difficulty and confusion by the actions of the local peoples; and when the enemy was already present for battle and danger was at hand, the multitude of the Hebrews grew badly agitated, being at a loss in every respect and about to fight men who were in every way well equipped for war. So Moses began to offer encouragement, urging them to take heart, since they had put their trust in the judgment of God, by whose power they had been lifted up into freedom and would overcome those now arraying themselves against them in battle. He told them to consider that their own army was large and lacking in nothing—weapons, money, food, and all the other things men rely on when they fight with confidence—for they should judge that these were supplied to them through their alliance with God, while the enemy's forces were few, unarmed, and weak, of a kind that could hardly overpower men such as they knew themselves to be, especially since God did not wish it. He told them to recognize what kind of ally this was, from the many and far graver trials they had already endured: for this present contest was merely against men, but the hardships they had faced from hunger and thirst, and from having no way to escape by mountain or by sea, these they had overcome through the favor of God toward them. Now, he urged, they should show the greatest eagerness, since abundance in all things lay before them if they mastered their enemies.
With such words Moses encouraged the multitude, calling together the tribal leaders and the officials, addressing them individually and together; he urged the younger men to obey their elders, and all of them to heed their general. Their spirits were lifted toward the danger, and being ready to face the peril, they hoped at last to be free of their troubles; they urged Moses to lead them against the enemy at once, without delay, since postponement only hindered their eagerness. He then set apart from the whole people all who were fit for battle and put Joshua son of Nun in command of them, a man of the tribe of Ephraim, most courageous, noble in enduring hardship, most capable in both thought and speech, a man who worshiped God with distinction and who had made Moses his teacher in piety toward him, and who was honored among the Hebrews. He stationed a small detachment of the armed men near the water to guard the children, the women, and the whole camp. All through the night they occupied themselves with preparations, repairing any weapon that had suffered damage and attending to their officers, ready to set out for battle whenever Moses gave the order. Moses himself stayed awake as well, instructing Joshua on how he should draw up the camp for battle. As day began to break, he again urged Joshua to show himself no less a man in action than the hope placed in him, and to win glory through this present command in the eyes of those he led by what was accomplished. He also spoke privately to the most distinguished of the Hebrews, and roused the whole armed multitude as well. Having thus prepared the army both with words and with the arrangements made through action, he withdrew to the mountain, entrusting the army to God and to Joshua.
The enemy then closed in, and the battle was fought hand to hand. As long as the two sides urged each other on with eagerness and Moses kept his hands raised, the Hebrews had the better of the Amalekites. But Moses could not endure the strain of holding his hands raised, for every time he lowered them his own people began to lose ground; so he ordered his brother Aaron and Hur, husband of his sister Miriam, to stand on either side of him and support his hands, not allowing them to grow weary. When this was done, the Hebrews defeated the Amalekites decisively, and would have destroyed them all had night not fallen and stopped the killing. Our ancestors won a most splendid and decisive victory: they overcame those who had marched against them and struck fear into the surrounding peoples, and from their exertion they gained great and brilliant rewards, capturing the enemy's camp and acquiring great wealth, both public and private, though before this they had not even had enough for their basic needs. And the benefit of that battle, rightly won, extended not only to the present but into future ages as well; for they enslaved not only the bodies of those who had marched against them but their spirits too, and after their defeat they became feared by all the surrounding peoples, while they themselves gained the power that comes with great wealth. A great quantity of silver and gold was captured in the enemy camp, along with bronze vessels used in daily life, a large and notable quantity of woven goods on both sides, ornaments for weapons, and all the other equipment and gear of that kind, along with every sort of plunder in livestock and whatever else tends to accompany armies on campaign. The Hebrews were filled with pride in their courage, and gained a strong sense of their own worth; they were devoted to hard work, believing that everything was now within their reach through it. And this was the outcome of that battle.
On the following day Moses stripped the enemy dead and gathered the arms of those who had fled; he gave honors to those who had distinguished themselves and praised the general Joshua, whose conduct was attested by the whole army. Not one Hebrew died, while the enemy dead could not even be counted. After offering sacrifices of thanksgiving, Moses set up an altar which he named "Victorious," and prophesied that the Amalekites would be utterly destroyed and that none of them would survive into the future, because they had made war on the Hebrews—and had done so while the Hebrews were in the wilderness and suffering hardship. He then restored the army's strength with feasting. This was the first battle they fought against those who dared to oppose them after their exodus from Egypt, and this is how it went. When they had held the festival of victory, Moses let the Hebrews rest for a few days after the battle and then led them onward in formation; their armed force was now considerable. Advancing gradually, within three months of setting out from Egypt they arrived at Mount Sinai, where the incident of the bush and the other wonders we described earlier had taken place.
Reuel, his father-in-law, on hearing of his success, came gladly to meet him, welcoming Moses, Zipporah, and their children. Moses was glad at his father-in-law's arrival, and after offering sacrifice he feasted the people near the bush that had escaped being consumed by the flame. The people took part in the feast by families, each in its own group, while Aaron, together with those present, brought Reuel along, and they sang hymns to God as the one responsible for their deliverance and freedom and its provider, and they praised the general, since through his virtue everything had turned out according to their wishes. Reuel spoke at length in praise of the people's gratitude toward Moses, and marveled at Moses himself for the courage he had shown in saving his friends.
The next day Reuel saw Moses occupied with a crowd of business—for he was settling disputes for those in need, since everyone came to him, believing that only through him could they obtain justice, for even those who lost their case thought it easy to accept, believing that they suffered it through justice and not through favoritism. At the time Reuel kept quiet, not wishing to interfere with those who wanted to make use of the general's excellence; but once the crowd had dispersed, he took Moses aside privately and instructed him in what he ought to do. He advised him to leave the burden of dealing with lesser disputes to others, and to keep his own attention fixed on greater matters and on the safety of the people. "Other capable men could be found among the Hebrews to render judgments," he said, "but no one but you could see to the safety of so many tens of thousands. Since you recognize your own virtue, and what you have become in serving God for the salvation of the people, leave the settling of complaints to others as well, and devote yourself alone to the service of God, continually seeking ways to relieve the people of their present difficulties.
"If you follow my advice concerning human affairs, you will carefully review the army and appoint over them judges chosen by rank—first over ten thousand, then over a thousand, and after that you will divide them into groups of five hundred, then again into hundreds, then fifties. Over these you will appoint officers who will organize them further into groups of thirty, twenty, and ten, and let each of these have one man in charge, named for the number of those under him. Let these be men tested and approved by the whole people as good and just, who will judge disputes among them, and if some matter is too great, they will refer the decision to those of higher rank; and if even they find the matter too difficult, they will send it up to you. In this way both results will follow: the Hebrews will obtain justice, and you, by devoting yourself to God, will make him more favorable to the army."
When Reuel had given this advice, Moses gladly accepted the counsel and acted according to his father-in-law's suggestion, not concealing or claiming for himself the idea behind this arrangement, but making its true author known to the people. And in his writings he recorded that it was Reuel who had discovered the arrangement just described, thinking it right to give true credit to those who deserved it, even though this meant that the honor for what had been found by others would pass to another man's name—so that from this too one might learn Moses's virtue. But concerning this matter we will speak more fully elsewhere in this history at a fitting point.
Moses then called the people together and told them that he himself would go up to Mount Sinai to be with God, and that he would return to them bringing something useful from him; he ordered them meanwhile to move their camp near the mountain, giving priority to being close to God. Having said this, he went up to Sinai, the highest of the mountains in that region, so steep in its cliffs and so vast in size that it was not only unclimbable by men but could hardly even be looked upon without effort of the eye—made all the more fearsome and unapproachable by the report that God dwelt upon it. The Hebrews, in accordance with Moses's instructions, moved their camp and took up positions at the foot of the mountain, their spirits lifted, expecting Moses's return from God bringing the good things he had promised them. Keeping festival, they awaited their general, purifying themselves in every way, including abstaining from relations with their wives for three days, as he had told them beforehand, and praying that God would be gracious to Moses in their meeting and grant him a gift by which they might live well. They also observed richer diets and adorned themselves splendidly, together with their wives and children.
For two days they continued feasting, but on the third, before sunrise, a cloud rose up over the whole camp of the Hebrews—something they had never seen happen before—and it enclosed the area where their tents had been pitched, while the rest of the sky remained entirely clear. Violent winds arose, driving furious rain before them, lightning flashed terrifyingly to those who saw it, and thunderbolts falling down made clear the presence of God, with whom Moses rejoiced to find himself in favorable company. As for these things, let each of my readers think as he wishes; for my part I am bound to record them just as they are written in the sacred books. The Hebrews were terribly disturbed both by what they saw and by the sound that struck their ears, for such things were unfamiliar to them, and the report that had spread concerning the mountain—that God frequented that very place—struck their minds with great terror. They kept themselves by their tents, distressed, believing that Moses had perished through the anger of God and expecting something similar for themselves.
While they were in this state, Moses appeared, exultant and full of confidence. On being seen, he freed them from their fear and instilled in them better hopes for what was to come; and with Moses's arrival the air, too, became clear and calm after the disturbances of a little while before. He then called the people together in assembly to hear what God would say to him, and when they had gathered, he stood on a high place from which all could hear him, and said: "Hebrews, just as before, God has received me with favor, and having dictated to us a happy life and an ordered constitution, he is present himself in the camp. In view of him and of the works already accomplished for us through him, do not disregard what is said by looking to me, the one who speaks, nor because it is a human tongue that speaks to you; but when you consider the greatness of those deeds, you will recognize also the greatness of the one who conceived them and who, for your benefit, did not begrudge speaking through me. For it is not Moses, son of Amram and Jochebed, but the one who forced the Nile to run red with blood for your sake and subdued the pride of the Egyptians with manifold afflictions, who opened for you a road through the sea, who—"
and who contrived that food should come down from heaven to them in their need, who made drink gush from a rock for them in their want; through whom Adam partakes of the fruits of earth and sea, through whom Noah escaped the flood, through whom Abraham our forefather, a wanderer, took possession of the land of Canaan, through whom Isaac was born to aged parents, through whom Jacob was adorned by the virtues of twelve sons, through whom Joseph became master of the power of Egypt — it is this God who grants you these words, through my mediation as interpreter.
"Let them be held sacred by you, fought for even more fiercely than your children and your wives. For you will lead a happy life if you follow them, enjoying a fruitful land and a sea free of storms, and children born as nature intends, and you will be formidable to your enemies. For I myself, having come into God's presence, became a hearer of an incorruptible voice; so much does he care for our race and for its continuance."
Having said this, he led the people forward, women and children together, so that they might hear God himself conversing with them about what was to be done, in order that the excellence of what was said should not be weakened by being passed to their understanding through the feebleness of a human tongue. And all heard a voice coming from on high, reaching every one of them, so that none escaped it — words which Moses left inscribed on the two tablets. It is not permitted for us to state them here word for word, but we will make their sense known.
The first word, then, teaches us that God is one, and that he alone must be worshipped. The second commands that we make no image of any living creature and bow down to it. The third forbids swearing by God over anything worthless. The fourth commands observance of the sabbaths, resting from all work. The fifth, to honor one's parents. The sixth, to abstain from murder. The seventh, not to commit adultery. The eighth, not to steal. The ninth, not to bear false witness. The tenth, to covet nothing that belongs to another.
The multitude, having heard these things from God himself concerning what Moses had discussed, rejoiced at what had been said, and the assembly dispersed. On the days that followed they kept coming to his tent and asked him to bring them further laws from God as well. He set these down, and also gave indications concerning the whole course their affairs would take in later times — indications I will mention in their proper place. The greater part of the laws I reserve for another work, in which I intend to give a separate and full account of them.
Matters standing thus, Moses went up again to Mount Sinai, having told the Hebrews beforehand, and he made the ascent in their sight. And as time dragged on — for he was away from them forty days — fear seized the Hebrews that something had happened to Moses, and of all the troubles that befell them, none grieved them so much as the belief that Moses had perished. For there was strife among the people: some said he had died, having fallen in with wild beasts, and those especially who were ill-disposed toward him cast this vote; others said he had withdrawn to the divine.
But the more sensible, who took neither view to gratify some private wish of their own, and who thought it a merely human thing for him to have died by falling in with beasts, yet judged it likely that he had been translated to God on account of his surpassing virtue, were led by this reasoning to bear it calmly. But those who supposed themselves bereft of a protector and guardian such as they could never find again continued to grieve deeply; they could neither bring themselves to hope for anything good concerning the man nor stop grieving and looking downcast. The army did not dare to break camp, since Moses had told them beforehand to remain there.
Now when forty days and as many nights had already passed, he appeared, having tasted none of the food customarily eaten by men. His appearance filled the army with joy, and he made known the providence God had for them, and the manner in which they would prosper if they governed themselves rightly, saying that God had instructed him, during those days, to lay this down: that he wished a tent to be made for him, into which he would come down to be present among them, so that even when moving from place to place they might carry it with them and no longer need to go up to Sinai, but that he himself, visiting the tent, would be present at their prayers. The tent would be made according to the measurements and design he himself had indicated, if they were ready to undertake the work without hesitation.
Having said this, he showed them the two tablets, inscribed with the ten words, five on each. And the hand that had written them was God's own. The people, rejoicing both at what they saw and at what they heard from their commander, were not wanting in zeal to match their means, but brought silver, gold, and bronze; wood of the finest kind, incapable of suffering decay; goat hair and sheepskins, some dyed violet, others scarlet, some giving the hue of purple, others left white; wool dyed in these same colors; fine linen; and stones set in gold, of the sort men use for costly ornament. They also brought together a great quantity of incense — for it was from such materials that he constructed the tent.
It differed in no way from a portable, movable temple. When all this had been gathered together with zeal, each contributing beyond his means out of rivalry, Moses set architects over the works by God's command — men whom the people themselves would have chosen, had the choice been left to them. Their names, since they are recorded also in the sacred books, were these: Bezalel, son of Uri, of the tribe of Judah, grandson of Miriam the sister of the commander, and Oholiab, son of Isamachus, of the tribe of Dan. The people were seized by such eagerness for the undertaking that Moses had to restrain them by proclamation, declaring that those already engaged were sufficient — for the craftsmen themselves had told him so beforehand. So they proceeded to the construction of the tent, and Moses instructed them in every particular concerning the measurements, following God's design, and its size, and what vessels it must hold for use in the sacrifices. The women too vied with one another over the priestly robes and the other things the work required, for adornment and for the service of God.
When everything was ready — the gold, the bronze, and the woven materials — Moses proclaimed a festival and sacrifices according to each man's means, and set up the tent. First he measured out an open court, fifty cubits in width and a hundred in length. He set up bronze posts, five cubits high, along each side — twenty along each of the longer sides, ten along the width at the rear — with rings attached to each post; the capitals were silver, the bases were bronze, shaped like spearpoints, and fixed firmly in the ground. From the rings hung cords, fastened at their upper ends to bronze pegs a cubit long, which, driven into the ground beside each post, were meant to hold the tent immovable against the force of the winds. Fine linen of the most varied weave ran the whole way round, falling from capital to base in ample folds, enclosing the whole space, so that it seemed no different from a wall.
Such was the arrangement of three sides of the enclosure. As for the fourth side — which was likewise fifty cubits, being the front of the whole — twenty cubits of it were left open as a gateway, in which two posts stood on each side in imitation of gate-pillars. The whole of these was overlaid with silver over bronze, except for the bases, which were bronze. On either side of the gateway stood three posts, planted firmly in sockets, and over them too was drawn a woven hanging of fine linen. The hanging across the gate itself, twenty cubits long and five deep, was woven of purple, scarlet, hyacinth-blue, and fine linen, richly variegated with many other patterns, excepting only the forms of living creatures.
Inside the gates stood a bronze basin, its base likewise of bronze, from which the priests could wash their hands and pour water over their feet. Such was the arrangement of the enclosure of the open court. He set up the tent itself in the middle, facing east, so that the sun, as it rose, might cast its first rays upon it. Its length extended thirty cubits, its width ten; one of its walls faced south, the other faced north, and its rear was left toward the west. Its height was to match its width.
There were wooden pillars, twenty along each side, worked square, spaced a cubit and a half apart, and four fingers thick. They were plated all over with gold, on both their inner and outer faces. Each had two pivots set into two sockets; these sockets were silver, with a hollow in each to receive the pivot. The rear wall, facing west, had six pillars, all fitted together so precisely that, with the joints closed, their union looked like a single golden wall, both within and without — for the count of pillars matched: there were twenty in all, each providing a width of a third of a span, so that together they made up the thirty cubits.
Along the back wall, since the six pillars together provided only nine cubits, two further pillars were made, cut down to a cubit each, and set at the corners, finished to match the larger ones in every respect. Each pillar had a golden ring on its outer face, fixed as though rooted there, set in a row facing one another around the circumference, and through these gilded bars were run, five cubits long each, which bound the pillars together, the head of each bar fitting into the next by a contrived pivot fashioned like a screw.
Along the back wall a single bar ran through all the pillars, into which the slanting ends of the bars from each of the two longer side walls were fitted, held fast by a hinge, the female part receiving the male. This device kept the tent from being shaken by winds or any other cause, and was meant to hold it fixed in complete stillness. Dividing the interior length into three parts, he set up, ten cubits in from the innermost end, four pillars made like the others and resting on similar bases, spaced a little apart from one another.
The space enclosed by these four pillars was the inner sanctuary; the rest of the tent was left open to the priests. This division of the tent, and its correspondence, turned out to be an image of the nature of the universe: for its inmost third, within the four pillars, forbidden to the priests, stood, as it were, for heaven, set apart for God, while the outer twenty cubits, like earth and sea accessible to men, were entrusted to the priests alone.
At the front, where the entrance had been made, stood five golden pillars resting on bronze bases. They hung the tent with woven curtains of fine linen, purple, hyacinth-blue, and dyed scarlet blended together. First there was a curtain of ten cubits on every side, with which they covered the pillars that, dividing the temple, enclosed the inner sanctuary within themselves; this was what made it invisible to any onlooker. The whole temple was called the Holy Place, and the inaccessible part within the four pillars, the Holy of Holies within the Holy Place. This section was beautifully adorned with flowers of every kind that spring from the earth, woven in among all the other things meant to lend it ornament, except for the forms of living creatures.
A second curtain, similar to this one in size, weave, and color, was drawn around the five pillars at the entrance, a ring at the corner of each pillar holding it from the top down to the middle of the pillar; the rest was left open as a passage for the priests. Above this hung a linen curtain of equal size, drawn back on cords to one side, the rings assisting, by means of the weave and the cord, both in spreading it out and in gathering it in and fixing it at the corner, so that it would not obstruct the view, especially on the notable days. On the other days, and especially when it was snowing, it was let down in front and made the dyed hanging weatherproof; and from this the custom has persisted, even after we built the Temple, of draping the linen curtain in this same manner at the entrances.
There were ten other curtains, four cubits wide and twenty-eight in length, with golden hooks at their joining, by which female and male fastenings were joined together so as to appear as one; these, stretched over the tent, shaded both its roof and the walls along the sides and back, reaching down about a cubit from the ground. Equal in width but greater in number by one, and longer than these — for they were thirty cubits — were other curtains, woven of goat hair in fine work in the same manner as those made of wool; these were spread out, hanging down to the ground, forming at the doorway something like a gable and a porch, the eleventh curtain being used for this purpose.
Above these, further coverings made of skins served as shelter and protection for the woven curtains, both in the heat and whenever there was rain. Great astonishment seized those who viewed it from a distance, for its color seemed to differ in no way from that of the sky. The curtains made of hair and of skins came down in the same manner as the hanging at the gates, fending off both the heat and the violence of the rains. In this manner the tent was set up.
An ark was also made for God, of wood strong by nature and incapable of decay; it is called 'aron' in our language. Its construction was of this kind: its length
Its length was five spans, its width and depth three spans each. It was plated all over with gold, inside and out, so that the wood was completely hidden, and its lid was fastened to it by golden hinges, wonderfully fitted, so that it was perfectly level on every side, with no projection anywhere to spoil the symmetry. Along each of its two longer walls ran two golden rings, extending the whole length of the wood, and through these were passed gilded poles, one along each wall, so that the chest could be carried by them whenever it was needed. It was not conveyed on a wagon but borne on the shoulders of the priests. On its lid were two figures in relief, which the Hebrews call cherubim. They are winged creatures, but their form resembles nothing that men have ever seen; Moses says he saw them fashioned after the throne of God.
Into this chest he placed the two tablets on which the Ten Words had been written, five on each, two and a half to a face, and set the chest in the innermost sanctuary.
In the tent he set up a table like those at Delphi, two cubits long, one cubit wide, and three spans high. Its feet were fully worked from the halfway point down, made like the legs the Dorians put on couches, while the upper part rising toward the tabletop was square in form. Each side was hollowed with a groove about a palm deep, running as a spiral around the top and bottom of the leg, and on each foot, not far from the lid, a ring was fixed, through which passed golden rods of wood beneath the gilding, not removable, for the socket where the rings joined was hollow to receive them. These rods were not continuous but ended, before reaching all the way across, in pins, one of which fit into the projecting rim of the table and the other into the foot; by these the table was carried along the roads.
On this table, which stood in the tent facing north, not far from the inner sanctuary, they set out twelve unleavened loaves in two rows of six, made of very fine flour amounting to two assarons — a measure the Hebrews call, which holds seven Attic cotylae. On the loaves were placed two golden bowls full of frankincense, and after seven days other loaves were brought in their place, on the day we call the Sabbath, for we call the seventh day the Sabbath; the reason these customs were devised we shall explain elsewhere.
Opposite the table, against the wall facing south, stood a lampstand of cast gold, hollow, weighing a hundred minas. The Hebrews call it kincharis, which translated into Greek means a talent. It was fashioned with small globes and lilies together with pomegranate-buds and little bowls, seventy pieces in all, assembled from a single base rising upward, made by its craftsman in divisions corresponding to the number into which the planets and the sun are distributed. It terminates in seven heads set in a row, one beside the other, and upon these are set seven lamps, matching in number the seven planets; they face toward the east and the south, since the lampstand stands at a slant.
Between the lampstand and the table, within the tent, as I said before, stood an incense altar, made of wood — of the same wood as the other furnishings that could not rot — but plated all over with solid metal, a cubit in width on each side and twice that in height. Above it rose a golden grate with a horn at each corner and a golden molding running around it, to which rings and rods were attached, by which the priests carried it along the roads when it was needed. Before the tent stood a bronze altar, built over a wooden frame, likewise measured five cubits on each side and three cubits in height, adorned like the golden altar, covered with bronze plates, its grating resembling a net; for the earth received the fire that fell from the grate, since no solid base was set beneath it. Opposite the golden altar were placed pitchers and bowls, together with censers and mixing-bowls, and whatever else was made for use in the sacrifices — all of it of gold.
Such, then, was the tent and the furnishings that belonged to it.
Vestments were also made, for the priests in general and for the high priest as well, whom they call the arabaches, which means high priest. The dress of the ordinary priests is as follows. When a priest is about to approach the sacrifices, having undergone the purification the law prescribes, he first puts on what is called the manachases; this word means "binder," and it is a loincloth about the private parts, stitched from woven fine linen, into which the feet are put as into trousers; the upper part is cut away, and what remains reaches to the hip, where it is drawn tight around the body. Over this he wears a linen garment of doubled fine-linen cloth, called the chethomene — "linen," for we call linen chethon. This garment is an ankle-length tunic, fitted close to the body, with sleeves tight about the arms, which he girds about the chest, drawing the belt around a little above the armpit; the belt is about four fingers wide and is woven loosely, so as to look like the sloughed skin of a snake. Flowers are woven into it in scarlet and purple with blue and fine linen worked in, though the warp is fine linen alone. Beginning at the breast, it winds around and is tied off again, hanging loosely down as far as the ankles as long as the priest is performing no active duty — this suits the eye and looks well to onlookers — but when he must be busy about the sacrifices and serve at the altar, so that its looseness will not hinder him at his work, he throws it back over his left shoulder and carries it there. Moses called this garment the abaneth, but we, having learned the word from the Babylonians, call it the emia, for that is what they call it among them. This tunic has no fold anywhere, but leaves the opening at the neck loose, being fastened by cords hanging from the hem and from the parts at breast and back, and tied above each collarbone; it is called the massabanes. On his head the priest wears a cap without a peak, not covering the whole head but rising only a little above the middle of it; it is called the masnaephthes, and in its construction it is like a wreath made of a thick band of linen cloth, for it is folded over and stitched many times. Then a length of fine linen goes around it from above, reaching down to the forehead, hiding the seam of the band and the unsightliness this would otherwise show, and fitting evenly over the whole skull; it is fastened tightly, so that it will not fall off while the priest labors at his sacred duty.
Such, then, is the dress of the ordinary priests, as we have described it.
The high priest is arrayed in this same dress, omitting none of what has been described, but over it he puts on a tunic made of blue, likewise reaching to the ankles, called in our language the meeir; it is girded with a sash embroidered, like the one already mentioned, with gold woven through it. Along its hem are sewn tassels made to resemble pomegranates in dyed thread, and golden bells, arranged with great care for elegance, so that a pomegranate is set between two bells, and then a small bell, and so on. This tunic is not made of two pieces sewn together at the shoulders and sides, but is a single long woven piece with a slit opening lengthwise, not crosswise, running toward the chest and continuing down the middle of the back; a border is sewn along it so that the unsightliness of the cut will not show. In the same way the openings through which the arms pass are slit.
Over these he puts on, as a third garment, what is called the ephod, resembling the Greek epomis; it is made in this way. Woven a cubit deep, of every kind of color mixed with gold, it leaves the middle of the chest uncovered, is worked with sleeves, and in every respect is made in the shape of a tunic. In the gap of the garment is fitted a square piece a span in size, embroidered with gold and the same colors as the ephod; it is called the essen, which in the Greek tongue means "oracle." It exactly fills the space at the breast which the weavers left open in the ephod, and is joined to it by golden rings set at each of its corners, matched by an equal number on the ephod, with a cord of blue thread run through to bind the rings to one another. To keep the space left between the rings from hanging slack, they devised a seam of blue thread. The shoulder-piece is fastened by two sardonyx stones, one at the end of each shoulder, each set in a golden mounting fitted for the clasp-pins. On these are engraved the names of the sons of Jacob, in the characters of our native script, six names on each stone, the elder sons being on the right shoulder.
On the essen, too, are set twelve stones, outstanding in size and beauty, an adornment beyond the reach of ordinary men because of their surpassing price; they are arranged in rows, three to a row across four rows, and worked into the fabric, with gold running around each one, holding the settings in place so that they cannot fall loose. The first row is sardonyx, topaz, and emerald; the second yields carbuncle, jasper, and sapphire; in the third, the ligure comes first, then amethyst, then agate, which is ninth of all; of the fourth row, chrysolite stands first, then onyx, then beryl, last of all. On all of them were cut the names of the sons of Jacob, whom we regard as the founders of the tribes, each stone honored with the name of the one whose place in the birth order it corresponds to. Since the rings on the essen itself were too weak to bear the weight of the stones, they made two other, larger rings, set into the fabric at the edge of the essen nearest the neck, to receive woven chains,
which met at the tops of the shoulders, joined by cords plaited of gold, the ends of which, bent back, fit into a projecting ring at the back edge of the ephod. This was the fastening that kept the essen from slipping loose. A sash was also sewn to the essen, dyed in the colors already mentioned and mixed with gold thread, which went around and was tied again at the seam and hung down; golden tubes at each end caught up all the tassels and held them together.
He wore a cap like the one already described, worked in the same way as those of all the other priests, but beneath it was sewn another, of blue, worked in a pattern, around which ran a golden crown, wrought in three tiers. On it flourished a golden calyx, made in imitation of the plant called among us saccharus, which those skilled in the cutting of roots call by the Greeks' name, hyoscyamus, or henbane. In case anyone who has seen the plant does not know its nature through ignorance, or knows the name but, not having seen it, would fail to recognize it, I will describe its appearance to such people. The plant grows often to a height of more than three spans; its root resembles a turnip — one would not go wrong likening it to that — and its leaves are like those of rocket. From its branches it sends up a calyx close against the stalk, surrounded by a husk which, when it begins to ripen, splits open to yield the fruit; the calyx is the size of the joint of the little finger and, in its outline, resembles a drinking-cup. I will explain this too for those unfamiliar with it: it is as though a small sphere were cut in two, and it grows from the root round at the base where one of the cuts is made, then narrows gradually, the hollow curving in gracefully, and widens gently again at the rim, cut like the navel of a pomegranate. Fitted onto it exactly is a hemispherical cap, one might say precisely turned, bearing raised notches which, as I said, sprout like those of the pomegranate, thorn-like and tapering to a sharp point at the very tip.
It keeps the fruit throughout upon this cap, resembling in seed the plant called sideritis, and it puts out a flower that could be thought to resemble the petal of the poppy. From this plant the crown was wrought in bronze, running from the back of the head to each temple. The forehead itself is not covered by the ephielis — for so let the calyx be called — but there is a golden plate, on which the name of God is engraved in sacred letters. Such, then, is the adornment of the high priest.
One might well marvel at the hostility other men bear toward us, as though we held the divine in contempt — the very charge they have persisted in leveling against us, though it is they themselves who chose to worship what is base. For if a man will only consider the construction of the tent, and observe the priest's robe and the furnishings we use in the sacred service, he will find the lawgiver to have been a man of God, and that we hear these slanders from others in vain. For each of these things has been made, one will find, as a representation and reflection of the universe, if one is willing to examine it fairly and with understanding. The tent, thirty cubits long, he divided into three parts, and two of these
the sea, since the sea reddens with the blood of its fish, while the hyacinth-blue is meant to signify the air, and the scarlet stands as a token of fire. The high priest's tunic likewise signifies the earth, being made of linen, while the hyacinth-blue robe signifies the vault of heaven, likened by its pomegranates to lightning and by the sound of its bells to thunder. The gold-woven shoulder-piece, I think, was conceived to represent the nature of the universe, which God willed to be formed out of the four elements, woven through with gold on account of the radiance that belongs to all things. He set the ephod-clasp at the center of the shoulder-piece in the place of the earth, since the earth too occupies the most central position; and by the encircling band he signified the ocean, for the ocean encloses all things. The sun and moon are shown by the two sardonyx stones with which he fastened the high priest's garment. As for the twelve stones, whether one wishes to understand by them the months or the like number of the stars that the Greeks call the zodiac, he would not miss the sense of the matter. The turban too seems to me to indicate heaven, being made of hyacinth-blue — for otherwise the name of God would not have been set upon it, emblazoned on its golden crown, and that in gold, on account of the radiance in which the divine most delights. Let this much be said on these matters, since the excellence of the lawgiver will give us occasion to treat of them often and at length in what follows.
When the aforesaid work had reached its completion, and the dedicated offerings had not yet been consecrated, God appeared to Moses and directed him to give the priesthood to his brother Aaron, as the man most deserving of that honor for his virtue above all others. Moses gathered the people into an assembly and recounted Aaron's virtue and goodwill and the dangers he had endured on their behalf. When all bore witness to him on every point and showed their eagerness on his behalf, Moses said, "Men of Israel, the work is now complete, exactly as was most pleasing to God himself and within our power to accomplish. But since this tabernacle must receive him, we need first a man to serve as priest and to minister at the sacrifices and at the prayers offered on our behalf. Had the choice of this matter been entrusted to me, I would have judged myself worthy of the honor, both because all men are by nature fond of themselves, and because I am conscious of having labored much for your welfare. But now God himself has judged Aaron worthy of the honor and has chosen him as priest, knowing him to be the more deserving of us, since he will wear the robe consecrated to God, and will have charge of the altars and care for the sacrificial victims, and will offer the prayers on our behalf to a God who will hear them gladly, both because he cares for our race and because he accepts prayers offered through a man of his own choosing." The Hebrews were pleased with what was said and gave their assent to God's appointment; for Aaron, by reason of his lineage, his gift of prophecy, and his brother's virtue, was more worthy of honor than all others. He had at that time four sons: Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar.
Whatever remained over from the materials prepared for constructing the tabernacle, Moses ordered to be used for covering cloths to protect the tabernacle itself, the lampstand, the incense altar, and the other furnishings, so that on the march these might suffer no harm from rain or dust. He also gathered the people again and ordered each man to contribute half a shekel — the shekel being a Hebrew coin equal to four Attic drachmas. They readily obeyed what Moses commanded, and the number of those who contributed came to six hundred and five thousand five hundred and fifty. The silver was brought by the free men from twenty years old to fifty. What was collected was spent on the needs connected with the tabernacle.
He also purified the tabernacle and the priests in the following manner, performing their consecration. He ordered five hundred shekels' weight of choice myrrh and an equal amount of iris, and of cinnamon and sweet cane — this too being a kind of spice — half the previous weight, all pounded and steeped, together with olive oil, of which the local measure is two Attic chous; these he had mixed and boiled down by the skill of perfumers into a most fragrant unguent. Taking this, he anointed the priests themselves and the whole tabernacle and so consecrated them, and also the incense — of which there are many varieties — that was burned in the tabernacle upon the golden altar, of very great value, whose composition I omit to describe in detail, lest it prove tedious to my readers. Twice a day, before sunrise and at sunset, incense had to be burned, and oil purified and kept in reserve for the lamps, three of which had to burn upon the sacred lampstand before God every day, the rest being lit toward evening.
When everything was now finished, Bezalel and Oholiab were judged the most skillful of the craftsmen, for they had eagerly striven to improve upon what earlier workers had devised, and were most capable of conceiving designs for things whose construction had before been unknown; of the two, Bezalel was judged the more accomplished. The whole time spent on the work came to seven months, and after this, the first year since they had left Egypt was completed. As the second year began, in the month called Xanthicus by the Macedonians and Nisan by the Hebrews, on the first day of the month, they consecrated the tabernacle and all the furnishings connected with it that I have described.
God showed himself pleased with the work of the Hebrews, and that they had not labored in vain through overconfidence in what they had built, but came as a guest and took up residence in this sanctuary. He made his presence known in this way: the sky was clear, but over the tabernacle alone a mist gathered, neither so deep and thick as to give the appearance of a storm, nor yet so thin that the eye could make out anything through it; and from it a pleasant dew fell, making the presence of God clear to those who wished to recognize it and believed it so. Moses rewarded the craftsmen with such gifts as were fitting for men who had done such work, and, by God's command, sacrificed in the open court of the tabernacle a bull, a ram, and a goat as an offering for sins — and indeed, since I intend to speak of these matters in my account of sacrifices, I shall explain there what is done in these rites, both concerning what the law commands to be wholly burned and what it permits to be eaten. With the blood of the victims he sprinkled Aaron's robe and Aaron himself together with his sons, having first purified them with spring water and myrrh, so that they might belong to God. For seven days he treated them and their robes in this manner, and likewise the tabernacle and its furnishings, anointing them with oil, as I have said, and with the blood of bulls and rams slaughtered one of each kind on each day; and on the eighth day he proclaimed a feast for the people and ordered them to sacrifice according to their means.
They, vying with one another and eager to outdo each other in the sacrifices each would bring, obeyed what was commanded. While the offerings lay upon the altar, suddenly a fire flared up of its own accord from the altar itself, and, resembling the flash of lightning to look at, consumed with its flame everything that lay on the altar.
But a calamity befell Aaron as well from this occasion — one he bore, reckoning it as a father might over a son, yet endured nobly, since his soul was steadfast against misfortunes and he held that what had happened had come about by the will of God. For of his four sons, as I said before, the two elder, Nadab and Abihu, brought to the altar incense not of the kind Moses had prescribed, but such as they had been accustomed to use before, and were burned up, the fire's force falling upon them and beginning to consume their chests and faces, which no one was able to quench. So they died in this manner. Moses ordered their father and their brothers to lift up the bodies, carry them outside the camp, and bury them with all magnificence. The people mourned bitterly over their death, so unexpectedly come about. But Moses required only their brothers and their father not to concern themselves with grief over them, judging that they should prefer the honor due to God over their own sorrow; for Aaron was already clothed in the sacred robe. Moses himself, declining every honor the people were ready to bestow on him, devoted himself solely to the service of God.
He no longer went up to Sinai, but entering the tabernacle received oracles there concerning what needed to be done and the framing of the laws, conducting himself as a private citizen in his dress and in everything else, wishing to seem in no way different from the mass of the people except in his role as their overseer. He also went on writing out their constitution and laws, by which they might live in a manner pleasing to God, having no cause for complaint against one another; and these he composed according to the dictation of God. I pass over an account of the constitution and the laws.
What I omitted to relate concerning the robe of the high priest, however, I wish now to explain. Nowhere did Moses leave an opening for the schemes of false prophets, but if any such should arise and attempt to tamper with God's honor, he left it to God's own sovereign will to attend the sacred rites whenever he wished, and to be absent when he wished — and this he desired to make clear not to the Hebrews alone but also to any foreigners who might be present. Of the stones which, as I said before, the high priest wore on his shoulders — they were sardonyxes, and I think it superfluous to explain their nature to those who already know it well — it happened that they shone, whenever God was present at the sacred rites, the one fastened on the right shoulder flashing out a radiance visible even to those standing farthest off, a brightness the stone did not have before. This is a marvel indeed to those who have not schooled their wisdom to belittle divine things; but I shall tell of something still more marvelous than this. Through the twelve stones which the high priest wears sewn upon his breastplate, God foretold victory to those about to go to war; for so great a radiance flashed from them, even before the army had set out, that the whole multitude knew that God was present to give aid — which is why the Greeks who honor our customs, since they can find no answer to this, call the breastplate the Oracle.
The Oracle and the sardonyx, however, ceased to shine two hundred years before I composed this account, because God was displeased at the transgression of the laws — a matter I shall discuss at a more fitting time. I now turn to the account that follows.
When the tabernacle had been consecrated and the arrangements concerning the priests set in order, the people judged that God now shared their dwelling with them, and turned to sacrifices and festivities, as though every expectation of misfortune had now been driven off; and desiring even better things to come, they made offerings to God, some in common and some individually, by tribes. The tribal chiefs, coming together two by two, each pair brought a wagon and two oxen; there were six of these in all, and they were used to convey the tabernacle on the journeys. In addition, each chief brought a bowl, a dish, and a censer — the censer capable of holding ten darics and full of incense; the dish and the bowl, which were of silver, together weighed two hundred shekels, while the bowl alone contained seventy, and both were full of fine flour mixed with oil, such as is used at the altar for the sacred rites. Each also brought a young bull, a ram, and a yearling lamb, whole and unblemished, to be burned entirely, and with them a young goat as an offering for the forgiveness of sins. Each of the chiefs also brought other sacrifices, called peace offerings, on each day: two oxen and five rams together with yearling lambs and kids. These chiefs sacrificed for twelve days, one on each day. Moses, meanwhile, no longer went up to Sinai, but entering the tabernacle learned from God both what was to be done and the ordering of the laws — laws that, being beyond ordinary human understanding, came to be preserved securely for all time, being held to be a gift of God, so that the Hebrews should never transgress any of them, neither in time of peace through indulgence, nor in time of war under compulsion.
But on these matters I stop speaking here, having resolved to compose a separate treatise concerning the laws. For now I shall touch briefly on a few points that concern purifications and sacred rites, since my account has in fact come round to the subject of sacrifices. There are two kinds of sacred rites: of these, the one is performed by private individuals, the other by the whole people, and each takes place in two ways. In the one, the whole offering is wholly burned, and for this reason it has received this very name; the other is a thank offering, performed with feasting on the part of those who have sacrificed. I shall speak first of the former. A private individual offering a whole burnt sacrifice sacrifices an ox, a lamb, or a kid — these must be within their first year, though he is permitted to sacrifice oxen even when older; but all victims wholly burned must be male.
When these have been slaughtered, the priests sprinkle the blood around the altar, then, having cleansed the carcass, cut it into pieces, sprinkle it with salt, and lay it upon the altar, which is already piled with wood and burning with fire. The feet of the victims and the inward parts, after being thoroughly cleansed, they add to the rest to be likewise consecrated by fire, while the priests take the hides for themselves. Such is the manner of the whole burnt offering.
As for those performing thank offerings, they sacrifice the same kinds of animals, but these must be whole and older than yearlings, males paired with females. Having sacrificed these, they redden the altar with the blood, and the kidneys, the caul, all the fat together with the lobe of the liver, and with these the tail of the lamb
...they lay it on the altar. The breast and the right leg they give to the priests, and for two days the offerers feast on what remains of the meat; whatever is left over they burn.
Sacrifices are also offered for sins, and the manner of the priestly rite for sins is the same as already described. Those unable to afford full-grown victims bring two pigeons or turtledoves, one of which is burned whole for God, the other given to the priests to eat. I will speak more precisely about the sacrifice of these creatures in my work on sacrifices.
A man who falls into sin through ignorance offers a yearling lamb, or a female kid. The priest sprinkles the altar with its blood, not as in the first case but only on the projecting corners, and the kidneys and the rest of the fat, together with the lobe of the liver, are laid on the altar; the priests take the hides and consume the meat that same day within the sanctuary, for the law does not allow it to be left until the morrow.
A man who has sinned but is conscious of it himself, with no one to convict him, offers a ram, as the law directs; its meat likewise the priests eat that same day within the sanctuary. Rulers who make atonement for their own offenses bring the same, but differ in that they present a bull or a male kid as their victim.
The law requires that fine, perfectly clean flour also be brought with both private and public sacrifices: for a lamb, the measure of one assaron; for a ram, two; for a bull, three. This is consecrated on the altar kneaded with oil, for those who sacrifice also bring oil — for an ox, half a hin; for a ram, a third of that measure; and a fourth portion for a lamb. The hin is an ancient Hebrew measure equal to two Attic choes. The same measure of wine is brought as of oil, and the wine is poured out around the altar.
If someone who is not performing a formal sacrifice brings fine flour in fulfillment of a vow, he casts one handful of it upon the altar as a first portion, and the priests take the rest for food, either boiled — since it has been mixed with oil — or made into loaves. But if a priest himself brings it, however small the amount, it must be burned whole.
The law forbids sacrificing an animal on the same day together with its parent, and likewise forbids sacrificing any animal before the eighth day from its birth has passed.
There are also other sacrifices offered for recovery from illness or for other reasons, at which cakes are consumed along with the victims; none of these may lawfully be left until the next day, the priests receiving their own portion.
From the public funds the law requires a lamb to be slaughtered every day, one at the beginning of the day and one at its close, of yearling animals; and on the seventh day, called the sabbath, they sacrifice two in the same manner. At the new moon they perform the daily sacrifices and, in addition, two bulls with seven yearling lambs and a ram, and a kid as atonement for sins, in case anything has been done through forgetfulness.
In the seventh month, which the Macedonians call Hyperberetaios, in addition to what has been named they sacrifice a bull, a ram, and seven lambs, and a kid for sins.
On the tenth day of that same month, reckoned by the moon, they fast until evening; on this day they sacrifice a bull, two rams, seven lambs, and a kid for sins. In addition to these they bring forward two more kids, of which one is sent alive into the wilderness beyond the borders, to be a means of averting and pleading away the sins of the whole people, while the other is led to a place outside the city, entirely pure, and burned there together with its hide, without being cleansed in any way at all.
A bull is burned along with it as well, brought not at the people's expense but supplied from the high priest's own means. Once it has been slaughtered, he carries its blood, together with that of the kid, into the sanctuary and sprinkles the ceiling with his finger seven times, and the floor the same number of times; then he brings the rest into the sanctuary and around the golden altar, and finally around the greater altar in the open court. In addition, the projecting parts, the kidneys, and the fat together with the lobe of the liver are laid on the altar. The high priest also provides a ram as a whole burnt offering to God.
On the fifteenth day of the same month, when the season turns at last toward winter, the law commands every household to pitch tabernacles, as a precaution against the cold as the year advances, and that when they have reached their own cities, coming to that city which they hold as their mother-city because of the temple there, they should keep a festival for eight days, offering whole burnt offerings and thank offerings to God, carrying in their hands a bouquet made of myrtle and willow bound with a palm frond, together with the fruit of the citron tree.
On the first of these days the whole burnt offering consists of thirteen bulls, one more than the usual number of lambs, and two rams, with a kid added as atonement for sins. On the following days the same number of lambs and rams is sacrificed along with the kid, but they reduce the bulls by one each day, so that they come down to seven. On the eighth day they rest from all work, and to God, as we have said, we sacrifice a calf, a ram, and seven lambs, and a kid as atonement for sins. This is the ancestral practice for Hebrews when they pitch the tabernacles.
In the month of Xanthicus, which among us is called Nisan and is the beginning of the year, on the fourteenth day reckoned by the moon, when the sun stands in Aries — for in this month we were freed from slavery under the Egyptians — the sacrifice which we were commanded to offer at that time, as we were leaving Egypt, called the Passover, he ordained should be offered every year; and indeed we perform it by family groups, with none of the meat sacrificed kept over to the following day.
On the fifteenth day the feast of unleavened bread succeeds the Passover, lasting seven days, during which they live on unleavened food, and each day two bulls are slaughtered, one ram, and seven lambs. These are burned whole, with a kid added to all of them as atonement for sins, for the enjoyment of the priests each day.
On the second day of unleavened bread — that is, the sixteenth — they partake of the crops they have harvested, for they had not touched them before this; and considering it right to honor God first, from whom they have received this abundance, they bring him the firstfruits of the barley in the following manner. Having parched a sheaf of the ears and pounded it, and cleaned the barley thoroughly for grinding, they offer an assaron of it to God upon the altar, and casting one handful of it forward, they release the rest for the priests' use. Only then is it permitted, publicly and privately, for everyone to reap. And at the offering of the firstfruits of the crops they also sacrifice a lamb as a whole burnt offering to God.
When seven full weeks have passed after this sacrifice — these being the forty-nine days of weeks — on the fiftieth day, which the Hebrews call Asartha, meaning "fiftieth," they bring to God a loaf made from two assarons of wheat flour, leavened, and two lambs as victims; for these alone it is lawful to bring to God, while they are prepared as a meal for the priests, with nothing left over from them permitted until the next day. As whole burnt offerings they sacrifice three calves, two rams, and fourteen lambs, and two kids for sins.
There is no festival on which they do not offer whole burnt offerings, and none on which they grant relief from these labors; rather, in all of them, both the form of sacrifice and the ease of rest are prescribed by law, and they add feasting to their sacrifices.
From the common fund, too, bread is baked without leaven, using twenty-four assarons of flour for this purpose. They are baked in pairs, divided on the day before the sabbath, and brought early on the sabbath itself, and set upon the sacred table arranged six facing six toward one another. Two golden dishes full of frankincense are placed above them, and they remain there until the following sabbath; then others are brought in their place, and the old loaves are given to the priests for food, while the frankincense is burned on the sacred fire on which everything is offered whole, one portion of frankincense being added for those loaves and another for these.
The priest sacrifices at his own expense, and does this twice each day: flour kneaded with oil and lightly baked and set — one assaron of flour — half of which he offers to the fire in the morning, and the other half in the evening. I will explain this matter more precisely elsewhere; for now it seems to me enough to have spoken of it in this way.
Moses set apart the tribe of Levi from association with the rest of the people, to be sacred, purifying them with running spring water and with the sacrifices which are lawfully offered on such occasions, and he handed over to them the tabernacle, the sacred vessels, and everything else that had been made for the tabernacle's protection, so that, under the guidance of the priests, they might serve; for it had already been consecrated to God.
He also distinguished among the animals which they should eat and from which they should abstain; concerning these, wherever occasion offers in the course of our narrative, we shall go through them, adding the reasons that moved him to command that some be food for us and others he ordered us to avoid. The use of any blood at all as food he forbade, holding it to be the soul and the breath of life; he also prevented the eating of meat from an animal that has died of itself, and forbade abstinence — rather, he commanded abstinence — from the fat and suet of goats, sheep, and cattle.
He also drove out of the city those whose bodies were afflicted with leprosy and those suffering a discharge, and removed women during the natural discharge that comes upon them to the seventh day, after which he permits them, as now clean, to live among the community again. In the same way it is lawful for those who have buried a corpse to return to the community after an equal number of days; but one who remains beyond that number of days still bound by the defilement must, by law, sacrifice two ewe lambs, one of which is to be consecrated whole, the other taken by the priests. In the same way sacrifice is made also for one suffering a discharge.
Whoever emits seed during sleep, by immersing himself in cold water, has the same standing as those who, according to the law, have had relations with a woman. Lepers he expelled entirely from the city, letting them share life with no one and reckoning them no different from the dead; but if someone, having entreated God, is released from the disease and recovers a healthy complexion, such a person repays God with various sacrifices, of which we shall speak later.
For this reason one might well laugh at those who say that Moses himself, disfigured by leprosy, fled from Egypt, and that, taking command of those who had been expelled for this same reason, he led them into Canaan. If this were true, Moses would hardly have made such laws to his own dishonor — laws which it would have been reasonable for him to oppose even had others proposed them — especially since among many nations lepers are found enjoying honor, not only free from insult and exile but even serving in the most distinguished military campaigns, entrusted with political offices, and permitted to enter shrines and temples. So nothing would have prevented Moses too, had he or the multitude with him been diminished by some such affliction affecting the skin, from legislating the best possible provisions for them and fixing no such penalty at all. It is plain, then, that those who say such things about us are driven by malice, whereas Moses, being himself free of any such thing, legislated among his clean kinsmen concerning those who had fallen ill, doing this out of honor to God. But on these matters let each person judge as he thinks best.
Women, once they have given birth, he forbade to enter the sanctuary or to touch the sacrifices for forty days, if the child born is male — for it happens that the days are doubled in the case of female births. When they do enter, after the aforesaid period has passed, they perform sacrifices, which the priests distribute before God.
If a man suspects that his wife has committed adultery, he brings an assaron of ground barley; casting one handful of it to God, they give the rest to the priests for food. One of the priests, having stood the woman at the gates — these face toward the sanctuary — and removed the covering from her head, writes the name of God on a piece of parchment and orders her to swear that she has done her husband no wrong; and that if she has transgressed her chastity, her right thigh shall be put out of joint and her belly swell, and so she shall die. But if it was through excessive love and the jealousy arising from it that the husband was rashly moved by suspicion, then in the tenth month she shall bear him a male child. When the oaths are completed, he wipes the name from the parchment into a bowl, and having brought in whatever dust he can find from the sanctuary and sprinkled it in, gives her the water to drink. If she was falsely accused, she becomes pregnant and carries the child to term in her womb; but if she lied to her husband concerning their marriage and to God concerning her oath, she ends her life in disgrace, her thigh dislocated and her belly seized with dropsy.
Concerning sacrifices, then, and the purification connected with them, this is what Moses provided in advance for his kinsmen; and such were the laws he established for them. Adultery he forbade absolutely, holding it a blessing for men to be sound in their marriages, and that it benefits both cities and households for children to be legitimate. And for a man to have intercourse with his mother the law pronounced the greatest of evils; likewise also with his father's...
a lawful wife, an aunt, a sister, or a son's wife, treating this as a monstrous injustice. He forbade a man to approach a woman defiled by her natural courses, and forbade intercourse with animals, and refused honor to the union of males with males, since men who pursue that pleasure hunt after it against nature and against the law. For those who dared such outrages he fixed death as the penalty.
On the priests he imposed a purity twice as strict. He excluded them, like everyone else, from these unions, and beyond that he forbade them to marry women who had practiced prostitution, or a slave, or a captive, or a woman who supported herself by keeping a shop or an inn, or a woman divorced from a former husband for any reason whatsoever. The high priest, moreover, he did not permit to marry even the widow of a man who had died -- a marriage he allowed to the ordinary priests -- but granted him only the right to marry a virgin, and to keep her so. For this reason the high priest does not even approach a corpse, though the rest of the priests are not forbidden to attend their own brothers, parents, or children when they die. Priests must be free of every physical blemish; a priest who is not whole in body may share in the priestly income but is forbidden to mount the altar or enter the sanctuary. They must be pure not only in the performance of sacred rites but must also take care over their manner of life generally, so that it too is beyond reproach. For this reason those who wear the priestly robe are blameless and pure in every respect, and abstain from wine as long as they wear that robe, being forbidden to drink it; and further, the victims they sacrifice must be whole and marred in no part.
These, then, are the regulations that Moses handed down as already in force during his own lifetime. But he also made provision, even while the people still lived in the wilderness, for what they were to do once they had taken possession of Canaan. Every seventh year he grants the land respite from plow and planting, just as he had earlier prescribed rest from labor for men themselves every seventh day. Whatever the earth brings forth of itself in that year is to be common property, free for the use of anyone who wishes it, both kinsmen and foreigners, with no one laying up a private store from it. The same is to be done also after seven such weeks of years -- fifty years in all -- and this fiftieth year is called by the Hebrews the Jubilee, in which debtors are released from their loans and slaves are set free, at least those who are of the same nation and who, having transgressed some point of the law, were punished with the condition of slavery rather than with death.
Fields, too, revert in this year to their original owners, in the following manner. When the Jubilee arrives -- the name signifies liberty -- the man who sold the plot and the man who bought it meet together, and after reckoning the produce taken from it and the expenses laid out upon it, if the produce is found to be the greater, the seller takes back the field, paying the buyer the balance; but if the expenses exceed the produce, the seller forfeits his claim to the property by paying only the amount by which they exceed it; and if produce and expenses are found to be equal, the field is simply restored to those who held it before. The same rule he wished to hold also for houses, so long as they had been sold in villages; for houses sold within a city he decreed otherwise. If the seller pays back the money before the year is complete, he compels the buyer to give up the house; but if the full year has elapsed, he confirms the buyer's ownership. This ordering of the laws Moses learned from God while he had the army encamped beneath Sinai, and he handed it down to the Hebrews in writing.
When he judged that the arrangements concerning the legislation were satisfactorily settled, he turned next to reviewing the army, since he already had it in mind to take up military operations; and he ordered the heads of the tribes, except the tribe of Levi, to determine precisely the number of men able to bear arms -- for the Levites were sacred and exempt from all such service. When the review was carried out, six hundred and three thousand six hundred and fifty men were found capable of bearing arms, ranging in age from twenty to fifty. In place of Levi, Moses enrolled among the heads of the tribes Manasseh, son of Joseph, and Ephraim in place of Joseph himself; for it had been Jacob's request to Joseph that he give him these sons as if they were his own, as I have already related.
When they pitched the tabernacle, it occupied the center, with three tribes encamping along each of its sides; roads had been cut through the middle of the camp, its arrangement was that of a marketplace, everything for sale was set out in order, and craftsmen of every trade had their own workshops, so that it resembled nothing so much as a city that had picked itself up and settled elsewhere. The area around the tabernacle was occupied first by the priests, and next by the rest of the Levites, who numbered in all -- for they too had been counted, every male thirty days old and upward -- twenty-two thousand eight hundred and eighty. As long as the cloud remained standing over the tabernacle, they took this to mean that God was present among them and stayed where they were; when it moved on, they broke camp.
Moses also devised a kind of trumpet, made of silver. It is fashioned as follows: it is a little short of a cubit in length, a narrow tube somewhat thicker than a flute, with an opening wide enough at the mouthpiece to admit the breath and flaring out at the end into a bell, much like a common trumpet; in the Hebrew tongue it is called the hasosrah. Two were made, and one of them was used to call the multitude together and summon them to assemblies. When it alone sounded, the elders were to gather to deliberate on matters concerning the community; when both sounded together, it gathered the whole people.
When the tabernacle was to be moved, this was the procedure: at the first sounding, those encamped on the eastern side rose up; at the second, those stationed to the south did the same in turn. Then the tabernacle itself, taken down, was carried in the middle, with six of the advancing tribes ahead of it and six following, and the Levites were all gathered around it. At the third sounding, the section encamped toward the southwest set out, and at the fourth, the section toward the north. The trumpets were also used at the sacred rites, when the sacrifices were brought forward, and on Sabbaths and on the other festival days. It was then, for the first time since the departure from Egypt, that the Passover, so called, was sacrificed in the wilderness.
After a short delay he set out from Mount Sinai and, passing through certain places which I shall describe, arrived at a spot called Eserimoth. There the people again began to rise up in faction, blaming Moses for what they had suffered on the journey, and complaining that, having persuaded them to leave a good land, he had cost them that land, while in its place, instead of the prosperity he had promised to provide, they now wandered amid these hardships, short of water, and -- should the manna also fail them -- bound to perish utterly. While many spoke bitterly and harshly against the man, one among them urged the rest neither to forget Moses and all he had labored for their common safety, nor to despair of God's help. But the multitude was stirred all the more by this, and grew still more clamorous and violent against Moses.
Moses, encouraging them though they were so utterly despondent, promised -- though he had just been shamefully insulted by them -- to provide them with meat in abundance, not for a single day but for many. When they refused to believe this, and someone asked where he could possibly find such quantities for so many tens of thousands, he said: "God -- and I too, though maligned by you -- will not cease laboring on your behalf, and this will come to pass before long." Even as he spoke, the whole camp was filled with quail, and the people gathered them, surrounding them on every side. Yet God was not long in taking vengeance on the Hebrews for their insolence and abuse toward him: no small number of them died, and to this day the place is still named for the event -- Kibroth-hattaavah, which might be rendered "Graves of Craving."
From there Moses led them to the place called Pharan, near the borders of the Canaanites and hard country to camp in. He gathered the people into an assembly, and standing before them said: "Since God has judged it right to grant us two blessings, freedom and possession of a prosperous land, you already have the one, given to you, and you are now about to receive the other. We sit upon the very borders of the Canaanites, and from now on nothing will hold back our advance -- not a king, not a city, not even the whole of their nation gathered as one. Let us therefore prepare for the task; for they will not yield us the land without a fight, but only after being stripped of it in great struggles. Let us send out scouts, who will assess the excellence of this land and how great a force it commands. But above all, let us stand united, and hold God, who is our helper and ally in everything, in honor."
When Moses had said this, the people repaid him with expressions of honor, and chose twelve scouts, the most respected men, one from each tribe. These traveled the length of Canaan from the borders of Egypt as far as the city of Hamath and Mount Lebanon, and after investigating the nature of the land and of the people who lived in it, they returned after forty days, having used the whole of that time for the task. They also brought back samples of the fruits the land produced, and by the beauty of these and the abundance of good things they described the land as having, they roused the people's eagerness for war; but at the same time they frightened them by describing rivers impossible to cross for their size and depth, mountains impassable to travelers, and cities strong with walls and fortified enclosures -- and they said that at Hebron they had come upon descendants of the giants. So the scouts, having seen things far greater than anything they had encountered since leaving Egypt, were themselves struck with terror over the state of Canaan, and tried to persuade the multitude to feel the same.
The people, concluding from what they had heard that gaining possession of the land was hopeless, broke up from the assembly and passed their time in lamentation together with their wives and children, protesting that God helped them in word only, not in deed. Again they blamed Moses, and cried out against him and against his brother Aaron the high priest, and spent the night uttering wicked reproaches, even against the men themselves. At dawn they ran together to the assembly, intent on stoning Moses and Aaron and then turning back to Egypt.
Of the scouts, Joshua son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, and Caleb, of the tribe of Judah, took fright, and stepped forward into the midst of the crowd, urging the people to take courage and neither to condemn God of falsehood nor to trust those whose report about the Canaanites, spoken to terrify them, was untrue, but rather to trust those who urged them on toward prosperity and the possession of good things. Neither the size of the mountains, they said, nor the depth of the rivers would stand in the way of men who had practiced virtue, especially with God eagerly working alongside them and fighting on their behalf. "Let us go, then," they said, "against the enemy, harboring no suspicion, but trusting God as our leader and following those who guide us."
With these words they tried to soothe the people's anger, while Moses and Aaron fell to the ground and pleaded with God -- not for their own safety, but that he would put an end to the people's folly and settle their minds, thrown into confusion by the helplessness of the calamity now confronting them. And the cloud appeared, and stood over the tabernacle, signifying the presence of God.
Moses, taking courage, came before the people and declared that God, moved to anger by their insolence, would take vengeance on them -- not a vengeance equal to their sins, but of the kind that fathers inflict on their children for correction. For when he had gone into the tabernacle and wept over the destruction that threatened them, God had reminded him of all they had suffered at his hands and of the great benefits they had received from him, and how ungrateful they had proved toward him, and how now, led astray by the scouts' cowardice, they had judged those men's words more trustworthy than his own promise. For this reason he would not destroy them all, nor wipe out their nation -- a nation he had honored above all others of mankind -- yet he would not grant them possession of the land of Canaan or the prosperity it offered; instead he would make them homeless and without a city, to spend forty years in the wilderness, paying this penalty for their transgression. To your children, however, he promised to give the land, and to make them masters of the good things which you, through your own weakness, grudged yourselves the chance to share.
When Moses had reported this, in keeping with God's judgment, the people fell into grief and misery, and begged Moses to become their reconciler with God and, freeing them from their wandering in the wilderness, to grant them cities to live in. But he said that God would not entertain such a request; for God had not been provoked to anger against them by any human fickleness, but had passed judgment on them deliberately. And it should come as no surprise that Moses, a single man, could calm and turn to gentleness so many tens of thousands enraged as they were; for God, standing beside him, made the people yield to his words, and often, after disregarding them, they came to recognize through falling into disaster how unprofitable their disobedience had been.
The man was remarkable for his virtue and for the power of being believed concerning whatever he said, a power that did not belong only to the time in which he lived but continues even now; for there is no Hebrew who does not, as though Moses himself were present and would punish him for disorder, obey the laws he established, even when he might act unlawfully and escape notice. And there are many other proofs of a power in him beyond that of an ordinary man; indeed, even now some who dwell beyond the Euphrates, after a journey of four months' distance, have come out of honor for our temple, and after great dangers and expense, and after offering sacrifice, have not been able to partake of the offerings, Moses having forbidden it in the case of anyone who does not meet the conditions our ancestral customs require. Some of them offered sacrifice without partaking, while others...
leaving their sacrifices half-completed, and many, unable even to gain entry to the temple at all, went away obeying Moses's commands rather than preferring to act as they themselves wished — not out of fear of anyone who might call them to account, but only from wariness of their own conscience. Thus God's legislation, though it seems to be the work of a man, has caused that man to be regarded as greater than his own nature.
Indeed, a little before this war, while Claudius was ruler of the Romans and Ismael was our high priest, a famine gripped our country, so severe that a measure of flour sold for four drachmas. When flour was brought in for the Feast of Unleavened Bread amounting to seventy cors — these cors being three hundred and one Sicilian medimni, or forty-one Attic — not one of the priests dared to eat a single grain of meal, though the land was in the grip of such distress, for fear of the law and of the wrath that the divine always holds against wrongs left unpunished.
So one need not wonder at what was done in that earlier time, when even now the writings left behind by Moses carry such power that even those who hate us admit that the one who established our constitution is God, working through Moses and Moses's own virtue. But on these matters, let each judge as seems best to him.

======== Antiquities — Book 4 ========

1. A battle against the Canaanites fought without Moses' consent, and its defeat. 2. The sedition of Korah and the people against Moses and his brother over the priesthood. 3. What befell the Hebrews in the wilderness over thirty-eight years. 4. How Moses defeated Sihon and Og, kings of the Amorites, destroyed their entire army, and allotted their land to two and a half tribes of the Hebrews. 5. Moses' constitution, and how he vanished from among men. This book covers a period of thirty-eight years.
Life in the wilderness wore the Hebrews down, unpleasant and harsh as it was, and made them impatient to test themselves against the Canaanites even though God forbade it. They were unwilling to keep still and obey Moses' commands, believing that they could defeat their enemies without his eager help. They accused him of scheming to keep them destitute, so that they would always need his assistance, and set out to make war on the Canaanites, arguing that God helped them not as a favor to Moses but out of concern for the nation as a whole—because of the ancestors he had watched over and because of their virtue—that he had granted them freedom in the past and would always stand by them as an ally when they were willing to labor for it. They claimed they were capable of mastering these nations on their own, even if Moses tried to turn God against them. On the whole, they said, it suited them better to be their own masters, and not, having rejoiced at escaping the arrogance of the Egyptians, to now put up with Moses as a tyrant and live according to his will, deceived by the claim that the divine reveals the future to him alone out of favor toward him—as though they were not all descended from Abraham, and God had singled out just one man among them as the source of all foreknowledge, so that everyone else must learn what was coming only from him. They would show themselves sensible, they said, by condemning his arrogance and trusting God directly to win the land he had promised them, if only they were willing—rather than heeding a man who forbade it for his own reasons under God's name. Weighing their hardship, then, and the desert life that made their present state seem all the worse, they set out to fight the Canaanites, taking God as their general and not waiting for the lawgiver's cooperation.
Once they had decided this was their best course, they attacked the enemy. The Canaanites, undaunted by their assault or their numbers, met them bravely, and many of the Hebrews died; the rest of the army, its formation broken, fled in disorder back to the camp. Utterly disheartened by this unexpected disaster, they expected nothing good to come, reasoning that they had suffered this too through God's anger, for rushing into war ahead of his will.
Moses, seeing his people stricken with panic at the defeat, and fearing that the enemy, emboldened by victory and reaching for greater gains, would now come against them, judged it necessary to lead the army further from the Canaanites into the wilderness. The people put themselves back in his hands, since they understood that without his foresight their affairs could not prosper. He broke camp and led the army into the desert, expecting that there they would settle down and not come to grips with the Canaanites again until God gave them the right occasion for it.
But what tends to happen with large armies, especially in times of misfortune—that they become hard to control and hard to persuade—happened to the Jews as well. Being six hundred thousand strong, they were, even in good times, unlikely to submit easily to their betters because of their sheer numbers; now, under hardship and misfortune, they grew still more exasperated with one another and with their leader. A sedition seized them the like of which we know among neither Greeks nor barbarians, one that came close to destroying them all, though Moses saved them from that danger, bearing no grudge even though he had come close to being stoned to death by them. Nor did God neglect to spare them from disaster: although they had insulted their lawgiver and the commandments he had delivered to them through Moses, God rescued them from the calamities their sedition would have brought had he not taken thought for them beforehand. I will now relate the sedition and Moses' subsequent measures, after first setting out its cause.
A certain Korah, a Hebrew outstanding both in lineage and in wealth, an able speaker and most persuasive with crowds, saw Moses established in surpassing honor and was consumed with envy—all the more since he happened to be of the same tribe and a kinsman of his—resentful that he himself, being no lesser in birth and enjoying greater wealth, deserved this glory more justly than Moses did. Before the Levites—his fellow tribesmen—and especially before his relatives, he loudly declared it outrageous that Moses, hunting glory for himself, had contrived this position and, acting unjustly, allowed it to be overlooked under the pretext of God's authority: that contrary to the laws he had given the priesthood to his brother Aaron, not by a common vote of the people but by his own decision—bestowing honors like a tyrant on whomever he pleased. This, Korah said, was worse than outright force: to commit an injustice unnoticed is worse than robbing men of their power by open compulsion against their will and knowledge, for whoever is conscious he does not deserve what he takes persuades others to let him have it and so has no need to use force outright; whereas those who cannot gain honor by just means, wishing to appear good, will not resort to open force, but are quite capable of wrongdoing by cunning. It was in the people's interest, he said, to punish such men while they still supposed themselves undetected, rather than let them grow into open, unmistakable enemies by allowing them to gain power first. What reasonable account, after all, could Moses give for handing the priesthood to Aaron and his sons? If God had decided to grant this honor to someone from the tribe of Levi, then he, Korah, being of the same lineage as Moses and surpassing him in wealth and in age, would more justly obtain it; and if it belonged instead to the eldest of the tribes, then by rights the honor should go to the tribe of Reuben, and be held by Dathan, Abiram, and Phalaos, who were the eldest men of that tribe and powerful through their abundance of wealth.
In saying this, Korah wanted to appear to be looking out for the common good, but in fact he was working to divert the people's honor to himself. He spoke this way to his fellow tribesmen with malicious intent dressed up in fine words. As the speech spread gradually to more and more people, and his hearers added their own voices to the slanders against Aaron, the whole camp became infected with them. Two hundred and fifty men of the foremost rank rallied to Korah, eager to strip Moses' brother of the priesthood and disgrace him. The people too were roused, and set out to stone Moses; they gathered in disorderly assembly amid uproar and confusion, and standing before the tent of God they shouted that the tyrant had come, and demanded that the people be freed from his slavery, for he issued harsh commands under the pretext of God's authority. If God himself, they said, were the one choosing who should be priest, he would advance the man who deserved it, not confer the honor on someone inferior to many others; and if he had decided to grant it to Aaron, the decision to bestow it ought to rest with the people, not be left to his brother's discretion.
Moses, who had long foreseen Korah's slander and now saw the people inflamed, was not afraid. Confident in the soundness of his own judgment in these matters, and knowing that his brother had received the priesthood by God's choice and not through any favor of his own, he came to the assembly. He addressed no words at all to the crowd, but cried out to Korah as loudly as he could—for he was skilled generally, and especially gifted at addressing crowds.
"Korah," he said, "both you and each of these men"—he meant the two hundred and fifty—"seem to me worthy of honor, and I do not deny the whole assembly an equal honor, even if they fall short of what you possess in wealth and other distinction. And as for the priesthood I gave to Aaron—it was not because he surpassed others in wealth, for you outstrip both of us in the size of your fortune; nor was it because of noble birth, for God made that common to us all by giving us the same forefather; nor did I give my brother, out of brotherly affection, an honor that in justice belonged to someone else. Indeed, even if I had no regard for God and the laws, and simply bestowed the honor as a favor, I would not have passed myself over to give it to another, since I am nearer to myself than my brother is, and more closely bound to my own interest than to his. It would hardly have been sensible for me to expose myself to danger by breaking the law simply to hand someone else the prosperity that comes with it. No—I am above such wrongdoing, and God would not have allowed himself to be treated with contempt, nor would he have left you ignorant that in obeying him you do him a favor. He himself chose the one who was to serve as his priest, and so freed us of responsibility in this matter.
"And so that no one might think Aaron received it as a gift from me rather than by God's judgment, I now lay the office open, to be contested by anyone who wishes it—not because I claim it has already been decided in his favor and simply ask that this be ratified for him now, valuing the prize above seeing you free of sedition, even though I hold it with your own consent. For we did not sin in accepting what God gave us, even against your will; refusing an honor God himself was granting would have been impious, and yet it would be utterly unreasonable to insist on holding it forever without God confirming to us the security of that possession. God himself, then, will judge again whom he wants to offer sacrifices on our behalf and preside over our worship; it would be absurd for Korah, in his desire for the office, to strip God of the authority to decide to whom he grants it. Put an end, then, to this sedition and the disturbance it has caused. Tomorrow morning, let each of you who lays claim to the priesthood bring a censer from home with incense and fire, and come forward. And you, Korah, leave the judgment to God and await his verdict on the matter; do not set yourself above God. Come, then, prepared to be judged on this question of the prize. I think it will cause no offense if Aaron too presents himself to be judged alongside you, since he is of the same lineage and cannot be faulted for anything he has done in the office of priest. You will offer incense, then, gathered together in full view of all the people, and whichever of you offers the sacrifice that God judges more pleasing will be appointed priest for you—this will clear me of the slander that I gave my brother the honor as a favor."
When Moses had said this, the people's turmoil and their suspicion of Moses subsided, and they assented to his proposal, for it was—and seemed—fair to the people. So for the time being they broke up the assembly, and on the following day they gathered again to attend the sacrifice and the judgment it would render on the contest for the priesthood. The assembly was turbulent, the crowd on edge with expectation of what was to come—some taking pleasure in the prospect that Moses might be shown guilty of wrongdoing, others more prudent, hoping to be rid of trouble and disorder, since they feared that if the sedition continued, the good order of their whole condition might be destroyed. The whole crowd, naturally delighted to shout down those in authority, made an uproar, swayed this way and that by whoever spoke to them.
Moses sent servants to Abiram and Dathan, ordering them to come as agreed and wait for the sacrifice. When they replied that they would not obey his messengers and would not stand by while Moses grew ever greater at the expense of the whole people through his wrongdoing, Moses, on hearing their answer, asked the elders to accompany him and went to Dathan and his companions, not thinking it beneath him to go to those who had shown him such contempt. They followed without objection. Dathan and his group, hearing that Moses was coming to them with the leading men of the people, came out with their wives and children and stood before their tents, watching to see what Moses meant to do; their servants stood by them too, ready to defend them if Moses used any force. When Moses drew near, he raised his hands to heaven and cried out in a voice loud enough to be heard by the whole crowd.
"Master," he said, "of heaven and earth and sea: you are the most reliable witness to everything I have done, that all of it happens by your will, and that you have provided the means for what was done, taking pity on the Hebrews in all their troubles. Come and hear these words of mine, for nothing done or even thought escapes you, and so you will not begrudge me the truth, setting their ingratitude before it. As for the events older than my own birth, you know them more exactly than I—not by hearsay, but because you were present and saw them happen; but as for what follows, which they know clearly and yet unjustly suspect, be my witness. I had established for myself a quiet life, through my own manly effort but by your counsel, one that Reuel my father-in-law had left me, and I gave up the enjoyment of that good fortune to devote myself to hardship on their behalf. Formerly I bore great toil for their freedom, and now for their safety, setting my own zeal against every danger. Now, then, since I am suspected of wrongdoing by men who owe their very survival to my labors, it would be fitting that you yourself—who showed me that fire at Sinai, and made me then a hearer of your own voice and a witness of all the wonders that place let me see; you who ordered me to go to Egypt and make your will known to them; you who shook the prosperity of the Egyptians and gave us escape from bondage under them, making even Pharaoh's rule seem smaller than my own—you who...
who made the sea into a road for us when we had no notion how to cross, who turned the parted water back to crash down on the Egyptians and destroy them, who granted safety from weapons to men who had none, who made bitter springs run sweet for us when we were dying of thirst, and who contrived a drink for us out of the rocks when we were entirely without resource, who preserved those who could find no food on land by sending it from the sea, and who sent down from heaven a food never heard of before, who put into my mind the framing of laws and the ordering of our commonwealth—come now, master of all things, be my judge and an incorruptible witness, that I never took a bribe from any Hebrew against justice, never condemned a poverty that deserved to prevail because of someone's wealth, never governed to the harm of the community, and never come here with designs most alien to my own practice—that it was not I but you who commanded that the priesthood be given to Aaron, and that I did this not as a favor of my own. Show now as well that everything is governed by your providence and that nothing comes to its end by chance but by a will that presides over it to the last, and that you care for those who benefit the Hebrews. Go after Abiram and Dathan, who condemn you of insensibility, as though you were being defeated by my cunning. Make plain the punishment that falls on them for raging so against your glory—not by removing them from life in the common way, nor letting them be seen to have departed this world as men who die by the ordinary law of nature, but let the earth open around them, together with their households and everything they possess on the ground they walk on. For this would be a demonstration of your power before everyone, and a lesson in self-control for those who hold such unholy opinions about you. In this way I would be found a good servant of what you command. But if the accusations made against me are true, then keep these men untouched by any harm, and let the destruction I have called down upon them fall instead on me. And once you have exacted justice from the man who wished to wrong your people, watch over harmony and peace for the rest of your time, and preserve the multitude that follows your commands, keeping it unharmed and free of any share in the punishment of those who have sinned. For you yourself know that it is not just for all the Israelites together to pay the penalty for the wickedness of those men."
When he had said this, weeping, the earth was suddenly shaken, and as the ground heaved like a wave stirred up by the force of wind, the whole people was seized with fear. Then, with a harsh, grinding crash, the earth gave way beneath their tents and drew down into itself everything that belonged to them. When they had vanished so completely that no one could tell they had ever been there, the gaping earth closed together again and settled, so that no trace of what had happened was visible to those who looked on. They perished in this way, made an example of God's power. One would grieve not only for their disaster, terrible enough in itself, but also because their own relatives rejoiced at what had happened to them; forgetting their kinship, they confirmed the verdict at the very sight of the event, and thinking that Dathan's company had died as guilty men, they felt no sorrow at all.
Moses now called forward the men who were competing for the priesthood, so that a trial might be held to determine which of them God preferred to receive as priest, choosing whoever's sacrifice he accepted more gladly. Two hundred and fifty men assembled, men honored among the people both for their fathers' merit and for their own, by which they had even surpassed their fathers. Aaron and Korah came forward as well, and before the tabernacle all of them burned incense in censers, whatever each had brought. Then fire blazed up, of a kind no one had ever recorded as kindled by human hands, nor as rising from the earth through some undercurrent of heat, nor struck out by the friction of wood in a violent wind, but such as would be lit when God commands it—bright and utterly consuming. By it all of them perished, the two hundred and fifty and Korah as well, the fire rushing upon them so that even their bodies vanished entirely. Aaron alone was spared, untouched by the fire, because it was God who had sent him to burn what needed burning.
When these men had perished, Moses, wishing their punishment to be preserved in memory and learned by those who would come after, ordered Eleazar, Aaron's son, to place their censers beside the bronze altar, so that it would serve as a reminder to future generations of what these men suffered and of the fact that they should not think the power of God could be deceived. And Aaron, no longer holding the high priesthood merely by Moses' favor as it had seemed, but now by a judgment of God made manifest, enjoyed the honor securely from then on, together with his sons.
The sedition, however, did not stop even after this, but grew and spread all the more, taking on a cause more bitter than before, one that made it likely the trouble would never end but would linger on indefinitely. For the people, now convinced that nothing happened apart from God's providence, refused to believe that these events had occurred without some favor shown by God to Moses, and accused him of causing God's anger to fall so heavily—not so much because of the wrongdoing of the men punished, as because Moses had contrived it. Those men, they said, had been destroyed though they had done nothing wrong except to be zealous for the worship of God, while the man who had cost the people the destruction of such men, the very best among them, not only went unpunished but had also secured the priesthood for his brother beyond dispute; for no one else, they said, would ever again lay claim to it, seeing how badly the first claimants had fared. And further, urgent appeals came even from the relatives of the men who had perished, asking that something be done to diminish Moses' pride of place, since this, they thought, would be safe for them.
Moses, who had for some time been hearing the disturbance building, fearing that the people might again attempt some upheaval and that something great and dangerous might come of it, gathered the multitude in assembly. He did not undertake to defend himself against what he had been hearing, so as not to provoke the people further, but told the tribal leaders only to bring the names of the tribes inscribed on staffs, for the man to whom God gave a sign upon the staff would receive the priesthood. So they agreed, and the others brought their staffs, and Aaron brought his inscribed “Levi,” and Moses placed them in the tabernacle of God. The next day he brought the staffs out again; they were recognizable because the men who had brought them, and the people as well, had marked them beforehand. The others they saw remained in the same form in which Moses had received them, but from Aaron's staff they saw shoots and branches had grown, and ripe fruit as well—almonds, since the staff had been made from wood of that kind. Astonished at the strangeness of the sight, even those who had felt hatred toward Moses and Aaron gave up such feelings and began to marvel at God's judgment concerning them, and from then on, acclaiming what God had decreed, they agreed that Aaron rightly held the high priesthood. And so, confirmed three times over by God's own choice, he held the honor securely, and the sedition of the Hebrews, after raging for a long time, was ended in this way.
Since the tribe of Levi had been excused from war and military service in order to attend to the service of God, Moses, so that want or the need to seek life's necessities should not make them neglect the temple, ordered—by the will of God—that once the Hebrews had taken possession of Canaan, they should assign the Levites forty-eight good and fine cities, and, marking off the land in front of them to a distance of two thousand cubits from the walls, grant it to them as well. In addition, he required the people to give the Levites and priests a tenth of their yearly produce. This is what the tribe receives from the people; but I have thought it necessary also to explain what is given privately to the priests by everyone. Of the forty-eight cities, Moses ordered the Levites to yield thirteen to the priests, and to set apart for them a tenth of the tithe they themselves receive each year from the people. He also required the people to bring firstfruits to God from all the produce that grows from the earth, and, among the four-footed animals reckoned fit for sacrifice, the firstborn, if it is male, to be given to the priests for sacrifice, so that they and their households might eat of it in the holy city. As for animals not customarily eaten according to ancestral law, their owners were to pay the priests a shekel and a half, and for a firstborn human child, five shekels; the priests were also to receive the firstfruits of the sheep-shearing, and those who bake bread were to provide them a portion of the loaves. And whoever consecrates himself by making a vow—these are called Nazirites, who let their hair grow and do not drink wine—when they dedicate their hair, they must offer it as a sacrifice, giving the shorn locks over to the priests. And those who dedicate themselves to God under the name “corban”—a word which, in the Greek tongue, signifies “gift”—if they wish to be released from this service, must pay the priests money: a woman thirty shekels, a man fifty. Anyone whose means fall short of the fixed amount may leave it to the priests to assess as they judge fit. Those who sacrifice at home for their own feasting, and not out of religious obligation, are required to bring the priests the stomach, the jaw, and the right foreleg of the victim. This was the extent of the provision Moses devised for the priests, apart from what the people give them when sacrificing for sins, as we have explained in the book before this one. He also ordered that the priests' male servants, daughters, and wives should all share in everything given to the priests, except the sacrifices offered for sin, for these only the male priests may consume within the temple, and on the same day.
When Moses had settled these matters after the sedition, he set out with the whole army for the borders of Idumea, and sent envoys to the king of the Idumeans asking that he grant them passage, promising to give whatever pledges the king wished that no harm would be done, that the army would pay for its provisions, and that they would even agree to pay for water drawn from his land. But the king, displeased with what Moses asked and unwilling to grant passage, led out his army under arms and advanced to meet Moses, intending to stop them if they dared to force their way through. Moses, since God had advised him against being the one to begin a battle, withdrew his forces and led them around through the desert.
At that time his sister Miriam's life came to its end, in the fortieth year after they had left Egypt, on the first day of the month of Xanthicus, reckoned by the moon. They buried her at public expense, with great honor, on a mountain called Sin, and when the people had mourned for thirty days, Moses purified them in this way: he had the high priest lead a young red heifer, unblemished, that had never known the plow or farm labor, a short distance from the camp to a place of complete purity, sacrifice it there, and sprinkle its blood seven times with his finger toward the tabernacle of God. Then, while the whole heifer was burning as it lay, hide, entrails and all, they threw cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet wool into the fire; a pure man then gathered up all its ashes and deposited them in a place of complete purity. Those defiled by contact with a corpse would then put a little of the ashes into a spring, dip hyssop in it, and sprinkle themselves with this water from the spring on the third and the seventh day, and after that they were clean. He also ordered that this same rite be performed once they had come into their allotted portions of land.
After this purification had been carried out for the mourning over the general's sister, Moses led the army away through the desert and through Arabia, arriving at a place the Arabs regard as their capital, formerly called Arce but now named Petra. There, on a high mountain that surrounds the place, Aaron went up—Moses having told him that he was about to die—in full view of the whole army, for the place sloped so that all could see. He stripped off his high priestly robes and gave them to his son Eleazar, to whom the high priesthood now passed by right of age, and died there while the multitude watched him, in the same year in which he had lost his sister, having lived in all one hundred and twenty-three years. He died on the first day of the month, reckoned by the moon, that the Athenians call Hecatombaeon, the Macedonians Loos, and the Hebrews Ab. The people mourned for him thirty days.
When this had passed, Moses took the army from there and came to the river Arnon, which rises in the mountains of Arabia, flows through the whole desert, and empties into the Dead Sea, marking the boundary between the land of Moab and the land of the Amorites. This is a fertile land, capable of supporting a great multitude of people from its produce. Moses sent word to Sihon, king of this region, asking passage for his army under whatever pledges Sihon might wish, so that no harm would come to his land or to those living under his rule, and offering that they would pay a fair price for whatever they needed from the market, even for water, if the king was willing to sell it. Sihon refused, and armed his own forces, standing fully ready to prevent the Hebrews from crossing the Arnon. Moses, seeing the Amorites disposed to make war on them and deciding he should not tolerate being held in contempt, and wishing to free the Hebrews from the inaction and the hardship it had caused—hardship that had earlier led them to sedition and was now again wearing on them—asked God whether he granted them leave to fight. When God signaled that they would have the victory, Moses himself grew confident for the contest and roused his soldiers, now urging them to enjoy the pleasure of fighting, since the divine allowed them to indulge it. They, seizing the freedom they had longed for and taking up their arms, went eagerly to the task. The Amorite, as they advanced, was no longer the man he had been, but was himself struck with terror, and the
The Hebrews and their army, which had shown itself eager for the fight only moments before, were now revealed to have been afraid all along. They could not withstand the first clash, turned to face the Hebrews only briefly, and then fled, thinking their safety lay in flight rather than in battle, since they trusted in the strength of their cities. But that trust did them no good once they were driven into those cities as a herd; the Hebrews, seeing that the enemy had given way, pressed the attack at once.
As soon as they saw them break, the Hebrews fell upon them, stripped away their order, and threw them into panic. Some, torn from the rest, fled toward the cities; others did not tire of the pursuit but chose to add fresh exertion to what they had already endured. They were the best slingers among the Hebrews, skilled with every kind of missile weapon, and their light armor made them quick in the chase, so that they ran down the enemy and caught even those who had gotten furthest away with their slings and arrows.
There was great slaughter, and those who escaped suffered from their wounds; indeed they suffered more from thirst than from anything the enemy did, for it was summer and they were desperate to drink. The greater number of them rushed headlong to a river, and as those who had kept together in flight gathered there, the Hebrews surrounded them and struck them down, killing them all with javelins and arrows together. Among the dead was their king, Sihon himself.
The Hebrews stripped the corpses, took plunder, and found great abundance from a land still full of its produce; the army moved through it freely, foraging even as the cities themselves were captured, for there was no one left to resist them, since every fighting man had perished. Such was the disaster that overtook the Amorites, a people who had shown neither wisdom in counsel nor courage in action, and the Hebrews took possession of what had been theirs.
There is a region lying between three rivers that is, by its nature, something like an island: the Arnon bounds it on the south, the Jabbok marks its northern side and, flowing into the Jordan, lends that river its own name, while on the west the Jordan itself runs around the territory.
While matters stood thus, Og, king of Gilead and Gaulanitis, attacked the Israelites, bringing an army with him. He had hurried to help Sihon as an ally and a friend, but found that Sihon had already perished, and even so decided to give battle to the Hebrews, believing he would prevail and wishing to put their courage to the test. His hope failed him: he himself died in the battle, and his entire army was destroyed with him.
Moses crossed the river Jabbok and advanced through Og's kingdom, overthrowing its cities and killing all their inhabitants, who surpassed every other people of that region in wealth, owing to the richness of their land and the abundance of their goods. Og himself was a man of a size and beauty such as few possess, and he was also valiant in combat, so that his deeds matched the advantages of his stature and good looks. Proof of his strength and size survives in a bed of his, taken from Rabbath, capital of the Ammanites: it was made of iron, four cubits wide, and more than twice that in length, longer by a full cubit besides.
His fall brought benefit to the Hebrews not only for the moment but for the future as well, for even in dying he became the cause of good things for them: they took over sixty cities, magnificently walled, which had paid him tribute, and both privately and as a people they grew rich from the great plunder. Moses then made camp, and leading the army to the Jordan, pitched it opposite the great plain of Jericho, a prosperous city, good for growing palms, and rich in balsam.
The Israelites now began to think highly of themselves and pushed their appetite for war beyond measure. After only a few days, Moses first offered sacrifices of thanksgiving to God and feasted the people, then sent out part of the armed men to ravage the land of the Midianites and besiege their towns.
The cause of the hostility toward them was this. Balak, king of the Moabites, had inherited friendship with the Midianites from his fathers and an alliance with them; and when he saw the Israelites growing so great, he was thrown into deep anxiety about his own affairs, for he had not learned that God had forbidden the Hebrews to meddle with any other land besides that of the Canaanites, which they had already gained. So he resolved to act by negotiation, more hastily than wisely.
He did not think it right to make war on men who, flushed with success, had just recovered from misfortune with even greater boldness, but reasoned that if he could prevent them from growing further great, he should send envoys to the Midianites on their behalf. The Midianites, since there was a certain Balaam from the Euphrates, the best seer of that age and well disposed toward them, sent, along with Balak's envoys, men of note from among their own people to urge the seer to come and pronounce curses that would utterly destroy the Israelites.
When the envoys arrived, Balaam received them hospitably as guests, gave them a feast, and then inquired of God's intention as to the request the Midianites were making. God stood in his way, and Balaam went out to the envoys, showing them his own eagerness and readiness to grant what they sought, but making clear that God opposed his purpose — God, who had raised him to such renown through his gift of truth and prophecy. He told them that the army they were asking him to come and curse enjoyed God's favor, and he advised them, for this reason, to abandon their hostility toward the Israelites and be reconciled.
With these words he dismissed the envoys. But the Midianites, since Balak pressed the matter hard and kept bringing urgent entreaties, sent to Balaam a second time. He, wishing to do the men some favor, asked God again, but God, indignant at the renewed attempt, ordered him not to refuse the envoys. Balaam, not supposing this a deceitful command from God, set out with the envoys.
On the road, as a divine angel confronted him at a narrow place enclosed by two walls, the donkey on which Balaam was riding, perceiving the divine spirit standing in the way, swerved aside against one of the walls, feeling nothing of the blows Balaam gave it in his anger at being crushed against the wall. When the angel pressed still closer and the donkey, being struck, sank down, it uttered, by God's will, a human voice, reproaching Balaam as unjust: he had no complaint against it from all its earlier service, yet he struck it blows, not understanding that it was, by God's own purpose, being kept from a task the animal itself had been eager to perform.
While he was still disturbed at the donkey's human voice, the angel appeared to him plainly and rebuked him for the blows, since it was not the beast's fault but its own — the angel's own — that had blocked the road, doing so against the wish of God. Balaam, terrified, was ready to turn back, but God urged him forward on the journey already begun, instructing him that whatever came into his mind he was to speak as a sign from God.
So, on God's command, he came to Balak. The king received him splendidly and asked him, once he had been brought up onto one of the mountains, to observe how the Hebrew camp was arranged. Balak himself came with him, bringing the seer up with royal attendance and great honor to a mountain that stood above the enemy's camp, sixty stadia away. When Balaam looked down on them, he ordered the king to build seven altars and bring forward as many bulls and rams.
When the king had quickly provided what was asked and the animals had been offered as whole burnt sacrifices, Balaam, seeing the manner of sign given him, declared:
"Happy is this people, to whom God grants possession of countless blessings and gives his own providence as an ally and guide in everything. There is no nation of men among whom you will not be judged, by virtue and by zeal for the best and purest ways of life, to be superior, and you will leave this legacy to children better than yourselves, since God watches over you alone among men and, from wherever you may be, will make you the most fortunate of all beneath the sun.
"The land to which he himself has sent you, you will hold, and it will remain in service to your children forever; the whole earth and sea will be filled with the fame of your name, and you will be enough to furnish every land in the world with settlers from your own stock. Marvel, then, blessed army, that from a single father you have become so numerous. Yet the land of the Canaanites will hold only the small remnant of you now present; know that the whole inhabited world lies before you as your dwelling place forever, and your multitude will live on islands and on the mainland in numbers beyond even the count of the stars in heaven.
"To so great a people, God will not refuse abundance of every good thing in peace, and victory and mastery in war. May the sons of your enemies find themselves so seized by desire for war against you, and grow so bold as to come to arms and meet your hands, that not one of them returns victorious, or so as to gladden his children and his wife. So great is the surplus of courage granted to you by God's providence, who has power both to diminish what is excessive and to supply what is lacking."
Such were the things he uttered in prophecy, not master of himself but overcome, in speaking them, by the divine spirit. Balak was indignant, and charged him with breaking the agreement on which he had received, from the allies, great gifts to come and curse their enemies, and instead singing their praises and pronouncing them the most blessed of men. Balaam answered:
"Balak, do you think it is within our own power to be silent or to speak on such matters, when the spirit of God takes hold of us? He sends forth whatever words and utterances he wishes, with none of it known to us beforehand. I remember well what you and the Midianites, in your entreaty, eagerly brought me here to do, and for the sake of which I made this journey; and it was my prayer to do nothing to wrong your wish. But God is more powerful than what I had resolved to grant you, and those who suppose they can foreknow human affairs by their own power are altogether weak — unable to say only what the divine dictates, and unable to force his will, since once he has entered, nothing in us remains our own any longer.
"For my part, then, I did not set out either to praise this army or to recount the blessings God has devised for their race; rather, it was he, being favorably disposed toward them and eager to grant them a happy life and eternal renown, who put into me the report of such words. But now — since it is my earnest wish to do a favor both for you and for the Midianites, whose request it would not be fitting for me to refuse — come, let us raise other altars once more and offer sacrifices like the previous ones, in case I might be able to persuade God to allow me to bind these men under curses."
Balak agreed, but though Balaam sacrificed twice, God would not grant him the curses against the Israelites; and when he sacrificed a third time, other altars again being raised, even then he did not curse the Israelites, but fell upon his face and foretold the sufferings that would come upon kings and upon the most notable cities, some of which had not yet even begun to be inhabited, together with things that had already happened to men in earlier times, by land or by sea, insofar as I can recall them. From the outcome of all these things, exactly as he foretold them, one may judge what is still to come.
Balak, enraged that the Israelites had not been cursed, sent Balaam away without granting him any honor. But as he was departing, once he had reached the crossing of the Euphrates, he sent for Balak and the leaders of the Midianites and said:
"Balak, and you Midianites who are present, since I must grant you a favor even against the will of God: the race of the Hebrews can never be overtaken by utter destruction, neither by war, nor by plague, nor by famine of the earth's produce, nor by any other unforeseen cause that might destroy them; for God's providence watches over them, to save them from every evil and to allow no such disaster to befall them as would destroy them all. Whatever misfortunes come upon them will be few and brief, ones under which they will seem humbled only to flourish again, to the terror of those who inflicted the harm.
"But if you desire to win some victory over them for a short time, you may obtain it in this way. Take your daughters, the most beautiful among them, adorn their loveliness to still greater effect, and send them near to the Israelite camp, capable by their beauty of overcoming the restraint of any man who looks on them, and instruct them to consent to lie with the young men who desire them. Once they see the young men mastered by their desire, let the women leave them, and when they beg them to stay, let them not agree, until they have persuaded the men to abandon their ancestral laws and the God who established them, and to worship the gods of the Midianites and the Moabites; for only so will God grow angry with them."
Having given them this counsel, he departed. The Midianites sent their daughters as he had advised, and the young men of the Hebrews, captivated by their beauty, came and spoke with them, begging them not to grudge them the enjoyment of their loveliness or the intimacy of their company. The women received their words gladly and consorted with them.
But once they had bound the young men to themselves by desire, and while that desire was still at its height, they began to make as if to leave. Deep despair seized the young men at the women's withdrawal, and they clung to them, begging them not to abandon them, but to remain there as their wives, promised mistresses of all they possessed. This they swore, calling God to witness their promises, weeping and doing everything to make themselves objects of pity to the women.
The women, seeing them thus enslaved and utterly overcome by intimacy, began to say to them: "Bravest of young men, we have ancestral homes and an abundance of possessions, and the goodwill and affection of our parents and kin, and we came here lacking none of these things for ourselves —
"We did not come here for commerce, nor did we welcome your attentions in order to trade on the beauty of our bodies. We took you for good and just men and were persuaded to honor such guests as you with hospitality of this kind. And now, since you say you feel affection for us and grieve that we are about to leave, we for our part do not turn away your entreaty. Taking a pledge of your goodwill — the only thing we count of any worth — we shall be glad to spend our lives with you as wives. For we fear that once you have had your fill of our company you may afterward abuse us and send us back in disgrace to our parents." They asked to be excused for taking this precaution. When the young men agreed to give whatever pledge the women wished and, overcome by passion for them, objected to nothing, the women said, "Since this is now settled between us, your customs and manner of life are utterly alien to everyone else — your food is peculiar to yourselves and your drink is not shared with others. If you wish to live with us, you must worship our gods as well; there can be no other proof of the goodwill you now profess and will go on professing than to bow down to the same gods as we do. No one could find fault if, in the land to which you have come, you turn to the gods native to that land, especially since our gods are open to all, while yours admit no one else to their worship." They told the men, then, that they must either think as everyone else thought or go and look for some other inhabited world in which to live alone by their own laws.
The young men, carried away by their passion for the women, thought this excellent advice, gave themselves over to what was proposed, and transgressed their ancestral ways. Believing now that there were more gods than one, they set about sacrificing to them according to the local custom of the people who had settled them there, took pleasure in foreign foods, and in everything, to please the women, kept doing the very opposite of what their own law commanded — until the lawlessness of the young men had by now spread through the whole army, and a far worse sedition than the earlier one fell upon them, along with the danger that their own ancestral customs would be utterly destroyed. For once the young had had a taste of foreign customs, they gorged themselves on them insatiably, and even some of the leading men, distinguished through their fathers' virtues, were corrupted along with the rest. Zambrias, the leader of the tribe of Simeon, keeping company with Chosbia, a Midianite woman, daughter of Sour, one of the rulers there, and acting at the woman's bidding, did what would please her in defiance of what Moses had ordained.
While matters stood thus, Moses, fearing that something worse might happen, gathered the people into an assembly. He named no one, not wishing to drive to desperation those who, by remaining unidentified, might still repent, but said that they were acting unworthily both of themselves and of their fathers in preferring pleasure to God and to the life lived in accordance with him. It was fitting, he said, while there was still time and it was still possible for them to do well, to change their course; courage, rightly understood, lay not in defying the laws but in not yielding to desire. Besides, he said, it made no sense that men who had shown self-control in the wilderness should now, in the midst of prosperity, run riot, or that what want had gained for them should be lost through abundance. By saying this he tried to set the young men right and lead them to repent of what they had done.
Zambrias rose after him and said, "As for you, Moses, keep to the laws you yourself have taken such pains over, laws whose authority you owe to the simplicity of these people. If they were not of such a disposition, you would long ago have learned by your own punishment that the Hebrews are not so easily deceived. You will not find me obedient to your commands, tyrannically given as they are. Up to now you have done nothing but use the pretense of laws and of God to work mischief, reducing us to slavery while securing power for yourself, and robbing us of the pleasure and the freedom of action over our own lives that belong to free men who have no master. You would prove yourself harsher toward the Hebrews than the Egyptians were, if you claim the right to punish, according to the laws, each man's pursuit of what pleases him. It would be far more just for you yourself to suffer punishment, since you have set out to destroy what is by common consent held to be right among every people, and have built up your own strangeness in defiance of the opinion of all mankind. As for me, I should rightly be deprived of what I am now doing only if I had judged it to be good and yet hesitated afterward to avow it openly. You say I have taken a foreign woman as my wife — you shall hear the truth of my conduct from my own mouth, as from a free man, for I never intended to conceal it. I sacrifice to the gods to whom it is my custom to sacrifice, holding it right to seek the truth for myself from many sources, rather than live as under a tyranny, with the whole hope of my entire life hung upon one man alone. And no one shall have more authority than I do to declare his own judgment about what I do."
When Zambrias had said this about his own wrongdoing, and some others had spoken to the same effect, the people kept quiet, both from fear of what might follow and because they saw that the lawgiver did not wish to carry his indignation further by open confrontation — for he was on guard lest many, imitating the license of Zambrias's words, should throw the multitude into confusion. And so the assembly broke up on these terms. The trial of this evil would have gone much further had not Zambrias met his death, and in the following manner. Phinehas, a man superior to the other young men in every respect and surpassing his contemporaries in the dignity of his father — for he was the son of Eleazar the high priest — was deeply grieved at what Zambrias had done, and resolved to exact justice from him by his own hand before the outrage, emboldened by impunity, could grow stronger, and to prevent the lawlessness from spreading to still more, since those who had begun it went unpunished. So far did he surpass others in daring and in courage of both soul and body that, once he had taken on any dangerous task, he would not withdraw from it until he had fought it through and won the victory. He went to the tent of Zambrias and killed both him and Chosbia, striking them with his sword. All the young men who had any claim to virtue and love of honor, following the daring example of Phinehas, killed those who had incurred the same charge as Zambrias.
Many of the offenders perished, then, at the hands of these brave men, but all the rest were destroyed as well, for God sent a plague upon them for this sin, and those relatives who, though bound to restrain the offenders, had instead urged them on to wrongdoing died as guilty in God's sight along with them. In all, no fewer than fourteen thousand men perished from the ranks. Roused to anger by this cause, Moses sent the army out to destroy the Midianites. We shall report shortly on their campaign against them, but first we must go back and relate something we passed over, for it is right not to leave unpraised the lawgiver's judgment in this matter. Balaam, who had been engaged by the Midianites to curse the Hebrews and, though he could not do this by divine providence, had instead suggested a plan by which, once the enemy put it into effect, the multitude of the Hebrews very nearly perished through the practices in which some of them fell sick — this same Balaam Moses honored greatly, recording his prophecies, even though it was open to him to claim this credit for himself and appropriate the glory attaching to them, since no witness would have survived to expose him. Instead he gave Balaam the credit and judged him worthy of being remembered for it. Let anyone who wishes to think otherwise about this judge for himself as he sees fit.
Moses, then, concerning the matters I mentioned earlier, sent an army against the land of the Midianites, twelve thousand men in all, choosing an equal number from each tribe, and appointed as their general Phinehas, whom we mentioned a little earlier as the man who had upheld the laws for the Hebrews and punished Zambrias for transgressing them. The Midianites, learning in advance that an army was marching against them and would soon be upon them, gathered together and secured the passes into their country by which they expected the enemy to come, and awaited them there. When the Hebrews arrived and battle was joined, an incalculable number of the Midianites fell, past all counting, together with all their kings — there were five: Ochus, Sures, Robees, Ures, and fifth, Recemus, whose city, bearing his name, holds the whole dignity of the land of the Arabs and is called to this day, by every Arab, Recem after the king who founded it, though the Greeks call it Petra. Once the enemy had been routed, the Hebrews plundered their land, took a great deal of booty, and put the inhabitants to death together with their women, sparing only the virgins, for Moses had so ordered Phinehas. He returned bringing back the army unharmed and abundant spoil: fifty-two thousand cattle, seventy-five thousand sheep, sixty thousand donkeys, and an immense quantity of gold and silver vessels used in their households, for in their great prosperity they lived very luxuriously. Also brought back were about thirty-two thousand virgins. Moses divided the spoil, giving one-fiftieth of one portion to Eleazar and the priests, one-fiftieth of the other portion to the Levites, and distributing the rest to the people. For the rest of the time they lived in prosperity, an abundance of good things having come to them through their valor, with nothing grim to hinder their enjoyment of it.
Moses, now grown old, appointed Joshua as his successor, both in prophecy and, whenever occasion should require, as general, God himself having commanded that the leadership of affairs be entrusted to him. Joshua had received a complete education in the laws and in matters concerning God, Moses himself having instructed him.
At this time two tribes, that of Gad and that of Reuben, together with half the tribe of Manasseh, being prosperous in great numbers of livestock and in everything else, took counsel together and asked Moses to grant them the land of the Amorites, which had been won by the spear, as their special portion, since it was good for raising cattle. Moses, supposing that fear of battle with the Canaanites lay behind this and that they had found a plausible excuse in their concern for their livestock, called them thoroughly base and accused them of having invented a respectable pretext for cowardice: they wished to live at ease and enjoy luxury while everyone else labored to win the land they were asking for, refusing to join in the remaining struggles for the land that God had promised to give those who crossed the Jordan, once they had subdued the enemies he had appointed for them. They, seeing him angry and understanding that his anger at their request was just, defended themselves, saying that it was not from fear of danger nor from any softness in the face of hardship that they had made the request, but so that, having left their spoil in a safe place, they might go into the struggles and battles unencumbered; and they said they were ready, once they had built cities for the protection of their children, wives, and possessions, to go along with the army, if he granted it. Moses, pleased with this answer, called together Eleazar the high priest, Joshua, and all the leading men, and agreed to give them the land of the Amorites on condition that they fight alongside their kinsmen until everything was settled. Having received the land on these terms and built strong cities, they placed their children, wives, and all else that would have hindered them in their labors within these cities.
Moses also built the ten cities that were to bring the total number to forty-eight, of which he designated three for those fleeing on account of unintentional homicide, and fixed the length of exile as lasting until the death of the high priest in whose time a man had committed the killing and fled. After the high priest's death, return was permitted, though the relatives of the man killed had the right to kill the slayer if they caught him outside the boundaries of the city to which he had fled — no one else was permitted to do so. The cities appointed as places of refuge were these: Bosara, on the borders of Arabia; Arimanon, in the land of Gilead; and Golan, in Batanea. Once they had also gained possession of the land of the Canaanites, three further cities, among the cities of the Levites, were to be assigned for the refuge of exiles, Moses having so directed.
When the leading men of the tribe of Manasseh came to Moses and told him that a man of some standing among their tribesmen, Salphaad by name, had died leaving no male children but only daughters, and asked whether these daughters were to receive the inheritance, he replied that if they were to marry men of their own tribe, they should take their inheritance with them to their husbands, but if they married into another tribe, they should leave the inheritance within their father's tribe. And he ordained that in every such case the inheritance should thereafter remain within the tribe.
When the forty years lacked thirty days of being completed, Moses gathered an assembly by the Jordan, at the place where the city of Abila now stands, a place planted with palm trees, and when the whole people had come together, he spoke as follows: "Fellow soldiers, sharers in this long hardship, since it has now pleased God, and my old age of one hundred and twenty years now completed, that I must depart from life, and since I am forbidden by God to be your helper and ally in what remains to be done beyond the Jordan, I have thought it right, even now, not to abandon my zeal on behalf of your prosperity, but to secure for you an enduring enjoyment of these good things, and to leave myself a memory among you amid an abundance of still greater blessings. Come, then, let me set before you the manner in which you yourselves may prosper and leave to your children an enduring possession of good things, and so depart from life. I deserve to be trusted, both because of my past zeal on your behalf and because souls at the point of death commune with all virtue. Sons of Israel, the one cause of the acquisition of good things for all men is God's favor; for he alone is able both to give these things to the worthy and to take them away from those who sin against him. If you offer yourselves to him such as he himself wishes — and I, who know his mind clearly, urge you to do so — you, who are blessed and enviable among all peoples, will never meet with misfortune or come to an end; rather, the possession of the good things you now have will remain secure, and you will swiftly gain possession of what you do not yet have. Only" —
"Obey these, and prefer no other arrangement to the laws now before you, and do not, out of contempt, abandon the reverence you now hold toward God for some other way. If you do this, you will prove the most valiant of all in fighting your battles and be caught by none of your enemies; for with God present to help you, it is reasonable to look down on everything else. Great rewards for virtue lie before you for your whole life, once you have gained it: virtue itself is, first, the most honorable of goods, and then it grants you abundance of the rest as well, so that, practicing it toward one another, you will make your life a blessed one, be judged beyond dispute more glorious than the foreign nations, and secure your good repute among those who come after. You could attain all this if you become obedient to, and guardians of, the laws which I have set in order for you at God's dictation, and if you study their meaning closely.
"I myself depart rejoicing over your blessings, entrusting you to the moderation and good order of the laws and to the constitution of the state, and to the virtues of the commanders, who will take thought for your advantage. And God, who has led us until now, by whose will I too became useful to you, will not stop his providence here, but for as long as you yourselves wish to keep him as your protector, remaining in the practices of virtue, for so long you will enjoy his forethought. The best counsels, by following which you will have happiness, will be given you by the high priest Eleazar and Joshua, and the council of elders, and the officers of the tribes; listen to them without resentment, knowing that all who know how to be governed well will also know how to govern, once they come into authority themselves. And do not consider liberty to mean taking offense at whatever your leaders think fit to have you do; for now you regard insolence toward your benefactors as free speech—a habit which, if you guard against it in future, will serve your affairs better. Never again feel the resentment you often dared to show toward me; you know how many times I risked death at your hands rather than at the enemy's. I have not brought this up to reproach you—I did not think it right, on the point of leaving life, to depart bearing a grudge, nor was I angry when I suffered these things at the time—but so that this very memory should make you more prudent in the future, and so that you should not, through wealth, grow insolent toward your leaders, wealth which will surround you in abundance once you have crossed the Jordan and taken possession of Canaan. For if you are led on by it to contempt and to neglect of virtue, you will lose the goodwill of God as well; and having made him your enemy, you will be overpowered in arms and stripped once more of the land you will have won, amid the greatest disgrace, and scattered throughout the world you will fill both land and sea with your servitude. And when you come to feel the effects of this, repentance will do you no good, nor will the memory of the laws you failed to keep. So, if you wish these blessings to remain yours, leave not one of your enemies alive once you have conquered them, but judge it best to destroy them all, lest, tasting something of their way of life, you corrupt the ancestral constitution. I further urge you to tear down all their altars, groves, and temples, however many they have, and to consume by fire their race and its very memory; for only so will the security of your own blessings stand firm for you. And so that your nature may not, through ignorance, turn away from the better course toward the worse, I have composed for you both laws, at God's dictation, and a constitution, the order of which, if you preserve it, will make you judged the happiest of all people."
Having said this, he gave them the laws and the arrangement of the constitution written down in a book. They wept and pressed him at length with questions, remembering the dangers he had faced and the zeal he had shown for their safety, and despairing of the future, since there would be no other leadership like his, and since they thought God would show less providence for them once Moses, the one who had interceded for them, was gone. They grieved too, in remorse, over the times they had spoken to him in anger in the wilderness, so that the whole people broke into tears, and this display of feeling for him proved more powerful even than words of comfort. Moses tried to console them, and, judging himself worthy of their tears, led them away and urged them to make use of the constitution. And so, for that time, they parted.
I wish first to describe the constitution, since it corresponds to the worth of Moses's virtue, and, in setting it out, to give those who read it the means of learning what our institutions were from the beginning, rather than turning to the account others give of them. All that has been written stands as he left it; we have added nothing of our own for the sake of ornament, nor anything beyond what Moses left behind. The one innovation we have made is to arrange each matter by category; for it was left by him scattered as it was written, just as each point was learned from God on its own occasion. For this reason I judged it necessary to make this distinction beforehand, so that none of our own people who come upon the writing should find fault with us as having gone astray. The order of our laws bearing on the constitution is as follows. Those laws he left that are common to us and concern our dealings with one another I have deferred to the account of customs and their reasons, which, with God's help, it is my purpose to compose after this present work.
"When you have gained possession of the land of Canaan and, having leisure to enjoy its goods, choose thereafter to found cities, if you do these things you will act as friends to God and your happiness will stand secure. Let there be one holy city, in the finest part of the land of Canaan and made conspicuous by its excellence, which God shall choose for himself through prophecy; and in it let there be one temple, and one altar of unhewn stones, but fitted together as picked from the field, which, plastered over, should be handsome and clean to look upon. The ascent to it must not be by steps, but by an earthen ramp built up with a gentle slope. In no other city shall there be either altar or temple; for God is one, and the race of the Hebrews is one. Whoever blasphemes God shall be stoned, hung up for the day, and buried without honor and out of sight. Let those from the ends of the land held by the Hebrews gather three times a year at the city appointed for the temple, to give thanks to God for benefits already received and to entreat him for those to come, and, meeting and feasting together, to grow affectionate toward one another; for it is good that men of the same race, sharing the same way of life, should not be strangers to each other, and this will come about for them through such mingling, as sight and converse plant the memory of it in them—whereas, remaining apart from one another, they will come to be reckoned wholly foreign to each other. Let there also be, besides the tithe you have ordained to be given to the priests and Levites, a tithe of the produce set apart for you, which may be sold in your own districts but is to serve for the feasts and sacrifices in the holy city; for it is right that you should enjoy, in honor of the giver, a portion of what the earth yields, which God granted you to possess. Sacrifices are not to be paid for out of a harlot's wages, for God takes no pleasure in anything born of outrage, and such a gift is no better than the shame it brings upon the body; nor, likewise, is anything to be sacrificed to God from a fee taken for the mating of a dog, whether a hunting dog or a sheepdog. Let no one blaspheme the gods which other cities honor, nor plunder foreign temples, nor take any object dedicated to any god, whoever he may be. Let none of you wear a garment woven of wool and linen together, for that has been reserved for the priests alone.
"When the multitude has gathered at the holy city for the sacrifices, once every seven years, at the coming of the feast of Tabernacles, let the high priest stand on a raised platform, from which he can be heard, and read the laws to all; and let neither women nor children be kept from hearing, nor even the slaves, for it is good that, once inscribed on their souls and kept in memory, they should never be able to be erased. In this way they will commit no wrong, since they will not be able to plead ignorance of what the laws prescribe; and the laws themselves will have great force against wrongdoers, since these have had foretold to them what they will suffer, and have had inscribed on their souls, through hearing, what is commanded them, so that the choice set before them is always present within them—a choice which, if they disregard it, leaves them guilty of the wrong and the author of their own punishment. Let the children too learn first of all the laws, the finest lesson and the cause of happiness. Twice each day, at its beginning and when the hour turns toward sleep, let all bear witness to God of the gifts he granted them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt, since thanksgiving is by nature owed both as repayment for what has already come to pass and as encouragement for what is still to come; and let them inscribe on their doorposts the greatest of the benefits God has done them, and let each display on his arms whatever can signify the power of God and the goodwill he bears them, inscribed upon the head and the arm, so that his eager care for them may be seen from every side.
"Let there be appointed in each city seven men who have practiced virtue and zeal for justice above others; and to each such office let two assistants be given from the tribe of the Levites. Let those allotted to judge in the cities be held in every honor, so that none may be free to speak ill of them or show insolence in their presence, out of a deference toward men of standing that keeps people, in effect, from showing contempt for God. Let the judges have full authority to pronounce as seems right to them, unless someone can show that they took money to pervert justice, or bring some other charge by which it is proven that they did not judge rightly; for it is not fitting that they should render their judgments openly either to gratify gain or out of regard for rank, but that they should set justice above everything. In acting otherwise, God himself would be held in contempt, and made weaker than those to whom, out of fear of their power, a man assigns the verdict as already decided; for the strength of God is justice, and whoever grants that as a favor to men of rank makes them more powerful than God. If the judges cannot see their way to a verdict on the matters brought before them—and many such cases arise among men—let them refer the case to the holy city, where the high priest, the prophet, and the council of elders shall assemble and pronounce what seems right. Let no single witness be believed, but three, or at the least two, whose testimony is made trustworthy by their past lives. Let there be no testimony from women, on account of the frivolity and boldness of their sex; nor let slaves testify either, because of the ignobility of their spirit, since it is likely that, whether for gain or out of fear, they would not testify truly. If anyone is convicted of bearing false witness and is believed, let him suffer whatever the one he testified against was to have suffered.
"If a murder has been committed in some district and the doer is not found, nor is anyone suspected of having killed out of hatred, let the people search for him with great diligence, offering rewards for information; and if no one comes forward, let the magistrates of the cities near the district where the murder was committed, together with the council of elders, assemble and measure the distance from the place where the corpse lies. Whichever city proves nearest, let its officials buy a heifer and bring it to a ravine, to ground unsuited to the plow or to planting, and there cut the tendons of the heifer's neck; and taking water for the washing of hands, let the priests, the Levites, and the elders of that city, over the head of the heifer, cry aloud that their hands are clean of the murder, that they neither did the deed nor were present when it was done, and let them call upon God to be merciful and to let no such dreadful thing befall the land again.
"Aristocracy, then, and the life lived under it, is best; and let no longing for another form of government take hold of you, but cherish this one, and, keeping the laws as your masters, do all things according to them; for it is enough that God be your leader. But if a longing for a king should come upon you, let him be of your own race, and let him have care for justice and for the rest of virtue at all times. Let him yield the greater part of his judgment to the laws and to God, and do nothing apart from the high priest and the opinion of the council of elders; let him not take many wives, nor pursue an abundance of money or of horses, since, once he has these in plenty, he will grow arrogant toward the laws. And should he show eagerness for any of these things, let him be prevented, so that he does not become more powerful than is good for you. Let it not be permitted to move the boundaries of land, whether one's own or that of others with whom you are at peace; let a man guard against removing them as he would a fixed decree of God, set for all time, since from this arise wars and civil strife, as those who covet more wish to press beyond their boundaries; and those who shift a boundary are not far from also transgressing the laws.
"If a man has planted land, and the trees bear fruit before four years have passed, let him neither bring first-fruits from it to God nor use it himself, for it was not brought forth by them in due season, but forced out of nature before its time, and so is fit neither to be offered to God nor used by its own owner. In the fourth year let him harvest the whole yield, for then it is ripe, and, gathering it, let him bring it to the holy city, and there, together with the tithe of his other produce, consume it in feasting with his friends, together with orphans and widowed women. From the fifth year on, let the owner be free to enjoy the fruit of the trees for himself. Land planted with vines is not to be sown with grain as well; let it be content to nourish this one crop and be spared the labors of the plow. Let land be plowed with oxen, and let no other animal be yoked together with them, but let each kind of beast be put to...
the plowing. Let the seed be pure and unmixed, and let no one sow two or three kinds together, for nature does not delight in the union of things unlike. Nor let anyone put together animals of different kinds, for fear that this small and trivial beginning might, through imitation, spread contempt for the proper order even to human affairs. Nothing of this sort should be permitted, lest some distortion of the constitution creep in by way of such precedents; the laws leave nothing, even the smallest matters, unattended, since they know how to provide for a people's blamelessness in everything.
Those who reap and gather in the harvest should not glean it clean, but should leave some of the sheaves for those who lack the means of life, as a godsend for their sustenance. Likewise, at the grape harvest, they should leave the gleanings of the vine for the poor, and of the olive crop leave something to be gathered by those who have none of their own to draw on. The owners will not gain so much from harvesting their own crops down to the last measure as the gratitude they will win from the needy, and God will make the earth more eager to bring forth its fruits for those who take thought not only of their own advantage but also of feeding others. Nor should men binding sheaves for threshing muzzle the oxen on the threshing floor, for it is not just to keep from the fruit those who labored alongside in producing it. Nor, when fruit is ripe, should travelers on the road be prevented from picking it; rather they should be allowed to eat their fill as if it were their own, whether they are natives or strangers, the owners rejoicing to let them share in the season's bounty—only they may carry none of it away. Nor, at the vintage, should those bringing the grapes to the winepress stop passersby from eating some as they go; for it is unjust to grudge those who desire a share of goods that have come into the world by God's will, at the very time when the season is at its height and hastening to pass.
This would be pleasing to God, even if out of shame some hesitate to touch the fruit and must be urged to take it—Israelites as partners and, by kinship, as owners in their own right; and foreigners who have arrived from elsewhere are entitled to the guest-gifts of what God has provided them in their season. What a person allows others to take out of kindness should not be reckoned a loss, since God supplies abundance of good things not for the owners alone to enjoy but so that they may generously share with others as well, wishing in this way to make known, through great surplus given to others besides, his own goodwill toward the people of Israel and his provision for their prosperity. Whoever acts against these rules shall receive thirty-nine lashes of the public scourge, though a free man, and shall bear this most shameful punishment for having enslaved himself to gain and dishonored his own standing. For it is fitting that you, who have known hardship in Egypt and in the wilderness, should take thought for others in like circumstances, and that you who have found prosperity through God's mercy and providence should extend that same mercy, out of a like experience of suffering, to those in need now.
Of the two tithes which I have already said are to be paid each year, one goes to the Levites, the other toward the festal banquets; a third, in addition to these, is to be set aside every third year for distribution to those in want—widowed women and orphaned children. Whatever of the season's produce first comes to hand for each person, let them bring it to the Temple, and having blessed God for the land that bore it, which he granted them to possess, let them perform the sacrifices the law commands them to offer, and give the firstfruits of these to the priests. When a man has done this, and has brought all the tithes together with those for the Levites and for the festal banquets, and is about to return home, let him stand before the sanctuary and give thanks to God for having freed them from the outrage of the Egyptians and given them a good and abundant land to enjoy, calling him to witness that he has paid the tithes according to the laws of Moses, and asking God to be gracious and merciful to him always and to all the Hebrews in common, preserving the good things he has given them and adding to them whatever more he can bestow.
Let men marry, when they come of age for marriage, free-born virgins of good parentage. He who does not intend to take a virgin should not join himself to a woman already living with another, corrupting her and wronging her former husband. Slave women are not to be married by free men, even if some are driven to it by passion; they should master their desire out of a sense of propriety befitting their standing. Nor, further, should marriage be contracted with a prostitute, whose sacrifices at the wedding God would not accept because of the degradation of her body; for children will have free and upright characters, inclined to virtue, only if they are not born of shameful unions or of a couple who came together out of unfree desire rather than freedom. If a man, having betrothed a woman as a virgin, afterward finds she is not such, he may bring suit, accusing her himself and using whatever evidence he has for proof, while the girl's father, or her brother, or whoever after these is judged nearest of kin, shall speak in her defense.
If the girl is judged in the trial not to have done wrong, she shall live with her accuser, who shall have no power to send her away, except if she gives him serious grounds which he could not even answer. But whoever brings a charge and slander rashly and recklessly shall pay a fine, receiving forty lashes less one, and shall pay fifty shekels to her father. But if he proves the young woman corrupted, then, if she is of the common people, for not having guarded her virginity chastely until lawful marriage, she shall be stoned to death; but if she is of priestly descent, she shall be burned alive.
If a man has two wives, and one is held in great honor and affection—whether for love, or beauty, or some other reason—while the other is held in less regard, and the son born of the beloved wife, though younger than the son born of the other, claims the rights of the firstborn because of his father's affection for his mother, so as to receive a double portion of the paternal estate—for this is what I have ordained in the laws—this shall not be allowed; for it is unjust that the one who is older by birth should be deprived of what is owed him because his mother is less favored in his father's regard than the other.
Whoever seduces a girl betrothed to another—if he persuaded her and gained her consent to the seduction—shall die together with her; for both are equally wicked, the one for persuading her to submit willingly to the most shameful act and to prefer it to free and lawful marriage, the other for letting herself be persuaded, out of pleasure or gain, into disgrace. But if he happens upon her alone and forces her, with no one present to help her, he alone shall die. He who seduces a virgin not yet betrothed shall marry her himself; but if the girl's father does not wish to give her to him in marriage, he shall pay fifty shekels as the price of the outrage.
If a man wishes to divorce the wife who lives with him, for whatever reason—and there could be many such reasons among men—he must certify in writing that he will never again live with her; only in this way will she gain the right to live with another man, for before this it is not permitted. But if she is mistreated by that second husband as well, and after his death the first husband wishes to marry her again, she may not return to him. If a man dies leaving his wife childless, his brother shall marry her, and shall name the child born of this union after the dead man, to raise him as heir to the estate; this will also benefit the public good, since households will not die out and property will remain with kinsmen, and it will bring relief to the women in their misfortune, as they will remain joined to the nearest of their former husbands' kin. But if the brother does not wish to marry her, the woman shall go before the council of elders and declare that although she wished to remain in the household and bear children by him, he refuses to accept her, thereby dishonoring the memory of his dead brother.
When the council of elders asks him for what reason he is unwilling to marry her, whether he gives a slight reason or a weighty one, let him state it; then the woman shall untie her brother-in-law's sandals and spit in his face, saying that he deserves this treatment from her for having dishonored the memory of the departed. He shall leave the council bearing this reproach for the rest of his life, and she may marry whomever of her suitors she wishes. If a man takes captive a virgin or a married woman, and wishes to live with her, he may not first touch her bed and have intercourse with her until she has shaved her head, put on mourning dress, and lamented her relatives and friends who fell in the battle, so that having satisfied her grief for them she may then turn to feasting and marriage; for it is right and just, in taking her to bear children, to have regard for her wishes, rather than to pursue one's own pleasure alone and neglect what is owed to her feelings.
When thirty days of mourning have passed—for wise women find these sufficient for tears over their dearest ones—then he may proceed to the marriage. But if, once his desire is satisfied, he comes to disdain having her as a wife, he shall no longer have the power to enslave her, but she shall go wherever she wishes, free to do so. As for young men who despise their parents and do not give them due honor, whether out of shame or out of arrogant self-assurance, treating them with contempt—first let the fathers admonish them with words, for fathers are competent judges over their sons, saying that they did not come together for pleasure's sake, nor to increase their wealth by pooling what each possessed, but in order to have children who would care for them in old age and from whom they would receive what they need; that when the son was born, they raised him with joy and the deepest gratitude to God, sparing nothing that seemed useful for his welfare and education in the best things.
"But now, since forgiveness must be granted for the offenses of the young, let it be enough that you have already shown so little regard for the honor due us, and turn now to more prudent conduct, reflecting also that God is harsh toward those who dare such things against their parents, since he himself is father of the whole human race and feels himself dishonored along with those who bear the same title, when they do not receive from their children what is owed them; and the law becomes an implacable punisher of such offenses—may you never have to experience it." If by these means the young man's stubbornness is cured, let him be released from the reproach of his past faults; for in this way the lawgiver will have done well, and the fathers will count themselves fortunate in never seeing a son or daughter punished.
But if their words and the instruction they give prove to have taught the son nothing about self-control, and he makes the laws his implacable enemies by persisting again and again in outrages against his parents, then, led out of the city by these same parents with the crowd following, he shall be stoned, and having lain all day exposed to the sight of all, shall be buried at night. In the same way shall be dealt with all others condemned to death under the laws by whatever means. Enemies too are to be buried, and not even one corpse should lie deprived of burial beyond what justice requires in exacting punishment.
No Hebrew shall be permitted to lend to another Hebrew at interest, neither in food nor in drink; for it is not just to make profit from the misfortunes of one's own countryman, but rather, in helping him in his need, to consider as one's gain his gratitude and the reward that will come from God for such kindness. Those who have received either money or any produce, wet or dry, when their affairs prosper by God's favor, should repay their creditors gladly, bringing it back as though depositing what was their own, to be had again should they themselves ever be in need. But if the borrowers show no shame about repayment, the creditor should not go to the debtor's house to seize a pledge before a judgment has been rendered in the matter, but should ask for the pledge from outside, and the debtor should bring it out himself, raising no objection to the one who comes to him supported by the law.
If the man from whom the pledge is taken is well off, the lender may keep it until repayment; but if he is poor, the lender must return it before sunset, especially if the pledge is a cloak, so that he may have it to sleep in, since by nature God shows mercy to the poor. A millstone and the tools that go with it may not be taken as a pledge, so that people are not deprived of the very instruments for preparing their food, nor suffer some worse misfortune through want.
For kidnapping a man the penalty shall be death; whoever steals gold or silver shall repay double. A man who kills someone caught stealing from his house shall go unpunished, even if the thief was caught breaking through a wall. Whoever steals livestock shall pay fourfold the value as penalty, except for an ox, for which he shall pay fivefold. He who cannot afford to pay the fine imposed shall become a slave to those against whom the judgment was given. A man sold to a fellow countryman shall serve six years, and in the seventh shall be released free; but if, having had children by a slave woman in his master's household, he wishes because of his affection and attachment to his own to remain a slave, then, when the year of jubilee arrives—the fiftieth year—he shall be freed, taking with him his children and his wife as free persons as well.
If a man finds gold or silver on the road, he should seek out the one who lost it and, having announced the place where he found it, return it, not supposing that profit gained from another's loss is a good thing. The same applies to livestock a man comes upon wandering in the wilderness; if the owner is not found at once, he should keep it with him, calling God to witness that he does not intend to keep what belongs to another. One must not pass by animals in distress, fallen in the mud in bad weather, but should help save them, treating the effort as one's own concern. One should also show the way to those who do not know it, and not, seeking a laugh for oneself, hinder another's need by misdirection. Likewise, no one should curse a deaf man or one who is absent.
If someone strikes another in a fight, without using iron, and the man dies at once, let the killer be punished with the same fate he inflicted. But if the injured man is carried home and, after being ill for several days, then dies, the one who struck him is innocent; but if he recovers and has spent a great deal on his medical care, the striker must repay everything the sick man spent during his confinement and whatever he gave the physicians. If a man kicks a pregnant woman and she miscarries, he is to be fined by the judges, on the ground that he has diminished the population by destroying what was in her womb, and money is also to be given to the woman's husband by him. But if she dies from the blow, he too must die, the law demanding that he pay a life for a life.
No Israelite may possess a drug that causes death or any other harm; if a man is found in possession of one, he is to be put to death, suffering the very thing he had prepared to inflict on those against whom the drug was made. Whoever maims another is to suffer the same, being deprived of the very member he deprived another of — unless the injured man is willing to accept money instead, the law making the sufferer himself the arbiter of a value for what has happened to him, and permitting this if he does not wish to be too harsh.
An ox that gores with its horns is to be slaughtered by its owner; but if it kills someone on the threshing floor, it is to be stoned to death and judged unfit even for food. And if the owner is shown to have known its temper beforehand and failed to guard against it, he too must die, as responsible for the death of the man killed by the ox. If the ox kills a male or female slave, it is to be stoned, and the owner of the ox must pay thirty shekels to the master of the slave killed. But if an ox is struck in this way and dies, both the dead ox and the one that struck it are to be sold, and their owners are to divide the price between them.
Those who dig a well or a cistern must take care to keep it covered with boards, not in order to keep anyone from drawing water, but so that no one is in danger of falling in. Whoever's animal falls into such a pit, left uncovered, and is killed, must pay its value to the owner. Roofs, too, must have a parapet around them, which, serving in place of a wall, will keep people from rolling off and being killed.
Whoever receives a deposit must guard it as something sacred and holy, and no man or woman should be so bold as to defraud the one who trusted him, even if he stood to gain an untold amount of gold, thinking there is no one to expose him. For, in general, every man ought to act rightly out of regard for his own conscience, and, content with himself as witness, do everything that will win him praise from others — but above all he should regard God, from whom no wrongdoer is hidden. If, without any scheming, the one entrusted with the deposit should lose it, let him come before the seven judges and swear by God that nothing was lost through his own will or wrongdoing, nor through his making use of any part of it, and so let him depart without blame. But if he made use of even the smallest part of what was entrusted to him and happened to lose the rest, let him be condemned to repay everything he received. The same rule applies to wages: whoever withholds the pay of those who work with their own bodies is to be hated for it. A poor man's wages must never be withheld by those who know that God has given him this in place of land and other property; nor should payment be delayed, but it must be paid out on the very same day, since God does not wish the laborer to go without the benefit of what he has toiled for.
Children are not to be punished for the wrongs of their fathers; rather, because of their own virtue, they deserve pity all the more for having had wicked fathers, rather than hatred for having sprung from base ones. Nor, indeed, should fathers be held to account for the sins of their sons, since the young, in their arrogance about being taught, disregard much of our instruction.
Avoid the Galli and shun association with them, since they have deprived themselves of their manhood and of the fruit of childbearing which God gave to men for the increase of the race; drive them away as men who, on the occasion of the slaughter of their children, have in addition destroyed the very cause of it. For it is clear that, their souls having become effeminate, they have transformed their bodies to match — and so too with anything regarded as monstrous by those who see it. It is not permitted to make eunuchs, whether of men or of any other living creatures.
Let this, then, be for you a peaceable ordering of the laws for your commonwealth; and may God graciously grant that its order remain free of faction, and may there never be a time that alters any of these things or turns them to their opposite. But since it is inevitable that human affairs fall into troubles and dangers, whether unwilled or chosen, come, let us add a few further regulations concerning these as well, so that, knowing beforehand what must be done, you may be well provided for when safety is needed, and not, seeking at the moment what must be done, fall unprepared into the crisis.
"May God grant that you possess, unmolested by war, the land he has given you, since you scorn hardship and have trained your souls to virtue, and may he grant this to you as its possessors, with neither foreigners campaigning against it to your harm, nor civil strife taking hold of you — strife under which, acting contrary to your fathers, you would destroy what they held dear — and may you continue to use the laws which God, having judged them good, has handed down to you. Whatever act of war you undertake, now among yourselves or later among your children, let it be carried out beyond your own borders. When about to make war, send an embassy and heralds to those who are deliberately your enemies; for before resorting to arms it is good to use words with them, showing that, though you have a large army and horses and weapons, and before all these a God who is gracious and your ally, you nevertheless ask not to be forced to make war on them, nor, by taking what is theirs, to acquire gain you do not wish for. And if they are persuaded, it is right for you to keep the peace; but if, trusting in their own strength, they choose to do wrong, lead an army against them, using God as your supreme commander, and electing as his lieutenant one man who excels in valor; for a multitude of commanders is bound to be an obstacle to swift action and naturally harms those who resort to it. Lead an army purged of all whose bodies lack strength and whose souls lack courage, having weeded out the cowardly, so that they do not, by turning to flight in the midst of the action, help the enemy. Let those who have recently built houses, who have not yet had a year's enjoyment of them, and those who have planted but not yet tasted the fruit, remain at home, as well as those newly betrothed or newly married, lest, longing for these things and clinging to life in order to enjoy them, they turn cowardly toward the women. Once you have made camp, take care that you do nothing improper."
"When besieging a city and lacking timber for building siege engines, do not strip the land by cutting down its cultivated trees, but spare them, considering that they exist for the benefit of mankind, and that a tree, if it could find a voice, might justly plead with you that, having done nothing to cause the war, it should not suffer unjustly, since, had it the power, it would have moved elsewhere. Once you have prevailed in battle, kill those who resisted you in arms, but spare the rest to pay you tribute, except for the nation of the Canaanites; these must be utterly wiped out, household and all. Above all, guard in your battles against a woman wearing a man's equipment or a man wearing a woman's dress."
Such, then, was the constitution Moses left behind; and he handed down the laws, already written forty years before, about which we shall speak in another work. On the following days — for he kept the assembly in continuous session — he pronounced blessings on them, and curses on those who would not live according to the laws but would transgress what was laid down in them. Then he read to them a poem in hexameter verse, which he also left behind in a book kept in the temple, containing a prediction of things to come, according to which everything has happened and continues to happen, he having erred from the truth in nothing. These books, then, he handed down to the priests, along with the ark, in which he had placed the Ten Words written on two tablets, and the tabernacle. He charged the people, once they had conquered the land and settled in it, not to forget the outrage of the Amalekites, but to march against them and exact vengeance for the wrongs they had done them while they were still in the wilderness; and, once they had taken the land of the Canaanites and destroyed all its population as was fitting, to set up an altar facing the rising sun, not far from the city of Shechem, between two mountains, Gerizim on the right and the one called Ebal on the left, and to divide the army by six tribes to stand on each of the two mountains, with the Levites and priests along with them.
Those stationed on Gerizim were first to pray for the best blessings on those who were zealous in the worship of God and the keeping of the laws and who did not disobey what Moses had said, while the others were to say "Amen"; and then, when these in turn offered their prayers, the first group was to say "Amen" to them. Next, in the same way, curses were to be pronounced on those who would transgress, each side echoing the other's words to confirm what was said. Moses himself wrote down the blessings and the curses, so that their memory should never be lost through time, and at his death he had them inscribed on the altar, on either side, where, he says, the people stood and offered sacrifice and burnt offerings, and after that day brought no other offering there, since it was not lawful. This, then, is what Moses ordained, and the Hebrew nation continues to this day to act in accordance with it.
On the next day he gathered the people, together with their wives and children, into an assembly, so that even the slaves were present, and made them swear an oath to keep the laws and to become exact reckoners of God's purpose, allowing nothing — neither favoring kinship, nor yielding to fear, nor supposing any other cause whatsoever to be more powerful than the keeping of the laws — to lead them to transgress them; but if any of their own blood should attempt to confound and overthrow their constitution, or any city should do so, to defend the laws, both together and individually, and, once they had prevailed over such people, to tear them up from their foundations, and, if possible, leave not even the ground of the reckless offenders; but if they were too weak to exact the penalty, to make it clear that this at least was not happening by their own choice. And the people took the oath.
He also taught them how their sacrifices might be more pleasing to God, and how, when they went out to war, they should use the stones as a sign, as I have already explained. And Joshua also prophesied, in Moses's presence.
Then, reviewing everything he had done for the people's safety, in war and in peace alike, in framing the laws and in furnishing the good order of their commonwealth, he foretold, since the divine had revealed it to him, that if they transgressed in their worship of him, they would experience misfortunes: their land would be filled with the weapons of enemies, their cities razed, the temple burned down, and, sold into slavery, they would serve men who would show no pity for their misfortunes, and they would repent of this to no useful purpose. "Yet God, who created you, will restore the cities to your citizens, and the temple as well; and this loss of them will happen not once, but many times."
Having urged Joshua to lead the army out against the Canaanites, since God would cooperate in whatever he undertook, and having acclaimed the whole multitude, he said: "Since I am going to our forefathers, and God has appointed this day for my departure to them, I acknowledge, while I am still alive and present with you, my gratitude to him for the providence he has shown you — not only in delivering you from your troubles, but also in the gift of better things — and because, in all my labor and in all the thought I gave, with all my mind, to your improvement, he struggled alongside me and showed himself gracious to you in everything. Indeed it was he, rather than I, who gave the direction of your affairs and granted their successful outcomes, using me as his lieutenant and servant in the things by which he wished to benefit our people. In return for this, I thought it right, as I depart, to bless in advance the power of God, who will care for your future as well, myself rendering this debt owed to him, and leaving it in your memory that it is fitting for you to revere and honor him and the laws, in return for all he has given and, remaining gracious, will continue to give — the finest gift you can guard. As for a lawgiver made human, he is a formidable enemy to those who insult his laws and treat them as vain; may you never experience the anger of God on account of laws neglected, laws which he himself begot and gave to you."
When Moses had said this, near the end of his life, and had prophesied to each of the tribes, together with blessings, the things that in fact came to pass, the people broke into tears, so that even the women, beating their breasts, showed the grief they felt for him at his coming death. The children, too, wept still more, as being too weak to master their sorrow, since even at their age they understood his virtue and his great deeds. There was, as it were, a contest of grief between the young and the old: the older, knowing what kind of guardian they were being deprived of for the future, mourned on that account, while the younger grieved both for this reason and because it fell to them to be parted from him before they had properly tasted his virtue. One could gauge the extremity of the multitude's wailing and lamentation from what happened to the lawgiver himself: for though he had been persuaded, throughout his whole life, that one should not be downcast in the face of approaching death, since this happens by the will of God and the law of nature, he was overcome, by what the people were doing, into weeping himself.
As he made his way from there, to the place where he was to vanish from sight, all followed him in tears, and Moses, waving his hand to those farther off, bade them remain quietly where they were, while to those nearer he appealed in words not to make his departure one of tears by following him. They, judging that they should grant him this too — to go off as he wished — restrained themselves, weeping among one another. Only
The council escorted him on his way, along with the high priest Eleazar and the general Joshua. When he reached the mountain called Abarim — a height lying opposite Jericho, from which one can look out over a very great expanse of the finest land of the Canaanites — he sent the council back. While he was still embracing Eleazar and Joshua and speaking with them, a cloud suddenly stood over him, and he vanished into a ravine.
He wrote of himself in the sacred books that he had died, for fear that, because of the surpassing excellence of his character, people might dare to say that he had withdrawn to the divine. He lived in all a hundred and twenty years, a third of which, less one month, he spent as leader. He died in the last month of the year, on the new moon of the month the Macedonians call Dystrus and we call Adar.
He surpassed in understanding all men who have ever lived, and made the best use of whatever he conceived. He was gifted in speech and in addressing crowds, and, above all else, master of his passions, so much so that his soul seemed to hold none of them at all, and he seemed to know their very names only from observing them in others rather than experiencing them himself. As a general he ranked among the few, and as a prophet he had no equal, so that whatever he uttered seemed to be the very voice of God speaking through him.
The people mourned him for thirty days, and no grief of such magnitude ever gripped the Hebrews as when Moses died. Nor was he missed only by those who had known him personally; even those who simply read his laws felt his loss keenly, reckoning from them the surpassing measure of his virtue. Let this account of the end of Moses suffice for us.

======== Antiquities — Book 5 ========

1. How Joshua, the general of the Hebrews, made war on the Canaanites, defeated them, destroyed some of them, and divided the land by lot among the tribes. 2. How, after the general's death, the Israelites transgressed their ancestral laws and suffered great disasters, and how, in the civil strife that followed, the tribe of Benjamin was destroyed except for six hundred men. 3. How, after this calamity, God enslaved them to the Assyrians for their impiety. 4. The liberation brought to them through Cenaz, son of Athniel, who ruled for forty years and is called by both Greeks and Phoenicians a "judge." 5. How our people again served the Moabites for eighteen years and were freed from servitude by a certain Judes, who then held power for eighty years. 6. How, having been enslaved by the Canaanites for twenty years, they were freed by Barak and Deborah, who ruled them for forty years. 7. How the Amalekites made war on the Israelites, defeated them, and ravaged the land for seven years. 8. How Gideon freed them from the Amalekites and ruled the people for forty years. 9. How, after him, many successors made war for a long time on the surrounding nations. 10. Concerning the courage of Samson, and how much harm he caused the Philistines. 11. How the sons of Eli the priest were slain in battle against the Philistines. 12. How their father, hearing of the disaster, fell from his throne and died. 13. How the Philistines, victorious in that war, captured the Hebrews' ark. 14. How all who ruled from Cenaz onward were called judges. This book covers a period of four hundred and seventy years.
Moses had passed from among men in the manner already described, and Joshua, once all the customary rites for him had been completed and the mourning had subsided, ordered the people to make ready for a campaign. He sent spies to Jericho to learn the strength of its inhabitants and their intentions, while he himself reviewed the army in preparation for crossing the Jordan when the moment came. He summoned the leaders of the tribe of Reuben and the chief men of Gad and of Manasseh — for half of this last tribe too had been permitted to settle in the land of the Amorites, a seventh part of Canaan — and reminded them of what they had promised Moses, urging them, out of regard for his care of them even as he lay dying and for the common good, to show themselves eager to carry out what was commanded. Following them with fifty thousand men-at-arms, Joshua marched from Abel to the Jordan, a distance of sixty stadia.
As soon as the camp was pitched, the spies arrived, having missed nothing of what concerned the Canaanites. On first entering the city they had freely observed the whole of it, noting which sections of the wall were strong and which were not so well secured, and which of the small gates, being weak, offered a way in for the army. The inhabitants they met paid them no heed, supposing that they were examining everything closely out of a foreigner's curiosity about the city's history, not with hostile intent. But when evening came, the spies withdrew to a lodging near the wall, and there, having eaten, they were beginning to think only of how to get away, when word reached the king, who was at dinner, that certain men had come from the camp of the Hebrews to spy out the city and were lodging, with great care to remain unnoticed, at the house of Rahab. He at once sent men with orders to seize and bring them, so that he might question them under torture and learn what they wanted, coming as they had.
When Rahab learned of their approach — she happened to be drying bundles of flax on the roof — she hid the spies among these, and told the men sent by the king that some strangers, unknown to her, had indeed dined at her house shortly before sunset and had since left; if the city found them alarming, or if they had come posing any danger to the king, it would be easy to overtake and seize them as they fled. The men, thus deceived by the woman, suspected no trick and left without searching the lodging. When those who had set out after the spies, along the roads by which they supposed them most likely to be making their escape, and especially those leading down to the river, found no trace of them anywhere, they gave up the pursuit.
Once the commotion had died down, Rahab brought the men down and told them of the danger she had taken on herself for their safety — for if she were caught hiding them she would not escape the king's punishment, but would perish miserably along with her whole household. She begged them to remember, once they had gained control of the land of Canaan, to repay her for the deliverance she had now provided, and told them to go home, but first to swear that they would indeed save her and all that belonged to her when they took the city and destroyed everyone in it according to the decree they had made — for she knew, she said, by signs taught her by God, that this would happen. The men acknowledged their gratitude for what she had done for them, and swore that they would repay her in deed for it. They advised her that when she perceived the city was about to be taken, she should gather her possessions and all her household into the lodging and shut them in, hanging a scarlet cloth before the doors, so that the general, recognizing the house, would take care not to harm it. "For we will make this known to him," they said, "being eager that what is yours be spared. But if any of your people should fall in the fighting, you must not hold it against us, and we ask God, whom we have sworn by, not to be angry with us as men who have broken their oath."
Having agreed to these terms, they made their way out by letting themselves down through the wall, and, reaching their own people safely, reported all they had done and seen in the city. Joshua then told the high priest Eleazar and the council of elders what the spies had agreed with Rahab, and they ratified the oath.
The army was afraid to cross the river, for the Jordan was running high and could not be crossed by bridges, none having ever been built over it before; nor did they think they would have leisure, with the enemy at hand, to build one now, and no boats were to be had. But God promised to make the river passable for them by reducing its volume. Waiting two days, Joshua then led the army and the whole multitude across in the following manner: the priests went first, carrying the ark; after them came the Levites, bearing the tabernacle and the vessels used in the sacrifices; behind the Levites followed the whole company arranged by tribes, with the children and women in the middle, out of fear that they might be swept away by the current. When the priests, the first to step in, found the river passable — its depth having been checked, and its gravel bed, since the current was neither deep nor swift, lying firm enough to bear their weight in place of solid ground — everyone crossed the river confidently, seeing it become exactly what God had foretold it would be. The priests stood in the middle of the riverbed until the whole multitude had crossed and reached safety. Once all had crossed, the priests came out as well, and the current, now released, resumed its natural course. No sooner had the Hebrews stepped out of it than the river swelled again and regained its normal size.
Advancing fifty stadia, they pitched camp ten stadia from Jericho. There Joshua set up an altar of stones, each carried up from the riverbed by one of the tribal leaders at the prophet's command, as a memorial of the stopping of the current, and offered sacrifice on it to God. They kept the Passover in that place, now enjoying in abundance everything of which they had previously been short, for they harvested the Canaanites' grain, already ripe, and drove off the rest of the plunder as well; and it was then, too, that the manna, on which they had lived for forty years, failed them.
When the Israelites did all this and the Canaanites did not come out to meet them but stayed shut up behind their walls, Joshua resolved to besiege them. On the first day of the festival the priests carried the ark around the city, with a body of armed men guarding it in a circle, marching ahead and sounding seven horns to rouse the army's courage; they went around the wall with the elders following, and once the priests alone had sounded their horns — for they did nothing more than this — they returned to camp. They did the same for six days, and on the seventh Joshua assembled the armed men and the whole people and announced to them the good news that the city would fall that day, for God would bring down its walls on their behalf, without any effort of their own. He instructed them nonetheless to kill anyone they found, without growing weary of the slaughter of the enemy, without yielding to pity, and without letting greed for plunder allow any of the enemy to escape; they were to destroy every living creature, taking nothing for their own use, but whatever silver and gold there was they were to gather and set aside as a special first portion for God from the first city taken, since it belonged to him by right of conquest. Rahab alone, with her family, was to be spared, because of the oaths the spies had sworn to her.
Having said this and drawn up the army, he led it against the city. Once again they went around it, the ark leading and the priests rousing the army to the task with their horns. When they had gone around seven times and paused for a little, the wall collapsed, with no engine or other force brought against it by the Hebrews. Entering Jericho, they killed everyone, the inhabitants being too stunned by the extraordinary collapse of the wall, and too broken in spirit, to defend themselves; they were cut down in the streets and overtaken in their houses. Nothing spared them — all perished, down to the women and children, and the city was filled with corpses, with no one escaping. They burned the whole city and the surrounding country. Rahab, who had fled with her household to the lodging, was saved by the spies, and Joshua, when she was brought before him, acknowledged his gratitude for having saved the spies' lives and told her that his repayment for this kindness would prove no less generous; he at once granted her fields and held her in the highest honor. Whatever the fire had spared of the city he razed to the ground, and he pronounced curses on anyone who should undertake to rebuild it, so that whoever laid the foundations of its walls should lose his firstborn son, and whoever completed them should lose his youngest. The divine power did not neglect this curse, as we shall relate later when we come to what happened concerning it.
An immense quantity of silver, gold, and bronze was gathered from the captured city, no one having transgressed the decree or plundered any of it for private gain, but all having abstained from it as already consecrated to God. This Joshua handed over to the priests to store in the treasuries. Such was the fate of Jericho.
Now a certain Achar, son of Zebedaeus, of the tribe of Judah, having found a royal robe woven entirely of gold and a mass of gold weighing two hundred shekels, and thinking it a hard thing to give up for the use of God, who had no need of it, a gain he had risked his life to win, dug a deep pit in his own tent and buried it there, supposing he could hide it from God as easily as from his fellow soldiers.
The place where Joshua had pitched camp was called Gilgal, a name meaning "freedom": for once they had crossed the river, they knew themselves free at last both from the Egyptians and from the hardship of the wilderness.
A few days after the disaster of Jericho, Joshua sent three thousand armed men against Naia, a city lying beyond Jericho, to take it; but when the men of Naia engaged them, the Hebrews were routed and lost thirty-six men. When this was reported to the Israelites it caused great grief and terrible despondency, not so much on account of the men lost — though all of them had been good men and worthy of honor — as out of sheer despair. For having believed themselves already masters of the land and assured, by God's own promise, that their army would come through its battles unharmed, they now saw the enemy unexpectedly emboldened; they put on sackcloth over their clothes and spent the whole day in tears and mourning, seeking no food, and felt the blow all the more heavily for that reason.
Seeing the army thus terrified and already forming grim expectations for the whole enterprise, Joshua spoke boldly to God: "We were not led on by any presumption of our own," he said, "to bring this land under arms, but by Moses your servant, who roused us to this task, to whom you promised, by many proofs, that you would give us this land and would always make our army stronger in arms than the enemy. Some things have indeed turned out for us according to your promises; but now, having stumbled contrary to our expectation and lost some of our force, we are troubled at the thought that your word and what Moses foretold might not be secure, and the fear of what is to come distresses us all the more for having met with such a first trial. But you, Master — for it lies in your power to find a cure for these ills — grant us victory now to relieve our present distress, and remove from our minds this despair concerning what is to come."
Saying this, Joshua fell on his face and entreated God. God answered that he should rise and purify the army, for a pollution had come upon it, a theft having been committed of property consecrated to him, and that this was the cause of their present defeat; but that once the man who had done it was found out and punished, victory over their enemies would always be theirs. Joshua reported this to the people, and, summoning Eleazar the high priest and the leading men, cast lots by tribe. When the guilty tribe was thereby
The tribe of Judah pointed to itself, and the lot was cast again by clans within it; and the truth of the wrongdoing was found to lie with the kin of Achar. When the search proceeded man by man, they seized Achar, who, unable to deny it once God had closed every way of escape around him, confessed the theft and produced the stolen goods in full view. He was put to death at once and, that same night, received the dishonorable burial fitting a condemned man.
Joshua purified the army and led it out against Naia. By night he set ambushes around the city himself, and at dawn he engaged the enemy. When they came on boldly, emboldened by their earlier victory, he feigned retreat, and by this device drew them far from the city, since they supposed they were pursuing him and, flushed with the prospect of victory, grew careless. Then he wheeled his force about and faced them, and by signals prearranged with the men in ambush, roused them too into the battle. They rushed into the city while its defenders were occupied at the walls, some of them even distracted by watching the fighting outside. So one group took the city and killed everyone they met, while Joshua forced back those who had come to close quarters with him and put them to flight. Driven together as though toward an untouched city, but seeing it already taken and burning, women and children within it too, they scattered through the fields, unable to help one another for being isolated. Such was the disaster that overtook the people of Naia: a multitude of children was taken captive, along with women, servants, and other possessions beyond counting, and the Hebrews seized herds of livestock and great sums of money, for the place was wealthy. All of this Joshua distributed among the soldiers once he reached Gilgal.
The people of Gibeon, who lived nearest to Jerusalem, saw what had befallen Jericho and Naia and suspected that the same disaster would soon reach them. They decided not to appeal to Joshua, since they did not expect to obtain any fair terms from a man waging a war of extermination against the whole Canaanite nation. Instead they called on their neighbors, the men of Chephirah and Kiriath-jearim, to join them in an alliance, telling them that they too would not escape the danger if the Israelites captured Gibeon first; and together the allies resolved to slip away from the main body of the Israelite force.
When the Chephirites and Kiriath-jearimites accepted this proposal, the Gibeonites sent envoys to Joshua to negotiate a treaty of friendship, choosing for the task those citizens they judged best able to secure what was advantageous for their people. Since they thought it dangerous to admit they were Canaanites — believing that they could escape the danger only by claiming no kinship whatsoever with the Canaanites but rather that they lived very far from them — they said they had come because of a report of Joshua's valor that had reached them after a long journey, and they pointed to their own appearance as proof of the claim: their clothes, they said, had been new when they set out but were now worn through by the length of the road. In fact they had deliberately put on ragged garments to lend credibility to their story.
Standing before the assembly they declared that they had been sent by the Gibeonites and by the towns around them, all lying at a great distance from this land, in order to make friendship with the Israelites on the terms traditional among their people; for they had learned that by God's favor and gift the Israelites had been granted possession of the land of the Canaanites, and they said they were glad of this and asked to be admitted as fellow citizens. As they spoke, displaying the proofs of their journey, they urged the Hebrews to make a treaty and friendship with them. Joshua, believing what they said — that they did not belong to the Canaanite nation — made peace with them, and Eleazar the high priest, together with the council of elders, swore that the Israelites would treat them as friends and allies and would do them no wrong, the people confirming the oath by their assent. So the envoys, having gained what they wanted by deceit, went back to their own people.
Joshua then marched against the Canaanites of the hill country, and there learned that the Gibeonites, who lived not far from Jerusalem, in fact belonged to the Canaanite race. He summoned their leaders and charged them with the deception. Since they had no other plea for their safety than this very deceit, and had been driven to it out of necessity, he called together the high priest Eleazar and the council of elders; and when these judged that the Gibeonites should be made servants of the state, on condition that the oath not be broken, Joshua confirmed them as such. This was the safeguard and security the Gibeonites secured for themselves in the disaster that had overtaken them.
The king of Jerusalem was furious that the Gibeonites had gone over to Joshua, and he called on the kings of the neighboring nations to join him in a war against them. When the Gibeonites saw these four kings encamped with their forces beside a spring near their city, preparing for a siege, they called on Joshua, their ally, for help; for their situation was such that they expected to perish at the hands of these kings, yet hoped to be saved by those who had set out to destroy the whole Canaanite race, on the strength of the friendship now sworn between them. Joshua hurried to their aid with his whole army, marching day and night, and at dawn engaged the enemy. When they broke and fled, he pursued them down the sloping ground toward the place called Beth-horon.
There he learned of God's cooperation, made evident through peals of thunder, bolts of lightning, and a downpour of hail heavier than usual; and further, the day itself was lengthened beyond its natural span, so that night would not fall and check the eagerness of the Hebrews. It happened in this way that Joshua caught the kings hiding in a cave near Makkedah, and put them all to death. That the length of the day was then increased and extended beyond its accustomed measure is recorded in the writings preserved in the Temple.
With the forces of the kings who had marched against the Gibeonites thus crushed, Joshua returned again to the hill country of Canaan and, after a great slaughter of its inhabitants and the seizure of much plunder, came back to the camp at Gilgal. As the report of Hebrew valor spread widely among the surrounding peoples, and the number of the dead struck terror into all who heard of it, the kings of the Canaanites who dwelt around Mount Lebanon, together with the Canaanites of the plains, joined with the Philistines and encamped near the city of Beroth, not far from Kedesh in Upper Galilee — this territory too belongs to Galilee. The whole army numbered three hundred thousand infantry, ten thousand horsemen, and twenty thousand chariots. The sheer size of this enemy force struck fear into Joshua and the Israelites, and their confidence in a favorable outcome wavered, so overwhelming was their dread.
But God rebuked them for their fear and asked what more they could want beyond the help he had already given them; and he promised that he would defeat their enemies, commanding them to disable the horses and burn the chariots. Emboldened by God's promises, Joshua set out against the enemy, and on the fifth day he came upon them and joined battle. A fierce fight followed, with a slaughter greater than words can convey to those who hear of it. Joshua pressed the pursuit a very long way and destroyed the entire enemy army but for a few survivors, and all the kings fell; so that once there were no more men left to kill, Joshua had the horses slaughtered and the chariots burned. He then marched through the country unopposed, no one daring to come out and fight, but took the cities by siege instead, killing everyone he captured.
Five years had now passed, and not a single Canaanite remained except for those who had escaped behind the strength of fortified walls. Joshua broke camp from Gilgal, moved into the hill country, and set up the sacred tabernacle at the city of Shiloh, judging the place suitable for its beauty, until such time as circumstances would allow them to build a temple there.
From there he went on to Shechem with the whole people and set up an altar at the place Moses had foretold, dividing the army so that half stood on Mount Gerizim and half on Mount Ebal, where the altar itself and the Levites and priests were stationed. After offering sacrifices and pronouncing the curses, they left these inscribed on the altar and returned to Shiloh.
By now Joshua was an old man. Seeing that the Canaanite cities were hard to capture, both because of the natural strength of their sites and the might of their walls — defenses the Canaanites had thrown up in expectation that the enemy, learning of the Israelites' departure from Egypt, would give up any hope of taking the cities by siege, and so had spent all that time fortifying them — he gathered the people in assembly at Shiloh and summoned them. When they had eagerly come together, he reminded them of all that had already been achieved and of the deeds accomplished, declaring these the finest of deeds, worthy both of the divine power that had granted them and of the excellence of the laws they followed. He pointed out that thirty-one kings who had dared to meet them in battle had been overcome, and that every army that had ever put its confidence in its own strength and joined battle with them had been destroyed, so completely that not even a remnant of their descendants survived.
As for the remaining cities, since some had already been captured, but others required time and a great siege because of the strength of their walls and the confidence their inhabitants placed in them, he asked that those who had come across from the far side of the Jordan to join in the campaign and share its dangers, being kinsmen, now be released to go home, in recognition of what they had endured together; and that one man from each tribe, distinguished for merit, be sent to measure the land faithfully and honestly, doing no wrong, so as to report to the rest its extent without deceit.
Having made this proposal, Joshua found the people in agreement, and he sent out men to measure their territory, giving them assistants skilled in geometry, whose training would make it impossible for them to falsify the truth. He instructed them to assess separately the measure of the fertile land and of the less productive. For the nature of the land of Canaan is such that one would see great plains capable of bearing abundant crops — land that, compared with other country, would be reckoned altogether blessed, yet when set beside the territory of Jericho or of Jerusalem would appear as nothing. And yet the whole extent of their land is quite small, and much of it hill country; still, for the raising and quality of its crops it yields to none other.
For this reason he judged that the allotments ought to be reckoned by value rather than by simple measure, since a single plethron of land might sometimes be worth as much as a thousand elsewhere. The men who had been sent out — ten in number — traveled the land, assessed its value, and in the seventh month returned to him at the city of Shiloh, where the tabernacle had been set up. Joshua then took Eleazar, the council of elders, and the heads of the tribes, and distributed the land among the nine tribes and the half-tribe of Manasseh, measuring the allotment for each tribe according to its size.
When the lots were cast, the tribe of Judah, drawing the first lot, took the whole of upper Idumea, stretching as far as Jerusalem and reaching in width to the Dead Sea; within this allotment lay the cities of Ashkelon and Gaza. Simeon, which drew the second lot, received the part of Idumea bordering on Egypt and Arabia.
The Benjaminites received the land stretching from the Jordan river to the sea in length, and in width bounded by Jerusalem and Bethel; this was the narrowest of the allotments because of the richness of its soil, for they received both Jericho and the city of Jerusalem. The tribe of Ephraim received the land extending to Gezer from the Jordan river, and as wide, from Bethel, as reaches to the great plain; while the half-tribe of Manasseh received the land from the Jordan to the city of Dor, and in width as far as Beth-shean, now called Scythopolis. After these, Issachar received Mount Carmel and the river as the boundary of its length, and Mount Tabor as the boundary of its width.
The Zebulunites received the territory extending to Genesareth and reaching to Carmel and the sea. The Asherites received the whole valley called by that same name from the Carmel range, extending toward Sidon; their territory included the city of Arke, also called Ecdippa. The regions facing east as far as the city of Damascus and the upper parts of Galilee were taken by the Naphtalites, as far as Mount Lebanon and the springs of the Jordan, which rise from the mountain at the point where the boundary runs along the northern side of the city of Arke.
The Danites received the portion of the lowland facing west, bounded by Ashdod and Dor, taking in all of Jamnia and Gath, from Ekron to the mountain range where the territory of Judah began.
So Joshua divided the land in this way among six nations descended from the sons of Canaan, and gave it to the nine and a half tribes to possess; for the land of the Amorites — likewise named after one of the sons of Canaan — Moses had already allotted earlier to the two and a half tribes, as we have related before. The regions around Sidon, and the Arkites, Amathites, and Aradians, remained unorganized.
Since old age now prevented Joshua from carrying out all that he might otherwise have conceived, and since those who would succeed him in leadership were careless of the common good, he charged each tribe to leave nothing remaining of the Canaanite race within the land allotted to it; for their safety and the preservation of their ancestral customs depended on this alone, as Moses had foretold and as they themselves were convinced. He also directed that the thirty-eight cities be given to the Levites, for they had already received ten in the territory of the Amorites. Of these he assigned three as places of refuge for fugitives to dwell in, for great was his care to leave nothing that Moses had ordained unfulfilled.
To the tribe of Judah he assigned Hebron, to Ephraim Shechem, and to the tribe of Naphtali Kedesh, a place in upper Galilee. He also distributed whatever was left of the plunder, and there was a great deal of it: everyone, in common and individually, had come into possession of large amounts of gold, silver, clothing, and other furnishings, along with cattle in numbers too great to count.
After this, Joshua gathered the army into an assembly, along with the men settled beyond the Jordan in the territory of the Amorites — fifty thousand armed men had campaigned with him — and spoke as follows: "Since God, the father and master of the Hebrew people, has given us this land to possess and has promised to preserve it as ours forever, and since you, at his command, gave yourselves wholeheartedly to helping us whenever we needed you, it is only right that you should now be released to rest, with no further hardship awaiting you, so that we may spare your zeal and have it fresh and undiminished should we ever need it again, rather than wearied by present labors and slower to respond in the future. For the dangers you shared with us we will be grateful, not only now but always, being men who remember our friends and hold fast in our thoughts to what we owe them — that you postponed the enjoyment of your own blessings for our sake, and having toiled alongside us to secure what we now possess through God's favor, only then chose to claim your own share of it. And beyond the goods you already have, the toils we shared have brought abundant wealth: much plunder to carry home, gold and silver, and more besides, along with our goodwill and readiness to repay you however you wish. For you have not fallen short of anything Moses foretold, even after his death, out of contempt for him, nor is there anything for which we do not owe you thanks. So we release you gladly to your allotted portions, and we urge you not to regard our kinship as bounded by anything, nor, because a river now runs between us, to think of us as strangers rather than as Hebrews. For we are all descendants of Abraham, both those who live here and those who live there, and there is one God who brought both our ancestors and yours into being. Hold fast to the worship and the constitution of that God, which he himself established through Moses, keeping it in its entirety — for if you remain faithful to these things, God will show himself well disposed toward you and will fight on your side, but if you turn aside to imitate other nations, he will turn away from your people."
Having said this, and having embraced the leaders individually and the whole multitude together, he himself remained behind, while the people escorted them on their way, not without tears, and they parted from one another only with difficulty.
Once the tribe of Reuben and the tribe of Gad, together with those of the Manassites who had gone with them, had crossed the river, they set up an altar on the bank of the Jordan, meant as a monument for those to come and a symbol of their kinship with those settled on the other side. But when the tribes on the far side heard that those who had been released had set up an altar, they did not credit the intention with which it had actually been raised; instead, believing a slander about impiety toward God plausible enough — that it had been done to introduce innovation and the worship of foreign gods — they took up arms, intending to cross the river to punish those who had built the altar for departing from ancestral custom. For it did not seem to them to be a matter for weighing kinship or the standing of those under suspicion, but only what God wills and how he wishes to be honored.
So they set out to war in anger, but Joshua, the high priest Eleazar, and the council of elders restrained them, urging that they first test the intentions of the men in question with words, and only afterward, if they learned their purpose to be malicious, proceed against them with arms. They therefore sent as envoys to them Phinehas, son of Eleazar, and ten men of standing among the Hebrews with him, to learn what had been in their minds when they crossed and set up the altar on the riverbank.
When these men had crossed over and come to them, an assembly was gathered, and Phinehas rose and said that their offense was too great to be corrected merely by being rebuked in words and warned for the future; that instead of considering the enormity of the wrongdoing and rushing straight to arms and vengeance by force, however, out of regard for kinship, and because words might well bring them to their senses, the delegation had been arranged in this way — so that, once they had learned the reasoning that had led them to build the altar, they might not seem hasty in coming against them with weapons if the men's judgment in building the altar proved sound, and yet might justly take vengeance if the accusation were shown to be true. "For we did not think it right," he said, "that you, who have had experience of God's purposes and have been hearers of the laws he himself gave us, should be separated from us and, now settled in your own portion — which you received by God's grace and his providence toward us — forget him, abandon the tabernacle and the ark, and, by setting up an altar of your own that is not our ancestral one, bring in foreign gods to join the evils of the Canaanites. Yet you will incur no wrong if you repent now and go no further in this madness, but instead show reverence and remembrance for our ancestral laws. But if you persist in your wrongdoing, we will not shrink from the labor owed to the laws, but will cross the Jordan and fight on their behalf and, before that, on God's behalf, considering you no different from the Canaanites but corrupting yourselves just as they do. Do not imagine that, because you have crossed the river, you are beyond the reach of God's power — you are everywhere within it, and it is impossible to escape his authority or the judgment that follows from it. And if you think that your presence here is an obstacle to your good sense, nothing prevents you from redistributing the land and leaving even this portion to pasture flocks. You will do well to come to your senses and, while your wrongdoing is still recent, to change your course. And we beg you, for the sake of your children and your wives, not to force us to take vengeance upon you. So then, since your own safety and that of those dearest to you rests on the decision of this assembly, deliberate accordingly, judging it more to your advantage to yield to words than to await the trial of deeds and of war."
When Phinehas had said all this, the leaders of the assembly and the whole multitude began to defend themselves against the charges brought against them, saying that they would never abandon their kinship with the others, nor had they set up the altar out of any spirit of innovation; rather, they acknowledged one God, common to all the Hebrews, and the bronze altar before the tabernacle, on which they would offer their sacrifices. The altar they had now raised, on account of which suspicion had fallen on them, had not been set up for worship, but so that it might stand for all time as a token and proof of their kinship with the rest, and as a necessary reminder to be prudent and remain faithful to their ancestral ways — not as the beginning of any transgression, as had been suspected of them. "Let God himself," they said, "be a sufficient witness that this was our reason for building the altar; and so, thinking better of us, hold none of these things against us — offenses for which all who are of Abraham's race and who attempt new customs at variance with the accustomed way would rightly deserve destruction."
When they had said this, Phinehas commended them, went back to Joshua, and reported to the people what they had said. Joshua, rejoicing that there was now no need to muster an army or lead them out to arms and war against kinsmen, offered thank offerings to God on their behalf. Then, having dismissed the multitude to their own allotted portions, Joshua himself remained living at Shechem.
Twenty years later, now extremely old, he summoned the men of highest standing from the cities, the magistrates, the council of elders, and as many of the people as he could gather. When they had come, he reminded them of all the benefits God had given them — and they were many, for people who had risen from a humble condition to such glory and prosperity — and urged them to keep to God's design toward them just as it stood, and to remain devoted to piety, since only through that would the divine remain their friend. For it was good, he said, that as he was now about to depart from life he should leave them such counsel, and he asked that they keep his exhortation in memory.
Having spoken these words to those present, he died, having lived a hundred and ten years. Of these he spent forty in the company of Moses, being instructed in what was useful, and after Moses' death he served as commander for twenty-five years. He was a man lacking neither in understanding nor in the ability to set forth clearly to the multitude what he had conceived, but excelling in both — courageous and bold in the face of deeds and dangers, most skillful in managing affairs in time of peace, and a man whose virtue was suited to every occasion. He was buried in the city of Timnah, in the tribe of Ephraim.
About this same time the high priest Eleazar also died, leaving the priesthood to his son Phinehas; his monument and tomb are at Gabatha. After the death of these men, Phinehas prophesied, according to the will of God, that the leadership for the destruction of the Canaanite nation should be given to the tribe of Judah — for the people were eager to learn what God thought best. Judah took Simeon's tribe as a partner, on condition that, once Simeon's tributaries were removed, the men of Simeon would do the same for the tribe of Judah in its own portion. The Canaanites, since affairs were then flourishing for them, awaited them near Bezek with a large army, having entrusted command to Adoni-bezek, king of the people of Bezek — a name meaning "lord of the Bezekites," for in the Hebrew tongue "adoni" means "lord." They hoped to overcome the Israelites because Joshua was dead. But when the Israelites met them, the two tribes I have mentioned fought brilliantly and killed more than ten thousand of them.
Having routed the rest and pursued them, they captured Adoni-bezek, who, after his hands and feet had been cut off by them, said that after all he was not going to escape the notice of God for what he had now suffered — things he had not hesitated to do to seventy-two kings before him. They carried him alive as far as Jerusalem, and when he died there they buried him in the ground. They then went on capturing cities, and having taken a great many, they laid siege to Jerusalem. They took the lower city and, in time, killed all its inhabitants, but the upper city was difficult for them to capture, owing to the strength of its walls and the nature of the terrain. From there they moved their camp to Hebron, and having taken it, they killed everyone in it. There still remained a race of giants, whose bodies were of such size and shape, quite unlike other men, that they were an astonishing sight and a terrifying thing to hear about. Even now their bones are on display, unlike anything that those who come to examine them are familiar with.
This they gave to the Levites as a special privilege, together with the two thousand cubits of surrounding land, while they gave the land itself to Caleb as a gift, in accordance with the commands of Moses; for Caleb had been one of the spies whom Moses sent into Canaan. They also gave land to the descendants of Jethro the Midianite, for he had been Moses' father-in-law, so that they might have a place to live, since they had left their own homeland to follow Moses and Israel and had lived with them in the wilderness. The tribe of Judah and the tribe of Simeon took the cities in the hill country of Canaan, and, of those in the plain and by the sea, Ashkelon and Ashdod. Gaza and Ekron escaped them, since these lay in flat country well supplied with chariots, which dealt harshly with anyone who attacked there.
These tribes, then, having prospered greatly through their fighting, withdrew to their own cities and laid down their weapons. The Benjaminites, since Jerusalem belonged to them, allowed its inhabitants to remain there on condition of paying tribute. And so, once all of them had ceased, some from killing, others from being in danger, they had leisure to work the land. The rest of the tribes, following the example of Benjamin, did the same, and, content with the tribute paid to them, allowed the Canaanites to live without further war. The tribe of Ephraim, besieging Bethel, found no result worth the time and effort of the siege, but its men, though weary of the blockade, persisted in it. Then, having seized a man from the city who had come out for supplies, they gave him assurances that if he handed over the city, they would spare him and his relatives.
He, on these terms, swore to deliver the city into their hands. And so, having betrayed it in this way, he was saved along with his household, while the rest killed all the inhabitants and took possession of the city. After this the Israelites grew lax toward their enemies, and turned instead to caring for the land and its cultivation. As their wealth increased, they grew careless through luxury and pleasure in material things, and were no longer strict in their observance of the laws governing their commonwealth. Angered by this, the divine brought ruin upon them — first because they had, against his own judgment, spared the Canaanites, and then because the Canaanites, seizing their opportunity, would treat them with great cruelty.
The Israelites themselves were ill-disposed toward what came from God and unwilling to fight, having received much from the Canaanites and grown soft, through their luxury, toward hardship. And it happened that their aristocratic government had already broken down: they no longer appointed councils of elders or any other office previously established by custom, but lived in the fields, devoted to the pleasure of making money. And because of this great license, terrible civil strife once again overtook them, and they were led into war with one another for a reason of the following kind. A Levite, one of the common people of the district of Ephraim, living there, took as his wife a young woman from Bethlehem, a town in the tribe of Judah. Being deeply in love with the woman and overcome by her beauty,
he found himself unlucky, for she did not return his feelings in kind. As she grew estranged from him, and he, because of this, burned all the more with passion, constant quarrels arose between them, until finally the woman, worn down by these disputes, left her husband and went to her parents' house, in the fourth month. The man, taking the loss of his love hard, came to his father-in-law's house and, having settled their disputes, was reconciled.
He stayed there four days while her parents entertained him warmly, and on the fifth day, having decided to leave for home, he set out toward evening—for the parents were slow to release their daughter and kept drawing the day out. A servant went with them, and they had a donkey, on which the woman rode. When they reached the vicinity of Jerusalem, having already traveled thirty stadia, the servant advised stopping somewhere for the night, so that nothing untoward might befall them while traveling after dark, especially since they were not far from hostile country, for the times often made even friendly places dangerous and suspect. But the plan did not please him, to lodge among foreigners—the city was Canaanite—and instead he insisted they press on twenty stadia farther to a city of their own people.
His view prevailed, and he arrived at Gibeah, in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin, when it was already late. No one at the marketplace invited him in as a guest, but an old man coming down from the fields—an Ephraimite by tribe who lived in Gibeah—met him and asked who he was and for what reason, now that it was already dark, he was making arrangements for his dinner. The man said he was a Levite, and that he was on his way home bringing a woman from her parents' house; he explained that his home was in the allotment of Ephraim. The old man, both because of their kinship and because they belonged to the same tribe, and because of the chance meeting, took him in to be his guest.
But some young men of Gibeah, having seen the woman in the marketplace and marveled at her beauty, once they learned she was lodging with the old man, despised his weakness and his small numbers and came to the door. When the old man urged them to go away and not to use force or outrage, they demanded that he hand over the stranger woman to be rid of the matter. When the old man said she was his kinswoman and a Levite's wife, and that they would be doing terrible things, they made light of justice and mocked him, disregarding that they were sinning against the laws, and threatened to kill him for obstructing their desires. Driven to this extremity, and unwilling to see his guests outraged, he offered them his own daughter instead, saying that they would satisfy their desire more lawfully this way, without the outrage of violating guests, and that he himself would do no wrong to those he had received as guests, thinking this the better course.
But since they yielded nothing of their eagerness for the stranger woman, and instead pressed all the more to seize her, the old man kept begging them to dare nothing unlawful, while they seized her and, giving themselves over still more to violent lust, dragged the woman off with them and, after abusing her the whole night through, released her as day was beginning. Worn out by what had happened to her, she came to the lodging, and from grief at what she had suffered and from shame that kept her from daring to come into her husband's sight—for she reckoned that he above all would find what had happened impossible to bear—she collapsed and gave up her life.
Her husband, thinking his wife was sunk in a deep sleep and suspecting nothing amiss, tried to wake her, meaning to comfort her with the thought that she had not given herself to her abusers by her own free choice, but that they had seized her when they came to the lodging. But when he learned she was dead, controlling himself in the face of so great a disaster, he laid the dead woman on the animal and brought her home. There he cut her body limb by limb into twelve parts and sent them to each of the tribes, instructing the bearers to say who was responsible for the woman's death and what outrage the tribe of Benjamin had committed.
The Israelites, sickened both by the sight and by the report of what had been done by violence, having had no previous experience of such a thing, gathered at Shiloh in pure and righteous anger, and, assembled before the Tabernacle, were ready at once to take up arms and treat the men of Gibeah as enemies. But the Council of Elders held them back, persuading them that they ought not to bring war so hastily against fellow tribesmen before first discussing the charges in words—since the law did not permit an army to be led even against foreigners without first sending an embassy and making such an attempt to bring those judged to be in the wrong to a change of heart. It was better, therefore, to obey the law and send to the men of Gibeah demanding the guilty parties, and if they were handed over, to be content with their punishment, but if the Gibeonites showed contempt, then to take up arms against them.
So they sent to the men of Gibeah, accusing the young men of what had been done to the woman and demanding, for the sake of justice, that those who had done what was unlawful be handed over to die in the place of their victim. But the men of Gibeah neither surrendered the young men, and considered it shameful to obey the commands of others, judging themselves, out of fear of war, inferior to no one in arms, whether in numbers or in courage. They were, moreover, in great readiness, and the men of the other tribes joined in this resolve, conspiring with them to defend themselves against attack.
When such an answer from the men of Gibeah was reported to the Israelites, they swore oaths that none of them would give a daughter in marriage to a man of Benjamin, and that they would march against them, being angrier at them than, as we have learned, our ancestors ever were toward the Canaanites. At once they led out against them an army of four hundred thousand hoplites; the Benjaminite force of hoplites numbered under twenty-six thousand six hundred, of whom about five hundred were the finest slingers with the left hand, so that when battle was joined near Gibeah the Benjaminites routed the Israelites, and about twenty-two thousand of them fell—and perhaps more would have perished had not nightfall checked them and broken off the fighting.
The Benjaminites withdrew rejoicing into the city, while the Israelites, dismayed by the defeat, withdrew to their camp. The next day, when they joined battle again, the Benjaminites prevailed once more, and eighteen thousand of the Israelites died; fearing the slaughter, they abandoned their camp. Coming to the city of Bethel, which lay very near, and fasting there, on the following day they besought God, through Phinehas the high priest, to cease his anger against them and, satisfied with their two defeats, to grant them victory and mastery over their enemies. God promised this through the prophecy of Phinehas.
Dividing the army into two parts, they set half in ambush by night around the city, while the other half engaged the Benjaminites and, when pressed hard, gave ground. The Benjaminites pursued the Hebrews as they fled slowly, wanting to draw them out entirely from the city, and followed as they withdrew, so that even the old men and the young left behind in the city ran out, despite their weakness, wanting to join in overpowering the enemy along with everyone else. But when they had gone far from the city, the Hebrews stopped fleeing, turned about, and took their stand for battle, raising for those lying in ambush the signal that had been agreed upon.
Those in ambush rose up with a shout and attacked the enemy. The Benjaminites, realizing at once that they had been deceived, fell into confusion, and, driven into a hollow, ravine-like place, were surrounded and shot down with javelins, so that all perished except six hundred. These banded together, closed ranks, and forced their way through the midst of the enemy, fled to the nearby hills, and, seizing them, settled there. All the rest, about twenty-five thousand, were killed. The Israelites burned Gibeah, and put to death the women and the males not yet of fighting age; they did the same to the other cities of the Benjaminites.
They were so inflamed with rage that, because Jabesh in Gilead had not joined them against the Benjaminites, they sent twelve thousand men from their ranks and ordered them to destroy it. The men sent killed the fighting population of the city, along with the children and women, except for four hundred virgins—so far had they been driven by anger, from grief over the woman together with the loss of their armed men.
Then remorse seized them over the disaster that had befallen the Benjaminites, and they proclaimed a fast for them, even though they judged that the Benjaminites deserved to suffer for having sinned against the laws; and they summoned the six hundred survivors, through envoys, for they had settled above a certain rock called Rimmon, in the wilderness. The envoys, since the disaster had befallen not them alone but the envoys too had lost kinsmen, lamented and gently urged them to bear it and to come together again with the rest, and not to vote to bring about the utter destruction of the tribe of Benjamin, at least as far as depended on the Israelites. "We grant you," they said, "the land of the whole tribe, and whatever spoil you are able to carry off." The Benjaminites, since it had come about by God's judgment against themselves and through their own wrongdoing, changed their minds and came down to rejoin their ancestral tribe, obeying those who summoned them.
The Israelites gave them the four hundred virgins of Jabesh as wives, and deliberated about the remaining two hundred, so that they too might be supplied with wives and beget children. But since oaths had been sworn that no one would give a daughter in marriage to a man of Benjamin before the war, some advised setting the oaths lightly aside, since they had sworn in anger and not by considered judgment, and that they would do nothing contrary to God's will if they were able to save an entire tribe from the danger of destruction—for perjuries, they said, were harsh and dangerous not when committed under necessity, but when ventured in wickedness. When the Council of Elders was troubled at the very word "perjury," someone said he could tell them a way both to provide the men with wives and to keep the oaths. When they asked what he had in mind, he said: "Three times a year, when we gather at Shiloh, the women and daughters accompany us for the festival. Let it be permitted for the Benjaminites, by seizure, to marry whichever of these they are able to take, with us neither urging it nor forbidding it. And to their fathers, if they are aggrieved and demand punishment, we will say that they themselves are to blame, for neglecting to guard their daughters, and that our anger against the Benjaminites ought to be relaxed, having already been exercised too much and too swiftly."
Persuaded by this, they voted to allow the Benjaminites marriage by abduction. When the festival came, the two hundred lay in wait in twos and threes before the city, in the vineyards and other places where they would go unnoticed, waiting for the virgins to pass by; the girls, playing and suspecting nothing of what was coming, walked along unguarded, and the men, once they had scattered, seized them as they rose up. Having married in this way, they went off to work the land and took thought to return once more to their former prosperity. Thus the tribe of Benjamin, which had been in danger of complete destruction in the way described, was saved by the wisdom of the Israelites, and at once flourished, making swift increase both in numbers and in everything else. This is how that war came to an end.
Something similar to this befell the tribe of Dan as well, brought about for the following reason. Since the Israelites had by now abandoned the practice of war and devoted themselves to working the land, the Canaanites, despising them, joined forces together; expecting to suffer nothing themselves, and gaining firm hope of doing the Hebrews harm, they resolved to live in their cities thereafter in security. They prepared chariots and mustered their infantry, and their cities made common cause; from the tribe of Judah they seized Ashkelon and Ekron and many other cities in the plain, and forced the Danites to take refuge in the hills, leaving them no foothold whatever in the plain.
The Danites, being neither strong enough to make war nor possessed of sufficient land, sent five men of their number into the interior to reconnoiter land to which they might migrate. These men, going a day's journey not far from Mount Lebanon and the lesser springs of the Jordan, near the great plain by the city of Sidon, and having surveyed a good and all-productive land, reported back to their own people. Setting out with an army, the Danites founded there a city called Dan, after the name of Jacob's son, from whom their tribe also took its name.
For the Israelites things went from bad to worse, both from inexperience in hardship and from neglect of religion; for once they had shifted away from the order of their constitution, they were carried toward living as pleasure and private will dictated, so that they even became infected with the evils practiced among the Canaanites. God therefore grew angry with them, and the prosperity they had won through countless labors they lost through indulgence. When Chushan-rishathaim, king of the Assyrians, marched against them, they lost many of those who fought in the battle line, and, besieged, were taken by force; some, out of fear, went over to him voluntarily. Assessed tribute beyond their means, they paid it and endured every kind of outrage for eight years, after which they were freed from these evils in the following way.
A certain man of the tribe of Judah, Othniel by name, a man of action and noble spirit, was told by an oracle not to look on while the Israelites lay under such compulsion, but to dare to deliver them into freedom. Urging some to join him in facing the danger—there were few of these, but they felt shame at the present state of things and eagerness for a change—he first destroyed the garrison of Chushan-rishathaim that was stationed among them, and, as more men joined the struggle once the first stage of the enterprise had succeeded, he joined battle with the Assyrians and, driving them back completely, forced them to cross the Euphrates.
Othniel, having thus given proof by deed of his valor, received as a reward for it authority from the people, so as to judge them, and, having ruled for forty years, ended his life.
When he died, the affairs of the Israelites again sickened under lack of leadership, and because they did not honor God nor obey the laws, they suffered still worse—so that, in contempt of their disorderly conduct of their commonwealth, Eglon, king of the Moabites, made war on them, defeated them in many battles, subdued those who excelled the rest in spirit, brought their power entirely low, and imposed tribute upon them. Establishing his royal seat at Jericho, he left no form of oppression untried against the people, and reduced them to poverty for eighteen years. Then, taking pity,
the God of the Israelites was moved by their sufferings, and, softened by their pleas, delivered them from their humiliation under the Moabites. This is how their freedom came about. Among the tribe of Benjamin there was a young man named Ehud, son of Gera, a man of great daring and physically capable for action, who was stronger with his left hand and relied chiefly on that. He too lived in Jericho, and he grew close to Eglon, courting him with gifts and flattering attentions, so that through this he came to be well regarded by those around the king. On one occasion, bringing gifts to the king with two servants, he strapped a short sword secretly to his right thigh and went in to him. It was summer, and since it was already midday, the guards had relaxed their watch because of the heat and had turned to their meal.
So the young man gave the gifts to Eglon, and since he was spending time in a chamber that was well arranged for summer comfort, they fell into conversation. They were alone, for the king had ordered the attendants who kept entering to leave, since he wished to talk with Ehud. He was sitting on his throne, and Ehud felt afraid that he might miss his aim and fail to deliver a fatal blow. So he made him rise, saying he had something to reveal to him by God's command. And Eglon, delighted at the prospect of the revelation, leaped up from his throne, whereupon Ehud struck him in the heart, left the short sword embedded in the wound, and went out, pulling the door shut behind him. The servants, thinking the king had turned to sleep, remained undisturbed.
Ehud then signaled secretly to the people of Jericho and urged them to seize their freedom. They heard him gladly, took up arms themselves, and sent men through the countryside to sound the signal on rams' horns, for it was their custom to summon the people together with these. Eglon's men remained ignorant of what had happened to him for a long time, but when evening came, fearing that some mishap had befallen him, they went into the chamber, found him dead, and stood in helpless confusion. Before the guard could regroup, the mass of the Israelites fell upon them. Some were cut down on the spot, while others turned to flee toward Moab hoping to find safety there — there were more than ten thousand of them. But the Israelites had already seized the crossing of the Jordan ahead of them, and pursuing them they killed many at the crossing itself; not one escaped their hands. In this way the Hebrews were freed from their servitude under the Moabites, and Ehud, honored for this deed with leadership over the whole people, held that office for eighty years until his death — a man who, apart from the exploit just described, deserved praise in his own right.
After him Shamgar, son of Anath, was chosen to rule, but died in the first year of his office. The Israelites, once again — for they had learned nothing from the discipline of their earlier misfortunes about failing to honor God and obey the laws — before they had even had time to draw breath from their servitude under the Moabites, were enslaved for a short while to Jabin, king of the Canaanites. He, based in the city of Hazor, which lies above Lake Semechonitis, maintained an army of three hundred thousand infantry, ten thousand cavalry, and had at his disposal three thousand chariots. Sisera, the commander of this force, held the highest place of honor with the king, and when the Israelites gathered to oppose him he inflicted terrible harm on them, forcing them to pay tribute.
For twenty years they endured this treatment, unable to come to their senses through their misfortune, while God, wishing to humble their arrogance still further on account of their ingratitude toward him — so that, once changed, they might in future learn wisdom, having been taught that their calamities arose from their contempt of the laws — they turned in supplication to a certain prophetess named Deborah, which means "bee" in the Hebrew tongue, begging her to entreat God to take pity on them and not to look on while they perished at the hands of the Canaanites. God granted them deliverance and chose as their commander Barak, of the tribe of Naphtali — Barak means "lightning" in the Hebrew tongue. Deborah summoned Barak and ordered him, having chosen ten thousand of the young men, to march against the enemy, for God had declared beforehand that this number would suffice and had foretold victory.
"I will not command," Barak replied, "unless you command alongside me." Indignant, she said, "So you would hand over to a woman the honor God has given you? I, for my part, do not refuse it."
So, having mustered their ten thousand, they encamped near Mount Tabor. Sisera came out to meet them at the king's command and pitched camp not far from the enemy. The Israelites and Barak, terrified at the enemy's numbers, had resolved to withdraw, but Deborah restrained them, urging that the battle be joined that very day, for God would grant them victory and fight on their side. So they engaged, and as the armies closed a great storm broke — heavy rain and hail — and a wind drove the rain into the faces of the Canaanites, blinding their eyes, so that their bows and slings were useless to them, and their heavy infantry, because of the cold, could not wield their swords. The Israelites, by contrast, were far less troubled, since the storm struck them from behind, and, taking courage from the thought of God's aid, they pushed into the midst of the enemy and killed great numbers of them. Some fell at the hands of the Israelites, others, thrown into confusion by their own cavalry, were trampled, so that many died beneath the chariots.
Sisera, when he saw the rout beginning, leaped down from his chariot and, fleeing, arrived at the tent of a Kenite woman named Jael, who agreed to hide him at his request and, when he asked for a drink, gave him milk that had already gone sour. Having drunk more than his fill, he fell into a deep sleep. Jael, while he slept, drove an iron tent-peg through his mouth and jaw with a hammer, pinning it into the ground, and a little later, when Barak's men arrived, she showed them the body fastened to the earth. And so this victory, as Deborah had foretold, fell to a woman. Barak then marched against Hazor, killed Jabin when he came out to meet him, and, after the commander's fall, razed the city to the ground. He led the Israelites for forty years.
After Barak and Deborah died at about the same time, the Midianites, having called in the Amalekites and the Arabs as allies, marched against the Israelites, defeated them in battle, ravaged their crops, and carried off the plunder. Doing this for seven years, they drove the mass of the Israelites back into the hills, forcing them to abandon the plains and dig tunnels and caves, in which they kept whatever escaped the enemy's notice, guarding it there. For the Midianites, campaigning in the summer season, allowed the Israelites to farm through the winter, so as to have something to plunder once their labor had produced it. There was famine and scarcity of food, and the people turned to supplication, begging God to save them.
Gideon, son of Joash, of the tribe of Manasseh, was threshing a small quantity of sheaves of grain secretly in the winepress — for he was afraid to do so openly at the threshing floor because of the enemy. A phantom appeared to him in the form of a young man and declared him blessed and beloved by God. "This, at least," he replied, "is a fine token of his favor — that I now have to use a winepress instead of a threshing floor!" When the figure urged him to take courage and attempt to recover their freedom, he said he was powerless to do so, for the tribe from which he came was too small, and he himself was young and too weak for such great undertakings. But God himself promised to make up what was lacking and to grant victory to the Israelites while he commanded.
Gideon then told this to some of the young men, and they believed him; at once an army of ten thousand men stood ready for the struggle. But God, appearing to Gideon in his sleep, showed him that human nature is inclined to self-regard and hostile to those who excel in virtue, and that if they won with so great a host, thinking themselves a match for the enemy, they would set aside God's role in the victory and consider it their own. So, that they might learn the outcome depended on his help, God advised that around midday, at the height of the heat, he should lead the army to the river, and that those who lay down and drank in that posture should be judged brave, while those who drank hastily and in a hurry should be reckoned cowardly and terrified of the enemy. When Gideon did as God instructed, three hundred men were found who brought the water to their mouths with their hands, fearfully and in disorder, and God said these were the men with whom he should take on the enemy.
The Midianites were encamped beyond the Jordan, intending to cross over the next day. Gideon, being afraid — for God had told him beforehand to attack by night — was told, in order to relieve him of his fear, to take one of his soldiers and go near the tents of the Midianites, for from the enemy themselves he would gain confidence and courage. Persuaded, he went, taking with him his own servant Phurah, and drawing near a certain tent he found the men in it awake, one of them recounting a dream to his tent-companion, in such a way that Gideon overheard it. The dream was this: a barley loaf, too poor a thing for men to eat, seemed to roll through the camp and knock down the king's tent, and all the soldiers' tents with it. The man judged the vision to portend destruction for the army, explaining how he had come to this conclusion: barley, of all grains, is agreed to be the cheapest, and of all the peoples of Asia the Israelites can now be seen to be the most despised, resembling this cheap grain.
"And whatever now shows spirit among the Israelites," he said, "must be Gideon and the army with him. Since, then, you say you saw the loaf overturning our tents, I fear that God has granted Gideon victory over us." Hearing this dream, Gideon was filled with good hope and courage, and ordered his own men to take up arms, telling them also of the enemy's vision. They, emboldened by what he described, stood ready for his commands. At about the fourth watch Gideon led his army forward, having divided it into three companies of a hundred men each. All of them carried empty jars with torches burning inside, so that their approach would not be discovered by the enemy, and in their right hand a ram's horn, which they used in place of a trumpet.
The enemy's army occupied a great stretch of ground, for they had an enormous number of camels, and, distributed by nation, they all lay together within a single circle. The Hebrews, as instructed, once they drew near the enemy, at a given signal sounded their horns, broke their jars, and rushed forward with the torches, shouting their war cry, trusting God to grant Gideon's victory — and this they did. Confusion and terror seized the men, still half asleep, for it was night and God willed it so. Few were killed by the enemy proper; most died at the hands of their own allies, owing to the confusion of languages. Once panic took hold, they cut down whatever they came upon, taking it for the enemy, and there was great slaughter.
When word of Gideon's victory reached the Israelites, they took up arms, and pursuing the enemy caught them in a hollow ringed by ravines that could not be crossed, and, surrounding them, killed them all, including two of their kings, Oreb and Zeeb. The rest of the commanders, leading the remaining soldiers — there were eighteen thousand of them — encamped at a great distance from the Israelites. Gideon, however, was not worn out or ready to give up; pursuing with his entire army and engaging them, he destroyed the enemy utterly and brought back the remaining commanders, Zebah and Zalmunna, as captives. About one hundred and twenty thousand of the Midianites and their Arab allies died in this battle, and much plunder — gold, silver, fine cloth, camels, and pack animals — fell to the Hebrews. Gideon, arriving at Ophrah, his home town, put the Midianite kings to death.
The tribe of Ephraim, resentful of Gideon's success, had resolved to march against him, complaining that he had not informed them in advance of his undertaking against the enemy. Gideon, being a moderate man and supreme in every virtue, did not claim to have attacked the enemy on his own initiative and by his own judgment, without them, but said God had commanded it, and declared the victory to belong no less to them than to those who had actually fought. By these words he soothed their anger, and in doing so benefited the Hebrews even more than by his success against the enemy, for he saved them from what would have become civil strife just as it was beginning. That tribe, however, would later pay the penalty for this insolence, as we shall relate at its proper time.
Gideon, wishing to lay down his authority, was compelled to keep it, and held it for forty years, rendering just judgments for the people; whatever he pronounced in disputes brought before him was final. He died in old age and was buried in Ophrah, his home town. He had seventy legitimate sons, for he had married many wives, and one illegitimate son by a concubine from Shechem, named Abimelech, who, after his father's death, withdrew to Shechem to his mother's relatives — for that was his origin — and, taking money from them (men notorious for the great number of their crimes), came with them to his father's house and killed all his brothers except Jotham, who managed to escape and so was saved. Abimelech then turned the government into a tyranny, making himself master to do whatever he wished in place of the laws, and dealing harshly with those who stood up for justice. On one occasion, when a public festival was being held at Shechem and the whole populace had gathered there, his brother Jotham — the one we said had escaped — went up onto the
— on Mount Gerizim, which rises above the city of Shechem, and shouted loudly enough for the crowd to hear. When they had fallen silent to listen, he asked them to hear what he had to say, and once quiet had settled he spoke: he said that the trees, having once had a human voice, had come together in an assembly and asked the fig tree to rule over them. The fig tree refused, since the honor paid to its fruit was its own and did not come to it from outside; and so the trees did not give up their concern for finding a ruler, and it seemed good to them to offer the honor to the vine. The vine, when chosen, used the same words as the fig tree and declined the office. The olive trees did the same, so the trees asked the thorn bush to take up the kingship, since it is good at supplying kindling from its wood, and it promised to take up the rule and do so without hesitation — provided, however, that the trees would gather beneath its shade; and if they had destruction in mind against it, they would be consumed by the fire within it.
"I do not say this," he went on, "for the sake of a joke, but because you, who have experienced many good things from Gideon, are letting Abimelech — who joined with you in killing his brothers — hold power over everything, though he is no different from fire." Having said this he withdrew and lived in hiding in the mountains for three years, in fear of Abimelech.
Not long after the festival, the Shechemites — for they had come to regret the murder of Gideon's sons — drove Abimelech out of the city and the tribe, and he began plotting to harm the city. When the season for gathering the grape harvest came, they were afraid to go out and collect the fruit, lest Abimelech do them some harm. But when one of the officers, Gaal, arrived among them with armed men and his own kinsmen, the Shechemites asked him to provide them protection until they had finished the harvest. He agreed to their request, and they went out with Gaal, who brought his own armed force along. So the harvest was gathered in safety, and as they feasted by companies they grew bold enough to openly curse Abimelech, while the officers, catching men in ambushes around the city, seized and killed many of Abimelech's people.
Now a certain Zabulus, one of the rulers of Shechem and a guest-friend of Abimelech, sent messengers to inform him of everything Gaal was stirring up the people to do, and advised him to lie in ambush before the city; for he would persuade Gaal to come out against him, and after that it would be in Abimelech's power to take revenge — for once this had happened, Zabulus would negotiate a reconciliation for him with the people. So Abimelech took his position in ambush, while Gaal, less on his guard, was spending time in the suburb together with Zabulus. When Gaal saw armed men advancing, he said to Zabulus that men in arms were coming against them. Zabulus replied that these were the shadows of the rocks — but as the men drew nearer, and their outlines became clear, he said, "Those are not shadows, but a band of armed men." And Zabulus said, "Was it not you who accused Abimelech of cowardice? Why not show now the greatness of your courage by engaging him in battle?" Gaal, thrown into confusion, joined battle with Abimelech's men; some of those with him fell, and he himself fled into the city, bringing the rest with him.
Zabulus then worked to have Gaal expelled from the city, accusing him of having fought feebly against Abimelech's soldiers. Abimelech, learning that the Shechemites were about to go out again at the time of the grape harvest, set ambushes around the city; and when the people came out, a third part of his army seized the gates to cut off the citizens' way back in, while the rest chased down those who had scattered — and there was killing everywhere.
He razed the city to the ground, since it could not hold out against the siege, and sowed salt over the ruins as he advanced. All the Shechemites perished in this way; but those who had escaped the danger by scattering through the countryside found a strong rock and settled on it, preparing to fortify it. Abimelech, learning of their intention, moved quickly against them with his forces, and had bundles of dry wood carried and piled around the place, ordering his army to do this. Once the rock had been quickly surrounded on all sides with the wood, they threw fire onto it, using whatever kindled most readily, and raised a great blaze. No one escaped from the rock; men, women, and children perished together, about one thousand five hundred men, and a considerable number of others besides.
Such was the disaster that fell upon the people of Shechem, greater even than the grief it caused, except that it was just: they had joined with a man to do so great a wrong against their own benefactor. Abimelech, having terrified the Israelites with the sufferings of the Shechemites, was clearly reaching for even greater things and showed no sign of setting a limit to his violence unless he destroyed everyone. He therefore marched against Thebez and took the city by a sudden assault; but there was a great tower in it, into which the whole population had fled for refuge, and he prepared to besiege it. As he rushed close to the gates, a woman struck him on the head with a piece of a millstone she threw down. Abimelech fell, and begged his armor-bearer to kill him, so that his death would not be thought the work of a woman. The man did as he was ordered.
So Abimelech paid the penalty for his crime against his brothers and for the outrages he had dared against the people of Shechem; this disaster befell them in accordance with Jotham's prophecy. When Abimelech fell, the army that was with him scattered and returned to their homes.
Leadership of the Israelites then passed to Jair of Gilead, of the tribe of Manasseh, a man prosperous in other respects and blessed with thirty fine sons, all excellent horsemen, who had been entrusted with the governance of the cities of Gilead. He held the leadership for twenty-two years, died at an advanced age, and was thought worthy of burial in the city of Kamon in Gilead.
Now the whole conduct of the Hebrews had degenerated into disorder and contempt for God and the laws, and the Ammonites and Philistines, despising them for it, plundered the country with a great army; having seized all of Perea, they were even venturing to cross over and take possession of the rest as well. The Hebrews, chastened by their sufferings, turned to supplicate God and brought sacrifices, imploring him to soften his anger and, moved by their entreaty, to relent. God, changing to a gentler disposition, was about to help them.
When the Ammonites had marched against Gilead, the local people met together on the mountain, asking for someone to lead them in war. There was a certain Jephthah, a man of power because of his father's valor and because of the private force of mercenaries he himself maintained. They sent to him and asked him to fight on their side, promising to give him the leadership over them for all time to come. He would not accept their appeal, and reproached them for not helping him when he had been openly wronged by his brothers; for he was not their full brother by the same mother, but a stranger — his mother had been brought to his father's house out of erotic desire — and, despising his weakness, they had driven him out. So he had gone to live in the region called Gilead, taking in for pay anyone who came to him from wherever they might be. When the elders of Gilead pleaded with him and swore that they would grant him the leadership forever, he took the field.
He moved quickly to set matters in order, and stationing his army at the city of Mizpah, he sent an embassy to the king of Ammon to complain of the seizure of the land. The king sent back word charging the Israelites over their exodus from Egypt and demanding that they give up the land of the Amorites as territory that had belonged to his ancestors from the beginning. Jephthah replied that their ancestors had no just complaint against the Amorites, and that the Ammonites ought rather to be grateful, since it had been in Moses' power to take their land too, but he had spared it and called it their own — land which, once God had won it for them, they had held for three hundred years. He said he would fight them, and having said this to the envoys, he sent them away.
He himself, having prayed for victory and vowed that if he returned safe to his home he would sacrifice as a burnt offering whatever should first meet him, engaged the enemy and won a decisive victory, pursuing and slaughtering them as far as the city of Maniath. Crossing into Ammonite territory, he destroyed many cities, drove off plunder, and freed his own people from the slavery they had endured for eighteen years.
On his way back he met with a disaster in no way like the successes he had won: for his daughter came out to meet him — his only child, and still a virgin. He cried out in anguish at the magnitude of the blow and reproached his daughter for her eagerness in coming out to meet him, for he had vowed to dedicate her to God. She, however, took what was to happen without dismay, since it came with her father's victory and her people's freedom, and though she must die for it, she asked only that he grant her two months to go and mourn her lost youth with her companions before he carried out his vow. He agreed to the time she had named, and when it had passed he sacrificed his daughter, offering her up as a burnt offering — a sacrifice neither lawful nor pleasing to God, since he had not weighed carefully in his own mind how such an act, once done, would appear to those who heard of it.
When the tribe of Ephraim marched against him, angry that he had not shared with them the campaign against the Ammonites but had kept both the plunder and the glory of what had been done for himself alone, he told them first that their kinsmen had not gone unnoticed while under attack, and that they, though called on for help, had not come, though they ought to have hastened to their aid even before being asked; and second, that they were now trying to do wrong to their kinsmen, having not dared to face the enemy in battle. He warned that with God's help he would exact justice from them if they did not come to their senses. When this failed to persuade them and they engaged him with an army that had been summoned from Gilead, he inflicted heavy losses on them, and as he pursued them in their rout, having sent a detachment ahead to seize the fords of the Jordan, he killed about forty-two thousand of them.
Jephthah himself, having ruled for six years, died and was buried in his own home city of Sebee, in Gilead. After Jephthah's death, Abzan succeeded to the leadership, a man of the tribe of Judah from the city of Bethlehem. He had sixty children, thirty sons and the rest daughters, all of whom he lived to see married — the daughters given to husbands, the sons provided with wives. He accomplished nothing worth recording or remembering in the seven years of his rule, and died at an advanced age, receiving burial in his native city.
After Abzan's death in this way, the man who took up the leadership after him, Elon, of the tribe of Zebulun, held it for ten years and accomplished nothing of note either. Abdon, son of Elon, of the tribe of Ephraim and from the city of the Pirathonites, was appointed sole ruler after Elon, and would be remembered only for the number of his children, since he himself accomplished no notable deed, owing to the peace and security of the times. He had forty sons, and left behind, through these, thirty grandsons; and he used to ride out together with all seventy of them, every one an excellent horseman. He died at an advanced age, leaving all of them alive, and received a splendid burial at Pirathon.
After his death the Philistines overpowered the Israelites and took tribute from them for forty years. They were freed from this compulsion in the following way: a certain Manoah, of the Danites, outstanding among the few and acknowledged as first in his homeland, had a wife renowned for her beauty and unsurpassed among the women of her time. Since they had no children, he was distressed at his childlessness and repeatedly went with his wife to the plain outside the city to entreat God to grant them true offspring — for this is a large plain. He was also madly in love with his wife, and for that reason uncontrollably jealous.
Once, when his wife was alone, a vision of God appeared to her in the likeness of a beautiful young man, tall in stature, and announced good news to her: that by the providence of God she would bear a son, handsome and manifestly strong, under whom the Philistines would suffer once he had grown to manhood. He instructed her not to let his hair be cut; this would be, for him, an abstention imposed by God's command with respect to one kind of drink, but he would have a natural affinity for water alone. Having said this, he departed, having come in accordance with the will of God.
When her husband returned, she related to him what the angel had said, marveling at the young man's beauty and stature, so that from her praises he was thrown into a state of alarm through jealousy, and the suspicion natural to such a feeling took hold of him. Wishing to put an end to her husband's unreasonable distress, she implored God to send the angel again, so that her husband might also see him. By the grace of God the angel came again while they were in the field, and appeared to the woman when she was alone, her husband being elsewhere. She asked him to wait so that she could bring her husband, and when he agreed she went to fetch Manoah. When he saw him, even this did not put an end to his suspicion, and he asked that the angel reveal to him too whatever he had told his wife. The angel replied that it would be enough for her alone to know it; but when Manoah asked him to say who he was, so that when the child was born they might show him gratitude and give him a gift, he said he had no need of anything, since he had not brought this good news in expectation of reward concerning the birth of the child. Manoah then urged him to stay and share in hospitality, and though the angel did not agree at first, he was persuaded by his insistence to remain, so that Manoah might bring him some gift of hospitality.
Manoah sacrificed a kid and told his wife to roast it; and when everything was ready, the angel directed that the loaves and the meat be set out on the rock, apart from the vessels. When this was done, he touched the meat with the staff he held, and flame shot up and consumed it along with the loaves, and the angel went up to heaven through the smoke as though through a chariot, visible to them both. Manoah, afraid that some harm might come to them from having seen God, was reassured by his wife, who told him to take courage, since God would not have let himself be seen by them except for their benefit.
And she conceived, and kept the commands she had been given; and when the child was born they called him Samson, a name that signifies "strong." The boy grew,
He grew easily, and it was clear from his moderate diet and his unshorn hair that he would become a prophet. Traveling with his parents to Thamna, a city of the Philistines, while a festival was underway, he fell in love with a young woman of the place and urged his parents to arrange a marriage with her for him. They refused, because she was not of his own people, but since God intended this marriage for the advantage of the Hebrews, his desire prevailed and he became engaged to the girl.
Going often to visit her parents, he came upon a lion and, though unarmed, met it and strangled it with his bare hands, then threw the carcass into a wooded spot off the road. Going again to see the girl, he found a swarm of bees that had nested in the lion's carcass, and taking three honeycombs along with the other gifts he was bringing, he gave them to the girl.
At the wedding feast — for he entertained all the Thamnites — thirty of the sturdiest young men were given to him, ostensibly as companions but in fact as guards, for fear of the young man's strength, in case he should try to cause trouble. As the drinking went on and there was joking, as usually happens on such occasions, Samson said, "But let me put a riddle to you: if you solve it within seven days of searching, I will give each of you linen garments and robes as the prize for your cleverness." Eager both to seem clever and to win the prize, they asked him to state it. He said that the all-devouring had produced from itself something sweet to eat, though it was itself thoroughly repellent.
When for three days they were unable to find the answer, they urged the girl to learn it from her husband and reveal it to them, and indeed they threatened to burn her if she failed to do this. Samson, when the girl begged him to tell her, at first tried to hold out, but when she pressed him and broke into tears, taking this refusal to speak as proof of his ill will toward her, he told her about his killing of the lion and how he had taken from it three honeycombs and brought them to her. She, suspecting nothing treacherous, revealed the whole matter, and she in turn disclosed the answer to those who had begged it of her.
So on the seventh day, on which the riddle had to be explained to him, before the sun set they came together and said, "Nothing is more repellent to those who encounter it than a lion, and nothing sweeter to those who taste it than honey." And Samson said, "Nothing is more treacherous than a woman, since she is the one who has revealed our secret to you." He gave them what he had promised, having made spoil of the Ascalonites who happened to meet him along the road — for they too are Philistines. But he renounced that marriage, and the girl, despising him for his anger, lived instead with his friend, the one who had acted as his groomsman.
Enraged at this insult, Samson resolved to take vengeance on all the Philistines together with her. It was summer, and the crops were already ripe for harvest, so he caught three hundred foxes, tied lighted torches to their tails, and released them into the fields of the Philistines. The crop was destroyed in this way, and when the Philistines learned that this was Samson's work and the reason he had done it, they sent their leaders to Thamna and burned alive the woman who had been his wife, together with her relatives, as being responsible for the disaster.
Samson killed many Philistines on the plain and then settled at Etam, a fortified rock in the territory of Judah. The Philistines marched against that tribe. When the men of Judah protested that it was unjust to make them pay the penalty for Samson's offenses when they themselves paid tribute, the Philistines said that, if they wished to be free of blame, they must hand Samson over to them. Wanting to avoid any charge against themselves, three thousand armed men came to the rock and, reproaching him for what he had dared against the Philistines — men able to bring disaster on the whole race of the Hebrews — said they had come to seize him and hand him over, and they urged him to submit to this willingly.
He, after taking oaths from them that they would do nothing further to him themselves but only deliver him into the hands of the enemy, came down from the rock and placed himself in the power of his own tribesmen. They bound him with two new ropes and led him off to hand him over to the Philistines. When they reached a place now called Jawbone because of the feat of valor Samson performed there — though before that it had no name — with the Philistines encamped not far off, coming out to meet him with joy and shouting as though their wishes had been accomplished, Samson snapped his bonds, snatched up a donkey's jawbone lying at his feet, charged the enemy, and, striking them with the jawbone, killed about a thousand of them, and put the rest to flight in confusion.
But Samson, thinking too highly of himself for this deed, said that it had not come about through God's cooperation but credited his own courage for what had happened, boasting that some of the enemy had fallen and others had fled from fear of him alone. Then, overtaken by a violent thirst, he came to recognize that human excellence is nothing before God, and he confessed all of this and pleaded that God, not taking his words in anger, should not deliver him into the hands of the enemy, but should provide help against his distress and rescue him from his trouble.
Moved by his supplication, God sent up a sweet and abundant spring from a certain rock, and for this reason Samson called the place Jawbone, and it is still called that to this day. After this battle, Samson, holding the Philistines in contempt, went to Gaza and stayed in one of the inns there. When the leaders of Gaza learned of his presence there, they set an ambush before the gates so that he would not slip away unnoticed when he left. Samson, however — for their scheme did not escape him — rose about the middle of the night, tore loose the gates together with their very doorposts and bars and all the other woodwork around them, hoisted the whole mass onto his shoulders, and carried it to the mountain above Hebron, where he set it down.
He had by now begun to transgress the customs of his fathers and to corrupt his own way of life through imitation of foreign practices, and this became for him the beginning of disaster. Falling in love with a woman among the Philistines who worked as a prostitute, named Delilah, he lived with her. The leaders of the Philistine community came to her and, with promises, persuaded her to learn from Samson the source of the strength that made him unassailable by his enemies.
Over wine and in their intimacy she pretended to marvel at his exploits and worked to discover by what means he so surpassed others in strength. Samson, still keeping his wits about him, deceived her in turn, saying that if he were bound with seven fresh vine-withes still supple enough to be twisted around him, he would become weaker than any man. She said nothing for the moment, but having reported this to the Philistine leaders, she stationed some soldiers inside the house and, while he was drunk, bound him tightly with the withes in the strongest manner she could, then woke him and told him that some men were coming upon him. He snapped the withes and tried to defend himself as though enemies were indeed attacking.
When Samson kept coming to her, the woman said it was a terrible thing that, out of distrust in his affection for her, he would not tell her what she asked, since she would not keep silent about anything he thought it better she not know. When he deceived her again, saying he would lose his strength if bound with seven new ropes, and this too, when tried, achieved nothing, she pressed him a third time, and he told her that if his hair were woven together it would take away his strength. When this too proved false,
at her final pleading Samson — for he was fated to meet with disaster — wishing to gratify Delilah, said: "God cares for me, and, having been born by his providence, I grow this hair because God commanded that it not be cut; for my strength depends on its growing and remaining uncut." Learning this, and cutting off his hair, she handed him over to the enemy, no longer strong enough to fend off their assault. They gouged out his eyes and led him off in bonds.
As time passed, Samson's hair grew back. During a public festival of the Philistines, when their leaders and most prominent men were feasting together in a hall supported by two pillars, Samson was sent for and brought into the banquet so that they could mock him over their drinking. He, considering it a worse misfortune not to be able to avenge himself for the abuse than the abuse itself, persuaded the boy who guided him by the hand — saying he needed to rest from weariness — to bring him close to the pillars. When he arrived there, he threw himself against them, and the house collapsed as the pillars gave way, killing three thousand men, all of whom died, and Samson among them.
Such was the end that overtook him, after he had led the Israelites for twenty years. It is right to admire the man for his courage, his strength, and the greatness of spirit he showed at his death, as well as the anger he maintained against his enemies right up to the moment of dying. His capture through a woman ought to be attributed to human nature, which is too weak to resist such faults, but this should not obscure the credit due to him for his surpassing excellence in everything else. His relatives took up his body and buried it in Zorah, his homeland, with the tombs of his ancestors.
After Samson's death, Eli the high priest became leader of the Israelites. In his time, when the land was suffering from famine, a man named Elimelech from Bethlehem — a city belonging to the tribe of Judah — unable to bear the hardship, moved with his wife Naomi and the sons born to him by her, Chilion and Mahlon, to the land of Moab. As his affairs prospered there, he took Moabite wives for his sons, Orpah for Chilion and Ruth for Mahlon. Ten years later, Elimelech and, soon after him, his sons died one after another,
and Naomi, grieving bitterly over what had happened and unable to bear the loss of her loved ones before her eyes — the very reason she had left her homeland — decided to return to it, since she had now heard that things there had turned out well. Her daughters-in-law could not bear to be separated from her, and though she urged them not to, she could not persuade them to give up their wish to go with her. But as they pressed her, she prayed that they might find a happier marriage than the one they had missed with her own sons, and the acquisition of other blessings, given how matters stood for her, and urged them to remain there rather than share in uncertain fortunes by abandoning their native land. So Orpah stayed, but Ruth would not be persuaded, and Naomi took her along to share whatever fate might bring. When Ruth arrived with her mother-in-law in
Bethlehem, Boaz, a relative of Elimelech, received them as guests. When people greeted Naomi by name, she said, "You should more rightly call me Mara," for in the Hebrew tongue Naomi means good fortune, and Mara means grief. When the harvest came, Ruth went out to glean, with her mother-in-law's permission, so that they might have food, and she happened to come to the field of Boaz. Soon after, Boaz arrived
and, seeing the girl, asked the field overseer about her. The overseer, having already learned everything from her a little earlier, told his master. Boaz, out of goodwill toward the mother-in-law and in memory of her son, whom Ruth had married, greeted her and prayed that good fortune would come to her; he did not think it fitting that she should merely glean, but allowed her to reap whatever she could and
to keep it, instructing the overseer not to hinder her from taking grain and to provide her with food and drink whenever he fed the reapers. Ruth took the grain he gave her and kept it for her mother-in-law, and came home late bringing it along with the ears she had gleaned. Naomi too had saved her portions of certain foods with which the neighbors had looked after her. Ruth told her also what Boaz had said to her.
When Naomi learned that he was a relative and might well, out of piety, look after them, Ruth went out again on the following days to gather ears of grain along with the maidservants of Boaz. Not many days later, Boaz himself came and, since the barley had already been threshed, lay down to sleep on the threshing floor. Learning of this, Naomi contrived to have Ruth lie down near him,
for she said it would turn out well for them if he came to know the girl, and she sent her to sleep at his feet. Ruth, considering it improper to object to anything her mother-in-law commanded, went and for a time escaped the notice of Boaz, who was sleeping deeply; but waking around midnight and becoming aware of someone lying beside him, he asked who it was. When she
told him her name and said that her master permitted this, he then kept quiet, but early, before the servants began to stir for work, he woke her and told her to take as much barley as she could carry and go to her mother-in-law before anyone saw that she had been sleeping there, since it was prudent to guard against slander on such matters, especially about things that had not happened. "But concerning the whole matter," he said,
"it will be settled thus: I will ask the man who is my nearest relative whether he needs you as a wife, and if he says yes, you will follow him, but if he declines, according to the law I will take you as my own." When she told this to her mother-in-law, good cheer took hold of them in the hope that Boaz would look after them. And he, when the day was already half over, went down into the city, gathered the elders,
and, sending for Ruth, called the kinsman as well; and when he arrived, Boaz said, "Do you hold the inheritance of Elimelech and his sons?" When he agreed that the laws permitted this by right of kinship, Boaz said, "Then it is not right to remember only half the laws, but to do everything according to them. For a woman has come here from Moab, and if you wish to hold the fields, you must marry her,"
according to the laws. He ceded to Boaz both the inheritance and the woman, since Boaz too was a relative of the dead, but he said that he himself already had a wife and children. So Boaz, calling the elders to witness, told the woman to come forward, remove his sandal, according to the law, and spit in his face. When this was done, Boaz married
Boaz married Ruth, and after a year a son was born to them. Naomi, who nursed him, on the advice of the women named him Obed, since he was to be raised for her support in old age — for "Obed" in the Hebrew tongue means "one who serves." To Obed was born a son, Jesse, and to Jesse, David, who became king and left the rule to his own descendants for twenty-one generations of men. I have told the story of Ruth as a matter of necessity, wishing to show the power of God, that he is able to advance even ordinary people to splendid rank, as he raised up David from such origins.
The Hebrews, now that their affairs had again taken a turn for the worse, went to war once more with the Philistines, for the following reason. Eli the high priest had two sons, Hophni and Phinehas. These men, insolent toward their fellow men and impious toward the divine, abstained from no wrongdoing: some of the offerings they took as their due honor, but others they seized outright as plunder, and the women who came to worship they abused, forcing themselves on some and seducing others with gifts. Their way of life fell short of tyranny in nothing. Their father himself was deeply troubled by this, expecting that punishment from God would come upon them at any moment for what they were doing, and the people at large were distressed as well. And when God revealed to his servants Eli and the young prophet Samuel the disaster that was coming, Eli then openly mourned over his sons.
But I wish first to relate the story of the prophet before going on to tell what happened to Eli's sons and the calamity that befell the whole people of the Hebrews.
Elkanah, a Levite, a man of middling standing among the citizens of the tribal portion of Ephraim, who lived in the city of Ramathaim, had married two wives, Hannah and Peninnah. By the latter he had children, but the other, who was childless, he continued to love. When Elkanah went up with his wives to the city of Shiloh to sacrifice — for the tabernacle of God had been set up there, as we have said before — and again, at the feast, as he was distributing portions of meat to the wives and children, Hannah, seeing the other wife's children seated about their mother, burst into tears and lamented her own childlessness and isolation. Overcoming her husband's attempts to console her grief, she went to the tabernacle to entreat God to grant her offspring and make her a mother, promising to dedicate her firstborn to the service of God, to live a manner of life unlike that of ordinary people.
While she spent a long time at her prayers, Eli the high priest — for he sat before the tabernacle — supposing her drunk, ordered her to leave. She replied that she had drunk only water, but that, grieved at her want of children, she was entreating God. Eli then encouraged her to take heart, declaring that God would grant her children. Returning to her husband full of hope, she took food joyfully, and when they had gone back to their homeland she conceived, and a son was born to them, whom they named Samuel — one might render it "asked of God."
They came, then, to offer sacrifice for the child's birth and to bring the tithes. And the woman, remembering the vow she had made concerning the child, handed him over to Eli, dedicating him to God to become a prophet. His hair was accordingly left uncut, and his drink was water. And Samuel was raised, living in the temple, while to Elkanah, by Hannah, sons were born as well, and three daughters. When Samuel had already completed his twelfth year, he began to prophesy.
Once, as he lay sleeping, God called him by name. Thinking he had been summoned by the high priest, he came to him. But when the high priest said he had not called him, God did this a third time. Then Eli, enlightened, said to him, "I, Samuel, have kept silence as before, but it is God who is calling. Answer him, and say that I am here."
And when God spoke again, Samuel, having heard, asked leave to speak of what he had been told, for he said he would not fail those who asked of him whatever service they wished. And God said, "Since you are here, learn of a disaster that is to come upon the Israelites, greater than words and beyond the belief of those who hear of it: the sons of Eli will die on a single day, and the priesthood will pass to the house of Eleazar, for Eli loved his sons more than my service and against their own good."
Eli forced the prophet under oath to tell him these things, for Samuel had not wished to grieve him by speaking; and thereby he came to hold an even firmer expectation of the loss of his children. Samuel's reputation grew ever greater, as all that he had prophesied was seen to come true.
At that time the Philistines took the field against the Israelites and encamped near the city of Aphek. The Israelites went out to meet them after a short delay, and on the following day they engaged; the Philistines won, and killed about four thousand of the Hebrews, and pursued the rest of the host to their camp. Fearing for their whole cause, the Hebrews sent to the elders and the high priest, ordering that the ark of God be brought, so that with it present they might overpower their enemies in battle — not knowing that he who had decreed their disaster was greater than the ark, on whose account the ark's presence would come to nothing.
So the ark came, and with it the sons of the high priest, their father having instructed them, if they wished to live should the ark be taken, not to appear before him again. Phinehas was already serving as priest, his father having yielded the office to him because of his old age. Great courage now came upon the Hebrews, as though through the ark's arrival they would prevail over their enemies, while the enemies were struck with dread, fearing the ark's presence among the Israelites. Yet the outcome did not match either side's expectations: when the armies met, the victory the Hebrews had hoped for went to the Philistines, and the defeat the Philistines had feared, the Hebrews suffered, and learned that they had put their trust in the ark in vain. For they were at once routed when they came to close quarters with the enemy, and lost about thirty thousand men, among whom fell the sons of the high priest as well, and the ark was carried off by the enemy.
When the defeat was reported at Shiloh, and the capture of the ark — for a young man of Benjamin came to them as messenger, having been present at what had happened — the whole city was filled with mourning. And Eli the high priest, who sat by one of the gates on a lofty seat, hearing the wailing and supposing that something more serious had happened to his own household, sent for the young man; and when he learned the outcome of the battle, he bore it more easily, since he had already learned from God what would happen to his sons around the camp and had foretold it — for foreknowledge lessens the sting of misfortunes that come as expected. But when he heard that the ark too had been captured by the enemy, overwhelmed by grief at this blow falling upon him against all hope, he fell backward from his seat and died, having lived ninety-eight years in all, of which he had held the office forty.
On that same day there also died the wife of his son Phinehas, unable to go on living after her husband's misfortune. Word of what had befallen her husband reached her while she was pregnant, and she gave birth to a seven-month child, who, when he lived, they named Ichabod — the name signifying "without glory," on account of the disgrace that had then fallen upon the army.
Eli was the first to rule as high priest from the house of Ithamar, the other son of Aaron; for the house of Eleazar had held the priesthood first, a son receiving the honor from his father — Eleazar handed it down to his son Phinehas, after whom Abiezer, his son, received the honor and left it to his own son, named Bukki, from whom it passed to Uzzi, his son, after whom Eli held the priesthood, of whom our account now speaks; and the line from him continued down to the time of Solomon's reign. Then the house of Eleazar recovered it once more.

======== Antiquities — Book 6 ========

a. Destruction of the Palestinians and their land through the wrath of God, on account of the ark taken captive by them, and how they sent it back to the Hebrews. b. Campaign of the Palestinians against them and victory of the Hebrews under the generalship of the prophet Samuel. c. How Samuel, weakened by old age, handed over the administration of affairs to his sons. d. How, because they governed badly, the people in anger demanded to be ruled by a king. e. Samuel's indignation at this, and the appointment of a king for them, Saul by name, at God's command. f. Saul's campaign against the nation of the Ammonites, and victory, and plunder of the enemy. g. How the Palestinians, having again taken the field against the Hebrews, were defeated. h. Saul's war against the Amalekites, and victory.
i. That when Saul transgressed the prophet's commands, Samuel secretly appointed another king, David by name, by God's commission. j. How the Palestinians again made war on the Hebrews, while Saul was still king. k. The single combat of David then against Goliath, the champion of the Palestinians, and the killing of Goliath, and the defeat of the Palestinians. l. How Saul, admiring David's courage, gave him his daughter in marriage. m. That after this the king, having come to suspect David, was eager to kill him. n. How David, though often in danger of death at Saul's hands, escaped, and though Saul twice fell into his power so that he might have killed him, David did not do so. o. How, when the Palestinians again took the field against the Hebrews, the Hebrews were defeated in the battle, and their king Saul died fighting along with his sons. The book covers a span of thirty-two years.
Having taken the ark of their enemies captive, as we said a little earlier, the Palestinians carried it to the city of Azotus and set it beside their own god - he was called Dagon - like some kind of spoil. The next day, at daybreak, when everyone went into the temple to worship the god, they found him lying before the ark: he had fallen from the pedestal on which he regularly stood. They picked him up and set him upright on it again, distressed at what had happened. But when they kept returning to Dagon and again and again found him lying in the same posture, prostrate before the ark, they fell into terrible perplexity and confusion.
In the end the divine visited destruction and disease upon the city of the Azotians and their land: they were dying of dysentery, a painful affliction bringing on a most excruciating death - worse than a natural release of the soul from the body - for they vomited up their own internal organs, eaten away and utterly ruined by the disease. Meanwhile the countryside was overrun by a plague of mice that came up out of the ground and destroyed both the crops and the fruit trees, sparing nothing.
In the midst of these disasters the people of Azotus, unable to bear their misfortunes any longer, understood that these things had come upon them from the ark, and that its capture and the victory that had brought it had not turned out to be a blessing. So they sent to the people of Ascalon, asking them to receive the ark among themselves.
The Ascalonites did not find the request of the Azotians displeasing, and they granted them the favor; but once they had received the ark, they fell into the same terrible troubles, for the ark brought with it to those who received it from the Azotians the same afflictions the Azotians had suffered. So the Ascalonites in turn sent it on to others. Nor did it remain with them either, for driven by the same afflictions they passed it on to the neighboring cities.
In this way the ark made its way around the five cities of the Palestinians, exacting from each, as it were, a tribute for the visit it paid them - the very sufferings they endured on its account. Worn out by these evils, those who had experienced them, and a lesson to those who merely heard of them, resolved never again to receive the ark among themselves at such a price and such a cost, and from then on they sought some device and means of ridding themselves of it.
The rulers of the five cities - Gath, Ekron, Ascalon, and also Gaza and Azotus - came together to consider what should be done. At first it seemed best to send the ark back to its own people, on the ground that God was championing it and that the disasters had accompanied it and invaded their cities together with it. But there were some who said this should not be done, and that they should not be deceived into blaming the ark for their misfortunes; for it did not possess such power and strength on its own - God would never have allowed it, had he cared for it, to fall into human hands. They urged that the people remain calm and bear what had happened with patience, reckoning the cause of these things to be nothing other than nature itself, which, over the cycles of time, produces such changes in bodies, in the earth, in plants, and in everything composed of these elements.
But the counsel of men who in earlier times had been trusted for their good sense and prudence, and who were regarded as such then above all, prevailed over the opinions just mentioned, as fitting the present circumstances. They said the ark should be neither sent away nor kept, but that five golden statues should be set up, one for each city, as a thank-offering to God, because he had taken thought for their safety and had preserved them in life even while pursuing them with sufferings they could no longer withstand; and that they should also make an equal number of golden mice, matching those that had overrun and ruined the land. Then they should put these into a chest, place it on the ark, and build a new cart for it, yoking to it cows newly delivered of their calves. The calves themselves they should shut up and keep back, so that the cows, not hindered by following after their calves, would move all the more eagerly out of longing for them. Then, having driven the cows off pulling the ark, they should leave them at a crossroads and let them go whichever road they chose. If they went off toward the land of the Hebrews and went up into their country, that would show the ark was the cause of their troubles; but if they turned onto another road, they said, 'we will pursue and recover it,' since they would then know it had no such power at all.
They judged that this had been well proposed, and at once put the plan into effect. Having done as had been said, they drove the cart to the crossroads and, leaving it there, withdrew. The cows went straight ahead as if someone were leading them, and the rulers of the Palestinians followed to learn where they would stop and to whom they would come.
Now there is a village of the tribe of Judah called Bethshemesh; to this the cows came, and when a large, fine plain opened before their path they stopped, going no further, and halted the cart there. It was a sight for the people of the village, and they were filled with joy: for it was summer, harvest time, and everyone was out in the fields gathering in the crops; when they saw the ark they were seized with delight, dropped their work at once, and ran straight to the cart.
Taking down the ark and the chest that held the statues and the mice, they set them on a certain rock that was in the plain, and after offering a splendid sacrifice to God and feasting, they burned the cart and the cows whole as a burnt offering. When the rulers of the Palestinians saw this, they turned back.
But the anger and wrath of God overtook seventy of the people of the village of Bethshemesh, who were not worthy to touch the ark - for they were not priests - and who had approached it; he struck them down and killed them. The villagers mourned this suffering that had befallen their fellows and raised such lamentation as was fitting for a calamity sent by God, each bewailing his own dead. Declaring themselves unworthy to have the ark remain among them, they sent word to the community of the Hebrews, informing them that the ark had been given back by the Palestinians. When the Hebrews learned of this, they carried it off to Kiriath-jearim, a city neighboring the village of Bethshemesh.
There, a certain Levite named Abinadab, a man reputed for his righteousness and piety of life, took the ark into his house, as into a place befitting God, in which a righteous man dwelt. His sons cared for the ark and were in charge of this office for twenty years; for that was how long it remained at Kiriath-jearim, having spent four months among the Palestinians.
During that whole period, while the ark remained in the city of the men of Kiriath-jearim, the entire people turned to prayers and sacrifices to God, showing much devotion and zeal toward him. The prophet Samuel, seeing their eagerness, thought it a fit moment to speak to men in this frame of mind about freedom and the blessings it brings, and he used words which he thought would best win over their minds and persuade them.
'Men,' he said, 'for whom the Palestinian enemy is still a heavy burden, while God is beginning to grow gracious and friendly toward you, you must not only desire freedom, but also do what will bring it to you. It is not enough to wish to be rid of your masters while continuing to act in ways that will keep them in power over you. Instead, become righteous, cast wickedness out of your souls, and having purified them with your whole minds turn to God and continue to honor him; for if you do this, good things will come to you: release from servitude and victory over your enemies - things that cannot be won by weapons, or by bodily strength, or by numbers of allies. For it is not to these that God promises to grant such things, but to those who are good and righteous. I myself stand surety for his promises.'
When he had said this, the people acclaimed him, pleased with his exhortation, and pledged to make themselves acceptable to God. Samuel then gathered them at a certain city called Mizpah - which, in the language of the Hebrews, means 'watchtower' - and there, having drawn water, they poured it out as a libation to God, and after fasting the whole day they turned to prayer.
Their gathering there did not go unnoticed by the Palestinians; on learning of this assembly, they marched against the Hebrews with a large army and force, hoping to fall upon them while they neither expected nor were prepared for it. This news struck the Hebrews with terror and threw them into confusion and fear, and they ran to Samuel, saying that their spirits had sunk with fear and from their previous defeat, and that this was why they had kept quiet, so as not to stir up the enemy's forces; yet even though you led us up to prayers and sacrifices and oaths, the enemy has marched against us while we are unarmed and defenseless. We have no other hope of safety than you alone, and God, entreated by you, to grant us escape from the Palestinians.
Samuel urged them to take courage, and promised that God would come to their aid; and taking a suckling lamb, he sacrificed it on behalf of the people and called on God to stretch out his right hand over them in the battle against the Palestinians, and not to overlook them a second time in misfortune. God heard his prayers, and accepting the sacrifice with a kindly and allied disposition, granted them victory and mastery.
While the sacrifice was still on the altar, and had not yet been entirely consumed by the sacred flame, the enemy's force advanced out of their camp and drew up for battle, hoping for victory, since they supposed the Jews were caught helpless, having neither weapons nor having come there expecting battle. But they met with things that no one, however persuasively he had foretold them, would easily have believed. For first God threw them into confusion with an earthquake, shaking the ground beneath them and making it unstable and treacherous, so that as it heaved, the ground gave way under their footing, and where it split apart they were swallowed into some of the chasms; then, thundering upon them and flashing blinding lightning around them as if to burn up their eyes, and striking the weapons from their hands, he turned them, stripped of arms, to flight.
Samuel then went out with the people, and after slaughtering many, pursued them as far as a place called Corraeus. There he set up a stone as a boundary marker of the victory and of the enemy's flight, calling it 'Strong,' a symbol of the strength given them by God against their enemies. After that blow, they no longer made war on the Israelites but kept quiet, out of fear and the memory of what had happened; and the confidence the Palestinians had long held over the Hebrews now belonged, after this victory, to the Hebrews instead.
Samuel led a campaign against them, killed many, utterly humbled their pride, and took back the territory which they had earlier seized from the Jews when they defeated them in battle - territory that stretched all the way to the city of Ekron from the borders of Gath. At that time what remained of the Canaanites was on friendly terms with the Israelites.
The prophet Samuel, having set the people in order and restored a city to them, ordered that when they came together they should settle their disputes with one another there, while he himself went about the cities year by year, judged their cases, and administered good government for a long time.
Afterward, weighed down by old age and hindered from carrying out his usual duties, he handed over the rule and leadership of the nation to his sons, of whom the elder was called Joel and the younger Abiah. He assigned the one to sit and judge in the city of Bethel, and divided the people who were to obey each between them, appointing the other to Beersheba.
These two became a clear example and proof that some children do not turn out like the character of their parents, but sometimes prove themselves good and moderate though born of wicked ones, and at other times, as happened then, base though born of good ones; for turning aside from their father's practices and going down the opposite path, they let justice go for the sake of shameful gifts and gains, and rendered their judgments not according to truth but according to profit, inclining toward luxury and extravagant living. In this they acted, first, in opposition to God, and second, to the prophet who was their father, a man who had shown great zeal and care that the people should be just. The people, angered at the outrages committed against the former order and constitution by the prophet's sons...
the burden they placed on him, they ran to him — he was living in the city of Ramah — and told him of his sons' lawless conduct, and said that he himself was now old and worn down by time and could no longer stand at the head of affairs in the same way. They begged and pleaded with him to appoint one of themselves as king, who would rule the nation and exact justice from the Philistines, who still owed them a reckoning for their earlier wrongs.
These words distressed Samuel deeply, both because of his innate sense of justice and because of his hatred of kings; he was strongly devoted to aristocracy, believing it made those who lived under it godlike and blessed. Under the weight of anxiety and torment over what had been said, he took no thought for food or sleep, but spent the whole night turning over in his mind the questions these affairs raised.
While he was in this state, God appeared to him and told him not to be troubled that the people had made this demand, since it was not him they meant to slight but themselves, in refusing to have God alone as their king. This, God said, was the very thing they had been scheming ever since the day he brought them out of Egypt; before long they would come to a painful repentance, from which nothing that was destined to happen would fail to occur. They would be shown to have acted with contempt and to have taken counsel that was ungrateful both toward God and toward Samuel's own prophetic office. "I therefore command you to appoint for them whomever I designate as king, but first to warn them plainly what evils they will suffer under kingship, and to bear witness against the change they are so eager for." On hearing this, Samuel agreed to appoint them a king, and at dawn he called the Judeans together and said
that he must first describe to them what would come from kings and how many evils would befall them. "Know that first they will tear your children away from you: some they will make drive chariots, others they will make cavalry and bodyguards, others runners, commanders of a thousand, and commanders of a hundred. They will make some craftsmen, armorers, chariot-builders, and makers of instruments of war, farmers and overseers of their own fields, and diggers in vineyards — and there is nothing they will not compel you to do, as though you were slaves bought with silver. Your daughters they will turn into perfumers, cooks, and bakers, and every task that maidservants perform under compulsion, fearing blows and torment, they will be made to perform. Your property they will seize and give to their eunuchs and bodyguards, and the herds of your flocks they will assign to their own men.
In short, you will be enslaved, with everything that is yours, to the king, alongside his own servants. And when this happens, the memory of these words will come back to you, and suffering these things you will change your minds and beg God to have mercy on you and grant you swift release from your kings — but he will not receive your pleas; instead he will turn you away and let you pay the penalty for your own ill counsel."
Yet even against these predictions of what was to come, the people proved thoughtless, and it was hard to dislodge from their minds a judgment already fixed there by their own reasoning; they paid no heed and took no account of Samuel's words, but pressed on stubbornly, insisting that a king be appointed at once and that no thought be given to the future. It was necessary, they said, to have someone to fight alongside them in taking vengeance on their enemies, and there was nothing strange in their wanting the same form of government as the neighboring peoples who had kings. Seeing that they were not turned aside even by what he had said, but persisted, Samuel said, "For now, each of you go home; I will summon you again when the need arises, once I learn from God whom he gives you as king."
Now there was a man of the tribe of Benjamin, well born and good in character, named Kish. He had a son who was a young man outstanding in appearance, great in stature, and superior in spirit and understanding to all who saw him; they called him Saul. This Kish, when some fine donkeys of his had strayed from pasture — for he took more delight in them than in any other of his possessions — sent his son
together with one servant to search for the animals. When the young man had gone through his own tribal territory and reached the others without success, he had decided to turn back, so as not to leave his father any further cause for worry about him. But when the servant who was following him, as they came near the city of Ramah, said that there was a true prophet in that city and advised going to him — for they would learn from him the outcome of the matter of the donkeys — Saul said that if they went they would have nothing to give the prophet in exchange for his prophecy, since their provisions were now exhausted.
When the servant said he had a quarter-shekel on him and would give it — for in their ignorance they supposed the prophet took payment — they went on and, meeting near the gates some young women going out for water, asked them where the prophet's house was. The women told them, and urged them to hurry before he took his place at dinner, for he was entertaining many guests, who would recline before he did. Samuel had in fact gathered many people to the feast that day for this reason: when he had begged God every day to tell him in advance whom he would make king, God had revealed to him the day before that he would send
a young man from the tribe of Benjamin at just this hour. Samuel himself had been sitting on the rooftop awaiting the appointed time, and when it arrived he came down and set out for the dinner. He met Saul, and God signaled to him that this was the one destined to rule. Saul approached Samuel, greeted him, and asked him to point out the prophet's house, saying that as a stranger he did not know it.
When Samuel told him that he himself was the man, and led him toward the dinner, telling him also that the donkeys he had been sent to search for were safe and that every good thing had now been decreed for him, Saul, meeting this, said, "But I am unworthy of such a hope, my lord — my tribe is smaller than the others fit to produce kings, and my clan is lowlier than the rest. You are mocking me, making me a laughing-stock, speaking of things too great for my station." But the prophet led him to the feast and seated him, along with his attendant, above the other guests — who numbered seventy in all — and ordered the servants to set before Saul the king's portion. When the hour for sleep came, the others rose and each went off to his own home,
but Saul, with his servant, spent the night at the prophet's house. At daybreak Samuel roused him from his bed and set him on his way; and when they had come outside the city, he told the servant to go on ahead and had Saul remain behind, saying he had something to tell him with no one else present. So Saul sent his attendant off, and the prophet, taking the sacred
oil, poured it over the young man's head, and kissing him said, "Know that you are king, appointed by God, against the Philistines and for the defense of the Hebrews. And this shall be the sign I want you to know beforehand: when you leave here, you will come upon three men on the road going up to Bethel to worship God — the first you will see carrying three loaves,
the second a kid, and the third will follow bearing a skin of wine. They will greet you warmly and give you two of the loaves, and you shall take them. From there you will come to the place called Rachel's Tomb, where you will meet a man bringing you the good news that your donkeys are found. Then, going on from there to Gibeah, you will fall in with a company of prophets, and being seized by the divine spirit you will prophesy along with them, so that
everyone who sees it will be astonished and amazed, and will say, 'Where has this happened that the son of Kish has come to such fortune?' And when these signs have come to pass for you, know that God is with you. Greet your father and your kinsmen. You will come to me again, summoned to Gilgal, so that we may offer thank offerings to God for these things." Having said this and foretold these things, he sent
the young man away, and everything happened to Saul just as Samuel had prophesied. When he came to the house of his kinsman Abner — for he loved him more than his other relatives — and Abner questioned him about his journey and all that had happened to him, he hid nothing else from him, neither that he had gone to Samuel the prophet nor that Samuel had told him
the donkeys were found; but about the kingship and everything connected with it — which he thought, if heard, would arouse only envy and disbelief — he said nothing to him, judging it neither safe nor wise to reveal it even to a man who seemed most devoted to him and was loved by him more than his own blood relatives. I think he reasoned about human nature as it truly is — that no one, not friend nor kinsman, keeps his goodwill firm even in the face of another's brightest gifts from God, but men grow malicious and envious in the presence of another's advancement.
Samuel then called the people together at the city of Mizpah and addressed them, saying he spoke by God's command: that although God had given them freedom and had enslaved their enemies for them, they had forgotten his benefits, and
they were voting God out of the kingship, not realizing how greatly it profits to be governed by the best of all beings — and God is the best of all — choosing instead to have a man as king, who will treat those under him as his own property, acting according to his own will, desire, and every other impulse of passion, indulging his power without restraint, rather than laboring to preserve the human race as his own work and creation, the way God, precisely for that reason, cares for it.
"But since you have resolved on this, and your arrogance toward God has prevailed, take your places by tribes and clans and cast lots." When the Hebrews had done this, the lot fell to the tribe of Benjamin; and when that tribe was cast by lot, it fell to the clan called Matri; and when that clan was cast by lot man by man, it fell to
Saul, son of Kish, to be king. But when the young man learned of this, he made himself scarce beforehand, not wishing, I think, to appear to accept the office willingly; he showed such self-restraint and moderation that, whereas most men cannot contain their joy even at small pieces of good fortune, but rush to make themselves known to everyone, he not only showed nothing of the kind at being declared king
and made lord of nations so many and so great, but even hid himself from the sight of those who were to be ruled by him, and made them search for him and labor over it. While they were at a loss and anxious, since Saul had in fact vanished, the prophet implored God to show where he was and bring the young man into the open. Learning from God
the place where Saul was hiding, he sent men to bring him, and when he arrived Samuel set him in the midst of the assembly. He stood out above them all, and in height was every bit a king. The prophet said, "This is the man God has given you as king; see how he surpasses everyone and is worthy of the office." And when the people acclaimed the king with cries of "Long live the king," the prophet, having
written down what was to come, read it aloud with the king listening, and placed the scroll in the tent of God as a testimony for later generations of what he had foretold. Having completed this, Samuel dismissed the assembly and went himself to the city of Ramah, which was his home. As Saul went off to Gibeah, from which he came, many good men accompanied him,
paying him the honor due a king, but more men of a base sort, who despised him and mocked him before the crowd, neither bringing gifts nor troubling themselves to please Saul in word or deed. A month later, the war against Nahash, king of the Ammonites, began the honor that all would eventually pay him. This man had done much harm to those Judeans settled
across the Jordan, crossing over against them with a large and warlike army; he subdued their cities into slavery, overpowering them for the moment by force and violence, but also weakening them through cunning and calculation so that even if they later revolted they would be unable to escape servitude to him — for of those who came over to him under a pledge of good faith, or were taken
by the law of war, he gouged out their right eyes. He did this so that, with their left eye covered by their shields, they would be entirely useless in battle. Having done this, the king of the Ammonites marched against the people across the Jordan called the Gileadites, and encamping before the chief city of his enemies — Jabesh — sent envoys to them demanding that they surrender at once,
on condition that their right eyes be gouged out, or else he threatened to besiege them and raze their cities; the choice was theirs, whether they wished to give up some small part of the body or to perish altogether. Terrified, the men of Jabesh dared say nothing to either proposal, neither that they would surrender nor that they would fight, but asked for a truce of seven days
so that they might send envoys to their kinsmen and appeal to them for aid; if help came, they would fight, but if their situation proved hopeless, they said they would surrender themselves to suffer whatever he wished. Nahash, holding the multitude of the Gileadites and their answer in contempt, granted them the truce and permitted them to send
to whomever they wished for allies. They at once sent messengers through every city to the Israelites, who reported Nahash's terms and the desperate straits in which they stood. The people, on hearing this, were moved to tears and grief over the plight of the men of Jabesh, and fear allowed them to do nothing more than this. When the messengers had come also to the city of Saul the
king, and had told of the dangers the men of Jabesh faced, the people there suffered the same grief as the rest, for they mourned the calamity of their kinsmen. Saul, coming in from his work in the fields, found his fellow citizens in the city weeping, and asking the reason for their distress and dejection, learned the
When he heard what the messengers reported, Saul was seized by divine inspiration. He sent the men of Jabesh away, promising that he would come to their relief on the third day and would defeat the enemy before sunrise, so that when the sun rose it would find them already victorious and free of their fears; he told a few of them to stay behind to guide the way. Wanting to frighten the people into hastening more eagerly to the war against the Ammonites, he cut the sinews of his own oxen and threatened to do the same to the oxen of anyone who did not come armed to the Jordan by the next day and follow him and Samuel the prophet wherever they should lead. Fearing the punishment he had announced, the people assembled at the appointed time, and he mustered the multitude at the city of Bezek. He found the number, apart from the tribe of Judah, to be seven hundred thousand men gathered together, while that tribe alone numbered seventy thousand.
Crossing the Jordan and covering a distance of ten schoinoi in the course of a single night, he arrived before sunrise, divided his army into three companies, and fell upon the enemy suddenly from every side while they were off their guard. Joining battle, he killed many of the Ammonites, including their king Naas. This was a brilliant achievement for Saul, and it was reported to all the Hebrews, who praised him and admired him greatly for his courage; even those who had earlier despised him now changed their minds, honoring him and judging him the best of all men. Not content with having merely saved the men of Jabesh, he also marched against the territory of the Ammonites, subdued the whole of it, and returned home in triumph with a great quantity of plunder.
The people rejoiced at Saul's successes, glad that they had chosen such a man as king, and they shouted against those who had said he would be of no use to their affairs: "Where are those men now? Let them be punished" — and everything else that a crowd, elated by good fortune, is fond of saying against those who had recently belittled the men responsible for it. Saul welcomed their goodwill and their zeal on his behalf, but he swore that he would allow none of his countrymen to be put to death that day, for it was wrong, he said, to stain a victory given by God with the blood and murder of kinsmen on a day that should be spent in celebration.
Samuel then declared that Saul's kingship must be confirmed a second time by a fresh election, and everyone gathered at the city of Gilgal, for that is where he had told them to come. There, again in the sight of the assembled people, the prophet anointed Saul with the holy oil and proclaimed him king a second time. And so the constitution of the Hebrews changed into a monarchy. Under Moses and his disciple Joshua, who served as commander, they had continued to live under an aristocracy; after Joshua's death, for eighteen years in all, the people fell into anarchy. After that they returned to their former constitution, giving authority to whoever seemed best in war and bravest in judging disputes among the whole people — and for this reason they called that period of their government the age of the judges.
Samuel the prophet then called the Hebrews together in assembly and said: "I swear to you by the greatest God, who brought those brothers into being — I mean Moses and Aaron — and rescued our fathers from the Egyptians and their slavery, granting them nothing out of favor toward myself, holding back nothing out of fear, and yielding to no other feeling that might have kept them silent: tell me, if I have done anything base or unjust, or acted for gain or greed or favor toward others. Prove it, if I have ever taken so much as a calf or a sheep, which men think it no offense to take for food, or if I have ever seized anyone's beast of burden for my own use and wronged him by it — declare any one of these things now, in the presence of your king." They cried out that none of this had been done by him, but that he had presided over the nation with holiness and justice.
When Samuel had received this testimony from all of them, he said: "Since you have granted that you can say nothing improper about me, hear now what I have to say to you with all frankness: you have committed a great impiety against God in asking for a king. You ought to remember that our forefather Jacob came into Egypt because of famine with only seventy of our people, and that after many thousands had been born there, whom the Egyptians reduced to slavery and cruel outrage, God, in answer to our fathers' prayers, delivered the multitude from their distress without a king, sending them Moses and Aaron, brothers, who led you into this land which you now possess. Yet after enjoying all these benefits from God you have betrayed your worship and piety toward him.
"Nevertheless, when you fell into the hands of your enemies, he freed you — first from the Assyrians and their power, making you stronger than they were, and then giving you mastery over the Ammonites, the Moabites, and finally the Philistines. And you accomplished all this not under the leadership of a king, but under the command of Jephthah and Gideon. What madness, then, possessed you, to flee from God and desire to be ruled by a king? I myself have appointed the man God chose. But so that I may make plain to you that God is angry and displeased at your choosing a monarchy, I will ask him to show you this clearly through signs: something none of you has ever before seen happen in this place — winter weather in the height of summer. I will ask God to grant you this now, so that you may know it."
When Samuel had said this to the people, God signaled the truth of everything the prophet had said with thunder, lightning, and a fall of hail, so that they were struck with terror and overwhelmed with fear, confessed that they had sinned, and admitted that they had fallen into this through ignorance; and they begged the prophet, as a kind and gentle father, to make God favorable to them again and to forgive this sin, which they had committed on top of the other outrages and transgressions they had already perpetrated. He promised to entreat God on their behalf and to persuade him to pardon them for this, but he urged them to be just and good and always to remember the troubles that had befallen them for abandoning virtue, and to remember the signs of God and the legislation of Moses, if they desired safety and prosperity together with their king. But if they neglected these things, he told them, a great blow from God would come upon them and upon their king. Having prophesied these things to the Hebrews, Samuel dismissed them to their homes, having confirmed Saul's kingship a second time.
Saul then chose from among the people about three thousand men. Of these he kept two thousand with himself as a bodyguard and stayed in the city of Bethabo, while he gave the rest to his son Jonathan, sending him with them as his bodyguard to Geba. Jonathan besieged a Philistine garrison not far from Geba, for the Philistines, having subdued the Jews, had taken their weapons from them and occupied the strongest positions in the country with garrisons, and had forbidden them outright to carry or use iron. Because of this ban, whenever the farmers needed to repair one of their tools — a plowshare or a mattock or anything else useful for farming — they had to go to the Philistines to have it done. When the Philistines heard that their garrison had been destroyed, they were furious, regarding this contempt as a grave insult, and they marched against the Jews with three hundred thousand infantry, thirty thousand chariots, and six thousand cavalry.
When they encamped near the city of Michmash, Saul, king of the Jews, learned of it and went down to the city of Gilgal, and proclaimed throughout the whole country a call to the people to fight for their freedom against the Philistines, belittling their strength and dismissing it as not worth fearing or risking danger over. But when Saul's men saw the size of the Philistine force, they were terrified: some hid themselves in caves and underground passages, while most fled across the Jordan into the territory of Gad and Reuben. Saul sent for the prophet, summoning him to consult together about the war and the situation. Samuel told him to wait there and prepare sacrificial victims, for he would come to him after seven days, so that they might sacrifice on the seventh day and only then join battle with the enemy.
Saul waited as the prophet had instructed, but he did not keep to the command fully; when he saw that the prophet was delayed and that his soldiers were deserting him, he took the victims and performed the sacrifice himself. Just as he finished, he heard that Samuel was approaching and went out to meet him. Samuel told him he had not acted rightly in disregarding his instructions and anticipating his arrival, which was meant to take place according to God's will, in connection with the prayers and sacrifices offered on behalf of the people; Saul, he said, had usurped this by performing the sacrifice improperly and acting rashly. Saul defended himself, saying that he had waited the appointed number of days, but that necessity had driven him to hasten the sacrifice — his soldiers were deserting out of fear, the enemy was encamped at Michmash, and he had heard that they were coming down against him at Gilgal.
Samuel replied, "But if you had been righteous and had not disobeyed me, nor made light of what God instructed me concerning the present situation, acting more hastily than the circumstances warranted, you would have reigned for a very long time, both you and your descendants." And Samuel, grieved at what had happened, withdrew to his own home, while Saul went to the city of Gibeah, taking with him only six hundred men, along with his son Jonathan. Most of these had no weapons, since the country lacked iron and men able to forge weapons — for the Philistines did not allow this, as we have already explained a little earlier. The Philistines divided their army into three divisions and, advancing by as many roads, ravaged the country of the Hebrews, while Saul their king and his son Jonathan looked on, unable to defend the land, since they had only six hundred men with them.
Saul himself, his son, and the high priest Ahijah, a descendant of Eli the high priest, sat on a high hill, watching the land being plundered, in a state of terrible anguish. Saul's son made a plan with his armor-bearer: they would go secretly to the enemy's camp, rush in, and cause confusion and panic among them. When the armor-bearer said he would eagerly follow wherever he led, even if it meant death, Jonathan, taking the young man's cooperation, went down from the hill toward the enemy. The enemy's camp lay on a cliff, surrounded by three peaks tapering to sharp points, a rocky ridge encircling it like a natural rampart repelling any attack. Because of this the camp's guards had grown careless, since the place itself seemed to guarantee its own safety, and everyone thought it impossible not only to climb up but even to approach it.
When they reached the camp, Jonathan encouraged his armor-bearer, saying, "Let us attack the enemy. If they tell us to come up to them when they see us, take that as a sign of victory; but if they say nothing, as though not calling us, let us turn back." As they approached the camp, with daylight already breaking, the Philistines saw them and said to one another that the Hebrews were coming out of their underground hiding places and caves, and they called out to Jonathan and his armor-bearer, "Come up here to us, so that we may punish you as your daring deserves." Saul's son, welcoming these words as a sign of victory for him, at once withdrew from the spot where the enemy had seen them, and passing by it, came to the cliff face, which was left unguarded because of its natural defenses.
Climbing up from there with great effort, they forced their way up the difficult terrain to reach the enemy, and falling upon them while they slept, they killed about twenty men and filled the rest with confusion and panic, so that some fled, throwing away their armor, while most, unable to recognize one another — since the enemy force was made up of many different peoples — suspected each other, imagining that no more than two Hebrews had come up against them, and turned to fighting among themselves. Some of them died by each other's hands, while others, fleeing, were pushed off the cliffs and hurled down the rocks.
When Saul's scouts reported to the king that the Philistine camp was in turmoil, Saul asked whether any of his own men were missing. Learning that his son and his armor-bearer were absent, he ordered the high priest to take the priestly vestments and prophesy to him about what was to come. When the high priest declared that there would be victory and mastery over the enemy, Saul marched out against the Philistines, who were now in confusion, attacked them, and they began killing one another. Those who had earlier fled into the underground passages and caves now streamed to join him when they heard that Saul was winning, and when the Hebrews numbered about ten thousand, he pursued the enemy, now scattered across the whole countryside.
Whether it was because of the joy of so unexpected a victory — for it commonly happens that men overcome by such good fortune lose control of their judgment — or because of ignorance, Saul now fell into a grave error, one that brought him much blame: wanting to avenge himself and exact full punishment from the Philistines, he laid a curse on the Hebrews, that if anyone, instead of continuing to kill the enemy, stopped to eat before nightfall put an end to the slaughter and the pursuit of their enemies, that man would be accursed.
When Saul had pronounced this, they came into a deep forest, full of bees, in the territory allotted to Ephraim, and Saul's son, who had not heard his father's curse or the people's assent to it, pressed out a bit of honeycomb and ate it. Only afterward did he learn that his father had forbidden, under a terrible curse, anyone to taste food before the sun
He stopped eating, but said that his father had not acted rightly. If the men had taken food while pursuing, they would have caught and killed far more of the enemy, with greater strength and greater eagerness. And indeed, after cutting down many tens of thousands of the Philistines, toward evening the army turned to plunder the Philistine camp, and having seized much booty and livestock they slaughtered it and ate the meat with the blood still in it.
This was reported to the king by the scribes: that the people were sinning against God, sacrificing and eating before the blood had been properly drained and the flesh made clean. So Saul ordered a great stone rolled into the middle of the camp and proclaimed that the people should slaughter their offerings upon it and not consume the meat together with the blood, for this was not pleasing to God. When everyone had done as the king commanded, Saul set up an altar there and offered a whole burnt offering to God upon it—the first altar he built.
Wishing to lead the army at once against the enemy's camp to plunder what was in it before daybreak, and finding the soldiers in no way reluctant but showing great eagerness to do whatever he ordered, the king summoned the high priest Ahitob and bade him inquire whether God granted and permitted them to march against the enemy's camp and destroy those in it. But when the priest said that God was not answering, and not without cause, Saul said, "When we inquire, God gives us no reply—he who before this revealed everything to us of his own accord, even without our asking, and was quick to speak. There must be some hidden sin among us that is the cause of his silence. And I swear by him: even if it should be my own son Jonathan who has committed this sin, I will put him to death and thereby appease God, exactly as I would if the guilty man belonged to another and had nothing to do with me, and I were exacting justice on his account."
When the people cried out that this should be done, he at once made everyone stand in one place, and he himself with his son stood apart, and he sought by lot to learn who was guilty. The lot fell, it seemed, on Jonathan. Questioned by his father as to what wrong he had done and what in his conduct he was conscious of having performed neither rightly nor piously, he said, "Nothing else, father, except that yesterday, unaware of your curse and your oath, I tasted some honeycomb while pursuing the enemy." Saul swore to kill him, and he honored the oath above the ties of birth and natural affection. But Jonathan was not dismayed by the threat of death; bearing himself nobly and with high spirit he said, "I will not beg you to spare me, father. Death is sweetest to me when it comes for the sake of your piety and after so brilliant a victory, for it is the greatest consolation to leave the Hebrews masters of the Philistines."
At this the whole people grieved and shared his suffering, and swore that they would not stand by and let Jonathan, the author of the victory, be put to death. So they snatched him from his father's curse, and themselves offered prayers to God on the young man's behalf, that he might release him from his sin. Saul then returned to his own city, having destroyed about sixty thousand of the enemy.
He reigned prosperously, and by making war on the neighboring nations he subdued the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Philistines, the Idumeans, the Amalekites, and the king of Sobah. He had three sons—Jonathan, Jesus, and Melchisos—and two daughters, Merobe and Michal. His general was the son of his uncle, Abenner; that uncle was called Ner, and Ner and Kish, Saul's father, were brothers, sons of Abiel. Saul also had a great number of chariots and horsemen, and whomever he fought he departed from victorious. He raised the Hebrews to prosperity and greatness of good fortune and made them more powerful than the other nations, and from among the young men he made his bodyguard of those distinguished for stature and beauty.
Samuel then came to Saul and said he had been sent to him by God, to remind him that God had preferred him above all others and appointed him king, and that for this reason he must obey and be submissive to him—since Saul held command over the nations, but God held command over him and over all things. He said God spoke as follows: "Since the Amalekites did the Hebrews much harm in the wilderness, when they had come out of Egypt and were making their way to the land now theirs, I command you to punish the Amalekites in war, and having overpowered them, to leave none of them alive, but to go through every age, beginning with the women and infants, killing them, and to exact from them this vengeance for what they did to your forefathers; and to spare neither the beasts of burden nor the other livestock for your own use and possession, but to dedicate everything to God and, in obedience to the commands of Moses, to blot out the very name of Amalek."
Saul agreed to do what was commanded, and reckoning that obedience to God consisted not merely in undertaking the campaign against the Amalekites, but showed it still more by his readiness and speed, with no delay at all, he gathered his whole force and, numbering it at Gilgal, found the Israelites apart from the tribe of Judah to be about four hundred thousand; for that tribe alone furnished thirty thousand soldiers. Saul then invaded the territory of the Amalekites and set many ambushes and traps around the ravine, so that he might not only strike them down when they fought in the open but also fall upon them unexpectedly along the roads and destroy them by encirclement. Joining battle with them, he routed the enemy and destroyed them all as they fled, pursuing them.
When this campaign had proceeded according to God's prophecy, he attacked the cities of the Amalekites and took them, some by siege engines, some by tunneling mines and by building counter-walls outside, others by famine and thirst, and others by still other means, capturing them by force; and he proceeded to the slaughter of the women and infants, judging that in doing this he was committing nothing cruel or harsher than human nature allows—first, because he was doing it to enemies, and second, because it was by God's command, disobedience to which carried danger. He also took captive the king of the enemy, Agag, and, marveling at the beauty and stature of his body, judged him worthy of being spared—no longer acting in accordance with God's will, but overcome by his own feeling and yielding out of pity, unseasonably, in a matter over which he had no safe authority.
For God so hated the nation of the Amalekites that he commanded that not even the infants be spared, toward whom pity is most naturally felt by nature; yet Saul spared their king, the leader responsible for the wrongs done to the Hebrews, from the fate God had decreed for the memory of what he had commanded, setting the enemy's beauty above it. The people shared in his wrongdoing as well; for they too spared the beasts of burden and the livestock and carried them off as plunder, not keeping them for destruction as God had commanded, and they carried away the other goods and wealth, destroying only what was not worth the trouble of keeping.
Having conquered, Saul destroyed all the enemies from Pelusium in Egypt as far as the Red Sea, sparing only the nation of the Sikimites; for these dwelt in the midst of the land of Midian. Before the battle he had sent word ordering them to withdraw, so that they might not share in the Amalekites' disaster, for being kin of Raguel, the father-in-law of Moses, they had reason to be spared. Saul, then, as though he had disobeyed none of what the prophet had enjoined upon him when he was about to wage war against the Amalekites, but had carefully observed all of it and, having conquered the enemy, returned home rejoicing in his success.
But God was displeased both at the sparing of the king of the Amalekites and at the plundering of the livestock by the people, since these things had been done without his consent; for he considered it a grave matter that, while it was by his power that they were winning and prevailing over their enemies, he himself should be despised and disobeyed as though he were not even a human king. He therefore said he repented having appointed Saul king, since Saul did none of what he commanded but acted according to his own will. Hearing this, Samuel was greatly troubled, and throughout the whole night he began to entreat God to be reconciled with Saul and not remain angry with him.
But God would not grant the prophet's request for pardon on Saul's behalf, reckoning it unjust to forgive sins through mere entreaty; for nothing gives rise to wrongdoing more than the leniency shown toward wrongdoers, since in seeking a reputation for fairness and kindness men fail to notice that they are thereby breeding it. So, since God refused the prophet's plea and was clearly resolved not to relent, at daybreak Samuel came to Saul at Gilgal.
Seeing him, the king ran to meet him, and embracing him said, "I thank God for giving me the victory; everything he commanded has indeed been carried out." But Samuel replied, "Then where does this bleating of sheep and lowing of cattle in the camp come from?" He answered that the people had kept these for sacrifices, but that the whole race of the Amalekites had been wiped out according to the command, with no one else left, and that he had brought back only their king alive, about whom he said they would deliberate together as to what should be done. The prophet said that the divine is not pleased by sacrifices, but by good and just men—those who follow his will and his commands and consider nothing else to be done rightly by themselves except what they do at God's bidding.
For God is despised not when one fails to sacrifice to him, but when one appears disobedient. From those who do not submit to him, nor practice the true worship alone pleasing to God, he accepts nothing gladly even if they slaughter many fat victims or offer a wealth of dedications made of silver and gold, but turns away and regards these as tokens of wickedness, not piety. But those who keep in mind this one thing alone—whatever God utters and commands—and who choose to die rather than transgress any of it, in these he delights; and he seeks no sacrifice from them, and from those who do sacrifice, even if their offering is meager, he receives the honor of poverty more gladly than that of the very wealthy.
"You, then, know that you are the object of God's anger, for you have despised and neglected what he commanded. How then do you suppose he would look upon a sacrifice offered from what he condemned to destruction? Unless you think that offering these things to God is no different from destroying them. Expect, then, to be stripped of the kingship and the authority, since, though you owe your position to the God who gave it to you, you have shown him such neglect." Saul admitted he had done wrong and did not deny his sin—that he had transgressed the prophet's commands—but said it was out of fear and dread of the soldiers that he had not prevented them from plundering the spoil or restrained them. "But forgive me, and be gentle; for I will guard against sinning in this way in the future," and he begged the prophet to turn back and offer a thank-offering to God.
But Samuel, since he did not see that God was reconciled, was leaving to go on his own way. Saul, wishing to hold him back, seized his cloak, and as Samuel pulled away with force to depart, the garment was torn. The prophet declared that in just this way his kingship would be torn from him, and that another—good and just—would receive it; for God abides by his judgments concerning a man, since it is a human failing, not a mark of divine power, to change and alter one's mind. Saul said he admitted he had acted impiously, but that what had been done could not be made undone; still, he asked to be honored, in the sight of the people, by having Samuel come with him and worship God together with him.
Samuel granted him this, and going with him worshipped God. Then the king of the Amalekites, Agag, was brought before him; and when he asked how bitter death could be, Samuel said, "Just as you made many Hebrew mothers grieve and mourn over their children, so you will cause your own mother to grieve over your destruction." And he ordered him put to death at once, at Gilgal. Samuel himself then departed for the city of Armathon.
King Saul, perceiving what evils he had brought upon himself by making God his enemy, went up to his royal residence at Gaba—the name means "hill" when translated—and after that day he no longer came before the prophet. And to Samuel, who was grieving over him, God commanded that he cease his concern, and instead take the holy oil and go to the city of Bethlehem, to Jesse the son of Obed, and anoint whichever of his sons God himself should point out as the one destined to become king.
Samuel said he was afraid that Saul, learning of this, might kill him, whether by ambush or openly. But God instructed him and gave him a safe way to proceed, and he came to the city just named. Everyone there greeted him and asked the reason for his coming, and he said he had come to sacrifice to God. Having performed the sacrifice, he called Jesse together with his children to the sacred rites, and seeing his eldest son, who was tall and handsome, he judged from his fine appearance that this must be the one destined to be king. But he was mistaken about God's providence; for when he asked God whether he should anoint with the oil this young man whom he himself admired and judged worthy of the kingship, God said that men and God do not see the same things. "You, looking at the young man's beauty, think him worthy to be king; but I do not make bodily comeliness the prize of kingship, but the virtue of souls, and I seek one who is perfectly fitted for this, in piety and righteousness…"
courage, and persuasiveness—the qualities that make up the beauty of the soul. When God had said this, Samuel ordered Jesse to bring forward all his sons before him. Jesse had five others come: the eldest was Taliabos, the second Aminadabos, the third Samalos, the fourth Nathanael, the fifth was called Raelos, and the sixth Asamos. The prophet, seeing that these too were no less handsome in form than the eldest, asked God which of them he chose as king. When God said none of them, Samuel asked Jesse whether he had any other sons besides these. Jesse answered that there was one named David, who tended the flocks and looked after their safekeeping, and Samuel ordered him summoned at once, for it was not possible for them to sit down to the feast until he was present.
When David arrived, sent for by his father, he proved to be a boy fair-skinned, bright-eyed, and handsome besides. Samuel, saying quietly to himself that this was the one who had pleased God to be king, reclined at table himself, and set the young man to recline beside him, along with Jesse and the rest of the sons.
Then, while David watched, he took the oil and anointed him, and spoke softly into his ear, signifying that God had chosen him to be king. He urged him to be just and obedient to God's commands, for in that way his kingdom would remain his for a long time and his house would become splendid and celebrated; he would also overthrow the Philistines,
and against whatever nations he made war he would win and, surviving the battle, would gain a glory sung for ages, both in his lifetime and to leave to those after him. Having given this counsel, Samuel departed, and the divine spirit passed over from Saul to David. David began to prophesy as the divine spirit made its home in him, while Saul was beset by certain afflictions and demonic torments that brought him chokings
and stranglings, so that the physicians could think of no other treatment for him except that, if there were anyone able to sing charms and play the lyre, they should seek him out, and whenever the demons came upon Saul and threw him into confusion, this man should stand over his head, play, and sing hymns. Saul did not neglect this, but ordered that such a man be sought. Someone among those present said
that he had seen in the city of Bethlehem a son of Jesse, still a boy in age, but handsome and fair, worthy of note in other respects as well, and moreover skilled at playing the lyre and singing hymns, and an outstanding warrior. Saul sent to Jesse and ordered him to send David to him, taking him away from the flocks, for he wished to see him, having heard of his good looks and
his courage. Jesse sent his son, giving him gifts to bring to Saul. When David arrived Saul was delighted with him, made him his armor-bearer, and held him in every honor, for he was charmed by him, and whenever the disturbance from the demons came upon him, David alone was his physician, singing hymns and playing the lyre, and
making Saul himself again. Saul then sent to the boy's father Jesse, asking him to let David remain with him, for he took pleasure in seeing him and having him near. Jesse did not refuse Saul but consented to let him keep David. Not long afterward the Philistines again gathered together, mustered a great force, and advanced against the Israelites, and encamping between Socho and Azekah
they pitched camp. Saul led out his army against them and, encamping on a certain mountain, forced the Philistines to abandon their first camp and instead pitch camp on another mountain opposite the one Saul had occupied. A valley lay between the two mountains, separating the camps from each other. Then a man came down from the Philistine camp named Goliath,
from the city of Gath, a man of enormous size, for he was four cubits and a span tall, wearing armor to match the size of his body: he wore a breastplate weighing five thousand shekels, and a bronze helmet and greaves such as befitted a man of such extraordinary stature. His spear was no light burden for a right hand to carry, but he bore it lifted up on his shoulders,
and he also had a javelin weighing six hundred shekels. Many followed him carrying his weapons. This Goliath, standing between the battle lines, let out a great shout and said to Saul and the Hebrews: "I free you from battle and its dangers—why should our armies clash and suffer? Give me one of your men to fight me,
and let the outcome of the war be decided by the one who wins: those on the losing side will be slaves to the other, whoever proves victorious. It is far better and wiser to gain what you want by the risk of one man than by that of all." Having said this he withdrew to his own camp. The next day he came again and made the same speech, and for forty days he did not stop
challenging the enemy with the same words, until Saul himself and his army were struck with dread. They drew up in order as if for battle, but did not come to close quarters. While this war between the Hebrews and the Philistines was underway, Saul sent David back to his father Jesse, being content with Jesse's three sons whom he had sent to serve in the war and share its dangers.
David at first went back to the flocks and the pastures where the animals grazed, but not long after he came to the camp of the Hebrews, sent by his father to bring provisions to his brothers and to learn how they were faring. When Goliath came forward again, issuing his challenge and taunting them that there was no man among them brave enough to
come down and fight him, David, who happened to be talking with his brothers about the errand his father had sent him on, heard the Philistine blaspheming and reviling the army, and grew indignant. He said to his brothers that he was ready to fight the enemy in single combat. At this the eldest of the brothers, Eliab, rebuked him for being bolder than his age allowed and ignorant of what was fitting, and ordered him to go back to
the flocks and to their father. Ashamed before his brother, David withdrew, but he spoke privately to some of the soldiers, saying that he wished to fight the challenger. When they immediately reported the young man's intention to Saul, the king sent for him, and when he asked what he meant to say, David answered: "Let your spirit not be humbled or timid, O king; for I will bring down the arrogance of this enemy
by going out to meet him in battle and throwing down this tall, huge man beneath me. He himself will thereby become a laughingstock, but your army will gain glory, if he should die not at the hand of a man already capable of war and trusted with battle lines and combat, but at the hand of one who still seems a boy and is of this age." Saul, marveling at his boldness and courage,
but not confident in him because of his youth, said that on account of his age he would be too weak to fight a man skilled in war. David replied: "I make this promise trusting in God, who is with me, for I have already tested his help. Once, when a lion attacked my flocks and seized a lamb, I pursued and caught it, snatched the lamb from the mouth
of the beast, and when it turned and charged at me, I seized it by the tail, dashed it to the ground, and killed it. I have done the same defending against a bear as well. Let this enemy too be counted among those beasts, since for so long he has been taunting our army and blaspheming our God, who will deliver him into my hands." Saul, then, praying that an outcome to match the boy's eagerness and daring
might come from God, said, "Go," and sent him out to the battle. He put his own breastplate on him, girded him with his sword, and fitted a helmet on him, and sent him out. But David, weighed down by the armor—for he had not trained or learned to bear arms—said, "O king, let this equipment remain yours, for one who is able to carry it; allow me, as your servant, to
fight as I wish." So he set the armor aside, took up his staff, and, having gathered five stones from the stream and put them in his shepherd's pouch, carrying his sling in his right hand, he advanced against Goliath. The enemy, seeing him coming, despised him for this and mocked him, since he was carrying, not the weapons proper against a man, but rather
those with which they drive off dogs and defend themselves. "Does he think I am a dog rather than a man?" David answered that he considered him not merely such, but worse than a dog. This provoked Goliath to anger, and he called curses down on David in the name of his god, and threatened to give his flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth to tear apart. David answered him in turn:
"You come against me with sword, spear, and breastplate, but I advance against you armed with God, who will destroy you and your whole army by our hands. For I will cut off your head today and throw the rest of your body to the dogs of your own people, and all will learn that the divine stands as champion of the Hebrews, and that our weapons
and our strength lie in his care for us, while all other preparation and power are useless without God's presence." The Philistine, hindered in his speed and stride by the weight of his armor, advanced on foot toward David, contemptuous and confident that he would kill without effort one who was both unarmed and still a boy in age. The young man went to meet him with an ally the enemy could not see—
and that was God. Taking from his pouch one of the stones he had gathered from the stream, and fitting it to his sling, he cast it at Goliath's forehead, and the stone struck and passed through to his brain, so that Goliath, instantly stunned, fell forward on his face. David ran up and stood over the fallen enemy, and, having no sword of his own, took Goliath's own sword
and cut off his head with it. With Goliath's fall, defeat and flight overtook the Philistines: seeing their champion cast down and fearing for everything, they resolved no longer to hold their ground, but gave themselves over to shameful, disorderly flight and tried to save themselves from the danger. Saul and the whole army of the Hebrews raised a shout and dashed after them, killing
many as they pursued them all the way to the borders of Gath and the gates of Ashkelon. About thirty thousand of the Philistines died, and twice that number were wounded. Saul, turning back to their camp, plundered and burned their fortifications; David carried Goliath's head to his own tent and dedicated the sword to God. But envy and hatred
toward David were stirred up in Saul by the women, for as they went out to meet the victorious army with cymbals and tambourines and every kind of rejoicing, the women sang that Saul had destroyed many thousands of the Philistines, but the young girls sang that David had destroyed tens of thousands. Hearing this, the king reckoned that he himself had received the lesser share of praise, while the greater number, in the tens of thousands, had been credited
to the young man, and, concluding that nothing was left for him to lose after such brilliant acclaim except the kingship itself, he began to fear and suspect David. Since it seemed dangerous to have him so near and so close—for he had made him his armor-bearer—Saul removed him from his first post and appointed him instead a commander of a thousand, giving him a position that seemed better but was, as Saul reckoned, safer for himself; for he wished to
send him out against the enemy and into battles, so that he might be killed amid the dangers. But David, bringing God with him wherever he went, prospered and showed himself successful, so that through the excess of his courage he won the love of the people and of Saul's daughter, who was still a virgin; and as his passion overpowered her, it became evident and was reported to her father. Saul,
taking this as an opportunity for his plot against David, was glad to hear it and said he would gladly give the girl to him, telling those who reported her love that this would prove the cause of David's ruin and danger for the one who obtained her: "I promise him," he said, "my daughter's hand in marriage, if he brings me six hundred heads of our enemies." David, with so splendid a prize now offered, and wishing
to win glory by a bold and scarcely credible feat, would set out on the undertaking, Saul reasoned, and would be destroyed by the Philistines, and his affairs would turn out well for him this way; for he would be rid of David through others rather than by killing him himself. So he ordered his servants to sound out David's mind, to see how he felt about marrying the girl. They began to speak
to him, saying that King Saul and the whole people loved him, and that Saul wished to make him his son-in-law. David said, "Does it seem a small thing to you to become the king's son-in-law? To me it does not seem so, especially since I am a man of low station, without glory or honor." When the servants reported David's answer to Saul, he said,
"Tell him it is not money I ask of him, nor a bride-price—for in that way one would be selling one's daughter rather than giving her in marriage—but that, since my son-in-law must have courage and every other kind of excellence, which I see he possesses, I wish to receive from him, in place of a bride-price for my daughter's hand, not gold or silver, nor anything else brought from his father's house, but rather vengeance
on the Philistines and six hundred of their heads. For nothing could be a more welcome, more splendid, or more honorable gift to me than this, and for my daughter it is far more enviable than the customary bride-price to live with a man of such quality, one attested by the defeat of our enemies." When these words were brought to David, he was pleased, believing that Saul was eager for the
David, delighted that these terms had been reported to him, believing Saul was in earnest about becoming his kinsman, did not wait to deliberate, nor did he stop to weigh in his mind whether the task set before him was possible or difficult. He set out at once with his companions against the enemy, and — for it was God who made everything easy and possible for David — he carried out the exploit promised for the marriage: killing many and cutting off the heads of six hundred, he came to the king and displayed them, demanding the marriage in return.
Saul, having no way to escape what he had promised — for he thought it shameful either to appear to have lied, or to have promised the marriage as a plot meant to get David killed by attempting the impossible — gave him his daughter, named Michal, in marriage. But Saul was not going to abide long by what had been done. Seeing that David was held in high regard both by God and by the people, he grew afraid, and unable to hide his fear over matters so great — his throne and his life, the loss of either being a terrible calamity — he resolved to kill David, and ordered his execution to his son Jonathan and his most trusted servants.
Jonathan, astonished that his father's feelings toward David had shifted, not to some moderate coolness out of excessive goodwill but all the way to a death sentence, and loving the young man and revering his courage, told him his father's secret plan. He advised him, however, to keep out of sight and stay safe the next day; he himself would greet his father and, when the moment arose, speak with him about it, learn the reason, and belittle it, arguing that it was not right to kill, on this account, a man who had done such great good for the people and had been his own benefactor — for which he might reasonably obtain pardon even for the gravest offenses. "I will make known to you my father's mind," he said. David, persuaded by this good advice, kept himself out of the king's sight.
The next day Jonathan went to Saul, and finding him cheerful and glad, began to raise the subject of David with him: "What fault, small or great, have you found in him, father, that you have ordered a man put to death who has been of such great service to your own safety, and greater still for punishing the Philistines — who freed the Hebrew people from the insult and mockery they endured for forty days, when he alone dared to face the enemy's challenge, and afterward brought back as many heads of the enemy as he was ordered to, and received for this, as his reward, my sister in marriage — so that his death would grieve us not only for his courage but also for our kinship. For his death would wrong your own daughter as well, since she would be made a widow before she has come to enjoy the benefit of married life. Consider all this, and turn to a gentler course, and do no harm to a man who, first, did you a great service by saving you — when he cast out the evil spirit and the demons that had settled upon you and gave your soul peace from them — and second, avenged you on your enemies; it would be shameful to forget these things."
Saul was won over by these words and swore to his son that he would do David no harm — for a just argument prevails over anger and fear. Jonathan then sent for David, told him the good and welcome news from his father, and brought him to him, and David remained with the king as before. At this time the Philistines again took the field against the Hebrews, and Saul sent David with an army to fight them; David engaged them, killed many, and returned victorious to the king. But Saul did not receive him as he had hoped after his success — instead, pained by David's good fortune, he felt himself made the more insecure by David's very achievements.
When the evil spirit again came upon him and troubled and disturbed him, he called David into the chamber where he lay, holding his spear, and ordered him to sing to the harp and to hymns. While David was doing as he was told, Saul drew back his arm and hurled the spear; David, seeing it coming, dodged aside, then fled to his own house and stayed there the whole day. That night the king sent men and ordered David watched until dawn, so that he should not entirely slip away and vanish, in order that he might be brought before the court, condemned, and put to death.
But Michal, David's wife and the king's daughter, learning her father's intention, stood by her husband, fearful for his prospects and anxious for her own life as well — for she could not bear to go on living if she lost him. "Do not let the sun find you here," she said, "for it will not see you again. Flee while this present night can still give you the chance — and may God make it longer for you. Know that if your father finds you, you are a dead man." She let him down through a window and got him to safety. Then she arranged the bed as though for a sick man, placing a goat's liver under the coverlets, and when at daybreak her father sent for David, she said he had been unwell during the night, showing the covered bed and, by the liver's throbbing beneath the covers, giving the impression that the figure lying there was David breathing hard.
When those who had been sent reported that he had grown weaker during the night, Saul ordered him brought just as he was, for he meant to kill him. But when they came and uncovered the bed and discovered the woman's trick, they reported it to the king. When her father reproached her for having saved his enemy and outwitted him, she offered a plausible defense: she said he had threatened to kill her, and that out of fear she had helped him escape — for which, she said, it was only right that she be forgiven, since she had acted under compulsion and not by choice. "For I do not think," she said, "that you wanted your enemy dead so much as you wanted me kept safe." And Saul forgave the girl.
David, having escaped the danger, went to the prophet Samuel at Ramah and told him of the king's plot against him, and how he had nearly been killed by the spear Saul threw at him, though he had done nothing wrong toward him and had shown no cowardice in the wars against the enemy, but in everything had acted with spirit and success. This was the cause of Saul's hatred for David. When the prophet learned of the king's injustice, he left the city of Ramah and, taking David to a place called Galboath, stayed there with him.
When it was reported to Saul that David was with the prophet, he sent soldiers and ordered them to seize him and bring him back. But when they came to Samuel and found an assembly of prophets there, they were seized by the divine spirit and began to prophesy. When Saul heard this, he sent others, and when the same thing happened to them as to the first, he sent still others; and when a third group also began to prophesy, he finally grew angry and set out himself. When he was now close by, Samuel, before Saul could even see him, made him prophesy too. Saul, coming to him, was driven out of his senses by the overwhelming spirit, and stripping off his clothes, fell down and lay there a whole day and night, with Samuel and David looking on.
When David came to him from there and lamented his father's plot against him, saying that although he had done no wrong and committed no offense, his father was eager to have him murdered, Jonathan, Saul's son, urged him neither to believe this of his own suspicion nor to trust those who slandered him, if indeed there were such people doing this, but to trust him and take heart; his father intended nothing of the kind against him, for he would have told him about it and taken him into his confidence, as he did in everything else. But David swore that this was indeed so, and asked that, believing him, Jonathan look out for him rather than dismiss his true words as false — only to accept them as true when he either saw him dead or heard of it. He said his father told him nothing of these things, knowing his friendship and disposition toward him.
Grieved that, though he had put Saul's intentions to the test, he had not been able to persuade Jonathan, Jonathan asked David what he wanted from him. "I know," David said, "that you are willing to grant and provide me everything. Tomorrow is the new moon, and I am accustomed to dine seated with the king; if you think it best, I will go out of the city and stay hidden in the plain, and when he asks for me, tell him I have gone to my home town of Bethlehem, since my tribe is keeping a festival there, adding that you gave me leave. If he says what one would expect and usually says of friends away from home — that he has gone off on some good errand — know that there is nothing treacherous or hostile in him. But if he answers in some other way, that will be proof of what has been plotted against me. You will reveal to me my father's mind, showing me this favor out of the pity and friendship for which you have asked pledges from me, and have yourself, as my lord, given them to me. And if you find anything wicked in me, kill me yourself, and get to it before my father does."
Displeased at this last remark, Jonathan promised to do as David asked, and that if his father gave any grim answer revealing his hostility, he would let him know. And so that David might trust him the more, he took him out into the open air under the clear sky and swore that he would spare nothing for David's safety: "For I call to witness this God," he said, "whom you see everywhere present and poured out over all things, who even before I put my thoughts into words already knew this intention of mine, as witness to our covenant with you, that I will not stop testing my father's intentions again and again, until I learn exactly what they are and gain access to the secrets of his soul. And once I have learned them, I will not conceal them, but will disclose them to you, whether he proves gentle or ill-disposed. This God knows how I pray always that he be with you; for he is with you now and will not leave you, and he will make you stronger than your enemies, whether it is my father or I. Only remember this: if it should happen that I die, save my children, and repay to them the kindness I now show you." Having sworn this, he sent David off to a certain place in the plain he described, where David used to go to train.
For, knowing that word would come to him from his father, he said he would bring only a boy with him there. "And when I have shot three javelins at the target, I will order the boy to bring me the javelins," he said, "for they will lie in front of him. And if you hear this, know that nothing bad is intended by my father; but if you hear me say the opposite, expect the opposite from the king as well. In any case you will have safety from me, and nothing untoward will happen to you. But see that you remember these things in your time of good fortune, and be of use to my sons." So David, having received these pledges from Jonathan, went off to the agreed place.
The next day, which was the new moon, the king, having purified himself as was his custom, came to the feast, and when his son Jonathan sat at his right and Abner the commander-in-chief on the other side, he saw David's seat empty and kept quiet, supposing that David was absent because he had not purified himself after some contact. But when David was absent on the second day of the new moon as well, he asked his son Jonathan why the son of Jesse had been missing from dinner and the feast both the previous day and this one. Jonathan said that David had gone, as agreed, to his own home town, since his tribe was keeping a festival, with his own permission — and that David had asked Jonathan too to come to the sacrifice, if it were permitted him to go, "for you know my goodwill toward him."
Then Jonathan recognized his father's hostility toward David and saw clearly the whole of his intention; for Saul did not restrain his anger, but cursing him called him a deserter and an enemy, and said he was David's partner and accomplice, and that he had no shame before him or before his own mother in holding such views, and would not even be persuaded that as long as David lived, their hold on the kingdom remained insecure. "Send for him, then," he said, "so that he may pay the penalty." When Jonathan replied, "What has he done wrong, that you want to punish him?", Saul no longer vented his anger in words and curses, but snatched up his spear and sprang at him, meaning to kill him. He did not carry out the deed, being restrained by his friends, but it became plain to his son that he hated David and longed to destroy him, since he had very nearly become his own son's murderer because of him.
Then the king's son leapt up from the feast and, unable because of his grief to eat anything, spent the night in tears, mourning both that he himself had nearly been killed and that David had been condemned to die. At daybreak he went out before the city into the plain, as though to train, but really to reveal to his friend his father's disposition, just as they had agreed. When Jonathan had done as arranged, he sent away the boy who followed him back into the city, and there was quiet for David to come into his presence and speak with him. David appeared and fell at Jonathan's feet, bowing down and calling him the savior of his life. Jonathan raised him up from the ground, and embracing one another they greeted each other at length, weeping and lamenting their youth and the friendship that had drawn such envy, and the parting soon to come, which seemed to them no different from death. Barely recovering from their mourning and urging each other to remember their oaths, they parted. David then, fleeing,
Fleeing the king and the death that threatened him, David came to the city of Nob, to Ahimelech the high priest. Ahimelech was astonished to see him arrive alone, with no friend and no servant accompanying him, and wanted to learn the reason why no one was with him.
David told him that he had been ordered by the king to carry out a secret mission, and that for it he could not be attended by any company, since the king wished it kept hidden. "I have instructed my attendants," he said, "to meet me at a certain place." He asked for provisions, since Ahimelech would be doing a friend's work by supplying him and helping him toward the task before him. Having received these, he also asked for some weapon, a sword or a small spear. Now Saul's servant Doeg was present, a Syrian by birth, who tended the king's mules.
The high priest said he had nothing of that kind himself, but that Goliath's sword was there, which David, after killing the Philistine, had himself dedicated to God. David took it and fled beyond the territory of the Hebrews to Gath, a city of the Philistines, where Achish was king. But he was recognized by the king's servants and brought to his notice, for they reported that this was David, who had killed many thousands of Philistines.
Fearing that he might be put to death by Achish and that he would meet from him the very danger he had escaped from Saul, David feigned madness and fits, letting foam run down over his mouth and doing all the other things that would persuade the king of Gath that he suffered from this disease. The king, indignant with his servants for bringing him a lunatic, ordered David thrown out at once.
Having gotten safely away from Gath, David came to the tribe of Judah, and while he was staying in the cave near the city of Adullam he sent to his brothers to let them know where he was. They came to him with their whole family, and all the others who were in need or in fear of King Saul flocked to him as well, declaring themselves ready to do whatever he thought fit. In all they numbered about four hundred.
Emboldened now that he had gathered a force and men to help him, David set out from there and came to the king of the Moabites, and asked him to receive his parents into his own country until he should see how his own affairs would turn out. The king consented to grant the favor, and treated David's parents with every honor for as long as they remained with him. The prophet himself then commanded David to leave the wilderness and go settle within the territory allotted to the tribe of Judah; David obeyed, and coming to the city of Hereth, remained there.
When Saul heard that David had been seen with a large company, he fell into no ordinary confusion and alarm, for knowing the man's spirit and daring, he suspected that no small undertaking would arise from him, one over which he himself would surely have to grieve and suffer. So he called together his friends, his officers, and the tribe from which he himself came, to meet him on the hill where his palace stood, and sitting on a place of honor called Arurah, with the customary bodyguard drawn up around him, he said to them:
"Men of my own tribe, I know well that you remember my kindnesses to you -- that I have made some of you owners of fields, and honored others with rank and with positions among the people. I ask you, then, whether you expect greater and more numerous gifts than these from the son of Jesse. For I know that all of you have gone over to him, my own son Jonathan having thought this way himself and having persuaded you to do the same. I am not unaware of the oaths and the agreements he has made with David, nor that Jonathan is an adviser and accomplice in what has been arranged against me -- yet none of you cares about any of this, but you sit in silence watching to see how it will turn out."
When the king fell silent, no one else present answered him, but Doeg the Syrian, who tended his mules, said that he had seen David come to the city of Nob, to Ahimelech the high priest, and that Ahimelech had inquired of God on his behalf about the future, given him provisions and Goliath's sword, and sent him off safely to whomever he wished. So Saul sent for the high priest and his whole family, and said:
"What have I done to you, that you should receive the son of Jesse -- a dreadful and thankless act -- give him food and weapons when he was plotting against my kingdom, and consult the future for him besides? For it surely was not hidden from you that he was fleeing from me and hated my house."
The high priest did not try to deny what had happened, but openly acknowledged that he had provided these things -- not as a favor to David, but to Saul himself. He said he had not known the man was Saul's enemy, but rather one of his most trusted servants, a commander of a thousand, and, greater still, already his son-in-law and kinsman. Such things, he said, are not given to enemies, but to those held in the highest goodwill and honor. And it was not the first time he had inquired of God for him; he had done this often before on other occasions as well. "When he told me he had been sent by you in great haste on a mission, I thought it more reasonable to give him what he asked for than to argue with him about it. So do not think ill of me, and do not suspect, because of what you now hear about David's undertaking, that the kindness I showed him then was meant against you. For I gave it to your friend, your son-in-law, your commander -- not to your enemy."
By saying this the high priest did not persuade Saul, for fear is a terrible thing, unwilling to trust even a true defense. He ordered the soldiers standing around Ahimelech to kill him. But when they did not dare to lay hands on the high priest, showing more reverence for what was sacred than fear of disobeying the king, he commanded Doeg the Syrian to carry out the killing.
Doeg, taking men as wicked as himself, killed Ahimelech and his family, who numbered in all about three hundred and eighty-five. Saul also sent men to the city of the priests, Nob, and had all its people killed, sparing neither women nor infants nor any other age, and burned the city itself. Only one son of Ahimelech, named Abiathar, escaped alive.
All this came about just as God had foretold to the high priest Eli, because of the transgressions of his two sons, saying that his descendants would be destroyed. King Saul, having carried out so brutal a deed, slaughtering an entire family that held the high priesthood, showing no pity for infants and no reverence for the aged, and razing to the ground the very city which the divine had chosen as the home and nurse of priests and prophets and marked out as the only one destined to produce such men, thereby gave everyone the means of learning and understanding human nature:
that as long as men are private citizens of humble station, unable to indulge their nature or dare do all they wish, they are fair-minded and moderate, pursuing only what is just, and show the utmost goodwill and zeal toward it; and at that time they also believe concerning the divine that it is present at everything that happens in life, and sees not only the deeds that are done but knows clearly already the very thoughts from which those deeds are going to arise. But once they come into power and authority, then they strip off all of that, and, as if putting away theatrical masks, they cast aside their character and manners and take up instead boldness, recklessness, and contempt for things both human and divine.
And it is precisely when, having drawn nearest to being envied and having become conspicuous to all in whatever they think or do, they most need piety and justice, that they behave as though God no longer sees them -- or as though he feared their power -- and so run riot against the world. Whatever they happen to fear on hearing of it, or hate out of some willful impulse, or love without reason, all of this they treat as valid, certain, true, pleasing to men and to God alike, while they give no thought at all to the future. They honor those who have endured great hardships in their service, but having honored them, they envy them, and having raised them to prominence, they strip from them not only that prominence but, on account of it, their very lives as well,
on wicked and, through their very extravagance, incredible charges. They punish not those whose deeds deserve justice, but those targeted by slander and untested accusations -- not as many as deserve to suffer this, but as many as they are able to kill. This Saul, son of Kish, the first man to reign as king over the Hebrews after the aristocracy and the constitution under the judges, made plain among us, killing three hundred priests and prophets
out of his suspicion against Ahimelech, and razing along with them the very city and, in a certain sense, the temple itself, striving to leave it empty of priests and prophets -- killing so many, and not even allowing their native place to survive, so that others might arise after them.
Now Abiathar, Ahimelech's son, the only one of that family of priests slaughtered by Saul able to escape, fled to David and told him of the disaster that had befallen his household and of his father's murder. David said he was not unaware that this would happen to them, for he had seen Doeg there; he had suspected the high priest would be denounced to the king by him, and he blamed himself for their misfortune. He urged Abiathar to stay there and remain with him, since he judged that he would be no safer hidden in any other place.
At this time David heard that the Philistines had invaded the territory of the people of Keilah and were plundering it, and he resolved to march against them, first inquiring of God through the prophet whether he would grant him victory. When the answer came that he would, David set out against the Philistines with his companions, inflicted great slaughter on them, and drove off their plunder.
He remained with the men of Keilah until they had safely gathered in their threshing floors and their crops, but word reached King Saul that he was there among them -- for the deed and its success did not stay confined to those in whose midst it happened, but spread everywhere by report, both to the ears of others and to the king's, establishing both the fact and the man who had done it.
Saul rejoiced on hearing that David was in Keilah, saying, "God has now delivered him into my hands," since he had forced himself to enter a city with walls, gates, and bars. He ordered the whole army to march against Keilah, besiege it, capture it, and kill David. But David, perceiving this and learning from God that if he remained among them the men of Keilah would hand him over to Saul, took his four hundred men and departed from the city for the wilderness above the place called En-gedi.
When the king heard that David had fled from the men of Keilah, he abandoned his campaign against him. David, moving on from there, came to a place called Horesh, in the district of Ziph, where Jonathan, Saul's son, met with him, and embracing him, urged him to take courage and hold good hopes for the future, and not to grow weary under his present troubles; for he would become king and hold all the power of the Hebrews under himself, though such things are wont to come only with great toil.
Once again they exchanged oaths of goodwill and loyalty toward each other for the whole of their lives, calling God to witness the curses each invoked upon himself should he break their agreement and turn to the opposite course. Jonathan, having eased David's cares and fears a little, left him there and returned home himself.
But the men of Ziph, to curry favor with Saul, informed him that David was staying among them, and promised to hand him over if he came against him, since once the narrow passes of the district of Ziph were seized, he would have no way to escape to others.
The king praised them, acknowledging his gratitude to them for informing him of his enemy, and promising to repay their goodwill before long. He sent men ahead to search for David and scour the wilderness, and answered that he himself would follow. Those sent out on the hunt to capture David pressed the king forward eagerly,
anxious not merely to reveal his enemy's whereabouts out of goodwill toward him, but also to put David more fully within his power by handing him over. Yet they failed in their unjust and wicked desire -- men who risked nothing by not disclosing this to Saul, but who, through flattery and hope of profit from the king, betrayed a man beloved of God who was being hunted unjustly to his death, though he could easily have remained hidden, and promised to deliver him up.
For David, learning of the malice of the Ziphites and of the king's approach, abandoned the narrow passes of their territory and fled to the great rock in the wilderness of Maon. Saul set out in pursuit of him there, for on learning that David had withdrawn from the narrow passes along the road he made for one side of the rock, while David moved off to the other side.
But Saul was turned aside from his pursuit of David, who was on the very point of being captured, when news came that the Philistines had again invaded the territory of the Hebrews; for he judged it more urgent to turn back against them, his natural enemies, and drive them off, than to overlook the ravaging of his land while eagerly bent on catching his personal foe. And so David, having thus escaped danger against all expectation, made his way to the narrow passes of En-gedi.
When Saul had driven out the Philistines, some men came reporting to him that David was staying within the borders of En-gedi. Taking three thousand picked men-at-arms, he hastened after him, and coming not far from the place, he saw beside the road a cave, deep and hollow, opening to great length and breadth, where it happened that David, with his four hundred men, lay hidden.
Pressed by natural need, Saul went into it alone, and was seen by one of David's men. When the man who had seen him told his companions that his enemy had, by God's doing, been delivered into his hand for vengeance, and advised him to cut off Saul's head and free himself from all his long wandering and hardship, David rose up and cut off the fringe of the...
only the piece of the garment Saul was wrapped in, he at once repented, saying it was not right to kill his own master, not even one whom God had deemed worthy of the kingship; for even if this man was wicked toward him, he himself must not be such toward him. When Saul had left the cave, David came out after him and called for Saul to hear him. The king turned around,
and David bowed down before him, falling on his face as was the custom, and said: "O king, you ought not lend your ears to wicked men who fabricate false slanders, granting them belief, while holding your dearest friends under suspicion; you ought instead to judge everyone's disposition by their deeds. Slander deceives, but plain proof of goodwill lies in what a man actually does. A word can prove
either true or false alike, but deeds lay the mind bare before the eyes. Know, then, from this that I am well disposed toward you and your house, and that you ought to trust me, and not, by believing my accusers, pursue my life for things I never had in mind and that could never happen, having no peace day or night,
consumed with anxiety over killing me, a pursuit you carry on unjustly. How have you not formed a false opinion of me, as though I wished to kill you? And how are you not impious toward God, in hunting down a man who today had it in his power to punish you and take justice from you, and yet was unwilling, and did not use the opportunity — which, had it fallen to you against me, you would not yourself have let pass,
longing to destroy me and counting me an enemy? For when I cut off the edge of your garment, I could at that same moment have taken your head as well. By showing you the piece of cloth I gave you cause to see and believe. But I," he said, "held back from a just act of vengeance, while you feel no shame in nursing an unjust hatred against me. May God judge between us and expose the true character of each." Saul, astounded
at the unexpected nature of his deliverance, and struck with wonder at the young man's restraint and character, wept aloud; and when David did the same, Saul answered that it was he himself who had reason to weep. "For you," he said, "have become the cause of good things for me, and I of misfortunes for you. Today you have shown that you possess the justice of the men of old, who, when they caught their enemies in the wilderness, gave orders to spare them. I am now convinced
that God is keeping the kingship for you, and that the might of all the Hebrews awaits you. Give me your sworn word that you will not wipe out my line, nor, bearing me a grudge, destroy my descendants, but that you will preserve and save my house." David swore as Saul asked, and let Saul go back to his own kingdom, while he himself, with the men
who were with him, went up into the narrow pass at Maon. At about this time Samuel the prophet also died, a man who enjoyed no ordinary honor among the Hebrews; for the mourning the people carried on for so long a time, and the zeal and eagerness shown in fulfilling the customary rites at his burial, made plain both his virtue and the goodwill the multitude bore him. They buried him
in his native city, Ramah, and wept for very many days — not grieving as one grieves for a stranger's death, a thing shared with everyone, but each man mourning him as his own. He was a just man, good by nature, and for that above all beloved by God. He led and stood at the head of the people
for twelve years alone after the death of Eli the high priest, and for eighteen more alongside Saul the king. And so the story of Samuel came to its end. There was a certain man of the Ziphites, from the town of Emmah, rich and owner of many flocks; he had three thousand sheep grazing and a thousand goats. David gave orders
to the men with him to keep these flocks unharmed and undamaged, and neither out of desire, nor need, nor the isolation of the wilderness and their ability to do harm unseen, should any of them commit wrong — putting above all these things the rule that no man should be wronged, and holding it a terrible thing, offensive to God, to lay hands on what belonged to others. He taught them this because he believed he was doing a favor to a good man, one worthy of such consideration. Now this man was
Nabal — for that was his name — harsh and evil in his ways, having shaped his life on a churlish, dog-like manner, though he had obtained a wife who was good, prudent, and beautiful in appearance. So at the time when Nabal was shearing his sheep, David sent ten of his men to him, and through them greeted him and wished him well in doing this for many years
to come; he asked him to provide, from what he was able, such things as he had learned from the shepherds — that his men had done Nabal no wrong, but had for a long time now, while staying in the wilderness, been guardians of the shepherds and their flocks, and Nabal would have no reason to regret giving something to David. But when those who had been sent delivered this message, Nabal met it with great inhumanity and harshness; for he asked them who
David was, and on hearing he was the son of Jesse, said, "So now, it seems, runaway slaves think a great deal of themselves, and pride themselves on having abandoned their masters!" When they reported this, David grew angry, and having ordered four hundred armed men to follow him — for he now had six hundred in all — leaving two hundred behind to guard the baggage, he marched against Nabal, having sworn that very night to destroy his house and
all his possessions entirely; for he said he was not troubled merely because Nabal had proven ungrateful toward men who had shown him great kindness, giving nothing in return, but because Nabal had also cursed and spoken ill of them, though he had suffered no wrong from them at all. But one of the slaves who guarded Nabal's flocks reported to his mistress — Nabal's wife — that David had sent to him,
and that his men had received nothing decent in return, but had even been insulted with terrible curses, though they had used every care and watchfulness in guarding the flocks, and that this had happened to their master's harm. When he said this, Abigail — for that was her name — loaded the donkeys, filled them with gifts of every kind, and without saying a word to her husband, since he was senseless with drink, set out toward
David. As she came down through the mountain pass, David met her, coming with the four hundred men against Nabal. When the woman saw him, she leaped down, fell on her face, and bowed before him, and begged him not to remember Nabal's words, for he was, she said, not unaware that the man matched his name — Nabal, in the Hebrew tongue, means foolishness — and she excused herself for not having seen
the men he had sent. "So forgive me," she said, "and give thanks to God, who has kept you from being stained with human blood; for as long as you remain clean, he himself will take vengeance for you on wicked men. May the evils that await Nabal fall instead upon the heads of your enemies. Be gracious to me, judging me worthy to receive this from you, and let go your rage
and your anger against my husband and his house, for my sake; for it befits you to be gentle and kind, especially since you are soon to be king." David, accepting the gifts, said, "But it was God in his mercy, woman, who brought you to us today; for otherwise you would not have lived to see tomorrow, since I had sworn this very night to destroy the house of
Nabal, and to leave not one of you alive, from man to beast, since he had proven wicked and ungrateful toward me and my companions. But now you have come before me and softened my anger, God himself caring for you. Yet Nabal, even though he is spared now for your sake, will not escape punishment for his wrongdoing; his own character will destroy him,
on some other charge." Having said this, he sent the woman away. She went home and found her husband feasting with many guests, already heavy with wine; at that time she told him nothing of what had happened, but the next day, when he was sober, she told him everything, and the shock of her words and the grief they caused left him paralyzed, his whole body as if dead. And after no more than ten
days he had lived, Nabal died. When David heard of his death, he said it was well that he himself had been avenged by God; for Nabal had died on account of his own wickedness, and paid the penalty while David's own hand remained clean. He recognized then, too, that the wicked are driven on by God, who overlooks nothing among men, but gives
to the good what is fitting for the good, and brings swift punishment on the wicked. David then sent to the woman, calling her to come and live with him as his wife. She said to those who came that she was unworthy even to touch his feet, yet she came all the same, with her whole retinue in attendance. And she became his wife, receiving this honor both because
his character was prudent and just, and, in gaining her, also for her beauty. Now David already had a wife before this, whom he had married from the city of Abesar; and Michal, the daughter of King Saul who had been David's wife, her father had joined in marriage to Phalti, son of Laish, who was from the city of Gethla. After this some of the Ziphites came and reported to
Saul that David was again in their territory, and that they were able to seize him if he wished their help in doing so. Saul marched against him with three thousand armed men, and when night fell he made camp in a place called Hachilah. David, hearing that Saul had come against him, sent scouts and ordered them to find out how far into the region Saul had already advanced. When those at
Hachilah told him, he waited through the night, then, slipping past his own men unseen, made his way into Saul's camp, bringing with him Abishai, the son of his sister Zeruiah, and Abimelech the Hittite. Saul was asleep, with his armed men lying around him in a circle and his general Abner beside him; David entered the king's camp, but did not kill Saul himself, though he recognized
his resting place by the spear that was planted beside him, nor did he allow Abishai, who wanted to kill Saul and had set himself to do it, but said that it was a terrible thing to kill the man whom God had appointed king, wicked though he might be, for in time he would receive justice from the one who had given him his rule. So he held Abishai back from his rush. And as a token that, though able to kill him, he had held back,
he took Saul's spear and the flask of water that lay beside him, and, with no one in the camp aware, all of them sound asleep, went out, having done everything fearlessly that the moment and his own daring allowed him to do to the king's men. Crossing the ravine and climbing to the top of the mountain, from where he could
be heard clearly, he shouted to Saul's soldiers and to the general Abner, rousing him from sleep and calling out to him and to the people. When the general answered and asked who it was calling him, David said: "I, the son of Jesse, your fugitive. But why is it that you, so great a man and holding the first place of honor
beside the king, guard your master's person so carelessly, and find sleep sweeter than his safety and welfare? These things deserve death and punishment, since you did not even notice some of your own men entering the camp a little while ago. Search, then, for the king's spear and the flask of water, and you will learn what harm came upon you unnoticed while it was within your reach."
When Saul recognized David's voice and understood that, having had him delivered into his hands by sleep and the carelessness of his guards, David had not killed him but spared him though he could justly have destroyed him, he said he was grateful to David for his life, and urged him to take courage and, fearing nothing more terrible from him, to return to his own home; for he was now convinced that not even
his own son could love him as much as he was loved by David — David, who, though able to protect him and had given many proofs of his goodwill, he had driven away and forced to live so long a time in flight and in anguish for his life, deprived of friends and family, while he himself never ceased being kept safe by him, and never took his life even when it plainly lay within his grasp. David then told him to send someone to retrieve
the spear and the flask of water, adding that God would be judge for each of them of his own character and of what he had done in accordance with it, and that God knew that this very day, though able to kill him, David had held back. And Saul, having twice escaped David's hands, returned to his palace and his own household. But David, fearing that if he remained there
he might be seized by Saul, judged it better to go up into Philistine territory and stay there, and with the six hundred men who were with him he came to Achish, king of Gath — one of the five cities. The king received him along with his men and gave him a place to live, and, having with him also his two wives, Ahinoam and Abigail, he spent his time
in Gath. When Saul heard of this, there was no more talk of sending men after him or marching against him, for he had already twice come near to disaster in his eagerness to seize him. But David did not think it right to remain in the city of Gath; instead he asked the king, since he had received him so kindly, to grant him this favor too — to give him some place in the country
to settle in, since he was ashamed that, by staying in the city, he was a burden and an annoyance to him. Achish gave him a village called Sekella, which David, once he became king, was fond of and honored as his own possession, as did his descendants after him. But of these things we shall speak elsewhere. The length of time David lived in Sekella, in Philistine territory, came to four months
for four months and twenty days. In secret raids on the neighboring Philistine peoples, the Girzites and the Amalekites, he plundered their territory, taking a great deal of livestock and camels as spoil before turning back; he kept clear of the people themselves, for fear they would report him to King Achish, though he did send Achish a share of the plunder as a gift. When the king asked him whom he had raided to bring back such spoil, David told him it was the people of Judah living toward the south and in the plain, and so persuaded Achish to believe this. Achish, for his part, hoped that David had come to hate his own nation and that he would keep him as a subject who would remain in his service for life.
At that same time the Philistines resolved to make war on the Israelites, and sent word around to all their allies to join them for the campaign at a place called Regan, from which they meant to muster and march out against the Hebrews. Achish, king of Gath, ordered David to join him in this alliance with his own armed men. David readily agreed, saying that the moment had come for him to repay Achish for his kindness and hospitality, and promised to serve as his bodyguard once the victory and the struggle against the enemy had gone well for them — a pledge by which he only heightened his zeal, through this promise of honor and loyalty.
Now Saul, king of the Hebrews, had driven out of the country all diviners, ventriloquists, and every such practitioner of that art, except for the prophets. But when he heard that the Philistines had already arrived and made camp near the city of Shunem, on the plain, he marched out against them with his army. Coming to a mountain called Gilboa, he pitched his camp facing the enemy. He was troubled, not without reason, by the size of the enemy's force, which was thought to be both very large and stronger than his own, and he asked God through the prophets to foretell the outcome of the coming battle. When God gave him no answer, Saul grew still more afraid and lost heart, foreseeing, as was only natural, the disaster that threatened him now that the divine was no longer at his side. He ordered a search made for some woman who was a ventriloquist and could call up the souls of the dead, so that through her he might learn how matters were going to turn out for him; for the ventriloquist's art, by bringing up the souls of the dead, foretells to those who ask what is going to happen.
When one of his servants told him there was such a woman in the city of Dor, he slipped away from everyone in the camp, changed out of his royal robes, and taking two servants whom he knew to be utterly loyal, came to the woman at Dor. He asked her to practice her art and bring up for him the soul of whomever he named. The woman refused, saying she would not defy the king, who had banished this class of diviners from the land; she had done Saul no wrong, and it would not be right of him to entrap her into breaking the law so as to punish her for it. Saul swore that no one would learn of it and that he would not report her divination to anyone else, and that she would come to no harm. Once he had persuaded her with his oaths not to be afraid, he ordered her to bring up the soul of Samuel.
Not knowing who Samuel was, she called him up from Hades. When he appeared and the woman saw a dignified, godlike figure, she was seized with fear, and, startled at the sight, cried out, "Are you not King Saul?" — for Samuel had revealed to her who he was. When Saul nodded that he was, and asked her why she was so disturbed, she said she saw someone coming up who looked like a god in form. He told her to describe the figure's appearance and dress and to say how old he was; she answered that he seemed already an old man, of distinguished bearing, wearing a priestly robe. From this the king recognized that it was Samuel, and, falling to the ground, he did him reverence and bowed down.
When Samuel's soul asked why he had disturbed it and forced it to come up, Saul lamented that the enemy pressed hard upon him, that he was at a loss what to do, abandoned as he was by God, receiving no guidance either through prophets or through dreams, and that for this reason he had taken refuge with him, the one who had once watched over him. Samuel, seeing that Saul's fortunes had already reached their end, said, "It is pointless for you to wish to learn anything more from me, now that God has abandoned you. But hear this all the same: David must become king and bring the war to a successful end, while you will lose both your kingdom and your life for having disobeyed God and failed to keep his commands in the war against the Amalekites, just as I foretold you while I was still alive. Know, then, that your people will fall into the power of the enemy, and that tomorrow you yourself, together with your sons, will fall in the battle and join me."
On hearing this, Saul was struck speechless with grief and collapsed to the ground, whether from the anguish that came upon him at these words or from weakness — for he had eaten nothing the previous day and night — and lay there as still as a corpse. When he had barely come to himself, the woman urged him to eat, asking this favor of him in return for the perilous divination she had performed, one it was not lawful for her to carry out, given the danger to herself while not even knowing who he was; yet she had undertaken it and provided it all the same. In return she asked him to let her set a table and food before him, so that once he had regained his strength he might make his way safely back to his own camp. Though he resisted and, in his despair, had turned entirely away from the thought, she pressed him and won him over. She had a single calf that she kept, one she cared for and fed with her own hands as a poor woman does, her sole comfort and possession; this she slaughtered, prepared the meat, and set it before his servants and before him. So Saul returned to the camp during the night.
It is right to commend the woman for her generosity, in that, although she had been forbidden by the king to practice her art — the very king from whom, had things gone otherwise, her household might have had a better and more secure living — and though she had never laid eyes on him before, she bore him no grudge for having condemned her craft, nor did she turn away from him as a stranger with whom she had never had any dealing. Instead she showed him sympathy, comforted him, and, though he was utterly averse to it, urged him toward the very thing that was distasteful to him, and gave him freely and warmly the one thing she had, poor as she was — not repaying some kindness already done to her, nor courting a favor to come, since she knew he was going to die. Most people show generosity either toward those who have already done them some good, or toward those from whom they hope to gain some future advantage; she did neither. It is good, then, to imitate this woman, and to do good to all who are in need, without supposing that anything is more fitting or more proper to the human race, or anything by which we might better secure God's favor as the giver of good things.
So much, then, may suffice to have said about the woman. I will now turn to an account that is of value to cities, peoples, and nations, and fitting for good men — one that will move everyone to pursue virtue, to strive for glory, and to leave behind an undying name and memory, and that will instill in kings and rulers of nations alike a great longing and zeal for what is noble, spurring them to face danger and death for their homelands, and teaching them to despise every terror. I take as the occasion for this account Saul, king of the Hebrews. For although he knew what was to happen and the death that awaited him, since the prophet had foretold it, he did not choose to flee it, nor, out of love of life, to abandon his own people to the enemy and disgrace the dignity of his kingship; instead, he gave himself over, with his whole household and his sons, to danger, judging it a fine thing to fall fighting alongside them for his subjects, and for his sons to die good men rather than be left to an uncertain fate as to what kind of men they would turn out to be — for a worthy heir and lineage will keep his praise and his memory forever undimmed. This man, then, seems to me alone — or if there has ever been or will ever be another like him — just, brave, and self-controlled, and alone worthy to reap from everyone the tribute owed to virtue.
Those who go out to war full of hope, expecting to win and to return safe, and who, once they have accomplished some brilliant feat, are then called brave by historians and other writers — I do not think they are rightly so called. Such men are indeed just and deserve approval, but only those who imitate Saul could rightly be called courageous, daring, and men who despise danger. To go into battle without flinching, not knowing what is going to happen, and to leave oneself to the uncertainty of fortune, is not yet a mark of true nobility, even if such men happen to accomplish many great deeds. But to expect nothing good in one's mind, to know beforehand that one must die and suffer this fate in the fighting, and yet not to be afraid or terrified at the danger, but to go forward to meet what one knows lies in store — this I judge to be the true proof of courage. This, then, is what Saul did, showing that all who long for a good name after death ought to act in such a way as to leave one behind, and above all kings, since the greatness of their power leaves them no room to be anything less than good to their subjects, indeed no room even to be merely moderately good. I could say still more about Saul and his courage, since the subject furnishes ample material, but so as not to appear to make excessive or tasteless use of his praises, I return now to the point from which I turned aside to this digression.
The Philistines, then, having encamped as I said before, and mustering their forces by nation, kingdom, and province, the last king to come forward was Achish with his own army, and David followed with his six hundred armed men. When the Philistine commanders saw him, they asked the king where these Hebrews had come from and who had summoned them. He told them that this was David, who had fled from his master Saul and come over to him, and that Achish had received him, and that David now wished to repay the favor and be avenged on Saul by fighting on their side. But the commanders found fault with Achish for having taken on an enemy as an ally and advised him to send David away, lest he do some great harm to their side without their noticing, for it would give him a way to be reconciled with his former master by damaging their forces. This, they said, was clearly what he had in mind, and they urged that he be sent back, together with his six hundred armed men, to the place Achish had given him to live in; for this, they said, was the David of whom the young women sang, that he had destroyed many tens of thousands of Philistines.
On hearing this, the king of Gath judged that they had spoken well, and calling David to him said, "I myself can testify to your great loyalty and goodwill toward me, and it was for that reason I brought you along as an ally; but the commanders do not share my view. Go, then, at daybreak to the place I gave you, suspecting nothing amiss, and there keep watch over the territory for me, in case any of the enemy should invade it. That too is a part of being an ally." So David, as the king of Gath ordered, went to Ziklag. But during the very time he had left to fight alongside the Philistines, the Amalekites had come and taken Ziklag by force, and after burning it and carrying off a great quantity of plunder both from that town and from the rest of the Philistine territory, had withdrawn.
David, finding Ziklag sacked, everything plundered, and his own wives — he had two — together with the wives and children of his companions carried off captive, at once tore his clothes. Weeping and mourning with his friends, he was so overcome by these misfortunes that his very tears finally failed him, and he was in danger of being killed, pelted by his own companions, who were in anguish over the captivity of their wives and children and blamed him for what had happened. But recovering from his grief and turning his mind toward God, he asked the high priest Abiathar to put on the priestly robe, to inquire of God, and to prophesy whether, if he pursued the Amalekites, God would grant him to overtake them, to save the women and children, and to punish the enemy. When the high priest bade him pursue them, David set out at once with his six hundred armed men and went after the enemy. Coming to a wadi called Besor, he came upon an Egyptian wandering there, exhausted from want and hunger — for he had gone three days lost in the wilderness without food — and, first reviving him with drink and food, asked him who he was and where he came from.
The man said he was an Egyptian by birth, left behind by his master because illness had made him unable to keep up; he told him he had been one of those who had burned and plundered parts of Judea, including Ziklag. David then used him as a guide against the Amalekites, and, finding them sprawled on the ground — some eating, others already drunk and slack with wine, enjoying their spoils and plunder — he fell upon them suddenly and slaughtered a great number of them; for, being unarmed and expecting nothing of the kind, but all bent on drinking and feasting, they were easy prey. Some of them were cut down still reclining at their tables, their blood mingling with the food and drink before them; others were killed as they toasted one another's health; others still as sleep overcame them from the strong wine. Those who managed to arm themselves in time and stand against him were struck down just as easily as the ones lying unarmed. David's men kept up the slaughter from the first hour until evening, so that no more than four hundred of the Amalekites were left, and these escaped by mounting swift camels. He recovered
and everything else the enemy had plundered from them, together with his own wives and those of his companions. When they came back to the place where they had left the two hundred men who had been unable to keep up and had stayed with the baggage, the four hundred refused to share with them any of the rest of the spoil and plunder, saying that since these men had not joined the pursuit but had grown soft over it, they should be satisfied to get back their rescued wives without receiving anything more.
David, however, declared their opinion wicked and unjust. Since God had granted them the power both to punish their enemies and to recover all that was theirs, he said, the spoil should be divided equally among all who had taken part in the campaign, especially since it was by guarding the baggage that these men had remained behind. From that time this became their established law, that those who guarded the baggage should receive the same share as those who fought.
When David reached Ziklag he sent portions of the spoils to all his acquaintances and friends among the tribe of Judah. Such, then, was the course of the sack of Ziklag and the destruction of the Amalekites.
When the Philistines joined battle, a fierce fight followed, and the Philistines won, killing many of their opponents. Saul, king of the Israelites, and his sons fought nobly and with all eagerness, since their entire reputation now rested on dying well and risking everything boldly against the enemy — for they had nothing left beyond this. They turned the whole enemy line upon themselves, and though surrounded, they killed many Philistines before falling. His sons were Jonathan, Abinadab, and Malchishua.
When they had fallen, the mass of the Hebrews turned to flight, and disorder and confusion arose as the enemy pressed upon them. Saul fled with the strong company he still had around him, but when the Philistines sent javelin-throwers and archers after him, he lost all his men but a few. He himself fought brilliantly and received many wounds, until he could no longer hold out or withstand the blows. Unable to kill himself, he ordered his armor-bearer to draw his sword and run him through, before the enemy could take him alive.
When the armor-bearer did not dare to kill his master, Saul drew his own sword, set it upright, and threw himself upon its point. But he could not stand steady or press the blade through by his own weight, so he turned to a young man standing nearby, and on learning that he was an Amalekite, asked him to press the sword through, since he himself could not manage it with his own hands, and so give him the death he wished. When the young man had done this, he stripped the gold armlet from Saul's arm along with the royal crown and made off.
The armor-bearer, seeing Saul dead, killed himself as well. Not one of the king's bodyguard survived; all fell on what is called Mount Gilboa. When the Hebrews living in the valley across the Jordan, and those who held the cities on the plain, heard that Saul and his sons had fallen and that the force with him had been destroyed, they abandoned their own cities and fled to the strongest fortresses. The Philistines, finding the abandoned cities empty, occupied them.
The next day, as the Philistines were stripping the enemy dead, they came upon the bodies of Saul and his sons. They stripped them, cut off their heads, and sent messengers throughout the whole country announcing that their enemies had fallen. They dedicated their armor in the temple of Astarte, and impaled their bodies on the walls of the city of Beth-shan, which is now called Scythopolis.
When the inhabitants of Jabesh, a city of Gilead, heard that Saul's corpse and those of his sons had been mutilated, they thought it terrible to leave them unburied. The bravest and most daring men of the city — for this city produces men strong in body and spirit alike — set out and traveled all through the night to Beth-shan. Approaching the enemy's wall, they took down the body of Saul and those of his sons and carried them to Jabesh, without the enemy daring to stop them, out of respect for their courage.
The people of Jabesh, weeping as one people, buried the bodies in the finest spot in their territory, called Aroura, and for seven days they mourned them, together with their wives and children, beating their breasts and lamenting the king and his sons, tasting neither food nor drink.
This was the end Saul met, as Samuel had prophesied, because he had disobeyed God's commands concerning the Amalekites, and because he had destroyed the family of the high priest Ahimelech, Ahimelech himself, and the city of the priests. He reigned eighteen years while Samuel was alive, and twenty-two after his death. Such was the end of Saul's life.

======== Antiquities — Book 7 ========

1. How David reigned over the one tribe at the city of Hebron, while the son of Saul reigned over the rest of the people. 2. How, when Ish-bosheth was murdered by a conspiracy of friends, David received the kingdom over all. 3. How David besieged Jerusalem, took the city, drove the Canaanites out of it, and settled Jews there. 4. How, when the Philistines twice took the field against him, he defeated them at Jerusalem. 5. The friendship that arose between David and Hiram, king of Tyre. 6. How David campaigned against the surrounding nations, subdued them, and imposed tribute on them. 7. The battle and victory David won against the Damascenes. 8. How he campaigned against the Mesopotamians and mastered them. 9. How, when his own household rose against him, he was driven from power by his son and fled beyond the Jordan. 10. How Absalom took the field against his father David and perished together with his army. 11. How David came down again to the kingdom, lived out his days in happiness, and, while still alive, appointed his son Solomon king. 12. The death of David, who left his son a great store of silver, gold, and precious stones for building the temple. This book covers a period of forty years.
Now it happened that this battle took place on the very day that David, having defeated the Amalekites, returned to Ziklag. He had already spent two days at Ziklag when, on the third, a man arrived who had escaped from the battle against the Philistines — the very man who had killed Saul — with his clothes torn and ashes poured over his head. He bowed before David, and when David asked him where he had come from in such a state, he said he had come from the battle of the Israelites, and reported that its outcome had been disastrous: many tens of thousands of the Hebrews had been killed, and their king Saul had fallen along with his sons. He claimed to know this because he himself had been present at the rout of the Hebrews and had been with the king when he fled.
He said that when Saul, about to be captured by the enemy, was on the point of killing himself, he had been urged by the king to do it, and admitted that he had done so: Saul had fallen upon his sword, but because his wounds were so severe he had grown too weak to finish himself off. As proof of the killing the man produced the gold armlet the king had worn and his crown, which he had stripped from Saul's corpse and brought to David. David, now unable to disbelieve, seeing clear evidence of Saul's death, tore his clothes, and together with his companions spent the whole day weeping and lamenting.
His grief was made still sharper by the fact that Saul's son Jonathan had been his most faithful friend and the man responsible for saving his life. Indeed Jonathan had shown such virtue and such devotion toward Saul that, though he had often been in danger of losing his own life at his father's hands, he not only took his death hard but also punished the man who had killed him. For when the Amalekite told him he had himself been the one to kill the king, boasting of it as his own doing, and David learned that the man was the son of an Amalekite father, he ordered him put to death. David also composed dirges and funeral eulogies for Saul and Jonathan, which survive even to my own day.
When he had honored the king with these tributes and his mourning was ended, he inquired of God through the prophet which city of the tribe called Judah he should give him to settle in. God answered that he should give him Hebron; so David left Ziklag and went there, bringing with him his wives — he had two — and the soldiers who were with him. And all the people of the tribe just named came together to him and proclaimed him king.
When he heard that the inhabitants of Jabesh in Gilead had buried Saul and his sons, he sent to them praising and commending their deed, promising to repay them for the devotion they had shown the dead, and at the same time informing them that the tribe of Judah had chosen him king. Now Saul's commander-in-chief, Abner son of Ner, a vigorous man of good natural ability, when he learned that the king had fallen, along with Jonathan and his two other sons, hastened to the camp, snatched up Saul's surviving son — his name was Ish-bosheth — and carried him across to the far side of the Jordan, where he proclaimed him king over the whole people except the tribe of Judah.
He made him a royal seat at the place called, in the native tongue, Mahanaim, and in Greek, "The Camps." From there Abner set out with a picked force, intending to engage the men of the tribe of Judah, for he was furious with them for having made David king. But he was met by a man David had sent — the son of Zeruiah, whose father was Suri, and who was Zeruiah's son by David's sister — Joab, who was David's commander-in-chief, together with his brothers Abishai and Asahel and all of David's soldiers.
Coming upon each other at a certain spring in the city of Gibeon, they drew up for battle. Abner proposed that they find out which side had the braver soldiers, and it was agreed that twelve men from each side would fight it out. So the men chosen for the contest by the two commanders advanced into the space between the battle lines, hurled their spears at one another, then drew their swords and, seizing each other by the head, held on and struck each other in the ribs and flanks with their blades, until, as if by agreement, every one of them died.
When these had fallen the rest of the armies clashed as well, and after a hard-fought battle Abner's men were defeated. Joab did not let up in pursuing the routed enemy, but pressed on himself, urging his soldiers to keep close on their heels and not tire of cutting them down. His brothers fought eagerly too, and the younger, Asahel, distinguished himself above the rest, for he had a reputation for speed of foot — indeed they say he could outrun not only men but even a horse matched against him in a race.
He pursued Abner headlong, running straight on without swerving to either side. Abner turned and tried to outwit his pursuer's charge, and at one point one of his own soldiers told him to give up the chase and strip Asahel of his armor; but when this failed to persuade Asahel to stop and he kept urging him not to pursue further, warning that if he killed him he would lose the friendship he enjoyed with his brother — Asahel would not listen to these words but kept up the pursuit, so that Abner, still fleeing, thrust his spear backward and struck a fatal blow, killing him on the spot.
When the men who had been pursuing Abner alongside Asahel reached the place where he lay, they stood around the body and pursued the enemy no further. But Joab himself and his brother Abishai ran past the corpse, and, driven by anger over their dead brother to press the chase against Abner all the harder, pursued him with incredible speed and eagerness as far as a place called Ammah, by which time the sun was already setting. Abner climbed a certain hill in that region, which belongs to the tribe of Benjamin,
and from there kept watch on his pursuers and on Abner's own men. Then Joab shouted out that kinsmen should not be goaded into strife and battle against one another, and that his own brother Asahel had been at fault as well, since he would not listen when warned not to pursue and so was struck down and killed because of it. Persuaded by these words, and taking them as good counsel, Joab sounded the trumpet to recall his soldiers and called off the long pursuit.
So Joab encamped that night on that very spot, while Abner marched the whole night through, crossed the Jordan River, and arrived at Mahanaim, where Saul's son was. The next day Joab counted all the dead and gave them burial. Of Abner's soldiers about three hundred and sixty had fallen,
and of David's, nineteen, plus Asahel, whose body Joab and Abishai carried from there to Bethlehem and buried in their ancestral tomb before returning to David at Hebron. From that time civil war began among the Hebrews and continued for a long while, David's side always growing stronger and gaining the advantage in the fighting, while Saul's son and his supporters grew weaker almost by the day.
About this time David also had sons born to him, six in number, from as many wives. The eldest, born of his mother Ahinoam, was named Amnon; the second, by his wife Abigail, was named Chileab; the third, born to him of Maacah, daughter of Talmai king of the Geshurites, was named Absalom;
the fourth he named Adonijah, by his wife Haggith; the fifth, Shephatiah, by Abital; and the sixth he named Ithream, by Eglah. While the civil war continued, with frequent clashes and battles between the two kings' forces, Abner, the commander-in-chief of Saul's son, being a shrewd man and
holding great goodwill among the people, kept them all firmly loyal to Ish-bosheth, and for a considerable time they remained devoted to his cause. But later Abner fell under a charge — accused of having slept with Saul's concubine Rizpah, daughter of Aiah — and when Ish-bosheth reproached him for it, he was deeply hurt and angered, feeling that he was not receiving fair treatment in return for all the care he had taken on Ish-bosheth's behalf,
and he threatened to turn the kingdom over to David, and to show that it was not through his own strength and judgment that Ish-bosheth ruled the lands beyond the Jordan, but through Abner's generalship and loyalty. He sent to David at Hebron asking to receive oaths and pledges that David would keep him as companion and friend, in return for his winning over the people to abandon Saul's son
and proclaim David king of the whole country. David agreed to the terms — he was pleased with what Abner proposed to him through his envoys — but insisted that as a first proof of the agreement Abner restore to him his wife Michal, whom he had won at great risk and with six hundred Philistine heads, which he had brought to her father Saul as her bride-price. So Abner sent Michal to him,
taking her from Paltiel, who was then living with her as her husband, with Ish-bosheth's cooperation as well — for David had written to him that he should justly get his wife back. Abner then called together the elders of the people, the captains, and the officers, and addressed them, saying that although he had before now turned them back from their readiness to abandon Ish-bosheth and side with David, he now let them go whichever way they wished,
for he knew that God, through the prophet Samuel, had appointed David king of all the Hebrews, and had foretold that David himself would take vengeance on the Philistines and reduce them to subjection. Hearing this, the elders and the leaders, since Abner's judgment now matched the view they themselves had already held about affairs, changed their allegiance to David's side. Once they were persuaded, Abner called together the tribe of Benjamin,
since it was from that tribe that all of Ish-bosheth's bodyguard came, and he made the same case to them; and when he found they raised no objection but went along with what he wanted, he took about twenty companions with him and went to David to receive the oaths from him in person, since agreements each man makes for himself are held to be more trustworthy than those made through another, and also to report
to the leaders and to the whole tribe the terms that had been arranged. David received him warmly, entertained him for several days at a lavish and costly table, and Abner asked leave to go and bring the people, so that in David's presence, before their own eyes, they might hand over the kingdom to him. But no sooner had David sent Abner off than Joab, his commander-in-chief, arrived at Hebron, and on learning that
Abner had just been with David and had a little before departed under a settlement and agreement about the kingship, he feared that David would honor Abner and give him the first place, making him his partner in the kingdom — since Abner was, besides, a shrewd man skilled at reading affairs and seizing opportunities — while he himself would be diminished and stripped of his command. So he set out on a wicked and treacherous course. First
he tried to slander Abner to the king, warning him to be on his guard and not trust what Abner had agreed to, since everything Abner did was aimed at securing the throne for Saul's son, and that he had come to David with deceit and treachery, meaning to leave again with the very hopes and plans he had set out to arrange. But when he failed to persuade David of this and saw that David was not even provoked by it, he turned
to a bolder course still, and, having decided to kill Abner, sent men after him with orders that, once they overtook him, they should summon him in David's name, on the pretext that David had some further business to discuss with him that he had forgotten to mention while Abner was present. When Abner heard the messengers' words, they caught up with him at a place called Besherah, twenty stadia from Hebron, and, suspecting nothing
of what was about to happen, he turned back. Joab met him at the gate and greeted him with every show of goodwill and friendship — for men who set their hand to monstrous deeds are quite practiced at feigning the manner of truly good men, so as to keep their plot from being suspected — and drew him away from his own companions, as though to speak with him privately, leading him to a more deserted part of the gate where he was alone with his brother Abishai;
there, drawing his sword, he struck him under the ribs. And so Abner died, ambushed in this way by Joab — ostensibly, as Joab himself claimed, in vengeance for his brother Asahel, whom Abner had killed in the battle near Hebron after catching him in pursuit, but in truth, as the matter really stood, because Joab feared for his command and for his standing with the king, lest he himself
be stripped of these honors and Abner receive from David the first place instead. From this one may see how far, and to what lengths, men will go out of greed for gain and power and their refusal to yield any part of it to another: longing to obtain such things, they resort to countless evils to get them, and, fearing to lose them, secure the permanence of their hold by means far worse still — as though winning something so great were no less dangerous a business than keeping it.
power, and a man who has grown used to the good things it brings, only to lose it afterward, since this is the greatest of misfortunes. It is for this reason that everyone, once seized by the fear of losing it, contrives harsher measures and dares terrible deeds. But let this brief statement suffice on that subject.
When David heard that Abner had been murdered, he was grieved to the heart, and he called everyone to witness, raising his right hand to God and crying out, that he had had no part in Abner's slaughter and that the man had not died by his order or his own wish. He pronounced terrible curses on the murderer, and he held Joab's whole house and his accomplices answerable to the penalties owed for the dead man, for he was anxious not to seem to have done this in violation of the pledges and oaths he had given Abner.
He ordered the whole people, however, to weep and mourn the man and to honor his body with the customary rites, tearing their garments and putting on sackcloth, and to do this while walking before the bier. He himself followed with the elders and the men in command, beating his breast and showing through his tears both his goodwill toward the man while he lived and his grief now that he was dead, and that it was not by his own wish that he had been killed. He buried him at Hebron with great splendor, and having composed dirges for the funeral, he himself stood first at the tomb and led the lament, then handed it over to the others. So thoroughly did the death of Abner overcome him that his companions could not persuade him to take food, and he swore to taste nothing until sunset.
This won him the people's goodwill, for those who had been devoted to Abner were deeply pleased at the honor David showed him after his death and at his fidelity in keeping faith, since he had accorded him everything customary as to a kinsman and friend, and had not, though the man had become his enemy, insulted him with a disorderly and neglected burial. And the rest of the people too rejoiced, as one does at a good and gentle nature, each reckoning that the same care the king had shown toward Abner's corpse he would find shown toward himself in similar circumstances. For this reason especially they were devoted to David, taking care, as was natural, for his good name, since no one suspected him of having had Abner murdered. He also spoke to the people, saying that no ordinary grief had come upon him at the death of a good man, and that it was no small loss to the affairs of the Hebrews to be deprived of one who could hold them together and preserve them, both by the best of counsels and by strength of hand in the deeds of war.
"But God," he said, "who cares for all things, will not let this go unavenged for us. And I know well that I am not able to do anything against Joab and Abishai, the sons of Zeruiah, who are more powerful than I am, but the divine will render them the recompense owed for what they have dared."
Such was the end to which Abner's life came. When Saul's son Ishbosheth heard of his death he did not bear it calmly, having lost a kinsman who had also given him the kingdom, but was overcome with grief, and Abner's death pained him greatly. He himself did not live much longer either, but was murdered through a plot by the sons of Eremmon, one named Bana and the other Thaenos.
These men were Benjaminites of the first rank, and reckoning that if they killed Ishbosheth they would win great gifts from David, together with a command or some other mark of trust, since the deed would recommend them to him, found Ishbosheth resting at noon and asleep, with neither the guards present nor the doorkeeper awake -- she too had fallen into sleep from weariness and the work she had been doing, and from the heat. They went in to the chamber where Saul's son lay sleeping and killed him. Cutting off his head, and traveling through a whole night and day, as men fleeing from those they had wronged toward one who would receive their favor and grant them safety, they arrived at Hebron. They showed David the head of Ishbosheth and presented themselves as loyal men who had done away with his enemy and rival for the kingdom.
But David did not receive their deed as they had hoped; instead he said, "You most wicked men, who will at once pay the penalty -- did you not understand how I punished the murderer of Saul and the man who brought me his golden crown, even though he did the killing as a favor to Saul, so that the enemy might not capture him? Did you suppose that I had changed and was no longer the same man, so as to delight in evildoers and to count as favors your master-killing deeds, done against a righteous man who had done no wrong to anyone, in his own bed, when you yourselves had received much goodwill and honor from him? For this you will pay the penalty owed to him by being punished, and to me the penalty for having supposed that I would be pleased at Ishbosheth's death, and that this would move you to kill him. For you could not have wronged my good name more than by that assumption."
Having said this, he had them tortured with every torment and then put to death, and taking Ishbosheth's head, he had it buried with all honor in Abner's tomb.
After these events reached such an end, all the leading men of the people of the Hebrews came to David at Hebron, both their commanders of thousands and their officers, and gave themselves over to him, recalling the goodwill they had held toward him even while Saul was still living, and also the honor which, when he had become a commander of a thousand, they had continued to show him without fail, and declaring that he had been appointed king by God through Samuel the prophet, and his descendants after him, and that it was he who had saved the country of the Hebrews for them by defeating the Philistines, a gift God had granted through him. He welcomed their eagerness, urged them to remain steadfast -- for they would have no cause to regret it -- feasted them and treated them kindly, and sent the people back to bring to him everyone else.
There assembled, from the tribe of Judah, about six thousand eight hundred armed men bearing shield and spear -- these had remained with Saul's son, for apart from them the tribe of Judah had proclaimed David king. From the tribe of Simeon, seven thousand one hundred. From the tribe of Levi, four thousand seven hundred, with Jodamus as their commander; with them was the high priest Zadok, together with twenty-two kinsmen who were leaders. From the tribe of Benjamin, four thousand armed men -- for that tribe still waited, expecting that someone of Saul's line would yet become king. From the tribe of Ephraim, twenty thousand eight hundred of the strongest and most outstanding in might. From the half-tribe of Manasseh, eighteen thousand of the strongest. From the tribe of Issachar, two hundred who had foreknowledge of things to come, and twenty thousand armed men. From the tribe of Zebulun, fifty thousand picked, armed men -- this tribe alone came out in full; all of these had the same equipment as the men of the tribe of Gad. From the tribe of Naphtali, one thousand notable men and leaders equipped with shield and spear, followed by a tribe beyond counting. From the tribe of Dan, twenty-seven thousand six hundred chosen men. From the tribe of Asher, forty thousand. From the two tribes across the Jordan and the rest of the tribe of Manasseh, one hundred twenty thousand armed with shield, spear, helmet, and sword; and the rest of the tribes used swords.
This whole multitude came together to David at Hebron with abundant provision of food and wine and everything needed for sustenance, and with one accord confirmed David as king. After the people had feasted and been entertained for three days at Hebron, David set out from there with them all and came to Jerusalem.
The inhabitants of the city, the Jebusites, a people of Canaanite stock, shut the gates against him, and set upon the wall, in mockery of the king, the blind and the lame and everyone who was maimed, saying that they would keep him from entering -- even the disabled would stop him -- and they did this out of contempt for the strength of their walls. Enraged, David began to besiege Jerusalem, and applying great effort and zeal, so as to display his strength at once by taking it and to strike fear into any others who might be disposed toward him as these people were, he took the lower city by force. But the citadel still held out, and the king, knowing this, resolved by promise of honor and rewards to make the soldiers more eager for the task, and he proclaimed that he would give command of the whole army to whoever climbed up to the citadel by way of the ravines beneath it and took it. As everyone was eager to make the climb and no one shrank from any labor out of desire for the command, Joab son of Zeruiah outstripped the others, and having climbed up, called out to the king demanding the command.
Having driven the Jebusites from the citadel and having himself rebuilt Jerusalem, he named the city after himself, the City of David, and he spent all his time there while he reigned. The time during which he ruled over the tribe of Judah alone, at Hebron, came to seven years and six months. Having made Jerusalem his royal seat, he grew ever more splendid in his fortunes, as God provided for him, making his affairs prosper and increase. Hiram, king of Tyre, sent envoys to him and concluded a treaty of friendship and alliance; he also sent him gifts -- cedar wood and skilled men, carpenters and builders, who built a palace at Jerusalem.
David, having taken the upper city and joined the citadel to it, made them a single body, and having walled it round, he appointed Joab overseer of the walls. David was thus the first to drive the Jebusites out of Jerusalem and to name the city after himself; for in the time of Abraham our forefather it was called Salem, but afterward, some say, because Homer too gave it this name, it was called Hierosolyma -- for in the Hebrew tongue "hieron" renders "Solyma," which means safety. The whole time from the campaign and war of Joshua the general against the Canaanites, in which he defeated them and allotted this land to the Hebrews, down to when the Israelites were no longer able to drive the Canaanites out of Jerusalem, until David took it by siege, was five hundred and fifteen years.
I shall also make mention of Orna, a wealthy man of the Jebusites, who was not killed in the siege of Jerusalem by David because of his goodwill toward the Hebrews, and because of a certain favor and eagerness he showed toward the king, which I will explain more fittingly a little later.
David also married other wives besides those he already had, and he took concubines. He fathered nine sons in all, whom he named Amase, Amnou, Seban, Nathan, Solomon, Iebares, Elien, Phalnageas, Naphe, Ienae, Eliphale, and also a daughter, Thamar. Of these, nine were born of women of noble birth, while the last two we have named were born of the concubines. Thamar was Absalom's sister by the same mother.
When the Philistines learned that David had been made king by the Hebrews, they marched against him toward Jerusalem, and seizing the valley called the Valley of the Giants -- a place not far from the city -- they encamped there. The king of the Jews, for he was accustomed to do nothing without prophecy and without bidding God stand as his guarantor concerning things to come, ordered the high priest to foretell what seemed good to God and how the battle would end. When he had prophesied victory and mastery, David led out his forces against the Philistines, and when battle was joined, falling suddenly upon the enemy's rear, he killed some of them and put the rest to flight.
Let no one suppose that a small army of Philistines came against the Hebrews, judging from the speed of their defeat and from the fact that they showed no brave deed worthy of note, that they were slow and cowardly. Rather, let it be known that all Syria and Phoenicia, and besides these many other warlike nations, campaigned together with them and shared in the war -- this alone was the reason why, though defeated so often and losing so many tens of thousands, they still came against the Hebrews with greater force. Indeed, having failed even in these battles, a threefold army came against David and encamped in the same place. Again the king of the Israelites inquired of God concerning the outcome of the battle,
and the high priest prophesied that he should hold the army back in the groves called the Weeping-groves, not far from the enemy's camp, and not move it nor begin the battle before the groves were stirred, though no wind was blowing. When the groves were stirred, and the moment God had foretold to him arrived, he delayed no longer but went out to a victory already assured and evident. For the enemy's ranks did not withstand him, but were routed from the very first clash, and he pressed on killing them; he pursued them as far as the city of Gazara, which is the boundary of their country, plundered their camp, and finding great wealth in it, destroyed their gods as well.
When this battle too had ended in this way, David resolved, after taking counsel with the elders and the officers and the commanders of thousands, to summon the men of fighting age from every part of the country belonging to his own people, and then the priests and Levites, and to go to Kiriath-jearim and bring up the ark of God from there to Jerusalem, and to worship it there from then on with sacrifices and the other honors in which the divine takes delight -- for if they had done this even while Saul was still reigning, they would have suffered no harm. So, when all the people had assembled, as they had resolved, the king came to the ark, which the priests had lifted from the house of Aminadab and placed on a new cart, and entrusted brothers and sons to draw it along with
of oxen. The king led the way, and the whole crowd with him hymned God and sang every kind of native song, with a rich accompaniment of instruments, dances, and psalms, and trumpet and cymbals besides, as they brought the ark down toward Jerusalem. But when they had come as far as the threshing floor of Chidon, a place so called, Uzzah died by the anger of God. For when the oxen shook the ark, he stretched out his hand and tried to steady it, and because he was not a priest and had touched it, God caused his death. The king and the people were distressed at Uzzah's death, and the place where he died is called the Breach. David, afraid, and reasoning that he might suffer the same fate as Uzzah if he received the ark into the city with him — since that man had died merely for stretching out his hand toward it — did not bring it in to himself in the city, but turned aside to the estate of a righteous man, a Levite named Obededom, and set the ark down with him. It remained there three full months, and in that time the house of Obededom prospered greatly and received a large share of blessings.
When the king heard that this had happened to Obededom, and that he had suddenly risen from poverty and humble station to prosperity and became the envy of all who saw or heard about his household, he took courage, confident that he would suffer no harm, and moved the ark to himself. The priests carried it, seven choirs which the king had arranged went ahead of it, and David himself played and struck the strings of a lyre — so that his wife Michal, daughter of Saul the first king, seeing him doing this, mocked him. When they had brought the ark in, they set it beneath the tent David had pitched for it, and he offered whole burnt offerings and peace offerings, and feasted the whole crowd, both women and men and children, giving out to each a small round loaf of bread, a portion of roasted meat, a fried cake, and a share of the sacrificial victim. Having thus feasted the people, he sent them away and returned to his own house.
Michal, Saul's daughter, came out to meet him. She wished him well in other things and prayed that God would grant him all he could, since he was in God's favor, but she also reproached him for having disgraced himself, so great a king, by dancing and exposing himself in his dancing before slaves and serving women. He answered that he was not ashamed to do what was pleasing to God, who had honored him above her father and everyone else, and that he would play and dance again and again, caring nothing that it might seem shameful to the servant women, since he took no such view of it himself. This Michal, though she lived with David, bore him no children; later, when she was given in marriage to the man to whom her father Saul had once handed her, and David then took her back from him by force, she bore five children. We shall speak of these in their proper place.
Seeing that in almost every day his affairs were turning out better through the will of God, the king thought he was doing wrong if, while he himself lived in a house built of cedar, lofty and furnished with every fine appointment, he allowed the ark to remain lying in a tent. He wanted to build a temple for God, as Moses had said, and he spoke of this with Nathan the prophet. Since Nathan told him to do whatever he had set his mind on, as God was with him and would cooperate with him in everything, David grew even more eager about building the temple. But that same night God appeared to Nathan and ordered him to tell David that he accepted his intention and desire — since no one before him had thought of building him a temple, though it was David who had first conceived the plan — but that he would not allow a man who had fought many wars and been stained with the blood of enemies to build him a temple. After David's death, however, once he had grown old and lived out a long life, the temple would be built by his son, who would succeed him in the kingdom and would be called Solomon. God promised to watch over and provide for him as a father does for a son, to keep the kingdom for his descendants and hand it down to them, and to punish him, if he should sin, with sickness and famine in the land.
When David learned this from the prophet, he was overjoyed to know for certain that the rule would remain with his descendants and that his house would be glorious and celebrated, and he went to the ark, fell on his face, and began to worship and to give thanks to God for everything — for having already raised him from a humble shepherd to so great a height of rule and glory, and for what he had promised his descendants, and for the providence he had shown toward the freedom of the Hebrews. Having said this and hymned God, he departed.
After a short interval he decided he must march out against the Philistines, unwilling to let his affairs grow idle or slack in anything, so that, having subdued his enemies as God had foretold to him, he might leave his descendants ruling thereafter in peace. He called the army together again, ordered it to be ready and prepared for war, and when he judged the moment right, marched out from Jerusalem against the Philistines with his forces. Having defeated them in battle and cut off a large part of their territory, annexing it to that of the Hebrews, he next carried the war against the Moabites, and defeating two-thirds of their army in battle he destroyed them, taking the remainder captive. He imposed on them a yearly tribute.
He then campaigned against Hadadezer son of Rehob, king of Zobah, and joining battle with him by the Euphrates river he destroyed about twenty thousand of his infantry and about five thousand of his cavalry. He also captured a thousand of his chariots, most of which he destroyed, keeping only a hundred for himself.
When Hadad, king of Damascus and of Syria, heard that David was warring against Hadadezer, being his friend he came with a strong force to help him, but the outcome was as he had feared: joining battle by the Euphrates river, he was defeated and lost many of his soldiers, for twenty thousand of Hadad's force fell at the hands of the Hebrews, and all the rest fled.
Nicolaus too mentions this king in the fourth book of his histories, writing as follows: "Long afterward, a certain man of the region named Hadad, having grown more powerful, ruled over Damascus and the rest of Syria, except Phoenicia. He made war on David, king of Judea, and after being tried in many battles, in the last of them, fought by the Euphrates, in which he was defeated, he was judged to be the best of kings in strength and courage." And besides this he also speaks of his descendants, saying that after his death they received the kingdom and the name from one another in succession, writing thus: "After his death his descendants reigned for ten generations, each receiving from his father both the rule and the name together, just as the Ptolemies do in Egypt. The third of them, who had grown mightiest of all, wishing to avenge his ancestor's defeat, marched against the Jews and ravaged the land now called Samaria." Nicolaus does not miss the truth here, for this is the Hadad who campaigned against Samaria in the reign of Ahab, king of the Israelites, of whom we shall speak in the proper place.
David, having campaigned against Damascus and all the rest of Syria, made it wholly subject to himself, stationing garrisons in the country and fixing the tribute they were to pay, then returned. The golden quivers and suits of armor worn by Hadad's bodyguards he dedicated to God at Jerusalem — the very ones which the Egyptian king Shishak later took when he campaigned against David's grandson Rehoboam, carrying off besides much other wealth from Jerusalem; we shall tell of this when we come to its proper place.
As God favored the king of the Hebrews and gave him success in his wars, he also campaigned against the finest cities of Hadadezer, Betah and Berothai, and taking them by force plundered them. A great quantity of gold was found in them, and silver, and bronze too, which they said was better than the gold — the very bronze from which Solomon later made the great vessel called the Sea, and those beautiful basins, when he built the temple for God.
When the king of Hamath learned what had happened to Hadadezer and heard that his forces had been destroyed, fearing for himself he resolved to bind David to himself in friendship and trust before David should come against him, and sent to him his son Joram, acknowledging his gratitude for David's having warred against Hadadezer, who was also his enemy, and offering an alliance and friendship. He also sent him gifts, vessels of ancient workmanship in gold, silver, and bronze.
David, having made the alliance with Toi — for that was the name of the king of Hamath — and received the gifts, sent his son back with the honor due to both parties. What was sent to him, along with the rest of the gold and silver he had taken from the cities and the nations he had subdued, he brought and dedicated to God.
Nor did God grant victory and success only to David himself when he fought and led the army in person; when he sent Abishai, brother of Joab the commander-in-chief, with a force into Idumea, he gave the Hebrews victory over the Idumeans through him as well, for Abishai destroyed eighteen thousand of them in battle. The king garrisoned all Idumea and received from them tribute for the land and a poll tax for each person. He was also just by nature and rendered his judgments with an eye to the truth.
He had Joab as commander of the whole army; over the records he set Jehoshaphat son of Ahilud; from the house of Phinehas he appointed Zadok high priest along with Abiathar, since he was his friend; he made Seraiah secretary; to Benaiah son of Jehoiada he gave command of the bodyguard; and his elder sons attended his person and served as his guard.
He also remembered the covenant and oaths he had made with Jonathan, Saul's son, and Jonathan's friendship and devotion toward him. For besides all the other good qualities he possessed, he was most mindful, for all time, of those who had done him good. He therefore ordered a search to be made for anyone still living from Jonathan's family, to whom he might repay the debt he owed Jonathan for his friendship. A man was brought to him who had been freed by Saul and who knew who among that family still survived; David asked him whether he could name any relative of Jonathan still alive who might receive in return the favor of the kindnesses he himself had received from Jonathan. The man said a son of his survived, named Mephibosheth, who was lame in both feet, for after news came that the child's father and grandfather had fallen in battle, his nurse had snatched him up and fled, and in her flight he had fallen from her shoulders and his feet were injured.
Learning where and with whom the boy was being raised, David sent to Machir, in the city of Lodebar, for it was with him that Jonathan's son was being brought up, and summoned him to himself. Mephibosheth came to the king, fell on his face, and did obeisance to him. David urged him to take courage and expect better things, and gave him his father's house and all the property that his grandfather Saul had owned, ordered that he should eat at his table as a companion, and that he should not be absent a single day from dining with him. When the boy had done obeisance for these words and gifts, David called Ziba and told him he had given the ancestral house to the boy along with all of Saul's estate, and ordered Ziba himself to work the land and, taking charge of everything, to bring the produce to Jerusalem, and to bring himself and his sons — there were fifteen of them — each day to David's own table, along with Mephibosheth, and he granted to the boy Ziba's servants, who numbered twenty. When the king had arranged all this, Ziba did obeisance, promised to do everything, and withdrew, while Jonathan's son settled in Jerusalem, dining with the king and receiving every attention as though he were his own son; a son was also born to him, whom he named Micha.
Those who survived from the family of Saul and Jonathan received these honors from David. About that time Nahash, king of the Ammonites, who had been his friend, died, and his son Hanun succeeded to the kingdom. David sent envoys to him, urging him to bear his father's death calmly and promising that the same friendship he had shown Nahash would continue toward him. But the rulers of the Ammonites received this in bad faith, not in the spirit David intended, and urged their king on, saying that David had sent spies to survey their country and their strength under the pretense of kindness, and they advised him to be on guard and not to heed David's words, lest he be deceived and fall into irremediable disaster. Hanun, king of the Ammonites, thinking the rulers spoke more plausibly than the truth, treated the envoys David had sent with harsh insult: he shaved off half of each man's beard, cut off half their garments, and sent them away, their answer conveyed in deeds rather than words. When the king of the Israelites saw this, he was furious, and it was clear he would not overlook the outrage and insult but would make war on the Ammonites and exact from their king punishment for this offense against his envoys. When the Ammonites learned this...
His kinsmen and commanders, seeing that they had broken faith and owed a reckoning for it, began preparing for war. They sent to Syrus, king of the Mesopotamian Syrians, a thousand talents to persuade him to become their ally for that fee, and did the same with Souba; between the two kings they had twenty thousand infantry. They also hired the king of the land called Maacah, and a fourth, named Istobos, together bringing twelve thousand heavy infantry.
David was not daunted by this alliance or by the strength of the Ammonites. Trusting in God, and convinced that he would be fighting them justly for the outrage he had suffered, he gave Joab, his commander-in-chief, the fittest part of the army and sent him against them. Joab encamped before Arabatha, the Ammonite capital.
When the enemy came out and drew up for battle, they did not form as one body but in two: the mercenary force was posted apart on the plain, while the Ammonite army stood by the gates, facing the Hebrews. Seeing this, Joab devised a countermeasure of his own. Choosing his bravest men, he drew them up opposite the Syrian and his allied kings, and gave the rest to his brother Abishai with orders to form up against the Ammonites.
He told Abishai that if he saw the Syrians pressing him hard and gaining the upper hand, he should wheel his line around and come to his aid, and that he himself would do the same if he saw Abishai being worn down by the Ammonites. Having encouraged his brother in this way and urged him to fight with the spirit and eagerness proper to men who fear disgrace, he sent him off to engage the Ammonites while he himself joined battle with the Syrians.
After holding out stubbornly for a little while, the Syrians were routed: Joab killed many of them and forced the whole force to flight. Seeing this, and afraid of Abishai and the troops with him, the Ammonites did not stand their ground either, but followed their allies example and fled into the city. Having thus mastered the enemy, Joab returned to Jerusalem to the king in triumph.
This defeat did not persuade the Ammonites to keep quiet, nor did they learn from stronger men to remain at peace. Instead they sent to Chalamas, king of the Syrians beyond the Euphrates, and hired him as an ally; he had as his commander-in-chief Sebekos, with eighty thousand infantry and ten thousand cavalry. When the king of the Hebrews learned that the Ammonites had again gathered so great a force against him, he decided he could no longer fight them through his generals, but crossed the Jordan himself with the whole army. Meeting the enemy, he joined battle and won: he killed about forty thousand of their infantry and about seven thousand cavalry, and wounded Chalamas general Sebekos, who died of the wound. The Mesopotamians, the battle having ended so, surrendered themselves to David and sent him gifts.
He himself returned to Jerusalem for the winter season, and at the beginning of spring sent his commander-in-chief Joab to make war on the Ammonites. Joab overran their whole land, laying it waste, and shut them up in their capital, Arabatha, which he besieged.
It was at this time that a grave misfortune befell David, a man naturally just and God-fearing, who kept faithfully to the laws of his ancestors. One evening, watching from the roof of the palace, where it was his custom to walk at that hour, he saw a woman bathing in cold water in her own house, a woman of the greatest beauty, surpassing all others; her name was Bathsheba. He was overcome by the woman's beauty, and unable to master his desire, he had her brought to him.
When the woman conceived, she sent to the king asking him to find some way of concealing the offense, since by their ancestral laws she was liable to die as an adulteress. David summoned from the siege one of Joab's armor-bearers, the woman's husband, whose name was Uriah, and on his arrival questioned him about the army and the siege.
When Uriah said that everything was going as they wished, David took portions from his own dinner and gave them to him, and told him to go home to his wife and rest with her. But Uriah did not do so; instead he lay down to sleep by the king's doors along with the other armor-bearers. When the king learned of this, he questioned him as to why he had not gone to his own house or to his wife after so long a time away, when it is the nature of all men to do so when they return from a campaign. Uriah answered that it was not right for him to rest and indulge himself with a woman while his fellow soldiers and his commander were sleeping on the ground in camp, in enemy territory. Having said this, he was ordered to remain there that day, so that he might be sent back to the commander-in-chief the next day.
Invited to dine with the king, Uriah drank to the point of drunkenness, the king plying him deliberately with toasts, but even so he again slept before the king's doors, feeling no desire at all for his wife. Exasperated by this, the king wrote to Joab ordering him to punish Uriah, making clear that Uriah had committed some fault, and, so that his own wish in the matter should not become apparent, he suggested the manner of the punishment: he ordered Joab to post him in the most exposed sector of the enemy line, at a point where he would be in danger of being left alone in the fighting, for he instructed that his fellow soldiers should withdraw once the battle began. Having written this and sealed the letter with his own signet, he gave it to Uriah to carry to Joab.
Joab received the letter, and having read the king's design, stationed Uriah, together with some of the army's best men, at the very point where he knew the enemy had proved most dangerous. He himself declared he would come up in support with the whole force, if they could breach part of the wall and get into the city. Since Uriah was a fine soldier who enjoyed a reputation with the king and with all his countrymen for courage, Joab thought it right to let him welcome great hardships rather than resent them. Uriah eagerly undertook the task, and Joab told the men posted alongside him to abandon him privately whenever they saw the enemy charging out.
So when the Hebrews attacked the city, the Ammonites, fearing that the enemy might scale the wall before they could stop them at the very point where Uriah happened to be posted, put their bravest men forward, threw open the gate, and suddenly rushed out upon the enemy with great force and speed. Seeing them, all the men with Uriah withdrew, just as Joab had told them to; but Uriah, ashamed to flee and abandon his post, stood his ground against the enemy. Receiving their charge, he killed no small number of them, but was surrounded, caught in their midst, and died there, along with a few others who fell alongside him.
When this had happened, Joab sent messengers to the king, instructing them to say that he had been eager to take the city quickly, but that after assaulting the wall and losing many men he had been forced to withdraw, and to add, if the king grew angry at this, the news of Uriah's death as well.
When the king heard this from the messengers, he was indignant, saying that they had done wrong to assault the wall, when they ought instead to have tried to take the city by mines and siege engines, citing as an example Gideon's son Abimelech, who, wishing to take the tower at Thebes by force, was struck by a stone thrown by an old woman and fell, and though a most courageous man died shamefully because of the recklessness of his attempt; men should remember him and not approach the enemy's wall too closely, for it is best, of all things done in war, whether they turned out well or badly, to keep such risks in memory, so as to imitate some and guard against others. But when the messenger, finding him in this mood, told him also of Uriah's death, he ceased from his anger.
He ordered the messenger to go and tell Joab that what had happened was merely human, and that war has this nature: sometimes it turns out well for one side, sometimes for the other. For the future, however, Joab should take care over the siege, so that they suffer no further reverse in it, but should reduce the city by earthworks and siege engines, and once they had mastered it, raze the city to the ground and destroy everyone in it.
The messenger hurried back to Joab carrying the king's orders. Meanwhile Uriah's wife Bathsheba, on learning of her husband's death, mourned him for many days; and once she had ceased her grief and her weeping over Uriah, the king at once took her as his wife, and she bore him a son.
God was not pleased by this marriage. Angry with David, he appeared to the prophet Nathan in a dream and reproached the king through him. Nathan, a shrewd and intelligent man, reasoning that kings, once they fall into anger, give more weight to their passion than to justice, decided not to state God's threats outright, but instead related to him another, gentler kind of story, wishing to make clear to David, by this means, what he thought of what David had done.
Two men, he said, lived in the same city. One was rich and owned many flocks of cattle, sheep, and other livestock; the poor man had only a single ewe lamb, which he raised together with his children, sharing his food with her and treating her with the affection one might show a daughter. When a guest arrived at the rich man's house, the rich man would not consent to slaughter any of his own flocks to entertain his friend; instead he sent for the poor man's lamb, seized it, prepared it, and feasted his guest with it.
This story greatly distressed the king, and he declared to Nathan that the man who had dared to do such a thing deserved to pay fourfold for the lamb and, beyond that, to be punished with death. Nathan replied that David himself was the man he had just condemned by his own judgment, for daring so great and terrible a deed. He then uncovered and laid bare to him the full anger of God, who had made him king over the whole power of the Hebrews and lord of many great nations round about, who had rescued him earlier still from the hands of Saul, and had given him wives whom he had lawfully and rightfully married, and who had been despised and wronged by him, since he had taken another man's wife and had put her husband to death by handing him over to the enemy.
For this, Nathan said, David would pay the penalty to God: his own wives would be violated by one of his sons, and he himself would be plotted against by that same son, and the wrong he had done in secret would be punished openly; moreover, the son born to him of that woman would die at once.
The king was shaken by this and overcome with grief; with tears he confessed that he had sinned, for he was by common consent a God-fearing man who had committed no wrong at all in his life except in the matter of Uriah's wife. God took pity on him, was reconciled, and promised to preserve both his life and his kingdom, saying that since he repented of what had happened, he would no longer deal harshly with him. Having prophesied these things to the king, Nathan went home.
God struck the child born of Uriah's wife with a grave illness. David, distressed by this, refused all food for seven days, though his household urged him to eat; he put on black clothing, and lay on the ground on sackcloth, imploring God for the child's life, for he loved its mother deeply. On the seventh day the child died, and his servants did not dare tell the king, reasoning that if he learned of it he would abstain even more from food and from all other care of himself, as would be natural for one whose beloved child had died, when even during its illness grief had made him treat himself so harshly.
But the king noticed that his servants were troubled and behaving as people do when they most want to conceal something, and understood that the child had died. He called one of the servants to him and, learning the truth, rose up, bathed, put on white clothing, and went to the tent of God; then he ordered dinner to be served to him, causing great astonishment among his relatives and servants at this unexpected behavior, since he had done none of these things while the child was ill, yet now, once it had died, did them all at once.
When they asked the reason, and begged leave first to ask him about it, he told them they were ignorant, and explained: while the child still lived he had reason to hope for its recovery, and so did everything that was fitting, believing that God would in this way be made favorable toward it; but once it had died, there was no further use in vain grief. Hearing this, they praised the king's wisdom and understanding.
He then went in to his wife Bathsheba again and made her pregnant; when she bore a male child, he named him Solomon, as the prophet Nathan had directed.
Meanwhile Joab pressed the siege of the Ammonites hard, cutting them off from their water and from their other supplies, so that they suffered greatly from lack of drink and food; for they depended on a small well and cistern, using it sparingly so that the spring would not fail them completely.
He then wrote to the king to report this and to urge him to come and take the city himself, so that the victory might be credited to him. When Joab's letter arrived, the king, approving of his loyalty and good faith, took the force that was with him and came to storm Rabatha. Taking it by force, he allowed the soldiers to plunder it.
He himself took the crown of the king of the Ammonites, a talent of gold in weight, set with a costly sardonyx stone in the center; David wore it on his head from then on. He found much other splendid and costly plunder in the city as well; and he tortured the men to death. He did the same to the other cities of the
That was how he treated the other cities of the Ammonites too, taking them all by force. When the king returned to Jerusalem, a disaster befell his household for the following reason. He had a daughter, still a virgin, of such striking beauty that she surpassed all the loveliest women; her name was Tamar, and she shared the same mother as Absalom. Amnon, the eldest of David's sons, fell in love with her, and since he could obtain the object of his desire neither because of her virginity nor because of how closely she was guarded, he fell into a wretched state: his body wasted away under the torment consuming him, and his color changed.
He could not hide what he was suffering from a certain kinsman and friend named Jonadab, a man of unusual intelligence and sharp understanding. Noticing every morning that Amnon was not himself physically, Jonadab came to him and asked him to explain the reason, guessing on his own that Amnon was in the grip of erotic desire. When Amnon admitted his condition—that he was in love with his sister, who shared the same father—Jonadab suggested a way and a device for him to obtain what he longed for: he advised Amnon to pretend to be ill, and when their father came to see him, to ask that his sister be sent to attend to him, since he would find relief and quickly be rid of the illness once that happened.
So Amnon took to his bed and feigned sickness, following Jonadab's advice. When their father came and asked how he was, Amnon begged him to send his sister to him, and the king at once ordered her brought. When she arrived he directed her to make him some fried cakes with her own hands, since he would eat more gladly from her hands. She kneaded the flour while her brother watched, shaped the cakes, fried them, and brought them to him. But he did not taste them then; instead he ordered the servants to withdraw from the chamber, saying he wanted to rest, free of noise and disturbance. When his order had been carried out, he asked his sister to bring the food into the inner room to him. She did so, but as soon as she came near he seized her and tried to persuade her to lie with him.
The girl cried out, "No—do not force me to this, and do not commit this outrage, brother! You would be breaking the law and wrapping yourself in terrible shame. Stop this unjust and vile desire, from which our house will reap only reproach and disgrace." She urged him to speak to their father about it, for he would surely consent. She said this only to escape, for the moment, the onrush of his passion. But he would not be persuaded; burning with love and goaded by the stings of his passion, he forced his sister.
Hatred entered Amnon at once after the assault, and after heaping abuse on her he ordered her to get up and leave. When she protested that this was an even worse outrage—for having violated her, he would not even let her stay until nightfall, but ordered her out at once, in broad daylight, so that she would meet witnesses to her shame—he had her thrown out by a servant. Overwhelmed with grief at the outrage and the violence done to her, she tore her tunic (for in ancient times unmarried girls wore long-sleeved tunics reaching to the ankles, so as not to be seen bare), poured ashes over her head, and went off through the middle of the city crying out and lamenting the violence. Her brother Absalom happened upon her and asked what terrible thing had befallen her to leave her in such a state. When she told him of the outrage, he comforted her, urging her to keep calm and bear it patiently, and not to think herself dishonored, since it was her brother who had violated her.
Persuaded by him, she stopped her crying and no longer spoke of the assault before many people, and for a long time she lived on, widowed in effect, in the household of her brother Absalom. When their father David learned of this, he was distressed at what had happened, but since he loved Amnon deeply—he was, after all, his eldest son—he was forced to hold back from grieving him. Absalom, however, hated Amnon bitterly, and in secret he watched for an opportune moment to avenge his sister's wrong.
A second year had now passed since the wrong done to his sister, and as Absalom was about to go out to Baal-hazor, a town in the territory allotted to Ephraim, for the shearing of his own flocks, he invited his father, along with his brothers, to come and feast with him. When David declined, so as not to be a burden to him, Absalom asked that his brothers be sent instead. When they were sent, Absalom instructed his own men that as soon as they saw Amnon overcome and heavy with wine, they should kill him at Absalom's signal, fearing no one.
When they had carried out the order, shock and confusion seized the brothers, and in terror they mounted their horses and rode off to their father. But someone reached him first with the report that all of them had been killed by Absalom. Since the grief over the loss of so many sons at once, and at the hand of a brother—which made it seem all the more bitter, since it could have been prevented—overwhelmed him, he was swept away by his suffering and did not stop to inquire into the cause or to learn anything else, as one would naturally do when such a great calamity is reported and, because of its enormity, hard to credit. Instead he tore his clothes, threw himself to the ground, and lay there mourning all his sons—both those reported dead and the one who had killed them.
Jonadab, the son of his brother Shammah, urged him to relax his grief somewhat: as for the others, he said, David should not believe they were dead, for there was no reason to suppose so; but as for Amnon, he said David should make inquiry, since it was likely that Absalom, because of the outrage done to Tamar, had dared to kill him. At that moment the sound of horses and the commotion of men approaching made them turn—it was the king's sons who had fled from the feast. Their father met them weeping with grief, and, against his expectation, saw alive those he had just heard were dead a little while before. There was weeping and groaning from everyone: from the brothers, as though for one who had died, and from the king, as though for a son who had been slaughtered. Absalom fled to Geshur, to his maternal grandfather, who ruled that region, and remained with him three full years.
David had a desire to send for his son Absalom, not to bring him back for punishment but so that he might be with him, for time had softened his anger. Joab, the commander-in-chief, urged him toward this all the more, for he arranged for a certain woman, already advanced in years, to come before the king in mourning dress, as if her sons had quarreled while working in the fields, and, falling into a violent dispute with no one present able to stop them, one had struck and killed the other. She begged that, since her relatives had risen up against the one who had done the killing and were seeking to put him to death, the king would grant her the life of her son and not deprive her of her remaining hopes for care in her old age; and that by preventing this he would keep those who wished to kill her son from doing so, for they would restrain themselves out of fear of no one but him.
When David agreed to what the woman pleaded, she took up the matter again, saying to the king, "Thanks be to you already for your kindness in taking pity on my old age and my near-childlessness. But so that your favor to me may be made secure, first be reconciled with your own son and let go of your anger toward him. For how could I believe that you have truly granted me this favor, when you yourself remain estranged from your own son on similar grounds until now? It would be utterly senseless to add, of your own free will, another son to the one who died against your intention."
The king perceived that the pretext was put into the old woman's mouth by Joab and his zeal for the matter, and when he had learned from her, upon questioning, that this was indeed so, he summoned Joab and told him that he had succeeded in his purpose and ordered him to bring Absalom back, for he was no longer harsh toward him but had already let go of his anger and wrath. Joab bowed before the king, welcomed his words with joy, set out at once for Geshur, and, taking Absalom with him, came to Jerusalem.
The king sent word ahead to his son, for he had heard of his arrival, directing him to go to his own house, since he was not yet prepared to see him at once upon his return. Absalom, in obedience to his father's order, kept out of his sight and continued to receive the care of his household. His good looks had not been harmed by his grief or by his failure to receive the attention due a king's son; rather, he still stood out and excelled in every respect, in both the beauty and the stature of his body, surpassing even those who lived amid every luxury. So thick, indeed, was the growth of his hair that it could scarcely be cut once every eight days, and it weighed two hundred shekels—that is, five minas. He remained in Jerusalem for two years, becoming the father of three sons and one daughter of surpassing beauty, whom Solomon's son Rehoboam later married, and by her had a child named Abijah.
Absalom himself sent to Joab and begged him to fully appease his father and to ask that he be permitted to come before him, to see him and speak with him. When Joab neglected this, Absalom sent some of his own men and set fire to the field adjoining his. When Joab learned what had been done, he came to Absalom, reproaching him and asking his reason. Absalom said, "I devised this stratagem, since it could bring you to us when you were neglecting the instructions I gave you, so that you might reconcile me with my father. I beg you now, since you are here, to soften my father toward me, for I judge my return more grievous than my exile, so long as my father remains angry."
Persuaded, and taking pity on his predicament, Joab acted as mediator with the king and, speaking on behalf of the young man, put him in so favorable a disposition that David at once summoned Absalom to himself. When Absalom threw himself to the ground and begged forgiveness for his offenses, David raised him up and declared an amnesty for what had happened.
Now that things had turned out this way for him at his father's hands, Absalom, in a very short time, acquired many horses and many chariots, and had fifty armed men about him. Every day, early in the morning, he would present himself at the palace, and by speaking agreeably to those who came for judgment and were losing their cases, suggesting that it was for want of good counselors to his father that they had perhaps been wronged in their judgments, he won everyone's goodwill by saying that if he himself held that authority he would administer much justice for them.
By such means he courted the populace, and once he judged the people's goodwill toward him firmly secured—four years having now passed since his reconciliation with his father—he came to David at Hebron and asked leave to go and pay a vow he had made to God while he was in exile. When David granted the request, Absalom set out, and, having sent word to many, a great crowd streamed together to him.
Also present was David's counselor Ahithophel the Gilonite, along with two hundred men sent from Jerusalem itself, who knew nothing of the plot but had simply been summoned as if for a sacrifice; and Absalom was proclaimed king by all, having engineered this outcome. When this news reached David, and word of his son's doings came to him against all expectation, he was seized with fear both at the impiety and at the audacity of it, marveling that Absalom, far from remembering the pardon granted him for his own offenses, had set his hand to a far worse and more lawless deed—seizing a kingship that, first, had not been given him by God, and, second, was aimed at the overthrow of his own father. He resolved to flee across the Jordan.
Calling together the most trusted of his friends, and taking counsel with them about his son's madness, and committing everything to the judgment of God, he left ten concubines behind to guard the palace and departed from Jerusalem, accompanied by the rest of the populace who joined his flight along with the six hundred armed men who had shared his first exile, back when Saul was alive. He persuaded Abiathar and Zadok, the high priests, who had decided to go with him, along with all the Levites, to remain behind with the ark, on the ground that God would deliver him whether or not it was carried along with him. He instructed them to send him secret word of everything that happened, and he had as trusted agents for this purpose their sons, Ahimaaz son of Zadok and Jonathan son of Abiathar. Ittai the Gittite set out with him as well, overriding David's own wish, for David had tried to persuade him to stay behind, and for this reason he appeared all the more devoted to him.
As David was going up the Mount of Olives barefoot, and everyone with him was weeping, word came that Ahithophel too was with Absalom and shared his views. This news added to his grief, and he called upon God, praying that he would turn Absalom's mind against Ahithophel, for he feared that, being a shrewd man and extremely sharp at perceiving what was advantageous, Ahithophel might persuade him with contrary advice.
When he reached the summit of the mountain, he looked back at the city and, with many tears, prayed to God as one cast out of his kingdom. There a loyal friend named Hushai met him. Seeing that his clothes were torn and his head full of ashes, and that he was mourning the reversal of his fortunes, David comforted him and urged him to stop grieving, and finally begged him to go back to Absalom, pretending to side with him, so as to learn his most private plans and to work against Ahithophel's counsels; for Hushai, he said, would be of less help by staying with him than by going over to Absalom. Persuaded by David, Hushai left him and came to Jerusalem; and not long after, Absalom too arrived there.
As David had gone on a little way, Ziba, the servant of Mephibosheth, met him. David had sent Ziba to look after the property he had given to the son of Jonathan, Saul's son, and Ziba now came with a pair of donkeys loaded with provisions, from which he told David to take whatever he and his companions needed. When David asked where he had left Mephibosheth, Ziba said that he had remained in Jerusalem, expecting to be made king because of the unrest, in memory of the benefits done for them
...Saul. David was angered by this and gave to Ziba everything he had assigned to Mephibosheth, judging that Ziba deserved to hold it far more justly than the other man did. Ziba was overjoyed. But when David reached a place called Choranus, a kinsman of Saul named Shimei son of Gera came out against him, pelting him with stones and cursing him. When David's friends closed ranks and shielded him still more closely, Shimei went on reviling him, calling him a murderer and the author of many evils. He ordered him to leave the land as a thing accursed and polluted, and declared that he was thanking God for taking the kingship from him and exacting through David's own son the penalty for the wrongs he had done his former master.
Everyone around David was inflamed with anger at this, above all Abishai, who wanted to kill Shimei on the spot, but David restrained him from his rage. "Let us not," he said, "add some new occasion to the troubles we already have. This raging dog's abuse means nothing to me and stirs no shame in me; I yield to God, since it is because of him that this man has been driven to such madness against us. It is no wonder that I suffer this at his hands, when I have already had experience of it from an impious son of my own. But we will yet receive some mercy from God, and if he wills it we will overcome our enemies." So he continued on his way, paying no attention to Shimei, who ran along the other side of the mountain hurling abuse the whole time. On reaching the Jordan, David let his men, who were worn out, rest there.
When Absalom and his counselor Ahithophel arrived at Jerusalem with the whole people, David's friend Hushai came to them, and bowing before Absalom he prayed that his kingship would endure forever and for all time. When Absalom asked him why, having been counted among his father's closest friends and having seemed faithful in every way, he was not now with his father but had abandoned him to come over to him, Hushai answered shrewdly and prudently.
"I must follow God," he said, "and the whole people. Since these have sided with you, my lord, I follow with them as well, for you have received the kingship from God. And I will show you the same loyalty and goodwill I am known to have given your father, now that I am trusted as your friend. There is no reason at all to be suspicious of my present position, for the kingship has not passed to another house; it has remained in the same family, only taken up now by the son." By speaking this way he won Absalom over, for Absalom had been suspicious of him.
Absalom then summoned Ahithophel and asked his counsel on what should be done. Ahithophel advised him to go in to his father's concubines, saying that from this act the people would come to believe that his breach with his father was irreconcilable, and would then join with great enthusiasm in the campaign against him; for up to now, he said, they were holding back from openly taking up hostility, expecting that father and son would be reconciled. Persuaded by this counsel, Absalom ordered a tent pitched for himself on the roof of the palace, in full view of the people, and went in and lay with his father's concubines. This happened in fulfillment of the prophecy of Nathan, who had foretold to David the attack that would come upon him from his own son.
After Absalom had done what Ahithophel advised, he asked him a second time for counsel on the war against his father. Ahithophel asked for twelve thousand chosen men, and promised that he would kill the father himself while bringing back those with him alive, and declared that once David was no longer living the kingship would then be secure. Pleased with this plan, Absalom summoned also Hushai, David's chief friend, for that was the title Absalom gave him, and having told him Ahithophel's opinion, asked what he himself thought of it. Hushai realized that if Ahithophel's advice were carried out, David would be captured and put to death, and so he tried to put forward an opposing view.
"You are surely not unaware, O king," he said, "of your father's courage and that of the men with him, that he has fought many wars and has always come off victorious over his enemies. As things now stand, it is likely that he will remain in camp, for he is a most capable general and skilled at foreseeing the tricks of an advancing enemy; instead, toward evening he will leave his own men and either hide himself in one of the ravines or lie in ambush by some rock. When our forces engage, his men will fall back a little, and our own, growing bold at the thought that the king is near them, will stand their ground; and while they are fighting, the father will suddenly appear and put courage into his own men to face the danger while striking terror into yours. So weigh my advice as well against your own judgment, and once you have recognized which is best, refuse Ahithophel's plan, and instead send throughout the whole land of the Hebrews and summon them to the campaign against your father; then take command of the army's full strength yourself and be its general, and do not entrust this to another. For you may expect to defeat him easily if you catch him out in the open with only a few men, while you yourself command many tens of thousands eager to display their zeal and devotion to you. And if your father shuts himself up under siege, we will bring that city down with siege engines and mines dug beneath it."
By saying this Hushai found more favor than Ahithophel, for Absalom preferred his plan to the other's. It was God, in fact, who had arranged in Absalom's mind that Hushai's counsel should seem the better one. Hushai hurried at once to the high priests Zadok and Abiathar, told them both Ahithophel's plan and his own, and reported that it had been decided to act on his advice; he told them to send messengers to inform David and make known to him what had been planned, and to urge him to cross the Jordan quickly, lest his son change his mind and set out in pursuit, overtaking him before he was safe. The high priests, for this very purpose, kept their sons hidden outside the city so that they could carry word to David of what was happening; they sent a trusted servant girl to them with the plans made by Absalom, and instructed them to report this to David with all speed. They wasted no time in delay or hesitation, but taking their fathers' orders became at once devout and faithful messengers, and judging speed and swiftness of service to be best, they hurried to meet David.
When they had gone about two stadia from the city, some horsemen caught sight of them and reported it to Absalom, who at once sent men to seize them. Realizing this, the priests' sons turned off the road and took refuge without delay in a village near Jerusalem called Bahurim, and begged a certain woman to hide them and keep them safe. She let the young men down into a well, spread fleeces of wool over its mouth, and when their pursuers arrived and questioned her whether she had seen them, she did not deny having seen them, saying that after drinking at her house they had gone off again, and telling them that if they pursued vigorously they would catch them. When the pursuers, after chasing far and wide, failed to catch them, they turned back. Seeing them withdrawing, and that the young men were no longer in any danger of being seized, the woman drew them up and urged them to continue on the road before them. Making great haste and speed on their journey, they came to David and reported to him in full detail everything Absalom had planned. David at once ordered his men to cross the Jordan, since night had already fallen, and not to hesitate on that account.
Ahithophel, seeing that his counsel had been passed over in favor of another's, mounted his beast and set out for Gilon, his native city. There he gathered all his household together and related to them everything he had advised Absalom, declaring that since his advice had not been followed, it was plain he himself would soon perish, but that David would prevail and be restored to the kingship. He said it was better, therefore, to take his own life freely and with dignity than to hand himself over for punishment to David, against whom he had joined in everything with Absalom. Having said this, he went into the innermost room of his house and hanged himself. His relatives took Ahithophel down from the noose and buried him, this being the judge he had made for himself over such a death. David, having crossed the Jordan as we said before, came to Mahanaim, a very fine and strongly fortified city.
All the leading men of that region received him most gladly, both out of respect for his flight at that time and out of honor for his former prosperity. These were Barzillai the Gileadite, Shobi ruler of Ammon, and Machir, the foremost man of the land of Gilead. They provided every kindness for him and for his men's needs, so that neither beds properly made up nor bread and wine were lacking, but they even supplied an abundance of sacrificial animals and, for men already worn out, a generous supply of things useful for rest and nourishment.
While David's men were occupied with these things, Absalom, having gathered a great army of the Hebrews against his father, crossed the Jordan river and camped not far from Mahanaim, in the land of the Gileadites, appointing Amasa as general of the whole force in place of his kinsman Joab, whose position he took over; for Amasa's father was Jether, and his mother Abigail, who together with Zeruiah, Joab's mother, were David's sisters. When David, having numbered the men with him, found them to be about four thousand, he decided not to wait for Absalom to come against him, but adding to his forces commanders of thousands and of hundreds, he divided them into three parts. One part he entrusted to the general Joab, another to Joab's brother Abishai, and the third division he gave into the charge of Ittai, who was both a familiar friend and a man from the city of Gath. His friends, with a very wise judgment, would not allow David himself to go out with them into battle, saying that if they were defeated together with him they would lose all hope of recovery, but if defeated in one part of the army they could flee to him with the rest and he would provide them a stronger force; and it was likely, they said, that the enemy too would suspect there was another army with him.
Persuaded by this advice, David decided to remain himself at Mahanaim, and as he sent out his friends and commanders to the war, he urged them to show eagerness, loyalty, and remembrance of it, if they had received any fair treatment from him; and he begged them, when they had overcome him, to spare his son Absalom, so that he might not do himself some harm once Absalom was dead. Having prayed for their victory, he sent the army out. Joab drew up his force facing the enemy in a great plain with a forest lying behind it, and Absalom led out his army to meet him. When the battle was joined, both sides displayed great feats of strength and daring: David's men risking everything and using all their zeal to recover the kingship for him, Absalom's men sparing no effort in either doing or suffering anything so that he should not be deprived of it and pay the penalty to his father for what he had dared, and further, the greater number on Absalom's side fighting so as not to be defeated by Joab's men, who were the fewer, since this would have been the greatest disgrace to them, while David's soldiers strove to overcome so vast a multitude. A fierce struggle broke out, and David's men won, superior both in strength and in skill at warfare. Pursuing the fleeing enemy through woods and ravines, they captured some and killed many, so that more fell in flight than in battle; about twenty thousand fell that day.
All of David's men then rushed upon Absalom, for he was conspicuous to them both for his beauty and his stature. Fearing that his enemies would overtake him, he mounted the royal mule and fled; but as he was carried along swiftly, and light because of the mule's motion and speed, his hair became entangled in a rough tree with great branches spreading far out, and he was left hanging there in an extraordinary way. The mule, being swift, went on ahead still carrying what it took to be its rider's weight, while Absalom hung suspended from the branches, at the mercy of his enemies. One of David's soldiers, seeing this, reported it to Joab, and when the general said he would have given him fifty shekels if he had shot and killed Absalom, the soldier replied, "Even if you were going to give me a thousand, I would not have done that to my master's son, especially when he himself, in the hearing of all of us, begged that the young man be spared." Joab then ordered him to show where he had seen Absalom hanging, and shooting him through the heart with an arrow, killed him; and the men bearing Joab's weapons surrounded the tree and pulled the corpse down.
They threw the body into a deep, gaping pit and heaped stones upon it, until it took on both the shape and the size of a tomb. Joab then sounded the recall and kept his own soldiers from pursuing the enemy's forces further, sparing his fellow countrymen. Absalom had set up for himself, in the King's Valley two stadia from Jerusalem, a pillar of marble, which he called "his own hand," saying that since his children had died, his name would still remain on the pillar; for he had three sons and one daughter, named Tamar, as we said before. She married Rehoboam, Solomon's son, and their child, who succeeded to the kingship, was Abijah. We will speak of these matters more fittingly later in our history. After Absalom's death, the people scattered to their homes.
Ahimaaz, son of the high priest Zadok, came to Joab and asked him to let him go to David and report the victory, and bring him the good news that he had received help and providence from God. Joab told him it was not fitting for him, who had always been a bearer of good news, now to go and announce to the king the death of his son, and asked him to remain; instead he called Hushai and assigned him this task, so that he might report to the king what he himself had seen. When Ahimaaz again begged him to let him carry the message too, saying that he would speak only of the victory and stay silent about Absalom's death, Joab allowed him to go to David. And taking the shorter route...
Cushi outran Ahimaaz on the shorter road, since he alone knew it. David was sitting between the gates, waiting for someone to come from the battle and report how it had gone, when a watchman saw Ahimaaz running but could not yet tell who he was, and told David that he saw a man approaching. When the watchman said this was good news, he soon reported that another man was following the first. The watchman, hearing that this second man too was a messenger, and now recognizing Ahimaaz drawing near, announced that it was the son of Zadok the high priest running toward them. David, overjoyed, said that this must be a messenger of good news, bringing him something he had prayed for from the battle. While the king was still speaking, Ahimaaz appeared.
Ahimaaz bowed before the king, and when asked about the battle he announced victory and triumph. Asked whether he had anything to report about the boy, he said that he himself had set out toward the king as soon as the enemy broke, but had heard a great shout of men pursuing Absalom and had been able to learn nothing more, because he had been sent by Joab and was hurrying to bring news of the victory. When Cushi arrived, bowed, and reported the victory, David questioned him about the boy. He replied, “May whatever has happened to Absalom happen to your enemies.” This word did not let David, or his soldiers, keep the great joy of the victory. He went up to the highest part of the city and wept for his son, beating his chest, tearing at his hair, and abusing himself in every way, crying out, “My child, would that death had come to me and that I had died together with you.” For he was by nature deeply affectionate, and felt still more tenderly toward that son.
When the army and Joab heard that the king was mourning his son so bitterly, they were ashamed to enter the city in the manner of victors, and all of them, downcast and in tears, passed through it as if returning from a defeat. While the king sat covered and groaning for his son, Joab came in to him and, trying to console him, said, “Master, you do not realize that you are wronging yourself by what you are doing. You seem to hate the very men who love you and have risked their lives for you, and yourself and your own family besides, while you cherish and long for men who no longer exist, men who died justly. For if Absalom had prevailed and held the kingdom securely, not one of us would have survived; all of us, beginning with you and your own children, would have perished miserably, and our enemies would not have wept over us but would have rejoiced, and punished anyone who pitied us in our misfortune. Are you not ashamed to act this way toward an enemy, simply because he happened, impiously, to be your son? Put an end to this unjust grief, come out and show yourself to your own soldiers, and thank them for the victory and for the eagerness they showed in the fighting. For I swear that if you continue as you are behaving now, I will persuade the people to desert you this very day and hand the kingdom to another, and then I will make your grief bitter, and real.”
By these words Joab turned David away from his grief and brought the king back to consider what needed to be done. David changed his appearance and made himself presentable to be seen by the people, and took his seat by the gates, so that the whole population, on hearing of it, ran together to him and greeted him warmly. That is how these events unfolded.
Those of the Hebrews who had fought with Absalom and had retreated from the battle each went back to their own homes and began sending word to one another throughout the cities, reminding themselves of the benefits David had done them and of the freedom he had won for them by delivering them from many great wars, and complaining that after driving him from the kingdom and handing it to another, now that the man they had set up as their leader was dead, they were not urging David to set aside his anger and be favorably disposed toward them, and to take up, as he had before, the care of the state by resuming the kingship. These reports were repeatedly brought to David, and he in turn sent word to Zadok and Abiathar, the high priests, telling them to speak with the leaders of the tribe of Judah about how shameful it was that other tribes should be first to make David king, ahead of Judah's own tribe, especially since they were his kinsmen and shared a common blood with him. He gave the same instructions to be conveyed to Amasa the general, telling him that as David's own sister's son he ought to persuade the people to restore the kingdom to David, and that he could expect from David not only reconciliation -- for that had already been granted -- but also command of the whole army, the very post that Absalom too had given him.
The high priests spoke to the leaders of the tribe as instructed, and also persuaded Amasa, telling him what the king had said, to take up the king's cause in earnest. He at once persuaded the tribe to send envoys to David urging him to return to his own kingdom, and all the Israelites did the same at Amasa's urging.
When the envoys reached him, David set out for Jerusalem. The tribe of Judah outran all the others in meeting the king at the Jordan river, along with Shimei son of Gera, who brought a thousand men from the tribe of Benjamin, and Ziba, the freedman of Saul, with his fifteen sons and twenty servants. Together with the tribe of Judah, these men bridged the river so that the king might cross most easily with his own people. When he reached the Jordan, the tribe of Judah welcomed him, and Shimei, falling before him as he stepped onto the bridge and clasping his feet, begged him to forgive the wrongs done against him, and not to hold it bitterly against him, nor to think it right, now that he had the power to punish, to make that his first act, but rather to consider that Shimei, having repented of his offenses, had hurried to come to him first of all. While he was pleading and lamenting in this way, Abishai, Joab's brother, said, “Shall he not die for this, then, for cursing the one appointed king by God?” David turned to him and said, “Will you never stop, sons of Zeruiah? Do not stir up new troubles and factions for us on top of the old ones; you ought to know that today I begin my reign. I therefore swear to grant amnesty from punishment to all who did wrong, and to hold nothing against any offender.” And he said, “As for you, Shimei, take courage and have no fear of death.” Shimei bowed before him and went ahead.
Mephibosheth, Saul's grandson, also came to meet him, wearing filthy clothing and with his hair long and unkempt; for since David's flight he had neither cut his hair in his grief nor cleaned his clothing, judging this misfortune fitting given the change in the king's fortunes. He had also been unjustly slandered to David by his steward Ziba. After greeting David and bowing before him, David began to ask why he had not gone out with him and shared in his flight. He said that this was Ziba's wrongdoing: ordered to prepare what was needed for the journey, Ziba had paid no attention, but had disobeyed him as if he were some slave. “Yet if my legs had been sound, I would not have failed to use them to accompany you in your flight. Nor is this the only wrong he has done to my loyalty toward you, my lord; he has also slandered and lied about me out of malice. But I know that your judgment, being just and eager to uphold the truth and devoted to God, will accept none of this. For though you were in danger of suffering far worse at the hands of my grandfather, and though our whole family deserved to perish for those wrongs, you were moderate and kind to me then, forgetting all of that above everyone else, at the very time when your memory of it gave you full power to punish us for it. You judged me your friend and kept me at your table every day, and I lacked nothing that your closest kinsmen enjoyed.” When he had said this, David decided neither to punish Mephibosheth nor to condemn Ziba as a liar against him, but, saying that he forgave Mephibosheth for not having come with Ziba, he promised to grant Ziba's request and ordered that half of the estate be restored to Mephibosheth. But Mephibosheth said, “Let Ziba have it all; it is enough for me that you have recovered your kingdom.”
David urged Barzillai the Gileadite, a large and handsome man who had provided much for him in the camps and had escorted him as far as the Jordan, to come along with him to Jerusalem, promising to care for him in his old age with every honor and to look after him as a father. But Barzillai, out of longing for his home, declined to spend his remaining time with him, saying that his old age was such that, having reached eighty years, he could no longer enjoy pleasures, but instead needed to think about his final rest and burial; he asked, since David wished to grant him his desire, to be released for that purpose. He said he could no longer make sense of food or drink because of his age, and that his hearing, too, was already closed to the sound of flutes and other instruments, the very things that delight those who live alongside kings. Since he pleaded so earnestly, David said, “I release you, but leave your son Achimas with me; I will share with him all good things.” So Barzillai, leaving his son behind, bowed before the king, prayed that everything he wished for his own soul might come to pass, and returned home.
David arrived at Gilgal, already having about half the whole people around him, together with the tribe of Judah. The leaders of every tribe came to him at Gilgal with a large crowd, and they reproached the tribe of Judah for having come to him secretly, saying that all of them together, with one mind, ought to have gone to meet him. The leaders of the tribe of Judah asked them not to be aggrieved at having been anticipated, since, being his kinsmen and therefore all the more concerned for him and devoted to him, they had hurried to be first -- not in order to receive gifts by arriving early, so that the others, arriving later, might have grounds for resentment on that score.
When the leaders of the tribe of Judah had said this, the leaders of the other tribes did not stay quiet, but said, “We are astonished, brothers, that you call the king kinsman of yourselves alone. He who received authority over all of us from God is judged to be kinsman of us all. For this reason the people hold eleven shares, and you hold one, and yet we are the elder, and you have not acted justly in coming to the king in secret.” While the leaders were exchanging such words with one another, a wicked man who delighted in strife, named Sheba, son of Bichri, of the tribe of Benjamin, stood up in the midst of the crowd, shouted loudly, and said, “None of us has any share from David, nor any portion with the son of Jesse.” And after these words he sounded a trumpet as a signal of war against the king, and everyone followed him, abandoning David; only the tribe of Judah remained with him and established him in the royal residence at Jerusalem. As for the concubines with whom his son Absalom had lain, he moved them to another house, ordering their attendants to provide them with everything they needed, but he no longer went in to them himself. He also appointed Amasa general, giving him the command that Joab had held, and ordered him to gather as large a force as he could from the tribe of Judah and come to him within three days, so that, once he had handed over the whole army to him, he could send him out to make war on the son of Bichri.
When Amasa had gone out and was slow in gathering the army, and when he had not returned by the third day, the king said to Joab that it was not to their advantage to give Sheba a respite, lest, given more time to prepare, he become the cause of still greater troubles and disasters than Absalom had been for them. “So do not wait for anyone; take the force you have, along with the six hundred men under your brother Abishai, and pursue the enemy, and wherever you catch up with him, try to engage him. Hurry to get ahead of him, so that he does not seize fortified cities and create for us struggles and much hard toil.” Joab decided to delay no longer, but took his brother and the six hundred men, and, ordering whatever other force remained in Jerusalem to follow, set out against Sheba.
By the time he reached Gibeon, a village forty stadia from Jerusalem, Amasa, who had gathered a large force, met him there. Joab had a sword girded on and was wearing a breastplate; as Amasa approached to greet him, Joab contrived for the sword to fall of its own accord from its sheath, picked it up from the ground, and with his other hand took hold of Amasa's beard as if to kiss him, as Amasa drew near without suspecting anything, and struck him in the belly and killed him -- an impious and wholly unholy act, since he had grown jealous of the command and of the equal honor Amasa held with the king, though Amasa was a good young man, his kinsman, and had done him no wrong. It was for this same reason that he had also murdered Abner. But that earlier crime of his had seemed to have a plausible excuse that made it forgivable, since it was thought to be vengeance for his brother Asahel; the murder of Amasa had no such cover.
Having killed his fellow general, he pursued Sheba, leaving one man beside the body with orders to shout to the army that Amasa had died justly and for good cause: “But if you are loyal to the king, follow his general Joab and his brother Abishai.” While the body lay in the road and the whole crowd streamed together around it and, as a crowd is wont to do, marveled and pitied him as they stood by, the guard lifted it from there and carried it to a place well off the road, laid it down, and covered it with a garment. Once this was done, all the people followed Joab. As he pursued Sheba through the whole territory of the Israelites, someone told him that Sheba was in a fortified city.
Sheba, they learned, was in a town called Abel-beth-maacah. Joab marched there, invested the city with his army, threw up a rampart around it, and ordered his soldiers to undermine the walls and tear them down; for since the people inside had refused to admit him, he was thoroughly incensed against them. But a certain woman, prudent and intelligent, who saw her city already brought to the last extremity, climbed onto the wall and, through the men-at-arms, asked to see Joab.
When he came forward she began to speak: God, she said, appointed kings and generals so that they might destroy the enemies of the Hebrews and secure them peace from them; yet here he was, bent on tearing down and sacking a mother-city of Israel that had done no wrong. Joab answered that he prayed God would remain gracious to her, but that this was his own position: he had no wish to kill any of the people, still less to destroy so great a city; if, however, they would hand over Sheba son of Bichri, who had risen against the king, to face punishment, he would break off the siege and lead his army away.
When the woman heard Joab's terms, she asked him to wait a little, for the enemy's head would be thrown to him at once, and went down to her fellow citizens. "Would you rather," she said, "perish miserably, you and your children and your wives, for the sake of a worthless man whose very identity nobody even knows, and set him up against David, who has done you so much good, as your king — pitting one town against a power so vast?" She persuaded them, and they cut off Sheba's head and threw it into Joab's camp.
When this was done, the king's general sounded the recall, broke off the siege, and, returning to Jerusalem, was once more appointed commander of the whole people. The king also set Benaiah over his bodyguard and the six hundred, made Adoram overseer of the tribute, Jehoshaphat son of Ahilud keeper of the records, Sheva scribe, and appointed Zadok and Abiathar priests.
After this, when the land was being wasted by famine, David begged God to have mercy on the people and to make known to him both the cause of it and the cure for the affliction. The prophets declared that God wished the Gibeonites to obtain redress, whom King Saul, in killing them, had wronged, breaking faith with the oaths that Joshua the general and the council of elders had sworn to them. If, then, David gave the Gibeonites whatever satisfaction they themselves wished for the men who had been killed, God promised to be reconciled and to free the people from their sufferings. On learning this from the prophets, David sent for the Gibeonites and asked them what they wished to receive. When they asked to be given seven sons from Saul's line for punishment, the king searched them out and handed them over, sparing only Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan. The Gibeonites took the men and punished them as they wished.
At once God began to send rain, calling the earth back to the bearing of fruit and releasing it from the drought that had gripped it before; and the land of the Hebrews flourished again. Not long after, the king campaigned against the Philistines, and when he joined battle with them and routed them, he became separated from his men in the pursuit and, growing exhausted, was seen by one of the enemy, Akmon by name, son of Arapha — one of the descendants of the Giants — who, armed with a spear whose shaft alone weighed three hundred shekels, and a coat of chain mail, and a sword, wheeled about and rushed at him, meaning to kill the king of his enemies, for David had collapsed from fatigue.
But Abishai, Joab's brother, appeared suddenly, threw himself over the fallen king to shield him, and killed the enemy. The army took it hard that the king had come so close to danger, and the officers made him swear never again to go into battle at their side, lest through his own courage and eagerness he suffer some disaster and rob the people of the good things he had already given them and of all they would still share in through the long years he had yet to live.
When the Philistines mustered at the city of Gezer, the king heard of it and sent an army against them. On that occasion Sibbecai the Hittite, one of David's bravest men, distinguished himself greatly: he killed many who boasted descent from the Giants and prided themselves greatly on their courage, and became the cause of victory for the Hebrews. After that defeat the Philistines went to war again, and when David sent an army against them, his kinsman Elhanan distinguished himself: he fought a single combat with the bravest of all the Philistines, killed him, and put the rest to flight, and many of them died fighting.
After a brief pause they encamped by a city near the borders of the land of the Hebrews. Among them was a man six cubits in height, who had, on each hand and each foot, one finger or toe more than is natural. Out of the army David sent against them, Jonathan, son of Shimea, fought him in single combat, killed him, and, having turned the whole battle in the balance, carried off the glory of the exploit — for this Philistine too boasted of being a descendant of the Giants. After this battle they made war on the Israelites no more.
Now that he was rid of wars and dangers and enjoyed deep peace for the rest of his days, David composed odes and hymns to God in varied meters — some in trimeters, some in pentameters — and, having had instruments made, he taught the Levites to sing hymns to God with them, both on the day called the Sabbath and on the other festivals. The instruments were of the following kind: the kinyra, strung with ten strings, was struck with a plectrum; the nabla, having twelve notes, was played with the fingers; and there were cymbals, broad, large, and made of bronze. On these matters let so much be said, that we may not be wholly ignorant of the nature of the instruments already mentioned.
All the men about the king were brave, but of these the most distinguished and brilliant in their deeds numbered thirty-eight, of whom I shall recount the exploits of five only; for these will suffice to make plain the courage of the rest as well, since they too were capable of subduing territory and mastering great nations.
First, then, was Jashobeam son of Hachmoni, who often leapt into the enemy's battle line and would not stop fighting until he had struck down nine hundred of them. After him came Eleazar son of Dodo, who was with the king at Pas-dammim. Once, when the Israelites, terrified at the numbers of the Philistines, were fleeing, he alone stood his ground, closed with the enemy, and killed so many of them that his sword stuck fast to his hand with the blood; and the Israelites, seeing the Philistines routed by him, came down and joined the pursuit, winning a victory that was marveled at and talked of ever after — Eleazar doing the killing while the crowd followed and stripped the slain.
Third was Shammah, son of Agee. When the Philistines had drawn up their line at a place called Lehi, and the Hebrews, once more afraid of their numbers, would not stand, he alone held his ground like an army and a battle-line by himself, cutting some of them down and pursuing the rest, who could not withstand his strength and force and turned to flee. Such were the deeds of hand and battle these three performed.
At the time when, the king being in Jerusalem, the Philistine army came up to make war, David went up to the citadel, as we have said before, to inquire of God about the war; and while the enemy's camp lay in the valley that stretches as far as the city of Bethlehem, twenty stadia from Jerusalem, David said to his companions, "What good water we have in my homeland!" — marveling most of all at the water in the cistern by the gate, and saying that anyone who brought him a drink from it would earn more gratitude from him than if he gave him great sums of money.
On hearing this, the three men at once dashed out, charged straight through the middle of the enemy's camp, reached Bethlehem, drew the water, and made their way back through the camp to the king, so that the Philistines, struck with astonishment at their daring and courage, held still and did not venture against them, despising their small number. But when the water was brought, the king would not drink it, saying that it had been fetched at the risk and cost of men's blood and that for this reason it was not right for him to drink it; instead he poured it out as a libation to God and gave thanks to him for the men's safe return.
After these three came Abishai, Joab's brother, who in a single day killed six hundred of the enemy. Fifth was Naharai, a priest by birth, who, when challenged by distinguished brothers in the land of Moab, overcame them by his valor. Again, when an Egyptian of remarkable size challenged him, though unarmed he killed him, throwing the man's own spear at him, for he had wrested the javelin from him and, while the man was still alive and fighting, stripped him and finished him off with his own weapons.
One might add this exploit also to those already told, either as the foremost of them for sheer courage or at least as their equal: once, while God sent snow, a lion slipped into a pit and fell in; and since the mouth of the pit was narrow, it was clear it would be shut off entirely once the snow choked it, so that, seeing no way out to safety, the lion roared. Naharai, who happened to be traveling at the time, heard the beast, came toward the sound, went down into the pit, struck it as it fought him with the club he had in hand, and killed it on the spot. The rest of the men too were of like courage in their exploits.
Now King David, wishing to know how many tens of thousands the people numbered, forgot the command of Moses, who had declared that if the multitude were counted, a half-shekel should be paid to God for each head, and ordered Joab the general to go and number the whole people. Joab said this was not necessary and did not think it should be done, but David would not be persuaded, and ordered him to set out without delay on the census of the Hebrews.
Joab took the leaders of the tribes and scribes and, going through the land of the Israelites and noting how great the multitude was, returned to Jerusalem to the king after nine months and twenty days, and delivered to the king the number of the people, apart from the tribe of Benjamin, for he had not managed to count it, nor the tribe of Levi either, since the king repented of the sin he had committed against God. The number of the other Israelites able to bear arms and go to war was nine hundred thousand, and the tribe of Judah by itself numbered four hundred thousand.
When the prophets made known to David that God was angry with him, he began to entreat and implore that God be gracious and forgive him his sin. God sent Gad the prophet to him bearing three choices, that he might select whichever of them he judged best: whether he wished a famine to come upon the land for seven years, or to be defeated by his enemies after fighting them for three months, or a pestilence and plague to fall on the Hebrews for three days. Caught in a helpless choice among great evils, David was grieved and thrown into deep confusion.
When the prophet said that one of these must happen of necessity and pressed him to answer quickly, so that he might report his choice to God, the king reasoned that if he asked for famine, he would seem to have chosen it for himself without fear, since he had great stores of grain laid up, but to the harm of others; and if the people should be beaten for three months, since he had the bravest men about him and fortresses too and so had nothing to fear, it would look as if he had chosen war for that reason. So he asked for a suffering common to kings and subjects alike, in which the fear falls equally on everyone, declaring that it was far better to fall into the hands of God than into the hands of enemies. Hearing this, the prophet reported it to God, who sent the pestilence and destruction upon the Hebrews.
They died not in one manner, nor in a way easy to trace to a single disease; the affliction was one, yet it swept them away by countless causes and pretexts that they could not even imagine. One man perished after another, and the calamity, coming on unseen, brought a swift end — some giving up their lives suddenly amid violent pains and bitter agony, others wasting away with their sufferings and not even being left for burial, but utterly consumed in the very act of sickening; still others, as darkness suddenly ran over their eyes, choked and cried out in anguish, and some, while burying one of their own household, died themselves in the midst of it, leaving the burial unfinished. Beginning at dawn, the plague destroyed them until the hour of breakfast, and seventy thousand perished.
The angel stretched out his hand, sending the calamity to Jerusalem as well. But the king, clothed in sackcloth, lay upon the ground imploring God and begging him now at last to relent and, satisfied with those already lost, to stop. Looking up into the air, the king saw the angel being borne through it toward Jerusalem, sword drawn, and said to God that he himself, the shepherd, deserved to be punished, while the flock, having done no wrong, ought to be spared; he begged that the wrath fall upon him and all his line, and that the people be spared.
God, hearing his supplication, stopped the plague, and sending Gad the prophet, ordered him to go up at once to the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite and, building an altar there to God, to offer sacrifice. David, on hearing this, did not delay but hastened at once to the place appointed to him. Araunah, who was threshing his grain, when he saw the king approaching with all his attendants, ran up to him and bowed down. He was Jebusite by birth, but a close friend
Araunah asked what David wanted with his servant, and the king told him he wished to buy the threshing floor so that he could build an altar on it to God and offer a sacrifice. Araunah said he would give him the threshing floor itself, along with the plows and the oxen for the burnt offering, and that he prayed God would gladly accept the sacrifice. The king replied that he loved him for his simplicity and generosity and would accept the gift, but insisted on paying him the full value of everything, since it was not right to offer a sacrifice that cost him nothing. When Araunah said he might do as he wished, David bought the threshing floor from him for fifty shekels.
He built the altar there, performed the sacred rites, offered the burnt offering, and brought peace offerings as well. By these the divine anger was appeased and God became favorable again. It was to that same place that Abraham had once brought his son Isaac to offer him as a burnt sacrifice, and just as the boy was about to be slaughtered a ram suddenly appeared standing by the altar, which Abraham sacrificed in his son's place, as we have related earlier. When King David saw that God had heard his prayer and had gladly accepted the sacrifice, he decided to call that entire place the altar of the whole people and to build a temple to God there. And in saying this he unwittingly spoke a word that pointed to the future: for God, sending the prophet to him, said that it was there that his son would build him a temple—
the son who was to succeed him on the throne. After this prophecy the king ordered the resident aliens to be counted, and eighty-one thousand were found. Of these he appointed eighty thousand as stonecutters, and set the rest to carrying the stones, placing three thousand five hundred men in charge of the workers. He also prepared a great quantity of iron and bronze for the work, and enormous stores of cedar timber, which the Tyrians and Sidonians sent him, since he had written to them asking for a supply of wood. He told his friends that he was making these preparations now so that the son who was to reign after him would find the materials for the building ready at hand, and would not, being young and inexperienced in such matters, have to gather them himself because of his youth, but could carry out the work with everything already in place.
He summoned his son Solomon and, when he was about to succeed to the kingdom, charged him to build a temple to God, telling him that God had prevented him from doing so himself because he wanted to, since his hands were stained with blood and war, but had foretold that Solomon, his youngest son—who would bear that very name—would build it for him. God had promised to watch over him as a father would, and to make the land of the Hebrews prosperous under his reign, blessed above all with the greatest of goods: peace, freedom from war, and from civil strife. "You, then," he said, "since you were declared king by God even before your birth, strive in every other way to be worthy of his providence, by being pious, just, and courageous, and guard the commandments and laws he gave us through Moses, and do not allow others to transgress them.
As for the temple which he has chosen to have built during your reign, be eager to render it to God, and do not be daunted by the scale of the work nor lose heart before it, for I will have everything ready for you before my own death. Know that I have already gathered ten thousand talents of gold, and a hundred thousand talents of silver, and I have amassed bronze and iron beyond counting, and an abundance of timber and stone as well; and you have at your disposal many thousands of stonecutters and craftsmen. If anything more is needed besides these, you will supply it. Be excellent, then, having God as your protector." He also urged the leaders of the people to help his son with the building, and, free from every trouble, to devote themselves to the worship of God, for in return they would reap peace and good order, the rewards with which God repays pious and just men. He further instructed that once the temple was built, the ark and the sacred vessels—which for a long time now had lacked a temple to house them, ever since our fathers, in obedience to God's commandment, had failed to build one—
should be deposited there, after they had taken possession of this land and built him a temple. These were the things David said to the leaders and to his son. Now that he was already old and his body chilled with age, he was so susceptible to cold that even piling on many blankets could not warm him. When the physicians came together and gave their counsel, they proposed that a beautiful virgin, chosen from the whole country, should sleep beside the king, for the girl's warmth, they said, would be a remedy for his chill. A woman was found in the city more beautiful in appearance than any other, named Abishag, and by sleeping beside the king alone she warmed him, for through old age he was too weak for the pleasures of love and intercourse with a woman. We will speak of this virgin again shortly.
David's fourth son, a handsome and tall young man, born to him by a wife named Haggith, was called Adonijah. Resembling Absalom, he too was carried away in his own mind with the thought that he should be king, and told his friends that the throne ought to pass to him. He procured many chariots and horses and fifty men to run before him. Seeing this, his father neither rebuked him nor restrained him from his purpose, nor did he even go so far as to ask why he was doing these things. Adonijah's collaborators were Joab the general and Abiathar the high priest; the only ones who opposed him were Zadok the high priest, Nathan the prophet, Benaiah the commander of the bodyguard, Shimei, David's friend, and all the bravest men.
When Adonijah prepared a feast outside the city, near the spring in the royal garden, and invited all his brothers except Solomon, taking with him also Joab the general and Abiathar, and the leaders of the tribe of Judah, but did not invite Zadok the high priest, Nathan the prophet, Benaiah the commander of the bodyguard, or any of those of the opposing party to the banquet, Nathan the prophet reported this to Solomon's mother, Bathsheba, telling her that Adonijah intended to become king, and advised her to save both herself and her son Solomon, in case Adonijah should indeed seize the throne, and to go inquire of the king about this. While she was still speaking of this to the king, the prophet said he too would come in and would confirm her words.
Persuaded by Nathan, Bathsheba went in to the king, and after bowing before him and asking leave to speak, she related to him everything just as the prophet had instructed her: the feast of Adonijah and those he had invited to it—Abiathar the high priest and Joab the commander and his own sons—leaving out Solomon and his closest friends. She said that the whole people were watching to see whom he would appoint king, and urged him to bear in mind that once he had passed away, if Adonijah became king, he would put both her and her son Solomon to death.
While the woman was still speaking, the attendants of the chamber announced that Nathan wished to see him. When the king ordered him to be admitted, Nathan entered and asked whether he had that day proclaimed Adonijah king and handed over the kingdom to him; for Adonijah, he said, had prepared a splendid feast and invited all his sons except Solomon, along with Joab the general, who together with the others were feasting amid much noise and merriment and praying for his rule to last forever. "But he did not invite me," he said, "nor Zadok the high priest, nor Benaiah the commander of the bodyguard; and it would only be right that all should know whether this was done with your approval."
When Nathan had said this, the king ordered Bathsheba to be called back in, for she had left the chamber when the prophet arrived. When the woman came in, he said to her, "I swear to you by the greatest God that your son Solomon shall be king, as I swore before, and that he shall sit upon my throne; and this shall happen today." After the woman bowed before him and prayed for him a long life, he summoned Zadok the high priest and Benaiah the commander of the bodyguard, and when they arrived he ordered them to take with them Nathan the prophet and the guards stationed around the court, set his son Solomon on the royal mule, lead him outside the city to the spring called Gihon, and anoint him with the sacred oil and proclaim him king. He charged Zadok the high priest and Nathan the prophet to perform this,
and ordered them, as they went, to proceed through the middle of the city sounding trumpets and proclaiming, "Long live King Solomon!" and to seat him upon the royal throne, so that all the people would know that he had been declared king by his father, and that Solomon had been charged concerning his rule to preside piously and justly over the whole nation of the Hebrews and over the tribe of Judah. After Benaiah had prayed that God would be gracious to Solomon, without the slightest delay they set Solomon on the mule, led him out of the city to the spring, anointed him with the oil, and brought him back into the city amid shouts of acclamation and prayers that his reign would be long; and bringing him to the royal palace, they seated him
upon the throne, and all the people at once turned to feasting and celebration, dancing and delighting in the sound of flutes, so that the whole earth and sky seemed to resound with the multitude of instruments. When Adonijah and those present at the feast heard the shouting, they were thrown into confusion, and Joab the general said he did not like the sound of the trumpets. While the feast lay untouched before them and no one ate, and all of them were sunk in anxious thought, Jonathan, the son of Abiathar the high priest, came running in to them. Adonijah, seeing the young man, greeted him warmly and called him a bearer of good news, and Jonathan told them everything about Solomon and about King David's decision. At this Adonijah and all
his guests leaped up from the banquet and fled, each to his own home. Adonijah, fearing the king because of what had happened, became a suppliant of God and took hold of the horns of the altar, which projected from it, and made this known to Solomon, asking to receive pledges from him that he would not bear a grudge or do him any harm. Solomon, with great mildness and self-control, forgave him his offense for the time,
but told him that if he were found again attempting some new scheme, he would himself be responsible for his own punishment; then he sent for him and raised him up from his supplication. When Adonijah came and bowed before him, Solomon told him to go to his own house, free of suspicion, and urged him to conduct himself well from now on, since this would be to his own advantage. Wishing to proclaim his son king before the whole people, David called together the officials to Jerusalem, along with the priests and the Levites.
Counting them, he found first that those between thirty and fifty years of age numbered thirty-eight thousand. Of these he appointed twenty-four thousand to oversee the building of the temple, six thousand as judges of the people and scribes, four thousand as gatekeepers, and an equal number as singers of hymns to God, using the instruments David himself had made, as we said before. He divided them by families, and separating out the priests from the tribe found among them twenty-four families—sixteen from the house of Eleazar, eight from that of Ithamar—and appointed each family to serve God for eight days, from one Sabbath to the next. And so all the families cast lots
in the presence of David, and of Zadok and Abiathar the high priests, and of all the officials; and the family that came up first was recorded first, the second family followed in order, and so on to the twenty-fourth. This division has remained in force to this very day. He also organized the tribe of Levi into twenty-four divisions, and when they too had cast lots, they came up in the same manner to serve alongside the courses of the priests for eight days each. He also honored the descendants of Moses, appointing them guardians of the treasures of God and of the votive offerings that the kings had dedicated. He ordered all those of the tribe of Levi and the priests to serve God by night and by day, just as Moses had instructed them. After this he divided the army
into twelve divisions, each with commanders, centurions, and officers of companies. Each division numbered twenty-four thousand men, and he ordered them to attend on King Solomon in rotation for thirty days, from the first day to the last, together with their commanders of thousands and of hundreds. He also appointed over each division a leader whom he knew to be good and just, and other officials over the treasuries, the villages, the fields, and the herds, whose names I did not think it necessary to record. When he had arranged all these matters in the manner described, he called together the leaders of the Hebrews, the heads of the tribes, the commanders of the divisions, and all those placed in charge of any business or property of the king, to an assembly, and standing upon a very high platform the king spoke to the people:
"Brothers and countrymen, I want you to know that when I resolved to build a temple to God, I made ready a great quantity of gold and a hundred thousand talents of silver, but God, through the prophet Nathan, prevented me, because of the wars I fought for your sake and because my right hand had been stained by the killing of my enemies, and instead commanded that my son, who was to succeed to the kingdom, should build the temple for him.
Now then, just as our forefather Jacob had twelve sons, and you know that Judah was chosen as king among them, and I too, though I was one of six brothers, was preferred above them and received the kingship from God, and none of them resented it, so I ask that my own sons likewise not quarrel with one another now that Solomon has received the kingdom, but rather, understanding that it was God
"chose him gladly to bear him as master. For it is no hardship to serve one whom God has willed to rule, even a brother of one's own; rather it is fitting to rejoice that a brother has attained this honor, as though sharing in it oneself. I pray that God's promises may come to full completion, and that this prosperity may be sown throughout the whole land and remain there for all time, as he himself promised to provide it under King Solomon.
"These things will stand firm and come to a fair end, if you show yourself pious and just, and a guardian of our ancestral laws, my son. But if not, expect the worse for transgressing them." Having spoken these words the king fell silent, and in front of everyone he handed over to Solomon the plan and design for building the temple.
He specified the foundations, the chambers, and the upper rooms — how many there should be and how great in height and breadth — and he fixed the weight of all the gold and silver vessels. He also urged him, by his words, to apply himself to the work with every eagerness, and urged the officials and the tribe of Levi to join in the labor, both because of their age and because God himself had chosen him as leader both of the building of the temple and of the kingdom.
He declared that the building would be easy for them and not very burdensome, since he himself had prepared many talents of gold, still more of silver, timber, a multitude of craftsmen and stonecutters, and already-quarried emerald and every kind of costly stone. And now, he said, as a firstfruit offering of his own service he would give another three thousand talents of pure gold
for the inner sanctuary and for the chariot of God — the cherubim which must stand covering the ark. When David fell silent, great eagerness arose among the officials, the priests, and the tribe of Levi, who contributed and made splendid and magnificent pledges: for gold they undertook to bring in five thousand talents and ten thousand staters,
and ten thousand talents of silver, and many tens of thousands of talents of iron; and whoever had a costly stone brought it and handed it over to the treasuries, which were administered by Ialos, the descendant of Moses. At this the whole people rejoiced, and David, seeing the zeal and generosity of the officials, the priests, and everyone else, began to bless God with a loud cry,
calling him father and origin of all things, and maker of things human and divine with which he had adorned himself, and protector and guardian of the race of the Hebrews and of their prosperity and of the kingdom he had given him. After this he prayed for good things for the whole people, and for his son Solomon a sound and just mind, strong in every part of virtue,
and he bade the multitude bless God as well. They fell to the ground and worshiped, and gave thanks also to David for all the benefits they had enjoyed under his reign. On the following day they offered sacrifices to God — a thousand calves, as many rams, and a thousand lambs, which they burned whole; they also offered the peace offerings, slaughtering many tens of thousands of victims.
The king feasted with all the people through the whole day, and they anointed Solomon a second time with oil and proclaimed him king, and Zadok high priest of the whole multitude. Bringing Solomon to the palace and seating him on his father's throne, from that day they obeyed him.
A short time later David fell into sickness from old age, and knowing that he was about to die, he called his son Solomon and spoke to him as follows: "I, my child, am now departing to what is fated, going the way common to my fathers and to all who now exist and all who will exist, from which no one returning can learn what happens in life. Therefore, while I am still alive
and already close to death, I urge upon you what I have already counseled before: to be just toward your subjects, pious toward the God who gave you the kingdom, and to keep his commandments and the laws which he sent down to us through Moses, neither yielding to favor, flattery, desire, nor any other passion so as to neglect them.
For you will lose God's goodwill toward yourself if you transgress any of the laws, and you will turn away his good providence from everything. But by showing yourself to be the kind of man you ought to be, and the kind I urge you to be, you will keep the kingdom for our family, and no other house of the Hebrews will ever rule, but we ourselves for all time. Remember also the lawless deed of Joab
the general, who out of jealousy killed two just and good generals, Abner son of Ner and Amasa son of Jether. Avenge their deaths as you see fit, since Joab, being stronger and more powerful than I, has escaped justice until now. I also commend to you the sons of Barzillai the Gileadite, whom you will keep in every honor
and care, doing me this favor; for we are not the first to do good, but are repaying a debt for what their father did for me during my flight. And Shimei son of Gera, of the tribe of Benjamin, who cursed me abundantly during my flight, when I was going to Mahanaim, and met me at the Jordan and received pledges that he would suffer nothing
at that time — now, finding a reasonable pretext, punish him." Having given his son this counsel about all his affairs and about his friends, and about those he knew deserved punishment, he died, having lived seventy years, and having reigned seven years and six months over the tribe of Judah in Hebron, and thirty-three years over the whole country in Jerusalem. Such a man, the best of men
and possessed of every virtue, and entrusted as king with the safety of so many nations, deserved praise both for the vigor of his power and for the wisdom of his self-control. For he was courageous as no other man, and in the struggles waged on behalf of his subjects he was first to rush into danger, urging his soldiers to toil and fight in battle by his own example, not
by commanding them as a master would. He was most capable of understanding and grasping both what was to come and how to manage present affairs; he was self-controlled, fair, kind to those in misfortune, just, and humane — qualities most fitting for kings alone to have — and he erred in nothing whatever, given the greatness of his power, except in the matter of Uriah's wife. He left behind wealth greater than any other
king, whether of the Hebrews or of other nations. His son Solomon buried him in Jerusalem magnificently, with all else that custom requires for a royal funeral, and indeed he buried with him a great and abundant quantity of wealth, the extent of which one may easily judge from what will now be told: for after a period of one thousand three hundred years, Hyrcanus the high priest, when besieged by
Antiochus, surnamed the Pious, son of Demetrius, wishing to give him money to lift the siege and lead the army away, and having no other means of raising it, opened one chamber of David's tomb, removed three thousand talents, and gave part of it to Antiochus, and so ended the siege, as we have shown elsewhere. And after this, many years later,
King Herod likewise opened another chamber and took out a great deal of money. Neither of them, however, reached the burial vaults of the kings themselves, for these had been hidden underground by artifice, so that they would not be visible to those entering the tomb. But on this subject let what we have said suffice.

======== Antiquities — Book 8 ========

a. How Solomon, on taking the kingdom, destroyed his enemies. b. Concerning his wisdom, his understanding, and his wealth. c. That he was the first to build the temple in Jerusalem. d. How, after Solomon's death, the people revolted from his son Rehoboam and set up Jeroboam, one of their own subjects, as king over the ten tribes, while his son reigned over the remaining two.
e. How Isacus, king of the Egyptians, campaigned against Jerusalem, took the city, and carried its wealth off to Egypt. f. The campaign of Jeroboam, king of the Israelites, against Rehoboam's son, and his defeat. g. How a man named Basanes destroyed Jeroboam's line and took the kingdom for himself. h. The campaign of the Ethiopians against Jerusalem, ruled at that time by Abijah's son, and the destruction of their army.
i. How, after the line of Abesarus was destroyed, Amaris became king of the Israelites, and after him his son Achabus. j. How Adad, king of Damascus and Syria, campaigned twice against Achabus and was defeated both times. k. The defeat of the Ammonites and Moabites when they campaigned against Jehoshaphat, king of Jerusalem. l. How Achabus campaigned against the Syrians, was defeated, and perished.
This book covers a hundred and sixty-three years. Concerning David, then, his virtue, and all the good he brought his countrymen through the wars and battles he won, we have given an account in the book before this one, in which he died in old age. His son Solomon, still young in years, took over the kingdom, which his father, while still alive, had already declared to be his by God's will.
When he took his seat on the throne, the whole crowd cried out in acclamation, as is natural for a king at the start of his reign, wishing that his affairs turn out well and that he come to a prosperous and altogether blessed old age in his rule. But Adonijah, who while his father was still alive had tried to seize power for himself, came to the mother of the king
Bathsheba and greeted her warmly. When she asked whether he had come to her on some business and told him to speak freely, since she would gladly assist him, he began by saying that she herself knew the kingship had belonged to him, both because of his age and because of the people's preference, but that since it had passed to her son Solomon by God's judgment, he accepted this and was content with his present position, well pleased with it as it stood.
He asked her, then, to do him a service with her son and persuade him to give him in marriage Abishag, the woman who had shared his father's bed, for his father had never had relations with her because of his old age, and she remained still a virgin. Bathsheba readily promised to assist him and to bring about the marriage on two counts: because the king would wish to grant her something, and because she herself would press him earnestly.
So Adonijah went away hopeful about the marriage, while Solomon's mother went at once to her son to speak with him about what she had promised Adonijah at his request. Her son came out to meet her and embraced her, and after leading her into the house where the king's throne stood,
he had another seat set to his right for his mother. Bathsheba sat down and said,
"My son, grant me a favor I ask, and do not, by refusing, make me sad or downcast."
Solomon told her to command him, for it was right to grant a mother anything, and he added a mild reproach that she should not approach him without already firm confidence of obtaining what she asked, unless, suspecting a refusal, she meant to ask him to give the virgin Abishag in marriage to his brother Adonijah. At this the king took the request badly and sent his mother away, saying that Adonijah was reaching for greater things and that he was astonished she did not urge him to yield the kingship itself as well, to his elder brother, when she asked for the marriage to Abishag on behalf of a man who had powerful friends
Joab the general and Abiathar the priest. He then summoned Benaiah, the commander of his bodyguard, and ordered him to kill his brother Adonijah. And calling Abiathar the priest, he said,
"Death is what your other offenses deserve, along with what you shared with my father, and the ark you carried with him. But I lay on you this punishment instead, since you took Adonijah's side and shared his thinking: you are to be neither here nor ever again in my sight, but go to your own country and live out your life on your farms there, having forfeited, by your wrongdoing, any further right to your honor."
So the house of Ithamar was removed from the priestly office for the reason just stated, just as God had foretold to Eli, the grandfather of Abiathar, and the office passed to the family of Phinehas, to Zadok. Those of the family of Phinehas who had lived as private citizens during the period when the high priesthood had passed to the house of Ithamar, beginning with Eli, the first of that house to hold it, were as follows: the son of the high priest Jesus was Bokias, his son was Joatham, Joatham's son was Maraioth, Maraioth's son was Arophaios, Arophaios's son was Achitob, and Achitob's son was Zadok, who was the first to become high priest under King David.
When Joab the general heard of Adonijah's execution he was struck with fear, for he had been a friend to him rather than to King Solomon, and not unreasonably suspecting danger for himself on account of his loyalty to Adonijah, he took refuge at the altar, believing that the king's piety toward God would secure his own safety there. When this was reported to the king by certain men,
he sent Benaiah with orders to raise him up and bring him before the court to answer for himself. But Joab said he would not leave the sanctuary, and would rather die there than anywhere else. When Benaiah reported his answer to the king, Solomon ordered that his head be cut off there, just as he wished, and that this judgment be exacted from him for the two generals whom Joab had impiously killed,
but that his body be buried, so that the guilt might never remain on his family, while he himself and his father should be free of any blame for Joab's death. Benaiah, having carried out these orders, was himself appointed general of the whole army, and the king made Zadok sole high priest in place of Abiathar, whom he had removed from that office.
To Shimei he gave orders that, having built himself a house, he should remain in Jerusalem attending on him, and that he had permission not to cross the Kidron valley, but that if he disobeyed these terms, the penalty would be death. Given the weight of the threat, he also compelled him to bind himself by oath. Shimei said he was pleased with what Solomon had ordered, and kept to it, living in Jerusalem for a time. But when three years had passed, hearing that two of his slaves had run off and were in Gath, he set out after his servants. When he came back with them, the king learned of it, and considering that Shimei had shown contempt for his commands and, worse still, had taken no account of his oaths before God, he was greatly displeased, and summoning him, said,
"Did you not swear never to leave this city for another? You will not escape the penalty for your perjury, and for that, and for the insults you offered my father during his flight, I will punish you now that you have shown yourself wicked again, so that you may know that the wicked gain nothing by not being punished at the very moment of their crime; rather, for the whole time they think themselves safe from any consequence, their punishment grows and becomes greater than what they would have paid had they been punished for their offense at once."
And at the king's command Benaiah killed Shimei. Now that Solomon held the kingdom securely and his enemies had been punished, he married the daughter of Pharaoh, king of the Egyptians. He also built up the walls of Jerusalem, making them far greater and stronger than they had been before, and administered the kingdom's affairs, not, despite his youth, in a manner that harmed justice or the keeping of the laws or the memory of what his father had charged him at his death, but carrying out everything with the same thoroughness as men advanced in years and at the height of their judgment.
He decided, on going to Gibron, to sacrifice to God upon the bronze altar built by Moses, and offered a great number of burnt sacrifices there. By doing this he was thought to have honored God greatly, for God appeared to him in a dream that same night and told him to choose what gifts he wished to receive in return for his devotion.
Solomon did not ask God for the finest and greatest things a man might desire for himself, as most men, being human and young, would think worth striving for, the things that most people consider alone worthy of pursuit and reckon as gifts from God. Instead he said,
"Grant me, Master, a sound mind and good judgment, by which, in dealing with the people, I may discern what is true and just and render judgment accordingly."
God was pleased with this request, and promised to give him, besides all the other things he had not mentioned in his choice, wealth, glory, and victory over his enemies, and above all understanding and wisdom such as no other man had ever had, whether king or commoner, and to preserve the kingdom for his descendants for a very long time, provided he remained just, obedient to him, and an imitator of his father in those things in which his father had excelled.
When Solomon heard this from God he leapt up at once from his bed, bowed down before him, and returned to Jerusalem, where he offered great sacrifices before the tabernacle and gave a feast for all the Jews. In those days a difficult case was brought before him, one whose resolution was hard to find, and I have thought it necessary to relate the matter at issue in this trial,
so that the difficulty of the judgment may be plain, and so that readers, coming to know such matters, may grasp, as though from an image of it, the king's quickness of mind and his ability to pronounce readily on what was in question. Two women who lived by prostitution came before him, and the one who claimed to have been wronged spoke first, saying,
"I live, O king, together with this woman in one room. It happened that on the same day, at the same hour, we each gave birth to a male child. On the third day, this woman, having lain on her own child in her sleep, killed it; then she took mine from my lap, carried it to herself, and placed the dead child in my arms while I slept. In the morning, wishing to offer the child the breast, I could not find my own child, but saw hers lying dead beside me, for I recognized it at once on close examination. So I demand back my son, and since I cannot get him, I have come, Master, to beg your help; for since we are alone and no one can prove the truth, she relies on her stubborn denial, having no fear because there is no witness."
When she had said this, the king questioned the other woman as to what she had to say in answer to these charges, she claimed to have done no such thing, said the living child was hers and the dead one belonged to her opponent, and since no one could see how to reach a judgment, but all felt as if faced with a riddle, their minds baffled over how to find the truth, the king alone thought of a way: he ordered both the dead child and the living one brought to him, summoned one of his bodyguards, drew his sword, and commanded him
to cut the children in two, so that each woman might receive half of both the living child and the dead one. At this the whole crowd secretly mocked the king as a mere boy, but meanwhile the true mother, the one who had made the claim, cried out that he must not do this, but should give the child to the other woman as hers, for it was enough for her that it lived and that she could see it, even if it seemed to belong to someone else,
while the other woman was quite willing to see the child divided, and even asked that she herself be put to the ordeal. The king, recognizing from each woman's words which spoke from the truth, awarded the child to the one who had cried out, judging that she was truly the mother, and condemned the wickedness of the other, who had killed her own child and was eager to see her friend's child destroyed as well.
The people considered this a great proof and demonstration of the king's good judgment and wisdom, and from that day on they regarded him as one possessed of a more than human understanding. The generals and governors he had over the whole country were as follows: over the district of Ephraim was Ures; over the toparchy of Bithiemes was Diocleros; over Dor and the coastal region was Abinadab,
who held it under the king, having married Solomon's daughter; the great plain was under Banaias, son of Achilus, who also had charge of the whole region as far as the Jordan; Gilead and Gaulanitis, up to Mount Lebanon, together with sixty large and very strongly fortified cities, were governed by Gabares; Achinadab governed the whole of Galilee as far as Sidon, he too being married to a daughter of Solomon,
named Basima; the coastal region around Acre was held by Banacates; Saphates was entrusted with the whole region of Mount Tabor, Carmel, and lower Galilee as far as the Jordan river; Soumouis had charge of the district of Benjamin; Gabares held the country across the Jordan; and over these another single governor had again been appointed.
Under this arrangement both the Hebrew people and the tribe of Judah made great progress, turning to farming and the care of the land; for enjoying peace, undisturbed by wars or upheavals, and moreover reveling without restraint in the freedom they had longed for, each man devoted himself to increasing what was his own and to making it worth still more. Solomon had other governors as well, who
administered the land of the Syrians and of the foreign peoples stretching from the Euphrates river all the way to Egypt, collecting for him tribute from those nations. These also supplied, each day, for the king's table and dinner: thirty measures of fine flour and sixty of ordinary flour, ten fattened oxen and twenty pasture-fed oxen, and a hundred fattened lambs; all this
Besides these — I mean deer taken in hunting, and gazelles, and birds, and fish — foodstuffs were brought daily to the king from the peoples of foreign nations. So great was the number of Solomon's chariots that there were forty thousand stalls for the horses that drew them; and besides these there were twelve thousand horsemen, half of whom stayed in attendance on the king at Jerusalem, while the rest were quartered among the royal villages, scattered about and remaining there. The same officer who was entrusted with the king's expenditure also supplied provisions for the horses, gathering them to wherever the king happened to be staying.
So great was the understanding and wisdom God gave Solomon that he surpassed the men of old, and was found not merely to fall a little short of the Egyptians — who are said to excel all peoples in intelligence — but, when compared with him, to stand at the greatest possible distance from the king's wisdom. He rose above and surpassed in wisdom even those who at that time had a reputation among the Hebrews for cleverness, whose names I will not pass over: they were Athanus, Haimanus, Chalkeus, and Dardanus, sons of Hemaon. He also composed a thousand and five books of odes and songs, and three thousand books of parables and comparisons.
For he uttered a parable concerning every kind of tree, from the hyssop to the cedar, and in the same way concerning cattle and all creatures of the earth, the sea, and the air; there was no nature he failed to know or left unexamined, but on every one of them he philosophized and displayed the utmost knowledge of their particular properties. God also granted him to learn the art that works against demons, for the benefit and healing of mankind; he composed incantations by which sicknesses are relieved, and left behind methods of exorcism by which those possessed by demons expel them so that they never return. This therapy still retains great power among us to this day — for I have set on record a certain
Eleazar, one of our own people, who, in the presence of Vespasian, his sons, his tribunes, and a great crowd of other soldiers, freed men possessed by demons. The manner of the cure was this: he held to the nostrils of the possessed man a ring that had, set beneath its seal, a root of the kind Solomon had indicated, and then, as the man drew in its scent through his nostrils, drew the demon out through them, and the man immediately fell down, whereupon Eleazar adjured the demon, invoking the name of Solomon and reciting the incantations he had composed, never to return into him. And wishing to persuade the bystanders and prove to them that he truly possessed this power, Eleazar would set down a little way off either a cup full of water or a basin, and command the demon, as it went out of the man, to overturn it, so as to give the onlookers proof that it had left the man.
Once this had happened, the understanding and wisdom of Solomon stood plainly revealed — and it is on account of this, so that all men might know the greatness of his nature and how beloved he was of God, and so that no one under the sun should remain ignorant of the king's surpassing excellence in every kind of virtue, that we have been led to speak of these matters. Now Hiram, king of Tyre, on hearing that Solomon had succeeded to his father's kingdom, rejoiced greatly, for he had been a friend of David's, and he sent envoys to greet him and to share in his joy over the blessings now his. Solomon in turn sent him a letter, which read as follows.
"King Solomon to King Hiram. Know that my father wished to build a temple to God, but was prevented by his wars and his unceasing campaigns; for he did not stop subduing his enemies until he had made every one of them tributary to him. I, however, give thanks to God for the peace I now enjoy, and since this peace has given me leisure, I wish to build the house for God — for God foretold to my father that it would be built by me. I ask you, then, to send some of your people along with mine to Mount Lebanon, to cut timber; for in the felling of timber the Sidonians are more skilled than our own people. Whatever wage you set, I will provide it to the woodcutters."
When Hiram had read the letter and had welcomed what was asked of him, he wrote back to Solomon. "King Hiram to King Solomon. It is right to bless God, that he has handed your father's rule to you, a wise man possessed of every virtue. I, for my part, am glad of this, and will supply all that has been asked: I will have much great timber cut, both cedar and cypress, and will send it down by my own men to the sea, and will order my people to build it into rafts and sail to whatever place in your own territory you wish, and set it down there; from there your own men will carry it on to Jerusalem. In return, see that you supply us with grain, since we, living on an island, stand in need of it."
To this day copies of these letters remain preserved, not only among our own records but also among the Tyrians, so that anyone who wishes to learn the exact truth may inquire of the public keepers of the Tyrian archives and find that what is preserved there agrees with what I have reported. I have gone through all this because I wanted my readers to know that we are asserting nothing beyond the truth, and that we are not, by weaving together some plausible tale designed to deceive and entertain, trying to evade scrutiny while demanding instant belief; nor do we consider that, once we depart from what befits serious history, we ought to go unquestioned — rather, we ask no credence at all, unless we are able to make the truth evident by demonstration and firm proof.
When King Solomon received the letter from the king of Tyre, he commended his eagerness and his goodwill, and repaid him in the manner he had requested, sending him every year twenty thousand cors of grain and as many baths of oil — a bath holding seventy-two pints — and supplying the same measure of wine besides. And from these dealings the friendship of Hiram and Solomon grew still greater, and the two swore to maintain it forever. The king also levied on the whole people a labor force of thirty thousand men, whose toil he arranged so as to spare them hardship, dividing it wisely: he sent ten thousand to cut timber in Lebanon for one month, and then let them rest for two months, returning to their homes, until the next group of twenty thousand had completed their turn of duty in due order — so that it came about that the first ten thousand returned to the work every fourth month. Adoram was set as overseer of this levy. Of the resident foreigners whom David had left behind, seventy thousand carried the stone and the rest of the material, and eighty thousand were stone-cutters, with three thousand three hundred overseers set over them. Solomon had ordered them to cut great stones for the foundations of the temple and, having first fitted and bound them together on the mountain, to bring them down in that condition to the city; and this work was carried out not only by the local builders but also by the craftsmen Hiram had sent.
Solomon began the building of the temple in the fourth year of his reign, in the second month, which the Macedonians call Artemisios and the Hebrews Iyyar — five hundred and ninety-two years after the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, one thousand and twenty years after Abraham's arrival in Canaan from Mesopotamia, and one thousand four hundred and forty years after the flood; while from the birth of the first man, Adam, to the time when Solomon built the temple, three thousand one hundred and two years in all had passed. At the time the temple began to be built, the eleventh year of Hiram's reign at Tyre had already begun, and two hundred and forty years had passed since the founding of that city to the building of the temple.
The king laid the foundations of the temple at the greatest possible depth in the ground, with stone strong enough to endure through time; joined to the earth, these stones were to serve as floor and support for the structure to be raised upon them, and, by their strength from below, to bear without strain both the mass of what would rest above and the costliness of its ornament — a weight no less than everything else devised for height, for bulk, for beauty, and for splendor. He raised the building, made of white stone, all the way to the roof. Its height was sixty cubits, its length the same, and its breadth twenty. Above this stood another structure equal to it in measure, so that the whole height of the temple came to a hundred and twenty cubits; and it faced east.
Its porch they set before it, twenty cubits in length, spanning the width of the building, ten cubits deep, and raised to a height of a hundred and twenty cubits. Around the temple he built, in a circle, thirty small chambers, meant to bind the whole structure together by being packed closely and in great number around the outside, and he even built passages connecting them to one another. Each of these chambers had a width of five cubits, the same in length, and a height of twenty. Above them other chambers were built, and above those again still others, equal in both measurements and number, so that their combined height came to match that of the lowest chamber — for the uppermost story was not built all the way around.
Their roof was laid with cedar; for each chamber this roofing was its own, not joined to its neighbor's, but for the rest the roof was shared, being built through one another with very long beams that ran the whole length, so that the walls between them, held together by these same timbers, were made stronger for it. The ceiling beneath the beams, made of the same wood, he had carved throughout into paneling and overlaid with gold. He lined the walls with cedar planks and worked gold into them, so that the whole temple gleamed and the eyes of those entering were dazzled by the brilliance of gold streaming from every side. The entire construction of the temple was carried out with such great skill, of hewn stones fitted together so harmoniously and smoothly, that no mark of hammer or any other builder's tool could be detected by a careful observer — the material had been joined together so naturally, without any visible use of such tools, that the fit seemed to have come about of its own accord rather than by the constraint of tools.
The king also devised an ascent to the upper chamber through the thickness of the wall, since it had no large door on the east side as the lower chamber did, but had entrances from the sides through very small doors. He lined the temple, both within and without, with cedar timbers bound by thick chains, so that these served in place of buttressing and reinforcement. Dividing the temple into two, he made the inner chamber, twenty cubits long, the innermost sanctuary, and designated the forty-cubit chamber the holy place.
Cutting through the middle wall, he set up cedar doors overlaid with much gold and worked with varied engraving, and before these he hung curtains of the richest colors, woven of blue, purple, and scarlet, as well as of the brightest and softest linen. In the innermost sanctuary, twenty cubits wide and the same in length, he set up two cherubim of solid gold, each five cubits in height, each having two wings stretched out to a length of five cubits. For this reason he set them up not far apart from one another, so that with one wing each touched the wall of the sanctuary — the one on the south side, the other on the north — while their remaining wings, joining one another, formed a covering over the ark placed between them. What the cherubim actually looked like, no one is able to say or even guess.
He also paved the floor of the temple with plates of gold, and set upon the temple's gateway doors proportioned to the height of the wall, twenty cubits in width, and these too he overlaid with gold. In short, he left no part of the temple, inside or out, that was not gold; and he hung curtains over these doors as well, matching those within. The doorway of the porch alone had none of these.
Solomon sent to Tyre and had Hiram send him a craftsman named Chiromus, whose mother was of the tribe of Naphtali — for it was from her that he belonged to that tribe — while his father, Uri, was an Israelite by descent. This man was skilled in every kind of craft, but above all he was a master at working gold, silver, and bronze, and it was through him that everything concerning the temple was carried out according to the king's design.
This Chiromus also made two bronze pillars, four fingers thick, hollow within. The pillars stood eighteen cubits high, with a circumference of twelve cubits; and cast atop each capital stood a lily raised to a height of five cubits, around which was set a network of bronze woven like fir branches, covering the lilies. From this network hung, in two rows, two hundred pomegranates. Of these two pillars he set the one on the right of the porch's doorpost, naming it Jachin, and the other on the left, naming it Boaz.
He also cast a bronze sea, shaped as a hemisphere; the bronze work was called the "sea" on account of its size, for the basin measured ten cubits across and was cast to the thickness of a handbreadth. It was supported around the middle of its body by a molding that ran around it in ten coils; this molding was a cubit across, and around it stood twelve oxen, facing toward the four quarters of the winds, three of them turned in each direction, their hindquarters inward, so that the hemisphere rested upon them, sloping inward all the way around. The sea held three thousand baths.
He also made ten bronze stands for basins, square in shape. Each of these measured five cubits in length, four in breadth, and six in height; and the work enclosing it was wrought section by section in this manner: there stood four small pillars at the corners, square in their sides
each having its base fitted into it on either side. These stands were divided into three panels, and each panel was framed by a border worked in relief, showing here a lion, there a bull or an eagle, while the small columns were carved to match the reliefs on the panels beside them. The whole structure stood mounted on four wheels, which were cast in one piece, with naves and rims a cubit and a half in diameter. Anyone who saw the curved sections of the wheels would have marveled at how skillfully they were worked, so smoothly joined to the sides of the stands and fitted to the rims — and such indeed they were. At the top, the corners were closed off by shoulders formed of upraised arms, on which rested a curved support shaped to cradle the basin, which rested upon the hands.
An eagle and a lion were fitted to these so closely that they seemed, to anyone looking, to have grown together naturally with them, and between these figures palm trees were carved in relief. Such was the design of the ten stands. He also had ten round bronze basins made, shaped like cooking pots, each holding forty baths, for their height was four cubits, and their rims stood the same distance apart. These basins he set upon the ten stands called the Mechonoth. Five basins he placed on the left side of the temple, which faced north, and the same number on the right, facing south toward the east; and in the same place he set the sea as well. When he had filled them with water, he designated the sea for the priests entering the temple to wash their hands and feet in before going up to the altar, and the basins for cleansing the inner parts of the animals offered as whole burnt offerings, and their feet as well.
He also had a bronze altar made, twenty cubits long and the same in width, and ten cubits high, for the burnt offerings. He had all the equipment for it made of bronze as well — foot-basins and lifting-implements. And besides these, Chiromus fashioned cauldrons, flesh-hooks, and every kind of vessel out of bronze whose brightness and beauty matched gold. The king also dedicated a great number of tables — one large golden one, on which the loaves of God were set out, and countless others resembling it, made in a different way, on which were placed the vessels — bowls and libation cups, twenty thousand of gold and forty thousand of silver. He also had ten thousand lampstands made in accordance with the command of Moses, of which he dedicated one to the temple, so that it might burn daily as the law prescribed, and one table set with loaves on the north side of the temple, opposite the lampstand — for that one he set toward the south — while the golden altar stood between them. All these things the house of forty cubits held, in front of the veil of the inner sanctuary, in which the ark was to be placed.
The king also had eighty thousand wine-pitchers made, and ten thousand golden bowls and twice as many of silver; eighty thousand golden dishes for offering the fine flour kneaded for the altar, and twice that number of silver ones; sixty thousand golden mixing bowls in which the flour was mixed with oil, and twice that number of silver ones; and vessels of the measures called, according to the terms of Moses, hin and seah, corresponding — twenty thousand of gold and twice that number of silver. Golden censers for carrying incense into the temple, twenty thousand; and likewise another fifty thousand censers for carrying fire from the great altar to the small altar within the temple. He made a thousand priestly robes for the high priests, complete with the full-length garment, the ephod, the breastplate, and the precious stones. The crown on which Moses had inscribed the name of God was one, and it has survived to this very day. He also had the priestly robes made of fine linen, and ten thousand purple sashes for each priest. Following the command of Moses he made two hundred thousand trumpets, and two hundred thousand robes of fine linen for the Levites who sang the hymns; and the musical instruments devised for the singing of hymns, called nablas and kinyras, he had made of electrum, forty thousand of them.
All these things Solomon made at lavish expense and with great magnificence for the honor of God, sparing nothing, but applying every ambition to the adornment of the temple; and these he stored away in the treasuries of God. Around the temple he set a cornice — called in the local tongue a geison, and by the Greeks a trinchos — raising its height to three cubits, to bar the mass of the people from entering the sanctuary and to signal that entry was permitted to the priests alone. Outside this he built a further sacred precinct, raising great, broad colonnades in a square arrangement, opened by lofty gates, each of which faced one of the four directions and was closed with golden doors. Into this precinct came all those among the people who excelled in purity and in observance of the laws. This outer sacred precinct he made a thing of wonder, surpassing all description and, one might say, even belief — for he filled in immense ravines, so deep that one could not look down into them without difficulty even by peering over the edge, and raised them, to a height of four hundred cubits, level with the summit of the mountain on which the temple was built. And because of this, the outer precinct, though open to the sky, was made equal in extent to the temple itself. He enclosed it with double colonnades built of natural stone, its height supported on columns; their roofs were of cedar, carved in coffered panels. All the doors of this outer precinct he covered entirely with silver.
These, then, were the works, and the size and beauty of the buildings and of the offerings dedicated to the temple, which King Solomon completed in seven years, making a display of both his wealth and his zeal — so that anyone seeing them would have supposed that the whole span of time would have been needed to build such works, so vast were they in relation to the size of the temple, whereas in fact they were completed in so short a period. He then wrote to the leaders and elders of the Hebrews and ordered the whole people to be gathered at Jerusalem, both to see the temple and to bring the ark of God into it. And when the summons to come to Jerusalem had been proclaimed to all, they assembled with difficulty in the seventh month — called Athyr by the local people, and Hyperberetaios by the Macedonians. It happened that the season of the Feast of Tabernacles fell at the same time, a festival held by the Hebrews to be extremely holy and the greatest of all.
So they took up the ark and the tent that Moses had set up, and all the vessels used in the service of the sacrifices to God, and carried them to the temple. The king himself went ahead with sacrifices, together with all the people and the Levites, drenching the road with libations and the blood of many victims, and burning incense in such abundance that the whole surrounding air was filled with it, so that even those at the greatest distance perceived its sweetness and recognized, in human terms, the visitation and dwelling of God in a place newly built and consecrated for him. For indeed, singing hymns and dancing all the way, they did not grow weary until they reached the temple. In this manner they brought the ark across. But when it had to be carried into the inner sanctuary, the rest of the crowd withdrew, and only the priests, carrying it, set it down between the two cherubim, whose wings — for they had been fashioned this way by the craftsman — were interlaced, and they covered the ark as if with a kind of tent and canopy. The ark contained nothing but the two stone tablets, which preserved, inscribed upon them, the ten words spoken by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. The lampstand, the table, and the golden altar they set up in the temple before the inner sanctuary, in the same places they had occupied when they stood in the tent, and there they continued to offer the daily sacrifices. The bronze altar he set up in front of the temple, opposite the door, so that when it was opened it would face the altar directly and the sacred rites and the lavishness of the offerings could be seen. All the remaining vessels the priests gathered together and stored inside the temple.
When the priests had arranged everything concerning the ark and had come out, suddenly a dense mist — not harsh, nor such as is heavy with rain in winter — settled and, spreading and mingling through the air, poured into the temple, so that it darkened the sight of the priests, making them unable to see one another, while in the minds of all it produced the impression and conviction that God had descended into the sanctuary and had taken up gracious residence within it. While the others remained absorbed in this thought, King Solomon rose — for he happened to be sitting — and addressed words to God which he judged fitting to the divine nature and proper for him to speak.
"For you, O Master," he said, "we know that you have made for yourself an eternal and worthy dwelling in heaven, and in air, earth, and sea, which together do not contain you even though you fill them all; but this temple I have built for you as a place named after you, so that from it we may send up our prayers and sacrifices to you through the air, and remain convinced that you are present and not far off, even from us yourself. For while you see and hear all things, you never abandon, even now, your dwelling where it befits you to dwell, in order to be nearest to all — rather, you are present with each person alike, both in counsel and through night and day." Having spoken these words of devotion to God, he turned his address to the people, making known to them the power and providence of God — how he had disclosed to David his father, in the matter of things to come, all that had already come to pass and all that still remained, and how he himself had given the name to a son not yet born, and had foretold what he would be called, and that this son, once he became king after his father's death, would build the temple for him; and seeing these things fulfilled according to that prophecy, he urged them to bless God and to despair of nothing he had promised toward their happiness, trusting from what they now saw that it would indeed come to pass.
Having spoken these things to the crowd, the king turned again to face the temple, and raising his right hand toward the people, said: "By deeds it is not possible for men to repay God for the good they have received from him, for the divine is in need of nothing and is greater than any such recompense; but by that faculty by which we have been made superior to the other creatures, O Master, it is necessary for us to bless your majesty and to give thanks for what has been granted to our house and to the house of the Hebrews. For by what other means is it more fitting for us to propitiate one who is angry and displeased, and render him gracious toward us, than by the voice we have from the air and know returns again through it? I therefore acknowledge my gratitude to you through it, first concerning my father, whom you raised from obscurity to such great glory, and then on my own behalf, for having brought to pass, up to this present day, all that you foretold; and I beg that for the time to come you will supply whatever power God grants to men honored by you, and that you will increase our house in every way, as you promised to David my father both in his lifetime and at
his death, that the kingdom would remain with us and that his line would succeed to it through countless generations. Grant us this, then, and to my children, and give them the virtue in which you delight. Beyond this I beseech you also to send some portion of your spirit to dwell in the temple, so that you may seem to us to be present on earth as well. For to you even the whole vault of heaven and all that lies within it is a small dwelling place, let alone this temple, ordinary as it is — but I ask you to keep it forever unravaged by enemies, as your own possession, and to watch over it as your own property. And if ever the people should sin, and afterward, on account of that sin, be struck by some evil affliction from you — barrenness of the land, a plague of pestilence, or any
of those sufferings by which you punish those who transgress any of your holy laws — and the whole people gather and take refuge at the temple, imploring you and begging to be saved, hear them as though you were present within it, have mercy, and free them from their misfortunes. And I ask that this help from you be not for the Hebrews alone, but that if any should come even from the ends of the inhabited world, from wherever they may be, turning to you in supplication and entreating to obtain some good thing, you would grant it to them as well, hearing their prayer. For in this way all would learn that you yourself desired this house to be built for you among us, and that we are not by nature inhuman, nor ill-disposed toward those who are not of our own people, but have wished the help that comes from you, and the benefit of good things, to belong to all in common."
Having said these things, and having thrown himself upon the ground and worshiped for a long while, he rose and offered sacrifices to God, and having provided a great quantity of unblemished victims, he came to know clearly and with joy that God accepted the sacrifice — for fire ran down from the air and, in full view of all, darted upon the altar and consumed the whole offering. When this manifestation occurred, the people, supposing it to be a sign that God would dwell in the temple, rejoiced and fell prostrate on the ground in worship, while the king began to bless God and urged the people to do the same, since they now had proof of God's goodwill toward them, praying that his favor would always turn out this way for them, and that they should keep their minds pure from all wickedness, in righteousness and reverence, and in keeping the commandments that God had given them through Moses, and that these would endure; for in this way the nation of the Hebrews would be prosperous and more blessed than any other race of men. He urged them also to remember that by the same means by which they had gained their present blessings, they would keep them secure and make them still greater and more abundant; for it was not by taking
gained through piety and justice alone, but that they should also expect to keep them for the same reasons: for men, it was not so great a thing to acquire what they did not yet have as to preserve what they had gained and suffer no harm to it.
Having addressed these words to the people, the king dissolved the assembly, after offering sacrifices on behalf of himself and all the Hebrews—twenty-two thousand oxen slaughtered, and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep. For it was then that the temple first tasted sacred offerings, and all the Hebrews feasted in it together with their wives and children; and the king, together with the whole people, kept the festival called Tabernacles before the temple splendidly and magnificently for twice seven days.
When they had feasted there sufficiently and nothing was lacking to their piety toward God, each of them, once the king had dismissed them, went home giving thanks to the king for his care of them and for the works he had shown them, and having prayed to God to preserve Solomon as their king for a long time, they made their way home with joy and gladness, singing hymns to God, so that all completed the road to their own homes without effort, from sheer pleasure. And those who had brought the ark into the temple, having beheld its greatness and beauty and shared in the great sacrifices and festivities held over it, returned each to their own cities.
A dream appeared to the king as he slept and signified to him that God had heard his prayer, and that he would guard the temple and remain in it forever, so long as his descendants and he himself and the whole people continued to act justly; and that he himself, if he remained faithful to his father's precepts, would be raised to a height and greatness of prosperity beyond measure, and that those of his line and of the tribe of Judah would always rule the land.
If, however, he betrayed these practices, forgot them, and turned to worship foreign gods, God would root them out utterly, leaving no remnant of his line, nor would he look on the people of Israel unharmed, but would destroy them with countless wars and calamities, and would cast them out of the land he had given to their fathers and settle foreign newcomers in it. The temple now built would be handed over to their enemies to be burned and plundered, and the city itself would be razed by the hands of enemies, and their sufferings would become fit for legend, so extreme and so incredible that neighboring peoples, hearing of the disaster, would marvel and ask the reason why the Hebrews, once brought by God to glory and wealth, had come to be so hated by him—and would hear from the survivors, confessing, of their sins and their transgressions of their ancestral laws. Such is what has been recorded as God's words to him in his sleep.
After the building of the temple, completed in seven years as we have said before, he laid the foundations of the royal palace, which he barely finished in thirteen years. For it was not pursued with the same zeal as the temple: the temple, though great and of wonderful and extraordinary workmanship, and moreover with God's cooperation working toward its completion, was finished within the years already stated; but the palace, being far inferior in worth to the temple, since the materials for it had not been prepared over so long a time and with the same devotion, and since it was to be a dwelling for kings and not for God, was completed more slowly.
These buildings, worthy of note, were constructed in keeping with the prosperity of the land of the Hebrews and of the king; but it is necessary to describe their whole arrangement and disposition, so that those who are to read this account may from it be able to form some conjecture and grasp their scale.
There was a great and beautiful house, supported by many columns, which he built to receive and accommodate a crowd of people gathering for lawsuits and the settling of disputes—a hundred cubits in length, fifty in breadth, and thirty in height, upheld by square pillars all of cedar, roofed in the Corinthian style, with door-frames and triple-grooved doorways of matching proportions, at once secure and richly adorned.
Another building stood in the middle, set across the whole width, square, thirty cubits in breadth, having facing it a hall raised on thick pillars; in it was a splendid alcove where the king sat in judgment, and adjoining it was built another house for the queen and the remaining chambers meant for daily life and rest after the dispatch of business, all floored with cedar planks cut to measure.
Some parts he built of stones ten cubits long; the walls he clad with another kind of sawn and costly stone, quarried in places renowned for producing it, used to adorn temples and royal palaces. And the beauty derived from this stone was woven in for three courses, while a fourth section displayed the skill of carvers, by whom trees and plants of every kind had been fashioned, shaded with branches and hanging leaves so delicately worked that one would suspect them to be actually stirring, so fine was the craftsmanship concealing the stone beneath them. The rest, up to the roof, was plastered and richly decorated with colors and dyes.
He further built, in addition to these, other chambers for luxury and enjoyment, and very long colonnades placed in a fine position within the palace, among which was a most splendid hall for feasting and banquets, filled with gold; and all the other furnishings needed for the service of those feasting were made entirely of gold. It is difficult to enumerate the size and variety of the palace—how many were its greatest chambers, how many the lesser ones beneath them, how many underground and hidden, together with the beauty of the rooms open to the air, and the groves for the most delightful viewing, and as a refuge and shelter for the body in summer.
In sum, he built the whole structure of white stone, cedar, gold, and silver, adorning the ceilings and walls with stones set in gold in the same manner in which he had likewise embellished the temple of God.
He also made, as part of the throne's construction, an ivory seat of the greatest size, having six steps, and on each of these, on either side, stood two lions, with as many others standing above them. The armrest of the throne consisted of hands that received the king, and the back was fashioned into the likeness of a calf's head, facing backward, and the whole was bound in gold.
Solomon completed all this over twenty years. Since the king of the Tyrians, Hiram, had contributed much gold and even more silver to the building, as well as timber of cedar and pine, Solomon in turn repaid him with great gifts, sending him grain, wine, and oil year by year, of which Hiram was in particular need on account of living on an island, as we have already said. In addition, he presented him with twenty cities of Galilee not far from Tyre; but Hiram, having gone to inspect them and being dissatisfied with the gift, sent word to Solomon that he had no need of the cities, and from then on they were called the land of Chabalon; and "chabalon," translated according to the Phoenician tongue, means "not pleasing."
The king of the Tyrians also sent Solomon riddles and enigmatic sayings, asking him to solve them and relieve him of the difficulty of the questions contained in them. Solomon, being clever and shrewd, let none of them pass him by, but mastered them all by reasoning and, having grasped their meaning, resolved them. Menander, who translated the Tyrian archives from the Phoenician dialect into the Greek language, mentions these two kings, speaking as follows:
"When Abibalus died, his son Hiram succeeded to the kingdom. He lived fifty-three years and reigned thirty-four. He filled in the Eurychorus and set up the golden pillar in the temple of Zeus; he also went and cut timber from the mountain called Lebanon for the roofs of the temples. Tearing down the ancient shrines, he built a temple to Heracles and to Astarte, and he was the first to hold the festival of the raising of Heracles, in the month Peritius. He also campaigned against the people of Utica, who were withholding their tribute, and having subdued them again, returned. In his time there was a young son of Abdemon, who always won at the problems Solomon, king of Jerusalem, set."
Dius also mentions this, speaking as follows: "When Abibalus died, his son Hiram reigned. He filled in the eastern parts of the city and enlarged the town, and having filled in the area between it and the temple of Olympian Zeus, which stood by itself, he joined it to the city and adorned it with golden offerings; and he went up to Lebanon and cut timber for the building of the temples." He says that Solomon, ruler of Jerusalem, sent riddles to Hiram and asked to receive some from him in turn, and that whoever failed to solve them should pay money to the other; and that Hiram, having agreed but being unable to solve the riddles, spent much money as the penalty; then a certain Abdemon, a man of Tyre, solved the ones proposed and himself proposed others, which Solomon, failing to solve, had to pay a great sum of money back to Hiram. So Dius has told it.
When the king saw that the walls of Jerusalem needed towers for security and other fortification—for he considered that the enclosures ought to match the dignity of the city—he further strengthened them and reinforced them with great towers. He also built cities counted among the most important: Hazor and Megiddo, and third, Gezer, which, belonging to the land of the Philistines, Pharaoh, king of the Egyptians, had taken by storm after marching against it and besieging it; and having killed all its inhabitants, he razed it, and then gave it as a gift to his daughter, who was married to Solomon. For this reason the king rebuilt it, since it was naturally strong and could serve for wars and the changing circumstances of the times.
Not far from it he built two other cities: one was named Beth-horon, the other was called Baalath. In addition to these he built others suited for enjoyment and luxury, being well-favored both in the mildness of their climate and in their seasonal fruits and their springs of flowing water.
He also advanced into the desert of upper Syria, and having taken possession of it, founded there a very great city, two days' journey distant from upper Syria, one day's journey from the Euphrates, and six days' journey in length from great Babylon. The reason the city was settled so far from the inhabited parts of Syria was that nowhere in the region below was water to be found, but springs and wells were discovered only in that place. Having built this city and surrounded it with very strong walls, he named it Tadmor, and it is still so called by the Syrians to this day, while the Greeks call it Palmyra.
King Solomon, then, spent that period of time occupied with these matters. As for those who have raised the question why all the kings of Egypt, from Minaeus, who built Memphis, and who lived many years before our forefather Abraham, down to Solomon—more than one thousand three hundred years intervening—were called Pharaohs, taking this title from a king named Pharaoth who ruled among them in the intervening times, I have thought it necessary to speak, in order to dispel their ignorance and make clear the reason for the name: that "Pharaoh," in the Egyptian tongue, signifies "king."
I suppose that they, using other names from childhood, changed their names upon becoming kings, adopting according to their ancestral language the name signifying their authority; for indeed the kings of Alexandria too, formerly called by other names, were called Ptolemies once they took the throne, after the first king; and the emperors of the Romans likewise, though known from birth by other names, are called Caesars, this title being given them by their office and rank, rather than continuing with the names given them by their fathers. I also think that Herodotus of Halicarnassus, for this reason, in saying that after Minaeus, who built Memphis, three hundred and thirty kings of Egypt arose, did not give their names, because they were all commonly called Pharaoh; indeed, after the death of these kings, when a woman came to reign, he gives her name, calling her Nicaule, showing that while male kings could all share the same title, a woman could no longer share in it, and for this reason he gave her own natural name.
I myself, moreover, have found in our own national books that after Pharaothes, the father-in-law of Solomon, no king of Egypt was ever again called by this name, and that afterward the aforementioned woman, ruling over Egypt and Ethiopia, came to Solomon. Of her we shall speak shortly hereafter; for now I have mentioned these matters in order to show that our books agree with those of the Egyptians on many points.
King Solomon subdued those of the Canaanites who still would not submit, who dwelt on Mount Lebanon and as far as the city of Hamath, and imposed tribute on them, and levied from among them each year those who would serve him, perform household labor, and work the land. For none of the Hebrews served as a slave, nor would it have been reasonable, when God had given them many nations subject to their power, to reduce them to this condition and draw upon them for such menial labor; rather, all of them lived armed, campaigning on chariots and horses, rather than serving as slaves. But over the Canaanites whom he had reduced to servitude he appointed officers, five hundred and fifty in number, who received full charge over them from the king, so as to instruct them in the works and tasks to which each
Whatever these peoples needed from him, he required. The king also built many ships in the Egyptian gulf of the Red Sea, at a place called Gasion Gabelos, not far from the city of Ilaneus, now called Berenice, for that region had formerly belonged to the Jews. He received from Hiram, king of Tyre, the gift suited to fitting out the fleet, for Hiram sent him enough skilled pilots and men versed in seafaring, whom he ordered to sail with Solomon's own stewards to the land once called Sophira and now called the Golden Land, which belongs to India, and bring him back gold. They gathered about four hundred talents and returned again to the king.
Now the queen who at that time ruled over Egypt and Ethiopia, a woman practiced in wisdom and remarkable in every other way, heard from those who reported to her daily of Solomon's virtue and understanding, and was seized with a longing to see him for herself. For she was to be persuaded by trial, not by hearsay, which is naturally inclined to give credit even to a false report and then to be talked out of it again, resting as it does entirely on those who bring it. Wishing above all to test his wisdom for herself, and setting out riddles she desired him to solve, she came to Jerusalem with a great show of splendor and wealth, bringing camels laden with gold, spices of every kind, and costly stones. The king received her gladly on her arrival, was in every other respect eager to please her, and easily grasped, faster than anyone expected, the puzzles she put to him with his own understanding.
She was astonished to find Solomon's wisdom so far surpassing what she had heard, and greater by trial than by report, but she marveled most of all at the palace, both for its beauty and its size, and no less for the arrangement of its buildings, for in this too she recognized the king's great understanding. She was utterly amazed by the house called the Forest of Lebanon, by the extravagance of his daily banquets, by the preparation and service of them, by the dress of those who waited at table, and by the skill and decorum with which they served, and not least by the sacrifices offered daily to God and the diligence of the priests and Levites in performing them.
Seeing these things day after day, she was overcome with wonder, and unable to contain her astonishment at what she saw, she made plain how deeply she was affected, for she was moved to say to the king, in words that thoroughly confessed how far her judgment had been overcome by what she had seen: "Everything, O king, that comes to knowledge through hearsay is received with mistrust, but as for the good things which you yourself possess — I mean your wisdom and understanding — and those which your kingdom gives you, the report that reached us was not false after all. Being true, it showed a happiness far less than what I now see before me, present here myself. For report attempted only to persuade the ear, but it did not make known the true worth of things as the sight of them, and the actual presence among them, establishes it. I, at least, having put no trust in what was told me, on account of the abundance and greatness of what I inquired about, have found by far more than this to record. Blessed indeed, I judge, is the people of the Hebrews, and blessed your servants and friends, who day after day enjoy the sight of you and continue to listen to your wisdom. One might well bless the God who has so loved this land and those who dwell in it as to make you its king."
Having made plain through her words how the king had affected her, she also made her disposition clear through her gifts, for she gave him twenty talents of gold, an incalculable quantity of spices, and a costly stone. It is said, too, that we owe the root of the balsam, which our land still bears to this day, to this woman's gift. Solomon repaid her generously with many good things, and above all with whatever she chose to ask for, for there was nothing she desired to receive that he did not grant, but he gave more readily than she asked, of his own free will, displaying his magnanimity by anticipating what she wished to obtain. And so the queen of the Egyptians and Ethiopians, having received what we have described and having in turn given the king what was hers, returned to her own country.
At about this same time there were also brought to the king, from the land called the Golden Land, costly stone and pine timber, which he used to support the temple and the palace and for the making of musical instruments, harps and lyres, so that the Levites might sing hymns to God. Of all that was ever brought to him, what arrived on that day surpassed the rest in both size and beauty. Let no one suppose that the pine wood we speak of resembles what is now sold under that name by dealers to impress buyers, for that wood is like fig wood in appearance, but whiter and more lustrous. We have said this, since the king's use of it brought it to our attention, thinking it timely and useful to make the distinction known, so that no one should be ignorant of the difference or of the true nature of pine wood.
The weight of the gold brought to him came to six hundred and sixty-six talents, not counting what was bought from merchants or the gifts sent him by the governors and kings of Arabia. He cast the gold into two hundred shields, each weighing six hundred shekels, and he made three hundred targets, each carrying three minas of gold, and he had these carried and set up in the house called the Forest of Lebanon. He likewise had cups made of gold and precious stone for banqueting, fashioned with all the artistry he could command, and contrived every other kind of vessel in lavish abundance, all of gold, for there was nothing anyone sold or bought again for silver. He kept many ships, which the king stationed on the sea called Tarshish, and ordered to carry every kind of merchandise into the interior of foreign nations, from the sale of which silver and gold were brought back to the king, along with much ivory, Ethiopians, and apes. The voyage out and back took three years to complete.
A brilliant fame went round the whole surrounding country, proclaiming the virtue and wisdom of Solomon, so that kings everywhere longed to come into his presence, disbelieving through sheer astonishment what was told of him, and sought to display their zeal for him with great gifts, for they sent him vessels of gold and silver, purple garments, many kinds of spices, horses and chariots, and as many pack mules as they judged, by their strength and beauty, would please the king's eye, so that to the chariots and horses he already had, he added from what was sent to him, bringing the number of chariots to four hundred more than before, for he had had a thousand, and the number of horses to two thousand more, for he possessed twenty thousand horses. These were trained for beauty and speed, so that none could be found more handsome or swifter than they, but they were seen to be the finest of all and their swiftness beyond rivaling.
Those who rode them added to their splendor, for they were in the first bloom of youth, most delightful to look upon, and remarkable for their height, standing well above other men, letting their hair grow to the greatest length, and dressed in tunics of Tyrian purple. Gold dust was sprinkled daily on their hair, so that their heads shone with the gleam of gold reflected against the sun. With these men about him, armed and carrying bows at the ready, the king himself, riding in a chariot and dressed in white, was accustomed to set out for his excursions. There was a certain place about two hours' journey from Jerusalem, called Etam, delightful and rich alike for its gardens and the flow of its springs, and it was there that he rode out for his outings. Employing in everything a more than human ingenuity and diligence, and being exceedingly devoted to beauty, he did not neglect even the roads, but paved with black stone those leading to Jerusalem, which was the royal city, both to ease the going of travelers on foot and to make plain the dignity of his wealth and rule. Having divided the chariots and arranged them so that a fixed number should be stationed in each city, he kept few about himself, and he called these cities Chariot Cities.
The king made so great an abundance of silver in Jerusalem as of stone, and of cedar wood, previously unknown there, as of the sycamore trees which abound on the plains of Judea. He also ordered the merchants of Egypt who brought him chariots and horses to sell each chariot with two horses for six hundred silver drachmas, and he in turn sent these on to the kings of Syria and those beyond the Euphrates.
Having become the most illustrious and most beloved of God of all kings, and surpassing in understanding and in wealth all those before him who had held rule over the Hebrews, he did not persevere in these things to the end, but abandoning the observance of his ancestral customs, he did not end his life in a manner like what we have described of him, but became mad for women and given to unrestrained lust, and was not content with women of his own nation, but married many from foreign peoples as well — Sidonians, Tyrians, Ammonites, and Idumeans — transgressing thereby the laws of Moses, which forbade marrying women not of the same stock, and he began to worship the gods of those women, indulging them and his own passion for them, though the lawgiver had foreseen this very thing and had forbidden marrying women of other lands, lest, entangled with foreign customs, the people should abandon their ancestral ways and come to honor those women's gods, neglecting to honor their own.
But of these things Solomon took no heed, carried away by senseless pleasure, for having taken wives who were daughters of rulers and men of distinction, seven hundred in number, and three hundred concubines, and besides these the daughter of the king of the Egyptians, he was at once so mastered by them that he came to imitate their ways, and was compelled, out of goodwill and affection, to give them proof by living as was ancestral to them. And as his years advanced and his reasoning grew weaker with time in resisting the pull of memory toward the customs of his homelands' women, he came all the more to neglect his own God and persisted in honoring the gods introduced through these marriages. Even before this he had chanced to sin and to fail in the keeping of the laws, when he had the bronze images of oxen made for the base beneath the sea he had dedicated, and the lions about his own throne, for it was not lawful to make these either.
Though he had the finest and most fitting example of virtue in his own father, and the glory his father had left behind through his piety toward God, he did not imitate him, even though God had appeared to him twice in his sleep and had urged him to imitate his father, and so he died without honor. At once, then, the prophet came, sent by God, saying that his transgressions had not gone unnoticed, and warning that he would not long rejoice in what he had done; yet the kingdom would not be taken from him while he lived, since God had promised his father David to make Solomon's line his successor, but when Solomon died, God would deal thus with his son: not turning the whole people away from him, but giving ten tribes to his servant, and leaving only two to David's grandson, for the sake of David himself, because he had loved God, and for the sake of the city of Jerusalem, in which God had wished to have his temple.
Hearing this, Solomon was grieved and thrown into great confusion, since nearly all the good things for which he had been envied were now turning toward a wretched change. Not long after the prophet had announced to him what was to come, God raised up against him an enemy named Hadad, whose hostility had its origin as follows. He was a boy of Idumean race, of royal stock. When Joab, David's general, subdued Idumea and destroyed all who were of age to bear arms, over the course of six months, Hadad fled and came to Pharaoh, king of the Egyptians, who received him kindly, gave him a house and land for his support, and, when he came of age, loved him so much that he even gave him his own wife's sister, named Tahpenes, in marriage, and the son born of her was raised together with the king's own children. Hearing then of David's death in Egypt, and of Joab's death, he approached Pharaoh and asked leave to go to his own country.
When the king asked what he lacked, or what had befallen him, that he was eager to leave him, though he pressed and pleaded often, he was not released at that time. But at the very time when Solomon's affairs had already begun to go badly because of the transgressions we have described and God's anger over them, Pharaoh consented, and Hadad went to Idumea. Unable to bring it to revolt from Solomon, for it was held by many garrisons and had no freedom or safe opportunity for rebellion because of them, he set out from there and came into Syria. There he fell in with a certain Razes, who had fled from his master Hadadezer, king of Sophene, and was living as a bandit in that country. Joining himself to him in friendship, with the band of brigands Razes had about him, Hadad marched up, seized that part of Syria, and was proclaimed its king, and while Solomon still lived he raided and plundered the land of the Israelites, harrying it. Such were the sufferings the Hebrews endured at the hands of Hadad. Jeroboam, son of Nebat, one of Solomon's own countrymen, also rose up against him, in accordance with a prophecy made to him long before, to the effect that...
He had hoped for great things from him. For when Solomon saw that this boy, whom his father had left behind and whose mother had raised him, was noble and daring in spirit, he put him in charge of the building of the walls, when he threw the circuit around Jerusalem. Jeroboam took such care over the work that the king was pleased with him and gave him, as a reward, command over the tribe of Joseph. As Jeroboam was leaving Jerusalem at that time, he met a prophet from the city of Shiloh named Ahijah, who greeted him and led him off the road a little way into an open field where no one else was present. There he tore the cloak he was wearing into twelve pieces and told Jeroboam to take ten of them, saying:
“This is what God wills. He is tearing Solomon's kingdom in two: to his son he gives one tribe, and the one adjoining it, because of the promise made to David, but to you he gives the ten, since Solomon has sinned against him and given himself over to foreign women and their gods. Know, then, the reason why God is turning his purpose away from Solomon, and try to be just, and keep the laws, since the greatest of all prizes lies before you—the reward of piety and honor toward God—and you will become as great as you know David became.”
Elated by the prophet's words, Jeroboam, who was by nature a hot-headed young man and eager for great things, could not stay still. Once he had taken up his command, remembering what Ahijah had revealed to him, he set at once about persuading the people to revolt from Solomon and to turn and bring the leadership over to himself. But Solomon learned of his intention and his design and sought to seize and kill him. Jeroboam, learning of this before it happened, fled to Isocus, king of the Egyptians, and remained there until Solomon's death, thereby both escaping harm at Solomon's hands and preserving himself for the kingship.
Solomon died at an advanced age, having reigned eighty years and lived ninety-four. He was buried in Jerusalem, having surpassed in prosperity, wealth, and wisdom all the kings who reigned before him, except for the wrongs into which he was led in his old age, deceived by his wives—matters concerning which, and the evils that befell the Hebrews on their account, we shall find a more fitting occasion to explain. After Solomon's death, his son Rehoboam succeeded to the kingdom—his mother was an Ammonite woman named Naamah. The leaders of the people at once sent to Egypt and summoned Jeroboam. When he came to them at the city of Shechem, Rehoboam too went there, for it had been decided that he should be proclaimed king there, when the Israelites had gathered together.
So the leaders of the people and Jeroboam approached him and asked him to relax somewhat the burden of servitude that lay on them and to be gentler than his father had been, for they had borne a heavy yoke under him, and said that they would be better disposed toward Rehoboam and would embrace their servitude out of goodwill rather than fear, if he showed them kindness. He told them he would give his answer about their request after three days, and this at once made him suspect, since he did not immediately grant them what would please them—for they thought that kindness and generosity ought to come readily, especially from one so young—yet it still seemed that deliberating, rather than refusing outright, held out some good hope. He called together his father's friends and took counsel with them as to what answer he should give the people.
They, as was to be expected of men well disposed and acquainted with the nature of crowds, advised him to deal kindly with the people and speak to them in a more democratic manner than befits the majesty of kingship, for in this way he would win their goodwill, since subjects by nature love gentleness and being treated as nearly equal to their kings. But he turned away from counsel that was so good and, perhaps, advantageous for the whole future—or, if not for the whole, at least for that moment when he needed to become king—because, I suppose, God had already decreed that what was truly to his advantage should be rejected by him. He called together the young men who had been raised with him, told them of the older men's advice, and asked them to say what they thought he should do. They—since neither their youth nor God allowed them to perceive the better course—urged him to answer the people:
that his little finger was thicker than his father's loins, and that if they had found his father harsh, they would find him far more difficult still; and that if his father had disciplined them with whips, they should expect him to do it with scorpions.
Pleased with this answer and thinking it befitted the dignity of his office, when the assembled people came to hear it on the third day, while the whole people stood expectant and eager to hear something from the king—supposing it would be something kind—he set aside the young men's counsel and gave them the answer of his friends. This was done in accordance with God's will, so that what Ahijah had prophesied might come to pass. Stung and pained by his words as though they had been put to the test, the people grew angry and, crying out all together, declared that from that day on they had no part, nor any kinship, with David and his line, and that they would leave to Rehoboam only the temple which his grandfather had built—so bitterly did they feel, and so long did they nurse their anger, that when he sent Adoram, the man in charge of the tribute, to soothe them and win over those among them who had spoken rashly and roughly, to make them gentler, they would not tolerate it, but stoned him to death.
When Rehoboam saw this, and thought that he himself had been struck by the very stones with which the crowd had killed his servant, fearing that he might actually suffer this fate in reality, he mounted his chariot at once and fled to Jerusalem. The tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin made him king, but the rest of the people, from that day forward, deserted the sons of David and made Jeroboam master of affairs. Rehoboam, Solomon's son, called an assembly of the two tribes still subject to him and was prepared to take from them one hundred eighty thousand picked troops and march out against Jeroboam and the people, to force them by war into servitude to him. But he was prevented by God, through the prophet, from making this campaign—the prophet said it was not right for kinsmen to make war on one another, especially since the people's revolt had come about by God's own choice—and so Rehoboam did not go out.
I shall first relate what Jeroboam, king of the Israelites, did, and then, following on from this, set forth what was done by Rehoboam, king of the two tribes; for in this way, I think, the good order of the narrative will be preserved throughout. Jeroboam, then, built a palace in the city of Shechem and made his residence there, and he also built one in the city called Penuel. Not long afterward, as the Feast of Tabernacles was approaching, he reasoned that if he allowed the people to go up to Jerusalem to worship God and to spend the festival there, they might well repent and, lured back by the temple and the worship offered in it to God, abandon him and go over to the first king, and that if this happened he would be in danger of losing his life. So he devised the following scheme: he made two golden calves and built two small shrines for them, one in the city of Bethel and the other in Dan, which lies near the springs of the lesser Jordan. He set the calves in each of the shrines in these cities, and, summoning the ten tribes over which he ruled, he addressed them in these words:
“Fellow tribesmen, I think you know this, that every place has God in it, and there is no single appointed place in which he is present, but he hears everywhere and watches over those who worship him. For this reason it does not seem to me necessary for you now to hurry off to Jerusalem, the city of your enemies, to worship there by so long a journey; for it was a man who built that temple, and I too have made two golden calves, consecrated to God, and I have dedicated one in the city of Bethel and the other in Dan, so that those of you who live nearest to these cities may go there and worship God. And I will appoint for you priests and Levites from among your own number, so that you have no need of the tribe of Levi or the sons of Aaron; rather, whoever among you wishes to be a priest, let him offer to God a bull and a ram, just as they say Aaron, the first priest, also did.”
By saying this he deceived the people and led them, once they had abandoned their ancestral worship, to transgress the laws. This became the beginning of evils for the Hebrews, and the cause of their being defeated in war by foreigners and falling into captivity—but these matters we shall set forth in their proper place. When the feast came, in the seventh month, Jeroboam himself wished to celebrate it at Bethel, just as the two tribes were celebrating it in Jerusalem, and he built an altar in front of the calf; and, having made himself high priest, he went up to the altar together with his own priests. But as he was about to offer the sacrifices and the whole burnt offerings in the sight of all the people, a prophet named Jadon came to him from Jerusalem, sent by God, and, standing in the midst of the crowd where the king could hear him, spoke these words, directed at the altar:
“God foretells that there will come, of David's line, one named Josiah, who will sacrifice upon you the false priests who will arise at that time, and will burn upon you the bones of these deceivers of the people, these frauds and impious men. And so that they may believe this will indeed happen, I will foretell for them a sign that will come to pass: this altar will split apart at once, and all the fat of the sacrificial animals upon it will be poured out on the ground.”
When the prophet said this, Jeroboam, enraged, stretched out his hand and ordered him seized. But the outstretched hand was at once paralyzed, and he could no longer draw it back to himself, but held it hanging there, numb and dead. The altar too split apart, and everything on it was cast down, just as the prophet had foretold. Recognizing that the man spoke the truth and possessed divine foreknowledge, Jeroboam begged him to entreat God to restore life to his right hand. The prophet prayed to God to grant him this, and when the king's hand recovered its natural use, he rejoiced and invited the prophet to dine with him. But Jadon said he would not consent to enter his house, nor to taste bread or water in that city, for God had forbidden him this, and had also told him not to return by the road he had come, but by another. The king marveled at his self-restraint, but he himself remained fearful, suspecting from what had been said that some evil change in his own affairs was coming.
Now there was in the city an old man, a wicked false prophet, whom Jeroboam held in honor, being deceived by him, since the man said what pleased him. This man was at that time confined to bed by the weakness of old age, but when his sons told him about the prophet who had just come from Jerusalem and about the signs that had occurred, and how Jeroboam's right hand had been paralyzed and had been restored to life again at the man's prayer, he grew afraid that the stranger might be held in higher esteem than himself by the king and enjoy greater honor, and so he ordered his sons at once to saddle the donkey and prepare it for him to set out. When they had hastened to do as they were told, he mounted and pursued the prophet, and, catching up with him resting under a leafy tree that had the shade of a large oak, he greeted him first, then reproached him for not having come to his house and partaken of his hospitality.
When Jadon replied that he had been forbidden by God to taste food at anyone's house in that city, the old man said, “But not altogether at mine—God has not forbidden you my table, for I too am a prophet, and share the same worship of him as you, and I am here now, sent by him, to bring you to my own house to dine.” Jadon, believing his lie, turned back with him. But while they were still at the meal, enjoying each other's company, God appeared to Jadon and told him that he would pay the penalty for transgressing his commands, and declared what it would be: he said a lion would meet him on the road as he went away, and that he would be destroyed by it, and would be deprived of burial in his ancestral tombs. This happened, I suppose, by God's will, so that Jeroboam should not heed the words of Jadon, once he had been proven a liar.
As Jadon was going back again toward Jerusalem, a lion met him, dragged him down from his beast, and killed him, but did no harm at all to the donkey; instead, it sat beside it and guarded both it and the prophet's body, until some travelers, seeing this, came into the city and reported it to the false prophet. He sent his sons and had the body brought into the city, and gave it a costly funeral, charging his sons that when he himself died, he too should be buried with him, saying that everything the man had prophesied against that city and its altar and its priests and its false prophets was true, and that he himself would be dishonored after his death by not being buried with him, since his bones would not be recognizable.
Having buried the prophet and given these instructions to his sons, wicked and impious as he was, he went to Jeroboam and said, “Why ever were you so troubled by the words of that fool?” And when the king recounted to him the events at the altar and concerning his own hand, calling the man a true prophet indeed and the best of prophets, the old man began to undermine this opinion of his, working mischief and using plausible arguments about what had happened to damage the truth of it. For he tried to persuade him that his hand had gone numb from the effort of carrying the sacrifices, and had afterward, once relieved, returned again to its natural state, and that the altar, being new and having received many great sacrifices, had split and collapsed under the weight of what had been piled upon it. He went on explaining—
He also told him how the man who had foretold these signs had died, killed by a lion — so utterly did he retain not one word of the prophet, nor speak one. By saying this he persuaded the king, turning his mind completely away from God and from holy and righteous deeds, and drove him on to impious actions. And Jeroboam grew so insolent toward the divine and so lawless that he sought nothing else, day after day, but what new and more depraved thing he might dare beyond what he had already ventured. Let this much said about Jeroboam suffice for the present.
Rehoboam, the son of Solomon and king of the two tribes, as we have said before, built strong and large cities: Bethlehem, Etam, Tekoa, Beth-Zur, Soco, Adullam, Ipan, Mareshah, Ziph, Adoraim, Lachish, Azekah, Zorah, Aijalon, and Hebron. These he built first in the tribal territory and allotment of Judah, and he also constructed other large ones in the allotment of Benjamin. He fortified them all with walls, stationed garrisons and commanders in each, and stored up in every city abundant grain, wine, and oil and everything else needed for provisioning, and besides these, shields and spears numbering many tens of thousands.
The priests from among all the Israelites came together to him at Jerusalem, along with the Levites and any others of the people who were good and just, leaving their own cities behind so that they might worship God at Jerusalem; for they were unwilling to bow, under compulsion, to the calves that Jeroboam had made. And they strengthened Rehoboam's kingdom for three years.
He married a kinswoman and had three children by her, and later took as well Maacah, daughter of Absalom's daughter Tamar, who was also his kinswoman; and a male child was born to him from her, whom he named Abijah. He fathered children by several other women besides, but of them all he loved Maacah the most. He had eighteen wives joined to him by law and thirty concubines, and he had twenty-eight sons and sixty daughters born to him. He named Abijah, the son of Maacah, as successor to the kingdom, and entrusted to him the treasures and the strongest cities.
I think it is often the case that greatness of circumstance, and the turn of affairs toward the better, becomes for men the cause of much wrongdoing and lawlessness; for seeing his kingdom grow in this way, Rehoboam turned aside to unjust and impious deeds and came to despise the worship of God, so that even the people under him became imitators of his transgressions. For the character of the ruled is corrupted along with the ways of their rulers, and, treating their own restraint as a rebuke to the licentiousness of their leaders, they follow their vices as though following virtue; for it is not possible to seem to approve the deeds of kings while not doing the same things oneself. This, then, is what happened also to those set under Rehoboam: while he was impious and lawless, they too made it their concern not to offend the king by wishing to be just.
To punish him for these outrages, God sent against him Isokos, king of the Egyptians, about whose deeds Herodotus, misled, attributes them to Sesostris. This Isokos, in the fifth year of Rehoboam's reign, marched against him with many tens of thousands of men; twelve hundred chariots followed him, sixty thousand cavalry, and four hundred thousand infantry. Most of these he brought from the Libyans and the Ethiopians. He invaded the land of the Hebrews, seized the strongest cities of Rehoboam's kingdom without a fight, and having secured them, at last came against Jerusalem itself, where Rehoboam and the people were shut in because of Isokos's campaign, imploring God to grant them victory and deliverance. But they did not persuade God to take his stand with them; rather the prophet Shemaiah told them that God threatened to abandon them, just as they themselves had abandoned his worship.
On hearing this they immediately lost heart, and seeing no further hope of deliverance, all of them hastened to confess, admitting that God would rightly overlook them, since they had become impious toward him and had confounded his laws. But when God saw them in this state, acknowledging their sins, he told the prophet that he would not destroy them, but would nonetheless make them subject to the Egyptians, so that they might learn which is less burdensome, to serve a man or to serve God.
Isokos took the city without a fight, since Rehoboam surrendered it out of fear, but he did not abide by the agreements that had been made; instead he plundered the temple, emptied out the treasures of God and of the king, carrying off countless tens of thousands in gold and silver and leaving nothing at all behind. He also took away the golden shields and the shields that King Solomon had made, nor did he leave the golden quivers that David had dedicated to God, which he had taken from the king of Sophene. Having done this, he returned to his own country. Herodotus of Halicarnassus also mentions this campaign, mistaken only about the king's name, and says that he marched against many other nations as well, and enslaved Palestinian Syria, taking the people in it without a fight.
It is clear that he means to indicate our own nation as having been subdued by the Egyptian; for he adds that the king left stelae in the land of those who surrendered to him without a fight, on which he inscribed the private parts of women — and it was our king who surrendered the city to him without a fight. He says too that the Ethiopians learned circumcision of the private parts from the Egyptians; for the Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine themselves admit that they learned it from the Egyptians. It is plain, then, that no others among the Syrians of Palestine are circumcised except ourselves alone. But on these matters let each say what seems right to him.
When Isokos had withdrawn, King Rehoboam had bronze shields made, equal in number, to replace the golden shields, and gave them into the keeping of the guards of the palace. And instead of living with the fame of great generalship and the splendor of great affairs, he reigned the rest of his time in great quiet and fear, remaining always an enemy of Jeroboam. He died at the age of fifty-seven, having reigned seventeen years — a boastful and foolish man by character, who lost much of his power through failing to heed his father's friends. He was buried at Jerusalem in the tombs of the kings. His son Abijah succeeded him to the kingdom, in the eighteenth year of Jeroboam's reign over the ten tribes.
Such, then, was the end of these matters. As for Jeroboam, we must now relate what followed, and how he ended his life; for he did not cease or relent in his insolence toward God, but continued, day after day, setting up altars on the high mountains and appointing priests from among the common people. These impious acts, along with the punishment due for them, were not long in turning back upon his own head and upon the head of his whole family, at the hand of the divine.
At that time, when his son, whom they called Abijah, fell ill, he ordered his wife to lay aside her royal dress, take on the appearance of a private person, and go to the prophet Ahijah — for he was a remarkable man in foretelling what was to come, and indeed had foretold to him his kingship. When she arrived, he told her to inquire about the boy, as though a stranger, whether he would recover from his illness.
She, disguised as her husband had instructed her, came to the city of Shiloh, for that is where Ahijah was living. And as she was about to enter his house — his eyes dimmed by old age — God appeared to him and revealed both things: that Jeroboam's wife had come to him, and what he ought to answer regarding the matter she had come about.
As the woman entered the house appearing to be a private person and a stranger, he cried out: "Come in, wife of Jeroboam — why do you hide yourself? You do not escape God's notice; he has told me you would arrive, and instructed me what words I am to speak. Go, then, to your husband and tell him this: since I raised you up from small and insignificant beginnings, and, tearing the kingdom away from the house of David, gave it to you, and you have forgotten these things, and, abandoning my worship, have made molten gods and honor them instead, so I will bring you down again and destroy your whole family utterly, and make it food for dogs and birds. For a king shall be raised up by me from all the people, who will leave no one of Jeroboam's family remaining.
"The people, too, will share in the punishment, cast out of the good land and scattered into the regions beyond the Euphrates, because they followed the impieties of their king and worship the gods he made, abandoning my sacrifice. And you, woman, hasten to your husband bearing this news. As for your son, you will find him already dead; for as you enter the city his life will leave him. He will be mourned and buried by all the people, honored with a common grief, for he alone of Jeroboam's family was good."
After he had prophesied these things, the woman rushed out in distress, deeply grieved at the death foretold for her son, mourning along the road and beating her breast over her child's coming end. Wretched in her suffering, she hurried on, helpless — eager, and yet unwilling, because of her son, since she would sooner see him dead by hastening; yet compelled to hurry, because of her husband. When she arrived she found him already dead, just as the prophet had said, and reported everything to the king.
Jeroboam, giving no thought to any of this, gathered a large army and marched out to make war on Abijah, the son of Rehoboam, who had succeeded his father as king of the two tribes; for he despised him on account of his youth. But Abijah, hearing of Jeroboam's advance against him, was not dismayed; instead, rising above both his youth in spirit and his enemy's expectations, he chose an army from the two tribes and met Jeroboam at a place called Mount Zemaraim. He encamped near him and made his preparations for battle.
His forces numbered four hundred thousand; Jeroboam's army was twice that number. As the armies drew up against each other for the struggle and the danger, and were about to engage, Abijah stood on a high place and, gesturing with his hand toward the crowd, asked that Jeroboam too listen to him first in silence.
When silence had fallen, he began to speak: that God had granted the rule to David and his descendants for all time, you yourselves do not fail to know; but I am amazed how you, abandoning my father, attached yourselves to his servant Jeroboam, and are now present with him to make war on those whom God has judged fit to reign, and to take away the rule that rightly belongs to them — the greater part of which Jeroboam holds unjustly to this day. But I do not think he will enjoy even this much longer; rather, once he has paid the penalty to God for the past as well, he will cease from the lawlessness and outrages which he has not stopped committing against him, and which he has persuaded you also to commit — you who suffered no wrong from my father, but because he did not speak to please the assembly, persuaded by the counsel of wicked men, you deserted him, seemingly out of anger, but in truth you tore yourselves away from God and his laws.
"And yet it would have been well for you to have made allowance — not merely for the harsh words of a young man inexperienced in leading the people, but even if his youth and inexperience in affairs had led him into some harsh act — for the sake of Solomon our father and his benefactions; for the good deeds of fathers ought to serve as a plea for the errors of their descendants. But you took none of this into account, either then or now, but have brought so great an army against us. In what, then, do you place your trust for victory? Is it in the golden calves and the altars on the mountains, which are proofs of your impiety, not of true worship? Or does your numbers make you confident, since your army outnumbers ours? But no strength of a numerous army fighting alongside injustice avails; for it is in justice alone, and in piety toward the divine, that the surest hope of prevailing over one's enemies rests — and that is ours, since we have kept the laws from the beginning and worship our own God, whom no hands have made out of perishable matter, nor the device of a wicked king contrived to deceive the crowds, but who is himself the maker and the beginning and the end of all things. I urge you, then, even now, to change your minds, to take better counsel, to cease from making war, and to recognize the ancestral ways that raised you to so great a measure of prosperity."
This is what Abijah said to the people. But while he was still speaking, Jeroboam secretly sent some of his soldiers to surround Abijah, coming from parts of the camp that were not visible. When Abijah found himself encircled in the midst of the enemy, his army was struck with fear and lost heart, but Abijah encouraged them and urged them to place their hopes in God, for he himself, he said, was not encircled by the enemy. All together, calling on God's aid, and at the sound of the priests' trumpets, they raised the war cry and advanced upon the enemy; and God shattered their enemies' resolve and broke their fighting strength, and made Abijah's army superior. So great a slaughter as had never before been recorded in war, whether among Greeks or barbarians, they were found worthy to inflict on Jeroboam's forces, winning a wondrous and celebrated victory from God: they cut down five hundred thousand of their enemies and, taking their strongest cities by storm, plundered them — Bethel and its district, and Jeshanah and its district. And Jeroboam, after this,
the defeat, for as long as Abijah lived. He died not long after enjoying this victory, having reigned three years, and was buried in Jerusalem in the tombs of his ancestors. He left behind twenty-two sons and sixteen daughters, all born to him by fourteen wives. His son Asa succeeded him to the kingdom.
His mother's name, the young king's mother, was Machaia. During his reign the land of the Israelites enjoyed peace for ten years. This, then, is what we have received concerning Abijah son of Rehoboam son of Solomon. Jeroboam, king of the ten tribes, also died, having ruled for twenty-two years, and his son Nadab succeeded him, in the second year of Asa's reign.
Jeroboam's son ruled for two years, resembling his father in impiety and wickedness. During these two years he campaigned against Gabathon, a Philistine city, and settled down to take it by siege. But while there he was plotted against by a friend of his named Baasha, son of Ahijah, and was killed. After his death Baasha took the kingdom and destroyed the entire house of Jeroboam.
And it came to pass, in accordance with God's prophecy, that those of Jeroboam's kin who died in the city were torn apart and devoured by dogs, and those who died in the fields, by birds. Thus the house of Jeroboam paid the penalty its impiety and lawless deeds deserved.
Asa, king of Jerusalem, was a man of excellent character, who looked to God and neither did nor thought anything that did not bear on piety and the keeping of the laws. He set his kingdom in order, cutting out whatever wickedness was in it and purging it of every stain. His army of picked men, armed with shield and spear, numbered three hundred thousand from the tribe of Judah, and from the tribe of Benjamin two hundred fifty thousand men bearing shields and skilled with the bow.
When he had already reigned ten years, Zerah, king of Ethiopia, marched against him with a great force—nine hundred thousand infantry, ten thousand cavalry, and three hundred chariots. He advanced as far as the city of Mareshah, which belongs to the tribe of Judah, and Asa went out to meet him with his own forces, arraying his army against him in a certain ravine called Zephathah, not far from the city.
When he saw the multitude of the Ethiopians, Asa cried aloud and asked victory of God, and asked to capture the enemy's many thousands, for he said he trusted in nothing else but God's help, which was able to make even the few stronger than the many, and the weak stronger than the powerful, to face Zerah in battle.
As Asa was saying this, God signaled victory, and Asa joined battle, and with the joy of those to whom God had foretold it, he killed many of the Ethiopians and pursued those who turned to flight as far as the region of Gerar. Abandoning the slaughter, they turned to plundering the cities—for Gerar itself was captured—and went on to plunder the enemy's camp as well.
They carried off a great quantity of gold and a great quantity of silver, and drove away as plunder camels and pack animals and herds of cattle. Asa and the army with him, having received such a victory and such spoils from God, returned to Jerusalem. As they arrived, a prophet named Azariah met them on the road.
He bade them halt their march and began to speak to them, saying that they had obtained this victory from God because they had shown themselves just and holy and had done everything according to God's will. He said that if they persevered, God would always grant them mastery over their enemies and a life of happiness, but if they abandoned true worship, all the opposite of this would befall them, and a time would come
in which no true prophet would be found among their multitude, nor any priest declaring what was right, but their cities would be laid waste and the nation scattered over every land, to live a wandering, homeless life. He counseled them, while they still had the opportunity, to be good, and not to squander God's goodwill toward them. Hearing this, the king and the people rejoiced and took great care, both together and each on his own, for what was just.
The king also sent men out into the countryside to see to the observance of the laws. This is what happened in the reign of Asa, king of the two tribes. I now return to the multitude of the Israelites and to their king Baasha, who had killed Nadab son of Jeroboam and seized the throne.
For this man, residing in the city of Tirzah and making it his residence, reigned twenty-four years, and having become more wicked and impious than even Jeroboam and his son, he did much harm to the people and insulted God greatly. God sent the prophet Jehu to him to foretell that he would destroy his entire family, and would ruin his house with the same evils
with which he had afflicted the house of Jeroboam, because, having been made king by him, he had not repaid the benefit by leading the people justly and piously—which would have been good first for them, being such as they were, and then pleasing to God—but instead had imitated the wicked Jeroboam, and though that man's soul had already perished, had shown that his own wickedness was very much alive. He said Baasha would therefore reasonably suffer a fate like the one that had befallen him, since he had made himself like him.
Baasha, having heard beforehand what evils would befall him and his whole family because of what he had dared, did not thereafter grow quiet, so as not to die reputed even more wicked, and, repenting at least of what was past, obtain forgiveness. Instead, like men who, once they have set their hearts on a prize before them, never cease striving for it, so Baasha too, though the prophet had foretold what was coming as the greatest of evils—the destruction of his family and the ruin of his house—grew worse,
and day by day added, like an athlete of wickedness, further labors to that pursuit. Finally he took his army once again and attacked a city of some renown named Ramah, forty stadia from Jerusalem, and, seizing it, began to fortify it, having already resolved to leave a garrison there, so that setting out from it they might do harm to Asa's kingdom.
Asa, fearing this enemy undertaking and reckoning that the force left at Ramah would do much harm to the whole kingdom under him, sent envoys to the king of Damascus, along with gold and silver, asking for an alliance and reminding him that there was also a friendship between their fathers.
The king gladly accepted the great sum of money and made an alliance with him, dissolving his friendship with Baasha, and sending the commanders of his own forces to the cities under Baasha's rule, ordered them to do them harm. They went and burned some and plundered others, including the cities called Ijon and Dan
and Abel-beth-maacah, and many others. Hearing this, the king of the Israelites stopped building and fortifying Ramah and hastened back to help his own people, who were suffering harm. Asa, using the material that had been prepared for the building, erected two strong cities on that very site, one called Geba, the other Mizpah.
After this Baasha found no opportunity to campaign against Asa, for he was overtaken by fate and was buried in the city of Tirzah, and his son Elah took over the rule. He ruled for two years and died, murdered through the treachery of Zimri, the commander of half his cavalry: while Elah was feasting at the house of his steward, a man named Arza,
Zimri persuaded some of the horsemen under his own command to rush upon him and, through them, killed him while he was isolated from the soldiers and officers around him—for all of these were occupied with the siege of Gabathon, the Philistine city. Having killed Elah, Zimri the cavalry commander made himself king and destroyed the entire family of Baasha, in accordance with Jehu's prophecy, for it happened that his house perished root and branch
for its impiety, in the same manner as we have written that Jeroboam's house was destroyed. But the army besieging Gabathon, learning what had happened to the king and that Zimri had killed him and taken the kingdom, made their own commander, Omri, king instead, and he, rousing the army from Gabathon, came to Tirzah, the royal seat, and, attacking the city by force,
took it. Zimri, seeing the city taken, fled to the innermost part of the palace and, setting it on fire, burned himself alive together with it, having reigned seven days. The people of Israel immediately split, some wishing Tibni to be king, others Omri. Those who favored Omri prevailed and killed Tibni, and Omri became king over the whole people.
In the thirtieth year of Asa's reign Omri began to rule, for twelve years—six of these in the city of Tirzah, the rest in the city called Somoron, which the Greeks call Samaria. He himself named it Somoraios, after the man who sold him the hill on which he built the city, Somoros. He differed in no way from the kings before him
except in being worse than they were, for all of them sought ways to turn the people away from God through their daily impieties, and for this reason God brought it about that they destroyed one another, leaving no one of their line. He too died in Samaria, and his son Ahab succeeded him.
From these events one can learn how great a concern the divine has for human affairs, and how it loves the good but hates the wicked and destroys them root and branch. For the kings of the Israelites, one after another, because of their lawlessness and injustices, were in a short time seen to perish wretchedly along with their families, whereas Asa, king of Jerusalem and the two tribes, on account of his piety
and righteousness, was brought by God to a long and happy old age and died fortunate, having reigned forty-one years. When he died, his son Jehoshaphat, born to him by a wife named Abida, succeeded to the rule. Everyone judged him, in his deeds, to be an imitator of David his great-grandfather in both courage and piety. But it is not yet urgent to speak of this king.
Ahab, king of the Israelites, lived in Samaria and held the throne for twenty-two years, introducing nothing new from the kings before him except that, through the extremity of his wickedness, he devised things for the worse, imitating all their crimes and their insolence toward the divine, and above all zealously following the lawlessness of Jeroboam. For he too worshiped the calves that Jeroboam had made, and in addition contrived other strange things.
He married a wife, the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Tyrians and Sidonians, named Jezebel, from whom he learned to worship her own gods. This woman was forceful and bold, and fell into such wantonness and madness that
she even built a temple to the god of the Tyrians whom they call Belos, and planted a grove of all kinds of trees. She also appointed priests and false prophets to this god, and the king himself kept many such men about him, having surpassed in folly and wickedness all who came before him.
A prophet of the great God, from the city of Tishbe in the region of Gilead, came to Ahab and declared that God foretold he would send neither rain upon him in those years nor dew upon the land, unless he himself appeared. Having sworn to this, he withdrew to the regions toward the south, making his dwelling by a certain stream, from which he also had his drink, for ravens brought him food each day.
When the stream dried up for lack of rain, he went, at God's command, to the city of Zarephath, not far from Sidon and Tyre—for it lies between them—for he would find there a widow woman who would provide him with food. Not far from the gate he saw a poor woman gathering sticks, and when God made clear that she was the one who was to sustain him, he approached, greeted her, and asked her to bring him water to drink,
and as she went, he called her back and told her also to bring him bread. When she swore that she had nothing but a single handful of flour and a little oil, and was going to gather the sticks in order to knead it and make bread for herself and her child, after which, she said, having spent what little there was, they would die of hunger with nothing left, he told her: take courage, go, and expect better things, and first make a small portion and bring it to me,
for I tell you in advance that that jar of flour will never fail, nor the jug of oil, until God sends rain. When the prophet had said this, she went to her house and did as he had told her, and she herself had food, and provided sustenance for her child and for the prophet, and nothing of these ran short for them, until the drought too came to an end.
Menander also mentions this drought in his history of the deeds of Ethbaal, king of the Tyrians, saying as follows: there was a drought in his reign from the month of Hyperberetaios until the Hyperberetaios of the following year, and when he made supplication, sufficient thunderbolts fell. This man founded the city of Botrys in Phoenicia and Auza in Libya. And in recording these things, Menander was describing the drought that occurred in the time of Ahab,
for in his time Ethbaal too was king of the Tyrians, as Menander has written. Now the woman of whom we spoke before, the one who sustained the prophet, when her child fell ill, so gravely that he gave up his spirit and seemed dead, wept aloud, tearing at herself with her hands, and uttering such cries as her suffering dictated, blamed
his presence, since he had exposed her sins and her son had died for that reason. Elijah told her to take courage and hand the boy over to him, for he would restore him alive. She gave him up, and Elijah carried him to the upper room where he himself was staying, laid him on the bed, and cried out to God that it was not right to repay so badly the woman who had taken him in and fed him by taking away her son. He begged God to send the soul back into the child and grant him life. God took pity on the mother and wished also to do the prophet the favor of not letting it seem that his presence with her had brought her harm, and against all expectation the boy came back to life. The woman thanked the prophet and said she now knew for certain that the divine spoke with him.
A little time later, by God's will, Elijah went to King Ahab to tell him that rain was coming. Famine held the whole country in its grip at that time, and there was such a severe shortage of necessities that not only were people going without, but the land no longer produced even enough for the horses and other livestock to graze on, because of the drought. So the king summoned the man in charge of his property, Obadiah, and told him he wished to go out to the springs of water and the streams, so that if grass could be found anywhere near them, they might cut it and have feed for the animals. And he sent men throughout the whole inhabited world to search for the prophet Elijah, but they had not found him. He ordered Obadiah to go with him as well.
They decided to set out, and dividing the roads between them, Obadiah and the king each went a different way. Now it happened that at the time when Queen Jezebel was killing the prophets, this same Obadiah had hidden a hundred of them in the caves beneath Garis and had kept them fed, supplying them only with bread and water. While Obadiah was alone, separated from the king, the prophet Elijah met him. Elijah asked who he was, and when he learned, Obadiah bowed down to him. Elijah told him to go to the king and say that he was present before him. But Obadiah said, what wrong had he suffered at Elijah's hands, that he should be sent to a man seeking to kill him, one who had searched every land for him? Or did Elijah not know that Ahab had left no place he had not sent men to fetch him from, if they should catch him, to put him to death?
He said he was afraid on his own account, that once God had appeared to him, Elijah might again go off to some other place, and then, after the king had sent for him and failed to find him, wherever on earth he might be, he himself would die for missing him. He therefore begged Elijah to look after his safety by considering the loyalty he had shown toward his fellow prophets, saying that he had saved a hundred prophets when Jezebel had destroyed all the rest, and that he was keeping them hidden and feeding them. Elijah told him to go to the king without any fear at all, and gave him a sworn pledge that he would certainly appear before Ahab that very day.
When Obadiah had reported to the king that Elijah was there, Ahab went to meet him and asked him angrily whether he was the one who had brought harm on the Hebrew people and was responsible for the barrenness of the land. Elijah, without flattering him at all, said that Ahab himself had done all the terrible things, since his family had brought foreign gods into the country and worshipped them, and had abandoned their own god, who alone is God, and no longer gave him any thought at all. He then told Ahab to go up and gather the whole people to Mount Carmel, along with his own prophets and those of his wife, stating how many there were, together with the prophets of the sacred groves, who numbered about four hundred.
When Ahab had sent word around and all had assembled on the mountain named above, the prophet Elijah stood among them and asked how long they meant to go on living like this, divided in mind and in belief. If they thought the god of their own country was the true and only god, he urged them to follow him and his commandments; but if they thought nothing of him and supposed instead that they ought to worship the foreign gods, he advised them to follow those. When the crowd made no answer to this, Elijah, since he alone was a prophet of his god while the others had four hundred, asked to put to the test the power of the foreign gods against that of his own.
He proposed that he himself take a bull, sacrifice it, and lay it on wood without lighting the fire, and that the others do the same and then call on their own gods to kindle the wood; for once this was done, they would learn the true nature of God. The plan pleased them, and Elijah told the prophets to choose a bull and sacrifice it first, and to call on their own gods. But when nothing came of their prayer and invocation as they made their sacrifice, Elijah mocked them and told them to call on their gods with a loud shout, for surely they were away on a journey, or asleep.
They kept at this from early morning until midday, cutting themselves with knives and lances according to their ancestral custom. When Elijah was about to perform his own sacrifice, he told some of the people to withdraw and others to come close and watch him, so that he would not secretly throw fire onto the wood. When the crowd had come near, he took twelve stones, one for each tribe of the Hebrew people, and built an altar from them, and dug a very deep trench around it. He arranged the split wood on the altar, laid the victims on top of it, and ordered four jars of water to be poured from the spring over the altar, until it overflowed and the whole trench was filled with water drawn from the spring.
Having done this, he began to pray to God and call on him, asking him to make his power manifest to a people who had already gone astray for so long. And as he was still speaking, suddenly, while the crowd watched, fire fell from heaven onto the altar and consumed the sacrifice, so that even the water was burned up and the ground turned to dust.
When the Israelites saw this, they fell to the ground and worshipped, calling on the one, greatest, and true god alone, and denouncing the others as names invented by a base and foolish opinion. They seized the prophets of those gods and, at Elijah's urging, put them to death. Elijah told the king to go and eat, with no further worry, for in a little while he would see God send rain.
So Ahab went off, and Elijah climbed to the summit of Mount Carmel, sat on the ground, and rested his head on his knees, and told his servant to go up to a certain lookout point and watch the sea, and if he saw a cloud rising anywhere, to tell him; for until then the air had remained clear. The servant went up and reported repeatedly that he saw nothing, but on the seventh time he went he said he had seen something darkening the air, no larger than a human footprint. When Elijah heard this, he sent word to Ahab telling him to go down to the city before the rain broke.
Ahab set out for the city of Jezreel, and soon afterward the sky grew dark, was covered with clouds, a violent wind arose, and a heavy rain fell. The prophet, seized by the god, ran alongside the king's chariot all the way to the city of Jezreel.
When Ahab's wife Jezebel learned of the signs Elijah had performed and that he had killed their prophets, she was enraged and sent messengers to him threatening to have him killed in return for his destroying her prophets. Elijah, afraid, fled to a city called Beersheba, which lies at the farthest edge of the territory held by the tribe of Judah, bordering the land of Idumea. There he left his servant and withdrew into the desert, praying to die, for he said he was no better than his forefathers, that he should wish to go on living after they had perished.
He lay down to sleep beside a tree, and when someone woke him he rose and found food and water set beside him. He ate, and drawing strength from that food, he traveled to the mountain called Sinai, where Moses is said to have received the laws from God. Finding a hollow cave there, he went in and continued to make his dwelling in it.
A voice came to him from somewhere unseen, asking why he had left the city and come there, when he had killed the prophets of the foreign gods and persuaded the people that the one who is, is the only god, the one they had worshipped from the beginning. Elijah said that for this the king's wife was seeking to punish him. He then heard the voice tell him to go out again the next day into the open air, for there he would learn what he must do. He went out of the cave in daylight, heard an earthquake, and saw a bright flash of fire. When quiet had settled, a divine voice bid him not to be troubled by what had happened, for none of his enemies would overpower him, and it commanded him, on his return home, to appoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over the people, and Hazael as king of the Syrians in Damascus.
In his own place, it said, Elisha of the city of Abel-meholah would become prophet in his stead; of the impious multitude, Hazael would destroy some and Jehu the rest. Hearing this, Elijah turned back to the land of the Hebrews, and found Elisha son of Shaphat plowing, with some others alongside him driving twelve yoke of oxen. He went up to him and threw his own cloak over him. Elisha at once began to prophesy, and leaving the oxen, followed Elijah.
He asked leave to embrace his parents before going, and when Elijah told him to do so, he took leave of them and followed him, remaining Elijah's disciple and attendant for the rest of his life. So much, then, for this prophet.
Now a certain Naboth, from the city of Jezreel, was the neighboring landowner of the king. Ahab urged him to sell, for whatever price he wished, the field of his that lay next to the king's own, so that by joining it he might make it a single estate; and if Naboth did not wish to take money, Ahab offered to let him choose any of his own fields in exchange. Naboth said he would do neither, and that he would keep and enjoy the very land he had inherited from his father.
Ahab, distressed as though insulted by his failure to take what belonged to another, would neither bathe nor eat. When his wife Jezebel asked why he was distressed and would neither bathe nor take his lunch or dinner, he told her of Naboth's stubbornness, and how, after addressing him with reasonable words even more modest than his royal authority required, he had been insulted by not getting what he asked for.
She urged him not to be so small-minded over this, and to set his grief aside and turn again to his usual care for his body, for she would see to Naboth's punishment herself. At once she sent letters in Ahab's name to the leading men among the Israelites, ordering them to proclaim a fast and, having called an assembly, to seat Naboth in front, since he was of distinguished family, and to have three bold men ready to bear false witness against him, claiming he had blasphemed both God and the king, and then to stone him and finish him off in this way.
And so Naboth, just as the queen had written, was falsely accused of blaspheming God and Ahab, and was stoned to death by the crowd. When Jezebel heard of this, she went in to the king and told him to take possession of Naboth's vineyard without payment.
Ahab was delighted at what had happened and, leaping up from his bed, went off to see Naboth's vineyard. But God, angered, sent the prophet Elijah to the plot of Naboth's land to confront Ahab and ask him about what he had done, since he had killed the true owner of the land and had unjustly taken possession of it himself.
When Elijah came to him, the king asked what he intended to do with him, for it was shameful for him to be caught in wrongdoing by Elijah. Elijah replied that in that very place where Naboth's corpse had been devoured by dogs, his own blood and his wife's would be shed, and his whole family would perish, for daring such impiety and, against their ancestral laws, unjustly killing a citizen.
Grief and remorse for what he had done came over Ahab, and putting on sackcloth he went about barefoot, taking no food, confessing his sins, and in this way trying to appease God. God told the prophet that he would put off the punishment of Ahab's family while Ahab himself lived, in view of his repentance for what he had dared to do, but that he would carry out the threat upon Ahab's son. And the prophet made this known to the king.
While matters stood thus with Ahab, at the same time the king of the Syrians and of Damascus, son of Hadad, gathered a force from the whole of his country, made allies of thirty-two kings from beyond the Euphrates, and marched against Ahab. Ahab, whose army was no match for his, did not draw up his forces for battle, but shut everything in the country away in the strongest cities, while he himself remained in Samaria, for that city was surrounded by very strong walls and seemed otherwise hard to capture. The Syrian king brought up his forces against Samaria, surrounded it with his army, and laid siege to it.
He sent a herald to Ahab asking him to receive envoys from him, through whom he would make known what he wanted. The king of the Israelites having granted permission for them to come, the envoys arrived and said, on the king's instructions, that Ahab's wealth, his children, and his wives belonged to Ben-hadad; but if Ahab agreed and let him take from these whatever he wished, Ben-hadad would withdraw his army and stop the siege. Ahab ordered the envoys to go and tell their king that both he himself and all that was his belonged to Ben-hadad.
When they reported this back, Ben-hadad sent to him again, demanding that, since Ahab had already agreed that everything was his, he should now receive the men Ben-hadad would send the next day, whom he would order to search the palace and the houses of Ahab's friends and relatives, and to take whatever they found
"— whatever finest thing they find among them, and leave you whatever displeases you." Ahab, astonished at this second embassy from the king of the Syrians, called the people together in an assembly and told them that he himself had been ready, for the sake of his own safety and for peace, to give up his wives and children to the enemy and to yield all his possessions — for that was what the Syrian had first demanded in his embassy.
"But now he has seen fit to send his own slaves to search all our houses and to leave nothing in them of our finest property, seeking a pretext for war, since he knows that I would not spare what is my own for your sakes, and is contriving, out of his displeasure over what belongs to you, an occasion for making war. Still, I will do whatever seems best to you." The people said there was no need even to listen to his demands, but that they should treat him with contempt and stand ready for war.
Ahab therefore answered the ambassadors and told them, as they left, that he still stood by what he had first agreed to grant, for the sake of his citizens' safety, but that he would not submit to the second demand, and so he sent them away. Ben-Hadad, hearing this and taking it hard, sent envoys to Ahab a third time, threatening to raise a siege-mound higher than the walls he so despised, using his army — gathering a mere handful of earth from each man — to display to Ahab the size of his forces and to strike terror into him.
When Ahab answered that a man should not boast while he was still putting on his armor, but only once he had proved himself the better in battle, the envoys came and found the king at dinner with thirty-two allied kings and reported his answer to him. Ben-Hadad at once gave the order both to build a rampart around the city and to throw up siege-mounds and to leave out no method of blockade. While these things were being done Ahab was in terrible anguish, together with all his people; but he took courage and was freed from his fears when a certain prophet came to him and told him that God promised to make so many tens of thousands of the enemy subject to his hand.
When Ahab asked through whom the victory would come, the prophet said: through the sons of the commanders, with Ahab himself leading them, because of the enemy's inexperience in dealing with them. Ahab called together the sons of the commanders, and about two hundred and thirty-two were found. Learning that the Syrian had given himself over to feasting and ease, Ahab opened the gates and sent the young men out. When the watchmen reported this to Ben-Hadad, he sent some men to meet them, instructing them: if they had come out for battle, to bind them and bring them to him; but if peaceably, to do the same.
Ahab, meanwhile, kept the rest of his army ready within the walls. The sons of the commanders engaged the guards, killed many of them, and pursued the rest all the way to the camp. Seeing them winning, the king sent out the whole of his remaining army as well. Falling on the Syrians without warning, it overpowered them, for they had not expected an attack and so met it half-armed and drunk, so that they fled and abandoned their weapons in the camps, and the king himself barely escaped, making his flight on horseback.
Ahab pursued the Syrians a great distance, killing them as he went, and after plundering the camp — and the wealth was not small, but a great quantity of gold and silver — he took Ben-Hadad's chariots and horses and returned to the city. When the prophet told him to prepare himself and keep his forces ready, since the Syrian would march against him again the following year, Ahab attended to these preparations.
Ben-Hadad, having escaped the battle with as much of his army as he could save, took counsel with his friends on how he might again make war on the Israelites. They advised against engaging them in the mountains, for their god, they said, had power in such places, and that was why they had now been defeated by them; but they said they would prevail if they made the battle on a plain. They further advised him to dismiss the allied kings he had brought with him, sending them back to their own lands, and to keep their troops under his own command, appointing satraps in their place, and to levy from their own territory horses and chariots and men to fill the ranks of those who had been lost. Judging this advice sound, he reorganized his forces accordingly.
At the beginning of spring he took up his army and led it against the Hebrews, and on reaching a city called Aphek he encamped in a great plain. Ahab, going out to meet him with his forces, pitched camp opposite him, though his own army was very small compared with the enemy drawn up against it. When the prophet came to him again and said that God was giving him the victory, so that he might show his own power not only in the mountains but in the plains as well — a thing the Syrians did not believe possible — the two armies lay encamped facing each other in quiet for seven days.
On the last of these, at daybreak, when the enemy had come out of their camp and drawn up for battle, Ahab too led out his own forces to meet them. Joining battle, after a hard fight, he turned the enemy to flight and pressed the pursuit. Many of them perished under the chariots and at one another's hands; only a few managed to escape into their city of Aphek, and even these died when the walls fell upon them — twenty-seven thousand of them. In that battle a further hundred thousand were destroyed.
Ben-Hadad, king of the Syrians, fled with a few of his most trusted servants and hid himself in an underground chamber. These men, telling him that the kings of Israel were known to be humane and merciful, and that by resorting to the customary manner of supplication they might be able to win his safety from Ahab if he would allow them to go to him, he let them go. Putting on sackcloth and wrapping cords around their heads — for that was the ancient Syrian manner of supplication — they came to Ahab and said that Ben-Hadad begged him to spare his life, and that he would forever be his grateful servant.
Ahab said he rejoiced that Ben-Hadad was alive and had suffered no harm in the battle, and promised him the honor and goodwill one would show a brother. Having received oaths from Ahab that he would suffer no harm if he showed himself, they brought him out from the house where he had been hidden and led him to Ahab, who was seated on his chariot; and Ben-Hadad bowed before him. Ahab gave him his right hand, raised him up onto the chariot, and kissed him, telling him to take courage and expect nothing untoward.
Ben-Hadad thanked him, acknowledged that he would remember this kindness his whole life long, and promised to give back the cities of the Israelites which the kings before him had taken away, and to allow Ahab to establish markets in Damascus, just as his own fathers had had the right to do in Samaria. When oaths and a treaty had been made between them, Ahab gave him many gifts and sent him back to his own kingdom. Such was the end of the campaign of Ben-Hadad, king of the Syrians, against Ahab and the Israelites.
A certain prophet named Micaiah came to one of the Israelites and told him to strike him on the head, for this, he said, he would be doing in accordance with the will of God. When the man refused, Micaiah foretold that because he had disobeyed God's command he would be killed by a lion he would meet. This came about for the man, and the prophet then went to another and gave him the same order. That man struck him and shattered his skull; and Micaiah, having bound up his head, went to the king and told him that he had gone out with him to the campaign, and had been given custody of one of the captives by an officer, but that the captive had escaped, and he himself was in danger of being put to death by the man who had handed the prisoner over to him, since that man had threatened to kill him if the captive got away.
When Ahab said that his death would be just, Micaiah undid the bandage on his head and was recognized by him as the prophet Micaiah. He had used this trick against Ahab in preparation for what he was about to say to him: for he told him that just as God had allowed him to let Ben-Hadad escape punishment — the man who had blasphemed against him — God would likewise pursue him, and would cause him to die at that man's hands, and his people to be destroyed by his army. Ahab, provoked at the prophet, ordered him shut up and kept under guard, and himself, troubled by Micaiah's words, went back to his own house.
So Ahab was occupied with these matters; but I return now to Jehoshaphat, king of Jerusalem, who, having increased his kingdom and stationed forces in the cities within the territory of his subjects, established garrisons no less than his grandfather Abijah had done, when the allotment of Ephraim had been seized while Jeroboam ruled the ten tribes. But he had the divine favor as his ally and helper, being righteous and pious and seeking each day to do what was pleasing and acceptable to God.
The peoples round about honored him with royal gifts, so that he amassed very deep wealth and won very great renown. In the third year of his reign he called together the leaders of the country and the priests and ordered them to go about the land and teach the whole people, city by city, the laws of Moses, and to keep them, and to be zealous in the worship of God. And the whole people took such delight in this that they prized and loved nothing so much as keeping the laws.
The neighboring peoples continued to be devoted to Jehoshaphat and kept peace with him; the Philistines paid him fixed tribute, and the Arabs supplied him each year with three hundred and sixty lambs and as many goats. He fortified great cities, among others strongholds, and had prepared a military force for wars. From the tribe of Judah there was an army of three hundred thousand heavy infantry, commanded by Adnah; and Jehohanan commanded two hundred thousand more. This same commander also had from the tribe of Benjamin two hundred thousand foot archers, and another commander named Jehozabad contributed a hundred and eighty thousand heavy infantry to the king, apart from those he had sent to garrison the strongest cities.
He arranged a marriage for his son Jehoram with the daughter of Ahab, king of the ten tribes, named Athaliah. When, some time later, Jehoram went to Samaria, Ahab received him warmly and entertained the accompanying army splendidly with abundant grain, wine, and sacrificial animals, and urged him to join in an alliance against the king of the Syrians, so that he might take from him the city of Ramoth in Gilead — for that city, which had first belonged to Jehoshaphat's father, had been taken from Ahab's father.
When Jehoshaphat promised his help — for he too had a force no smaller than Ahab's — and had his army sent for from Jerusalem to Samaria, the two kings went out before the city and, each seated on his own throne, reviewed their forces. Jehoshaphat asked that, if there were any prophets, they should be called and questioned about the campaign against the Syrian, whether they advised him to undertake it at that time — for peace and friendship had then held between Ahab and the Syrian for three years, ever since he had taken him captive and released him, up to that very day.
So Ahab called together his own prophets, about four hundred in number, and ordered them to inquire of God whether he would give him victory in a campaign against Ramoth and the overthrow of the city, on whose account he intended to wage the war. When the prophets advised him to march out, saying that he would defeat the Syrian and take him captive again as before, Jehoshaphat, understanding from their words that they were false prophets, asked Ahab whether there was yet another prophet of God, "so that we may learn more precisely about the future."
Ahab said there was, but that he hated him because he had prophesied evil things and had foretold that he would die defeated by the Syrian, and that he was now keeping him in prison; he was called Micaiah, he said, and was the son of Imlah. When Jehoshaphat asked that he be brought forward, Ahab sent a eunuch to fetch Micaiah. On the way the eunuch told him that all the other prophets had foretold victory for the king. Micaiah said it was not permitted him to lie against God, but that he would say whatever God himself told him concerning the king.
When he came before Ahab, and Ahab put him under oath to tell him the truth, he said that God had shown him the Israelites in flight, pursued by the Syrians and scattered by them into the mountains, like flocks abandoned by their shepherds; and he said this signified that the men would return home in peace, but that the king alone would fall in the battle. When Micaiah had said this, Ahab said to Jehoshaphat that he had told him a little while before what the man's disposition toward him was, and that he had always prophesied the worse for him.
When Micaiah said that it was fitting for him to listen to everything foretold by God, and that the false prophets were urging him on to make war in the hope of victory, and that it was necessary that he fall in battle, Ahab fell to thinking it over. But a certain Zedekiah, one of the false prophets, came up to Micaiah and urged him not to attend to him, saying that he spoke nothing true; and he used as proof the prophecy Elijah had made — a man better able than Micaiah to discern the future — for he said that Elijah too had prophesied, in the city of Jezreel, in the field of Naboth, that dogs would lick up his blood, just as they had licked up the blood of Naboth, who had been stoned by the mob on his account.
"It is clear, then," he said, "that this man is lying, saying the opposite of what the greater prophet said, when he declares he will die within three days. And you will know whether he is telling the truth and has the power of the divine spirit in him: let him at once, when struck by me, do harm to my hand, just as Iadaos withered the right hand of King Jeroboam when he wished to seize him — for I think you have certainly heard that this happened." So when he struck Micaiah and nothing at all befell him as a result, Ahab took courage and was eager to lead his army against the Syrian; for, I suppose, fate was prevailing and was making the false prophets more persuasive than the truth, so that he might seize the occasion of his own end. Zedekiah, having made horns of iron, said to Ahab that God signified through these that he would overturn the whole of Syria. Micaiah, not many days
When Zedekiah, having said this, tried to escape punishment for his lying by slipping from one storeroom to another in hiding, the king ordered him seized and kept under guard at the house of Achamon, the ruler of the city, and given nothing beyond bread and water. Ahab and Jehoshaphat, king of Jerusalem, then took their forces and marched to Ramoth, a city of Gilead. The king of the Syrians, hearing of their advance, led his own army out to meet them and encamped not far from Ramoth.
Ahab and Jehoshaphat agreed between themselves that Ahab would set aside his royal dress, while the king of Jerusalem would wear his own robes and take his place in the battle line — a stratagem meant to outwit what Micaiah had foretold. But fate found him even without the royal dress. For Adad, king of the Syrians, had instructed his commanders to give the army orders that no one else was to be killed, only the king of Israel. When the fighting began, the Syrians saw Jehoshaphat standing at the front of the line and, taking him for Ahab, rushed at him and surrounded him; but as they closed in they realized he was not the man.
They withdrew, and from early dawn until evening the two armies fought, with the Syrians winning yet killing no one, since by the king's order they were seeking only to kill Ahab and were unable to find him. Then a certain royal page of Adad's, named Amanus, shot an arrow at the enemy and struck the king, piercing him through the breastplate into the lung. Ahab, however, would not let the wound become known to the army, for fear the men would turn and flee; instead he ordered his charioteer to wheel the chariot about and carry him out of the battle, since he had been struck hard and mortally. In pain, he stood propped in the chariot until sunset, and then, having lost much blood, he died.
As soon as night fell the Syrian army withdrew to its camp, and when the herald announced that Ahab was dead, they broke camp and went home. The body of Ahab was carried to Samaria and buried there. When the chariot, stained with the king's blood, was washed out at the spring of Jezreel, the truth of Elijah's prophecy was confirmed: dogs lapped up the blood, and the very same courtesans who bathed there afterward went on washing themselves in that water. He died at Ramoth, exactly as Micaiah had foretold.
Since, then, everything the two prophets had said to Ahab came to pass, one should conclude that the divine is to be reckoned great, and worshipped and honored everywhere; that one must not judge the more pleasing and agreeable account to be truer than the one that is; and that nothing is more advantageous than prophecy and the foreknowledge it grants, since God supplies to men, through such means, the knowledge of what to guard against. One should also reflect, drawing on what happened to this king, on the power of fate — that even when foreknown it cannot be escaped, but steals upon human souls, flattering them with pleasant hopes, by which it leads them around to wherever it means to overpower them. Ahab too, it is clear, was deceived in his judgment by fate, so that he disbelieved those who foretold his defeat and put his trust instead in those who prophesied to please him,
and so he died. His son Ahaziah succeeded him.

======== Antiquities — Book 9 ========

1. How Ahab's son Jehoram campaigned against the Moabites and conquered them. 2. How the man of the same name, Jehoram, who reigned over the people of Jerusalem, on taking over the whole kingdom killed his brothers and his father's friends. 3. How, when Idumea revolted and the Arabs marched against him, his whole army was destroyed, and his sons — except one still an infant — perished, and he himself, having become impious, brought his life to a wretched end. 4. The campaign of the king of the Syrians and of Damascus against Jehoram, king of the Israelites, and how, besieged in Samaria, he unexpectedly escaped the danger. 5. How Jehoram himself was killed by Jehu the cavalry commander, along with his family, and also Ahaziah, king of Jerusalem.
6. How after his death Jehu reigned over the Israelites, residing in Samaria, and his sons after him for four generations. 7. How a certain woman named Athaliah, of the people of Jerusalem, reigned for five years, and how the high priest Jehoiada killed her and proclaimed Ahaziah's son Joash king. 8. The campaign of Hazael, king of the Damascenes, against the Israelites, and how, after inflicting much harm on their land, and then, a little later, marching against the people of Jerusalem and taking much money from their king, he withdrew to Damascus. 9. How Amaziah, king of the people of Jerusalem, campaigned against the Idumeans and the Amalekites and defeated them. 10. How this same man, waging war against Joash, king of the Israelites, was defeated, was taken captive, and, after giving much money, was released again to his own kingdom, and how his son Uzziah subdued the surrounding nations. 11. The campaign of Jeroboam, king of the Israelites, against Syria, and his victory. 12. How the king of the Assyrians campaigned against Samaria and, after exacting much money from Pekah their king, returned home. 13. How Rezin, king of Damascus, campaigning against the people of Jerusalem, forced King Ahaz to send much money to the king of the Assyrians and persuade him thereby to campaign against Damascus. 14. How the king of the Assyrians took Damascus by storm and put its king to death, and, removing its people, settled them in Media, and settled other nations in Damascus. 15. How Shalmaneser, king of the Assyrians, campaigned against Samaria and, besieging it for five years, took the city, overpowering Hoshea, king of the Israelites, and killed him, 16. and how the Assyrian, having settled the ten tribes of the Israelites in Media, brought the nation of the Cuthaeans from Persia into their country — the people the Greeks call Samaritans. This book covers a period of one hundred and fifty years and seven months.
When King Jehoshaphat arrived in Jerusalem from the alliance he had furnished, as we said before, to Ahab, king of the Israelites, in his war against Hadad, king of the Syrians, the prophet Jehu met him and reproached him for that alliance as an impious and wicked man; for he said that God was displeased at this, yet had rescued him from the enemy despite his fault, because of his own good nature. The king then turned to give God thanks and offer sacrifices; afterward he set out to go around the whole country under his rule, teaching the people the laws given through Moses by God and reverence toward him. And having appointed judges in each city of those he governed, he charged them to judge the people with concern for nothing so much as justice, showing no favor either to gifts or to the standing of those thought superior for wealth or birth, but rendering equal justice to all, since God sees even what is done in secret.
Having taught this in each city of the two tribes, he returned to Jerusalem, where he likewise appointed judges from the priests, the Levites, and the leading men of the people, urging them to make all their judgments careful and just; and if any of their countrymen, disputing over greater matters, sent to them from other cities, they were to render judgment on these with still greater diligence and justice; for the judgments given in this city, where the temple of God stands and where the king resides, ought above all to be scrupulous and most just. As heads over them he appointed Amaziah the priest and Zebadiah, both of the tribe of Judah. In this way the king set these matters in order.
At this same time the Moabites and Ammonites campaigned against him, bringing with them also a great force of Arabs, and encamped near the city of Engedi, which lies on the Dead Sea, three hundred stades from Jerusalem; there the finest palms grow, and the balsam. When Jehoshaphat heard that the enemy had already crossed the lake and invaded the territory under his rule, he was afraid, and gathered the people of Jerusalem in assembly at the temple; standing before the sanctuary, he prayed and called upon God to grant him power and strength to punish those who had marched against him, for those who built his temple had asked precisely this of him — that he defend that city and take vengeance on any who dared come against it, who now came to strip away the land he had given them to dwell in.
As he prayed this he wept, and the whole multitude, together with their wives and children, joined in supplication. Then a prophet named Jahaziel, coming forward into the midst of the assembly, cried out, telling both the people and the king that God had heard their prayers and promised that he himself would fight their enemies. He ordered that the army go out the next day to meet the enemy, for they would find them on the ascent between Jerusalem and Engedi called the Ascent of Ziz; they were not to engage them, but only to stand and watch how the divine power fought on their behalf. When the prophet had said this, the king and the people fell on their faces, gave thanks to God, and worshiped, while the Levites went on singing hymns with their instruments.
At daybreak the king went out into the wilderness below the city of Tekoa and told the people that they must trust what the prophet had said and not form up for battle, but set the priests before them with the Levites and trumpets to give thanks, as though God had already delivered their land from the enemy. The king's counsel pleased them, and they did as he advised. And God cast fear and confusion upon the Ammonites, so that, mistaking one another for enemies, they killed each other, until not one of so great an army survived. Jehoshaphat, looking down into the ravine where the enemy had encamped and seeing it full of corpses, rejoiced at this unexpected help from God, since he had given them the victory without their having to labor for it themselves, and he allowed the army to plunder the enemy's camp and strip the dead. For three days they wearied themselves stripping the spoil, so great was the number of the slain; and on the fourth day all the people gathered in a certain hollow, ravine-like place and blessed the power and alliance of God, from which the place took the name Valley of Blessing.
From there the king led the army back to Jerusalem and turned to feasting and sacrifices for many days. And when news of the destruction of his enemies reached the foreign nations, they were all struck with terror of him, since it was now plain that God fought openly on his side. From then on Jehoshaphat lived in great glory, both for his justice and for his piety toward God; he was also a friend of Ahab's son, who reigned over the Israelites, and joined with him in building ships to sail to Pontus and the markets of Thrace, but he failed to gain anything from the venture, for the ships were wrecked by their own size; and because of this he no longer took any pride in ships. Such, then, was the state of affairs concerning Jehoshaphat, king of Jerusalem.
Ahaziah, Ahab's son, reigned over the Israelites, residing in Samaria; he was wicked, altogether like both his parents, and like Jeroboam, the first to break the law and lead the people astray. In the second year of his reign the king of the Moabites revolted from him and stopped paying the tribute he had formerly paid to his father Ahab — two hundred thousand sheep together with their fleece. It happened that Ahaziah, falling as he came down from the roof of his house, was injured, and being ill, he sent to Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron — for this was the god's name — to inquire about his recovery. But the God of the Hebrews appeared to Elijah the prophet and ordered him to meet the messengers who had been sent and ask them whether the people of Israel had no god of their own, that their king should send to inquire of a foreign god about his recovery, and to command them to turn back and tell the king that he would not escape his illness. When Elijah had done as God commanded, the messengers, on hearing his words, at once turned back to the king.
The king, wondering at the speed of their return and asking the reason, was told that a man had met them and stopped them from going further, and told them to turn back and say to him, by order of the God of Israel, that his illness would grow worse. When the king ordered them to describe the man who had said this, they said he was a hairy man, girded with a leather belt. Understanding from this that the one the messengers described was Elijah, he sent a captain with fifty soldiers, with orders to bring him. The captain, finding Elijah seated on the mountaintop, ordered him to come down and go to the king, saying that the king commanded it, and that if he was unwilling, he would compel him by force.
Elijah answered him that, to test whether he was truly a prophet, he would pray for fire to fall from heaven and destroy both the soldiers and himself — and he prayed, and a thunderbolt came down and destroyed the captain and those with him. When this destruction was reported to the king, he was enraged and sent another captain with as many soldiers as had gone with the first. When this one too threatened the prophet that he would take him by force if he refused to come down, Elijah prayed against him, and fire consumed him just as it had the captain before him. Learning what had befallen this one as well, the king sent a third.
This man, being prudent and quite reasonable in character, came to the place where Elijah was and addressed him kindly, saying that he knew Elijah had not come there willingly to serve the king's command, and that those sent before him had come not of their own will but for the same reason; he therefore asked him to have mercy on him and on the soldiers with him, and to come down and follow him to the king. Elijah, accepting the graciousness of his words and the courtesy of his character, came down and followed. Arriving before the king, he prophesied to him, declaring what God said: since you judged him to be no god, unable to foretell the truth about your illness, and instead sent to ask the god of the Ekronites what the outcome of your illness would be, know that you will die.
And indeed, after a very short time, he died just as Elijah had foretold, and his brother Jehoram succeeded to the kingdom, since he had died childless. This Jehoram, resembling his father Ahab in wickedness, reigned twelve years, given over to every kind of lawlessness and impiety toward God; for neglecting to worship him, he revered foreign gods, though he was otherwise a vigorous man. At that time Elijah vanished from among men, and to this day no one knows of his death; he left behind Elisha as his disciple, as we have already shown. Concerning Elijah, and Enoch, who lived before the flood, it is written in the sacred books that they became invisible, and no one knows of their death.
Having taken the kingdom, Jehoram resolved to campaign against the king of the Moabites, named Mesha; for his brother, as we said before, had let him revolt and stop paying the tribute of two hundred thousand sheep together with their fleece that he used to pay to their father Ahab. So, gathering his own forces, Jehoram sent word to Jehoshaphat, urging him — since he had been a friend to his father from the beginning — to join him in the war he intended to wage against the Moabites, who had revolted from his rule. Jehoshaphat promised not only to help in person but also to compel the king of Idumea, who was under his authority, to join the campaign. When such messages about the alliance had reached him from Jehoshaphat, Jehoram took his army and came to Jerusalem, and, being splendidly entertained by the king of the people of Jerusalem, it seemed best to them to march against the enemy through the wilderness of Idumea, since the enemy would not expect their approach by that route. So the three kings set out from Jerusalem — Jehoram himself, the king of the Israelites, the king of Idumea — and after circling about for seven days' march, they fell into want of water for both the cattle and the army, their guides having lost the way, so that all were in distress, above all Jehoram, who in his grief cried out to God, asking what evil he had done that he should lead the three kings to surrender themselves without a fight to the king of the Moabites. But Jehoshaphat, being a righteous man, encouraged him, and having sent to the camp, ordered them to find out whether any prophet of God had come along with them, so that through him they might learn from God what they should do. And a certain servant said...
Joram had someone at hand who could tell him that Elijah's disciple Elisha, son of Saphat, was to be found nearby, so on Jehoshaphat's advice the three kings went to see him. They came to the prophet's tent — he happened to be camped outside the army lines — and asked what the future held for the expedition, Joram most of all. Elisha told him not to trouble him but to go to the prophets of his father and mother, for they were the true ones. Joram begged him to prophesy and save them anyway.
Elisha swore that he would not have answered Joram at all if it were not for Jehoshaphat's holiness and justice. He had a man brought who knew how to play the harp — for he asked for one himself — and as he played, the prophet was filled with the god and directed the kings to dig many pits in the streambed. "Though no cloud will form, no wind will rise, and no rain will fall," he said, "you will see the riverbed full of water, enough to save the army and the pack animals from thirst. And this will not be the only thing you receive from God: you will also defeat your enemies and take the finest and strongest cities of the Moabites. You will cut down their cultivated trees, ravage their land, and block up their springs and streams."
When the prophet had said this, the next day, before sunrise, the streambed ran full — for it happened that God had sent a heavy downpour three days' journey away in Idumea — so that the army and the pack animals found abundant water to drink. When the Moabites heard that the three kings were marching against them through the desert, their king at once gathered an army and ordered camp pitched on the border, so the enemy could not slip into the country unnoticed. But when they saw, at sunrise, the water in the streambed — for it was not far from Moab — looking the color of blood (for at that hour the water reddens most strongly in the light), they got the mistaken idea that the enemy kings had killed each other out of thirst and that the river now ran with their blood.
Taking this to be so, they begged their king to let them go plunder the enemy, and all of them rushed out as if toward an easy prize and came to the enemy's camp expecting to find them destroyed. But this hope proved false: the enemy surrounded them, and some were cut down while others scattered in flight to their own country. The kings then invaded Moab, destroyed its cities, plundered the fields and ruined them by filling them with stones from the streambeds, cut down the finest trees, blocked up the springs of water, and tore down the walls to their foundations.
The king of Moab, hard-pressed by the siege and seeing his city in danger of being taken by force, set out with seven hundred men to break through the enemy's camp at the point where he thought their guard was weakest. He tried, but could not escape, for he ran into a section that was closely watched, and turned back into the city. There he did a deed of despair and dire necessity: he took his eldest son, the one who was to succeed him as king, brought him up onto the wall where he would be visible to all the enemy, and sacrificed him as a burnt offering to his god. The kings, seeing this, pitied his desperate state, and moved by something human and merciful, broke off the siege and each returned to his own land.
Jehoshaphat came back to Jerusalem, and after living a little longer in peace following that campaign, he died — having lived sixty years in all and reigned twenty-five of them. He received a magnificent burial in Jerusalem, for he had modeled himself on the deeds of David. He left behind a good number of sons, but named his eldest, Joram, as his successor — the same name as his wife's brother, who was king of the Israelites and son of Ahab.
When the king of the Israelites returned from Moab to Samaria, he had with him the prophet Elisha, whose deeds I now wish to relate, for they are splendid and worth recording, as we have learned from the sacred books. It is said that the wife of Obadiah, Ahab's steward, came to him and said that he surely knew how her husband had saved the prophets from being killed by Ahab's wife Jezebel — for she said he had borrowed money to feed a hundred of them in hiding — and that now, after her husband's death, she and her children were being taken by their creditors into slavery on account of that very debt. She begged him, in return for her husband's work, to have pity and provide some help.
When he asked what she had in the house, she said she had nothing else, only a little oil in a jar. The prophet told her to go and borrow many empty jars from her neighbors, shut the doors of the room, and pour the oil into all of them, for God would fill them. The woman did as she was told, having her children bring her each jar in turn, and when all were full and none remained empty, she went to the prophet and reported this. He advised her to go and sell the oil, pay her creditors what was owed, and use what remained from the sale to support her children's living. In this way Elisha freed the woman from her debts and from the abuse of her creditors.
Elisha soon sent word to Joram warning him to guard a certain place, for some Syrians were lying in ambush there to kill him. So the king no longer went out to hunt, heeding the prophet. Ader, finding his plot had failed, as though his own men had betrayed the ambush to Joram, grew furious, summoned them, called them traitors to his secrets, and threatened them with death, since a plan he had entrusted only to them had become known to the enemy. When one of those present said he was mistaken, that they had not betrayed to the enemy his plan to send men to kill him, but that he should know it was Elisha the prophet who revealed everything to him and made known all his schemes,
Ader ordered men sent to learn in which city Elisha happened to be staying. Those sent returned reporting that he was in Dothan. So Ader sent against the city a great force of cavalry and chariots to capture Elisha. They surrounded the whole city by night and kept it under guard. At dawn the prophet's servant learned of this, and that the enemy sought to capture Elisha, and told him, running to him with shouting and alarm. Elisha calmed his servant's fear and prayed to God — whose alliance he trusted so fully that he himself felt no dread — asking that he reveal to the servant, as far as possible, his own power and presence, to give him confident hope of escape.
God, listening to the prophet's prayers, let the servant see a multitude of chariots and horses surrounding Elisha, so that his fear left him and he took heart at the sight of what he took to be this divine alliance. Afterward Elisha also asked God to darken the eyes of the enemy, casting a mist over them so that they would not recognize him. When this too had happened, he went out among the enemy and asked whom they were seeking. When they said the prophet Elisha, he promised to hand him over if they would follow him to the city where he happened to be. And they, their sight and understanding darkened by God, followed the prophet eagerly as their guide. Elisha led them to Samaria, where he ordered King Joram to shut the gates and surround the Syrians with his own force,
and he prayed to God to clear the enemy's sight and remove the mist from their eyes. Freed from that blindness, they saw themselves standing in the midst of their enemies. In the terrible shock and helplessness natural to men caught in so divine and extraordinary an event, King Joram asked the prophet whether he should order them shot down with javelins. Elisha forbade this: it was just, he said, to kill men taken lawfully in war, but these men had done his country no harm, having come against it by divine power without even knowing it. He advised instead that they be given a share of food and released unharmed from the table. So Joram, obeying the prophet, entertained the Syrians most splendidly and generously and sent them back to Ader, their king.
When they arrived and told him what had happened, Ader marveled at the extraordinary event, at the manifestation and power of the God of the Israelites, and at the prophet to whom the divine was so plainly present, and he decided he could no longer move against the king of Israel in secret, fearing Elisha, but resolved to make open war, trusting to overcome the enemy by the size and strength of his army. So he marched against Joram with a great force. Joram, not thinking himself a match for the Syrians, shut himself up in Samaria, relying on the strength of its walls. Ader, reckoning that he would take the city, if not by siege engines, then by famine and lack of provisions, attacked and besieged it.
So completely did supplies fail Joram that the shortage in Samaria grew so extreme that a donkey's head sold for eighty silver coins, and the Hebrews were buying a measure of dove's dung for five silver coins to use in place of salt. Joram, in fear that someone might betray the city to the enemy because of the famine, went round the walls and the guards every day, to see whether anyone among them was watching for such a chance — hoping that being seen and watched over would remove not only the will but the means to carry out such a plan, in case someone had already conceived it.
When a certain woman cried out, "Have pity, my lord," thinking she was about to ask for food, he grew angry and cursed her, calling on God to leave him with no threshing floor and no winepress from which he might give her anything she asked. She said she needed none of that and was not troubling him over food, but asked that judgment be given between her and another woman. When he ordered her to speak and explain what she sought, she said that she had made an agreement with the other woman, a neighbor and friend of hers, that since the famine and want had made things impossible, and each had a young son, they would kill and eat their children, one each day, to feed each other in turn.
"I," she said, "killed my son first, and yesterday we both ate him. But now she will not do the same, and has hidden her son away." This grieved Joram terribly to hear; he tore his clothes and cried out in horror, and then, filled with rage at the prophet Elisha for not asking God to grant them relief and a way out of the evils surrounding them, he set out to kill him, sending a man at once to cut off his head.
This man hurried off to carry out the killing of the prophet. But the king's anger did not escape Elisha's notice; sitting at home with his disciples, he told them that Joram, son of a murderer, had sent a man to take his head. "But you," he said, "when the man given this order arrives, watch for him, and as he is about to enter, press him against the door and hold him fast, for the king himself will follow close behind, coming to me, having changed his mind."
And they did as he ordered when the man sent by the king to kill Elisha arrived. Joram, meanwhile, regretting his anger at the prophet and fearing that the man he had sent would kill him before he could stop it, hurried to prevent the murder and save the prophet. Coming to him, he blamed him for not asking God to deliver them from their present troubles, but instead overlooking them as they perished. Elisha replied that by the next day, at that very hour when the king had come to him, there would be great abundance of food — two measures of barley selling in the marketplace for a shekel, and a measure of fine flour bought for a shekel.
This turned Joram and those present to joy, for they had learned to trust the prophet, being unwilling to doubt him because of the truth of his earlier predictions, and even the present want and misery of that day felt lighter to them in expectation of what was coming. But the captain of the third division, a friend of the king who was then supporting him, leaned toward disbelief and said, "You speak, prophet — but just as it is impossible for God to pour down torrents of barley or fine flour from heaven, so it is impossible for what you have just said to happen." The prophet answered him, "You will see this come to pass with your own eyes, but you will not taste any of it."
So the things Elisha had foretold came about in this way. There was a law in Samaria that those with leprosy, and others unclean in body from such conditions, must remain outside the city. Four men, kept outside the gates for this reason, with no one bringing them any food any longer because of the extremity of the famine — forbidden by the law from entering the city, and reckoning that even if they were allowed in they would perish miserably from hunger, while staying where they were meant the same fate for want of food — decided to give themselves up to the enemy: if they were spared, they would live, and if killed, they would at least die a quick death. Having settled on this plan, they came by night to the enemy's camp. But God had already begun to terrify and confound the Syrians, filling their ears with the sound of chariots and horses, as of an approaching army.
and reached their ears, bringing the suspicion even closer to them. In this way they were so affected by it that they abandoned their tents and ran to Ben-hadad, telling him that Joram king of the Israelites had hired the king of the Egyptians and the king of the islands as allies and was bringing them against them; for as these approached, they could hear the noise. So they told Ben-hadad this, and since he too was already assailed in his own ears by the same din as the multitude, he took heed, and in great disorder and confusion, abandoning in the camp their horses and pack animals and abundant wealth, they took to flight.
Now the lepers who had withdrawn from Samaria to the camp of the Syrians, of whom we made mention a little before, when they came near the camp saw a great stillness and silence there. They went inside, and rushing into one tent found no one; they ate and drank, carried off clothing and much gold, and brought it out and hid it outside the camp. Then, going into another tent, they likewise carried out its contents, and they did this four times, with no one at all confronting them. From this they concluded that the enemy had withdrawn, and they reproached themselves for not reporting this to Joram and the citizens.
So they went to the wall of Samaria and, calling out to the guards, disclosed to them the state of the enemy. The guards reported this to the king's guards, and Joram, learning it from them, summoned his friends and commanders. When they came before him he said he suspected the withdrawal was an ambush and a stratagem devised by the king of the Syrians, who, having despaired of destroying us by famine, wanted us to go out to plunder the camp as though the enemy had fled, so that he might suddenly fall upon us, kill us, and take the city without a fight. "For this reason," he said, "I urge you to keep guard over it and not to grow careless because the enemy have withdrawn."
But when someone said that he had guessed most wisely and shrewdly, yet advised sending two of the horsemen to scout the whole road as far as the Jordan, so that if they were caught by the enemy lying in ambush and destroyed, this would serve as a warning to the army not to suffer the same fate by advancing without suspicion — "and you may," he said, "count the horsemen among those who have already died of famine, even if they perish, caught by the enemy" — the king, pleased with this counsel, then sent out men to reconnoiter. They found the road empty of the enemy, but full of provisions and weapons, which the Syrians, to be lighter for flight, had thrown down and abandoned.
On hearing this the king let the multitude loose to plunder what was in the camp. And they profited not a little or in trifling measure, but got much gold, much silver, herds of every kind of livestock, and moreover such quantities of wheat and barley as they had not even hoped for in their dreams. Having obtained these, they were freed from their former hardships and had such abundance that two seahs of barley sold for a shekel, and a seah of fine flour for a shekel, in accordance with Elisha's prophecy. (The seah holds a modius and a half by Italian measure.)
Only the commander of the third division did not enjoy these good things; for having been stationed by the king at the gate to restrain the multitude in its great rush and prevent them from being trampled to death by pressing on one another, he suffered this fate himself and died in this manner, in fulfillment of Elisha's prophecy of his end — for when he alone of all had refused to believe what Elisha had said about the coming abundance of provisions, the prophet had foretold that he would die.
Ben-hadad, king of the Syrians, having escaped safely to Damascus and learned that it was God who had cast him and his whole army into that terror and confusion, and that it had not come from an enemy attack, was deeply disheartened at having God as his enemy and fell into illness. At that time Elisha the prophet happened to be away in Damascus, and Ben-hadad, learning of this, sent Hazael, the most trusted of his servants, to meet him and bring him gifts, instructing him to ask about the illness and whether he would escape the danger from it.
So Hazael, with forty camels carrying the finest and most precious of the goods produced in Damascus and kept in the palace, as gifts, went to meet Elisha, greeted him warmly, and said that he had been sent by King Ben-hadad to bring him gifts and to inquire about the illness, and whether he would recover from it. The prophet told Hazael to report nothing bad to the king, but said privately that he would die. And while the king's servant was grieved to hear this, Elisha wept and was overcome with many tears, foreseeing the evils the people were destined to suffer after Ben-hadad's death.
When Hazael asked him the reason for his distress, he said, "I weep in pity for the multitude of the Israelites, for the terrible things they will suffer at your hands: you will kill their best men and burn their strongest cities, you will destroy their children by dashing them against rocks, and you will rip open their pregnant women." When Hazael said, "What power so great could ever come to be mine, that I should do these things?" Elisha replied that God had revealed to him that Hazael was destined to be king of Syria.
So Hazael, coming back to Ben-hadad, reported to him the more favorable things concerning his illness, but on the following day, throwing a soaked net over him, strangled him to death, and himself took over the kingdom, being an energetic man and enjoying great goodwill among the Syrians and the people of Damascus. Because of this, down to the present day both Ben-hadad himself and Hazael, who ruled after him, are honored as gods for their benefactions and for the temples they built, with which they adorned the city of Damascus. The people parade every day in honor of these kings and take pride in their antiquity, not knowing that they are more recent, and that these kings are not yet eleven hundred years old.
Joram, king of the Israelites, on hearing of Ben-hadad's death, breathed a sigh of relief from the fears and terror he had felt on his account, and gladly embraced peace. Joram, king of Jerusalem — for he too, as we have said before, bore this same name — on taking over the kingdom, immediately proceeded to the slaughter of his brothers and of his father's friends, who were also commanders, making this the beginning and demonstration of his wickedness, and differing in no way from those kings of the people who were the first to transgress against the ancestral customs of the Hebrews and the worship of God.
He was taught to be wicked in other respects, and in particular to worship foreign gods, by Athaliah, daughter of Ahab, who lived with him as his wife. And God, because of his covenant with David, did not wish to destroy this man's line entirely, but Joram did not cease, day after day, from inventing new impieties and corrupting the customs of the land. At that time the Idumaeans revolted from him, killing the king who had formerly obeyed his father and setting up in his place the man they themselves wanted. Joram, with his horsemen and chariots, invaded Idumaea by night, and destroyed those who lived around the borders of his own kingdom, but advanced no further.
This action, however, gained him nothing at all; for all the Idumaeans revolted from him, as did also those who inhabited the region called Libnah. He was so given over to madness that he compelled the people to climb to the highest of the mountains and worship strange gods there. While he was doing this, and had utterly cast the ancestral laws out of his mind, a letter came to him from Elijah the prophet, declaring that God would exact great punishment from him, because he had not become an imitator of his own fathers, but had followed the impieties of the kings of Israel and had forced the tribe of Judah and the citizens of Jerusalem to abandon the holy worship of the god of their land and to serve idols, just as Ahab had compelled the Israelites; and because he had murdered his brothers and killed good and righteous men.
The prophet declared in the letter the punishment he was to undergo for these things: the destruction of the people and the ruin of the king's own wives and children, and that he himself would die of a disease of the bowels, tormented for a long time, his entrails rotting away from the excess of the corruption within, so that, seeing his own misfortune and unable to do anything to help himself, he would in this manner die. Such were the things Elijah made known through the letter.
Not long after, an army of Arabs who lived nearest to Ethiopia, together with the Philistines, invaded Joram's kingdom, plundered the land and the king's house, and moreover slaughtered his sons and his wives; only one of his children escaped the enemy and survived, a boy named Ahaziah. After this disaster, Joram himself contracted the disease foretold by the prophet, and after being ill for a very long time — for God's wrath had struck his belly — he died miserably, watching his own bowels rot away.
The people even dishonored his corpse; for reasoning, I suppose, that a man who had died in this way, by the wrath of God, did not deserve a funeral befitting kings, they neither buried him in the tombs of his fathers nor thought him worthy of any other honor, but buried him as a commoner, after he had lived forty years and reigned eight. The people of Jerusalem handed over the kingdom to his son Ahaziah.
Joram, king of the Israelites, after Ben-hadad's death, hoping to take the city of Ramoth in Gilead from the Syrians, marched against it with a great force, and during the siege, having been wounded — not fatally — by one of the Syrians, withdrew to the city of Jezreel to be healed there of his wound, leaving the whole army at Ramoth under the command of Amasa, son of Jehu, for he had already taken the city by force. He intended, once he was cured, to continue the war against the Syrians.
Elisha the prophet gave one of his disciples the holy oil and sent him to Ramoth to anoint Jehu and to tell him that God had chosen him king; he instructed him also to say other things besides these, and ordered him to make his journey in the manner of a fugitive, so that he might slip away from there unnoticed by everyone. Arriving in the city, he found Jehu seated among the commanders of the army, in their midst, just as Elisha had told him he would; approaching, he said he wished to speak with him about certain matters.
When Jehu rose and followed him into an inner chamber, the young man took the oil and poured it over his head, and said that God appointed him king for the destruction of the house of Ahab, and so that he might avenge the blood of the prophets who had been unlawfully put to death by Jezebel, in order that this house might be utterly destroyed for its impiety, in the same manner as that of Jeroboam son of Nebat and of Baasha, and that no offspring of the house of Ahab might be left. Having said this, he dashed out of the chamber, taking care to be seen by none of those in the army.
Jehu then came forward to the place where he had been sitting with the commanders. When they asked and pressed him to say why the young man had come to him, and moreover said that he was mad, he replied, "You have guessed rightly enough, for indeed he spoke like a madman." When they eagerly pressed to hear it, he told them that he had said God had chosen him king over the people. On hearing this, each man stripped off his own garment and spread it beneath him, and they sounded the trumpets with their horns to signal that Jehu was king.
Having gathered the army, he was about to set out against Joram at the city of Jezreel, where, as I said before, he was being healed of the wound he had received at the siege of Ramoth. It happened that Ahaziah, king of Jerusalem, had also come to Joram — for he was the son of his sister, as we have already said — having come, on account of the kinship, to see how he was faring from his wound. Jehu, wishing to fall upon Joram's party by surprise, insisted that not even a soldier who might desert should reveal this to Joram; for this, he said, would be a splendid proof to him of their goodwill and of their being so disposed as to show him to be king.
They, delighted with what he said, guarded the roads so that no one might slip through to Jezreel and inform those there of him. And Jehu, taking with him the choice of the horsemen and mounting a chariot, made his way to Jezreel. When he had drawn near, the watchman whom king Joram had stationed to look out for those coming to the city, seeing Jehu approaching with a multitude, reported to Joram that a troop of horsemen was riding toward them. He at once ordered one of the horsemen to be sent out to meet them and to find out who it was that was approaching.
So the horseman came to Jehu and asked about affairs in the camp, for the king wished to learn of them; but Jehu ordered him not to concern himself at all with these matters, but to follow him. The watchman, seeing this, reported to Joram that the horseman had mingled with the approaching multitude and was coming along with them. The king sent a second man, who did the same thing at Jehu's order. When the watchman reported this too to Joram, he finally mounted his chariot himself, together with Ahaziah, king of Jerusalem — for he was present, as I said before, to see how he was faring from his wound because of their kinship — and went out to meet him. Jehu rode more slowly and in good order.
Overtaking him in the field of Naboth, Joram asked whether all was well in the camp; but when Jehu answered him with bitter abuse, going so far as to call his mother a sorceress, the king, alarmed at his state of mind and suspecting that he intended nothing sound, turned his chariot around as it was and fled, telling Ahaziah that they had been outmaneuvered by ambush and treachery. Jehu shot him with an arrow, striking him down, the shaft passing through his heart. And
Joram fell at once to his knees and gave up his life. Jehu ordered Badakos, the commander of the third division, to throw Joram's corpse into Naboth's field, reminding him of Elijah's prophecy, which he had delivered against Ahab, Joram's father, when Ahab killed Naboth: that he and his line would perish in that very plot of ground. Jehu himself, seated behind Ahab's chariot, had heard the prophet say this, and now it came to pass exactly as he had foretold.
When Joram fell, Ahaziah, fearing for his own life, turned his chariot onto another road, hoping to escape Jehu's notice. But Jehu pursued him, caught up with him on a slope, and shot him with an arrow, wounding him. Ahaziah abandoned his chariot, mounted a horse, and fled from Jehu to Megiddo, where he was treated but died of the wound not long after. He was carried to Jerusalem and buried there, having reigned one year; he had proved wicked, and worse than his father.
When Jehu entered Jezreel, Jezebel adorned herself, stood on the tower, and called down, "How fine you look, you slave who kills his master!" He looked up at her and asked who she was, and ordered her to come down to him; then at last he commanded the eunuchs to throw her from the tower. As she fell, her blood spattered the wall, and she was trampled by the horses and died in this way.
After this Jehu went into the palace with his friends and refreshed himself from the journey, both otherwise and at table. He ordered his servants to take up Jezebel and bury her, on account of her lineage, for she was of royal blood. But those charged with the burial found nothing of her body except the extremities alone; all the rest had been devoured by dogs. On hearing this, Jehu marveled at Elijah's prophecy, for he had foretold, at Jezreel, that she would perish in exactly this way.
Ahab had seventy sons, who were being raised in Samaria. Jehu sent two letters, one to their tutors and the other to the officials of Samaria, saying that they should set up the bravest of Ahab's sons as king; for he had a multitude of chariots and horses and weapons, an army, and strong cities at his disposal, and that once they had done this they should exact justice on behalf of their master. He wrote this because he wanted to test the disposition of the Samaritans.
When the officials and the tutors read the letter they were terrified, and reckoning that they could do nothing against him, for he had overpowered two of the greatest kings, they wrote back acknowledging him as their master and promising to do whatever he ordered. He wrote back in turn, ordering them to obey him and to cut off the heads of Ahab's sons and send them to him.
The officials summoned the children's guardians and ordered them to kill the boys, cut off their heads, and send them to Jehu. They did this without any pity at all, and having put the heads into wicker baskets, they sent them off to Jezreel. When these arrived, word was brought to Jehu, who was dining with his friends, that the heads of Ahab's sons had been delivered. He ordered two heaps of them set up in front of the gate, one on each side.
When this had been done, at daybreak he went out to view them, and having seen them, he began to address the people present, saying that he himself had made war on his own master and killed him, but that he had not killed these others; he wanted them to understand, concerning the house of Ahab, that everything had happened according to God's prophecy, and that his house had perished just as Elijah had foretold. Having also destroyed the horsemen of Ahab's kin found among the people of Jezreel, he set out for Samaria.
On the way he met some of the household of the king of Jerusalem, Ahaziah's men, and questioned them as to why they had come. They said they had come to greet Joram and their own king Ahaziah, for they did not know that both had been murdered by him. Jehu had these men too seized and put to death, forty-two of them in number.
After this a good and righteous man named Jonadab met him, an old friend of his, who greeted him and began to praise him for having done everything according to God's will in destroying the house of Ahab. Jehu invited him to mount the chariot and come with him into Samaria, saying he would show him how he would spare no wicked man, but would punish the false prophets and the false priests and those who had deceived the people into abandoning the worship of the greatest God and bowing down to foreign ones; for it was the finest and most pleasing of spectacles for a good and just man to see the wicked punished. Persuaded by this, Jonadab mounted the chariot and came to Samaria.
There Jehu searched out and killed all of Ahab's relatives. Wishing that none of the false prophets or priests of Ahab's gods should escape punishment, he seized them all by trickery and deceit: gathering the people together, he said he wished to worship twice as many gods as Ahab had introduced, and asked that their priests and prophets and servants also be present, since he intended to offer costly and great sacrifices to Ahab's gods, and that any priest who failed to appear would be punished with death. Ahab's god was called Baal.
Having set a day on which he intended to hold the sacrifices, he sent throughout the whole land of Israel men to bring the priests of Baal to him. Jehu ordered the priest to give garments to them all; and once they had taken them, he went in with his friend Jonadab and ordered a search made to see that no foreigner or stranger was among them, since he did not wish any outsider to be present at their rites.
When they said that no stranger was present, and the sacrifices had begun, he stationed eighty men, whom he knew to be the most trustworthy of his soldiers, around them and ordered them to kill the false prophets, and now at last to avenge the ancestral customs that had been so long neglected, threatening that if any escaped, the soldiers' own lives would be forfeit for them. They slaughtered all the men and, setting fire to the house of Baal, cleansed Samaria in this way of foreign customs. This Baal was a god of the Tyrians.
Ahab, wishing to gratify his father-in-law Ethbaal, king of the Tyrians and Sidonians, had built him a temple in Samaria, appointed prophets for him, and allowed him every form of worship. Once this god had been destroyed, Jehu permitted the Israelites to worship the golden calves.
For having accomplished this and taken care to punish the impious, God, through the prophet, foretold that his sons would reign over the Israelites for four generations. Such, then, was the history of Jehu.
Athaliah, Ahab's daughter, on hearing of the death of her brother Joram, of her son Ahaziah, and of the destruction of the royal line, was eager to leave no one of the house of David surviving, and to wipe out the whole family, so that not a single one of them might ever become king again. And she accomplished this, as she believed; but one son of Ahaziah survived, and escaped death in the following way.
Ahaziah had a half-sister named Jehosheba, who was married to the high priest Jehoiada. She went into the palace and, among the slaughtered, found the infant Joash, for that was the child's name, then a year old, hidden away with his nurse; she took him up together with the nurse and shut them away in a storeroom for beds, and there she and her husband Jehoiada raised him in secret for six years, while Athaliah reigned over Jerusalem and the two tribes.
In the seventh year, Jehoiada took certain men into his confidence, five captains of a hundred in number, and having persuaded them to join in the plot against Athaliah and to secure the kingship for the boy, he took oaths by which the loyalty of his collaborators was assured, and from then on he grew confident in his hopes against Athaliah. The men whom the priest Jehoiada had taken as partners in the undertaking went throughout the whole country, gathered from it the priests and the Levites and the leaders of the tribes, and brought them to Jerusalem, to the high priest.
He required of them a sworn pledge that they would keep secret whatever they learned from him, since it required both silence and cooperation. Once they had bound themselves by oath, so that it was safe for him to speak, he brought forward the boy of David's line whom he had been raising, and said, "Here is our king, from that house which you know God has prophesied will reign for all time. I advise that a third of you guard him in the temple, a third stand at all the gates of the sacred precinct, and the next third keep watch at the gate that opens and leads to the palace; let the rest of the people remain unarmed in the temple, and let no armed man be allowed to enter except the priest alone."
He further ordered that some of the priests and Levites be stationed around the king himself, with swords drawn, guarding him, and that anyone who dared to enter the temple armed be killed on the spot; and that they should stand by the king's guard without any fear. Those whom the high priest had advised followed his counsel and made their intention clear by their action.
Jehoiada opened the armory in the temple that David had built, and distributed to the captains, the priests, and the Levites everything he found in it, spears, quivers, and whatever other kind of weapon he came upon, and stationed them, armed, in a circle around the temple, joining hands, so as to wall off the entrance from those who had no right to it. Bringing the boy into their midst, they set the royal crown upon him, and Jehoiada anointed him with oil and proclaimed him king; and the people, rejoicing and clapping, shouted, "Long live the king!"
Athaliah, hearing the uproar and the acclamations against her expectation, was thrown into great confusion of mind and rushed out of the palace with her own troops. When she arrived at the temple, the priests let her in, but those standing in the circle, under the high priest's orders, barred the armed men following her from entering. Seeing the boy standing on the platform with the royal crown set upon him, Athaliah tore her clothes and, crying out in horror, ordered the death of the one who had plotted against her and hurried to take away her rule.
Jehoiada summoned the captains and ordered them to lead Athaliah away to the Kidron valley and kill her there, for he did not wish the temple to be defiled by punishing the accursed woman on the spot. He further ordered that anyone who came to her aid be killed as well. Those charged with her execution seized Athaliah, led her to the Gate of the Mules, and there put her to death.
When the affair of Athaliah had been managed in this way, Jehoiada assembled the people and the soldiers in the temple and bound them by oath to be loyal to the king, to look after his safety and the continuance of his rule, and then required the king himself to swear to honor God and not to transgress the laws of Moses. After this they ran to the house of Baal, which Athaliah and her husband Joram had built in insult to the ancestral God and in honor of Ahab, tore it down, and killed Mattan, who held its priesthood.
Jehoiada entrusted the care and guarding of the temple to the priests and Levites, according to the ordinance of King David, ordering them to offer the prescribed burnt-offering sacrifices twice a day and to burn incense in accordance with the law. He also appointed some of the Levites as gatekeepers to guard the sacred precinct, so that no one defiled might slip past unnoticed.
Having arranged all this with the captains and commanders and the whole people, he brought Joash out of the temple and led him to the palace, and when he had taken his seat on the royal throne the people acclaimed him, and turning to feasting they celebrated for many days; the city, however, kept quiet over Athaliah's death. Joash was seven years old when he took the kingdom; his mother's name was Zibiah, and she was from Beersheba. He kept careful watch over the laws and showed great devotion to the worship of God throughout the whole time Jehoiada lived. When he came of age he married two wives, given him by the high priest, by whom he had both sons and daughters. Such, then, is what we have set forth concerning King Joash, how he escaped Athaliah's plot and took the kingdom.
Hazael, king of the Syrians, waging war on the Israelites and their king Jehu, ravaged the region across the Jordan to the east belonging to the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the Manassites, and also Gilead and Bashan, burning and plundering everything and using violence against all who fell into his hands. For Jehu did not manage to defend his country against him, having also grown contemptuous of things divine and scornful of holiness and the laws. He died after reigning twenty-seven years over the Israelites, and was buried in Samaria, leaving his son Jehoahaz as successor to the kingdom.
Joash, king of Jerusalem, was seized by an impulse to restore God's temple, and summoning the high priest Jehoiada, ordered him to send the Levites and priests throughout the whole land to collect a half-shekel of silver for each head, for the repair and renewal of the temple, which had fallen into ruin under Joram and Athaliah and her sons. The high priest did not do this at once, understanding that no one would readily give up the money; but in the twenty-third year of the reign, when the king summoned him and the Levites and reproached them for disregarding his orders, commanding them to see to the repair in future,
Since the people were glad to see money collected for the repair of the temple, the high priest devised the following scheme for gathering the funds. He had a wooden chest built, sealed shut on every side, with a single opening cut into it. He set this in the temple beside the altar and ordered that everyone who wished should drop into it, through the opening, as much as he pleased toward the repair of the temple. The whole people took kindly to this, and vying with one another in their generosity they contributed and amassed a great quantity of silver and gold.
Whenever the chest was emptied, the scribe and the priest in charge of the treasuries counted what had been collected in the king's presence and then put it away in the same place; and they did this every day. When the amount of money seemed sufficient, the high priest Jehoiada and King Joash sent and hired stonecutters and builders, and bought timber, choosing the finest and largest they could find.
Once the temple had been repaired, they used the gold and silver that was left over — and it was no small amount — to make mixing bowls, wine jugs, cups, and the rest of the temple vessels, and they kept up costly sacrifices day after day, enriching the altar continually. This state of affairs lasted for as long as Jehoiada lived and gave it the attention it deserved.
When Jehoiada died, at the age of a hundred and thirty, a man who had proved himself just and good in every way, he was buried among the tombs of the kings in Jerusalem, because he had restored the kingdom to the line of David. Once the king had lost his guardian's care for the things of God, the leading men of the people fell into ruin along with him, so that they came to regard as best whatever was contrary to justice and to their own established customs.
God, displeased at this change in the king and in the others, sent prophets to bear witness against what was being done and to check them in their wickedness. But so violent a passion and terrible a craving for that wickedness had seized them that they were moved neither by the punishments that had befallen, whole households and all, those before them who had transgressed the laws in the same outrageous way, nor were they persuaded by what the prophets foretold, to repent and turn back from the lawless course into which they had strayed.
Indeed the king even ordered Zechariah, the son of the high priest Jehoiada, to be stoned to death in the temple, forgetting the benefits he had received from his father — because Zechariah, whom God had appointed to prophesy, had stood in the midst of the assembly and urged him and the king to act justly, warning them that they would suffer great punishment if they did not obey. As he was dying, Zechariah, perishing bitterly and violently at the hands of Joash in return for his good counsel and for the services his father had rendered him, called on God to be witness and judge of what he was suffering.
The king did not have long to wait before paying the penalty for his lawless acts. Azael, king of the Syrians, invaded his country, overran and plundered Gitta, and then marched against him toward Jerusalem itself. Joash, terrified, emptied out all the treasures of God and of the royal palace and stripped away the votive offerings, and sent them to the Syrian, buying with them his safety from siege and from danger to his whole kingdom. Azael, won over by the sheer abundance of the money, no longer led his army against Jerusalem.
Joash then fell into a grievous illness, and his own friends, who wished to avenge the death of Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, conspired against the king and killed him. He was buried in Jerusalem, but not among the tombs of his ancestors, since he had proved impious. He lived forty-seven years, and his son Amaziah succeeded him on the throne.
In the twenty-first year of Joash's reign, Jehoahaz, son of Jehu, took over the rule of the Israelites in Samaria, and held it for seventeen years. He did not imitate his father, but was impious in the same way as those before him who had shown contempt for God. The king of the Syrians humbled and reduced him from so great a force to ten thousand infantry and fifty horsemen, after making war on him, taking from him many great cities, and destroying his army.
This is what befell the people of Israel in accordance with Elisha's prophecy, when he foretold that Azael would become king of the Syrians and of Damascus by killing his master. Being in such desperate straits, Jehoahaz took refuge in prayer and supplication to God, begging him to rescue him from the hands of Azael and not to allow him to fall entirely under his power. God, who welcomes repentance as a virtue and prefers to admonish those he could destroy outright rather than do so, granted him deliverance from the war and its dangers. Once the land had gained peace it recovered its former condition again and prospered.
After the death of Jehoahaz, his son Joash succeeded to the rule. It was in the thirty-seventh year of the reign of Joash of the tribe of Judah that this Joash took the throne of the Israelites in Samaria — for he bore the same name as the king of Jerusalem — and he held it for sixteen years. He was good, and utterly unlike his father in character.
At that time the prophet Elisha, now an old man, had fallen ill, and the king of Israel came to visit him. Finding him at the point of death, he began to weep in his presence, wailing and calling him father and shield; for it was because of him, he said, that he had never needed to use weapons against his enemies, but had overcome them without a fight through Elisha's prophecies. Now, he said, Elisha was departing from life and leaving him unarmed against the Syrians and the enemies that came from them; nor, he said, was it safe for him any longer to go on living himself, but it would be well to set out and depart from life together with him. As the king lamented in this way, Elisha comforted him and ordered a bow to be brought and strung.
When the king had made the bow ready, Elisha took hold of his hands and told him to shoot. After he had loosed three arrows and then stopped, Elisha said, "Had you loosed more, you would have utterly rooted out the kingdom of the Syrians; but since you were content with three only, you will likewise prevail in only as many battles when you engage the Syrians, so as to recover the land your father lost." Hearing this, the king went away.
Not long afterward the prophet died, a man renowned for his righteousness and evidently cherished by God; for he performed wonderful and extraordinary deeds through his prophetic power, deeds judged worthy of splendid remembrance among the Hebrews. He was also given a magnificent burial, such as was fitting for a man so beloved of God to receive.
It happened at that time too that some robbers, throwing into Elisha's tomb a man they had killed, found that the corpse, on touching Elisha's body, came back to life. So much, then, for what we have already related about the prophet Elisha, both what he foretold while living and how, even after his death, he still possessed divine power.
When Azael, king of the Syrians, died, the kingdom passed to his son Adad. Joash, king of the Israelites, made war against him, and after defeating him in three battles took from him the whole territory, along with all the cities and villages of the kingdom of Israel that his father Azael had seized — and this happened in accordance with Elisha's prophecy. When Joash in turn died, he was buried in Samaria, and the rule passed to his son Joash.
In the second year of the reign of Joash over the Israelites, Amaziah, of the tribe of Judah, became king in Jerusalem; his mother's name was Joadan, a native of the city. He showed a remarkable regard for justice even while still young. On taking control of affairs, he decided that he must first punish those who had murdered his father Joash and take vengeance on the friends who had conspired against him.
He had them all arrested and put to death, but did no harm to their children, following the law of Moses, which did not sanction punishing children for the sins of their fathers. He then chose an army from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, men in their prime, about twenty years old, and mustered some three hundred thousand of them, over whom he appointed centurions.
He also sent to the king of Israel and hired a hundred thousand armed men for a hundred talents of silver, for he had resolved to campaign against the nations of the Amalekites, the Edomites, and the Gebalites. But when he had made his preparations for the campaign and was about to set out, the prophet advised him to dismiss the Israelite troops, for it would be impious, and God foretold defeat for him if he made use of these men as allies; God would grant victory over the enemy even if he fought with only a few men, provided this was God's will.
The king was distressed at having already paid the wages to the Israelites, but the prophet urged him to do whatever seemed good to God, promising that much money would come to him from God in return. So he dismissed the men, telling them he was giving up their wages as a gift, and he himself campaigned against the nations mentioned with his own forces.
He defeated them in battle, killing ten thousand and taking just as many alive; these he led to the great rock that is by Arabia and hurled them down from it, and he carried off much plunder and abundant wealth from those nations. While Amaziah was thus occupied, the Israelites whom he had dismissed after hiring them grew indignant, considering their dismissal an insult — for they would not have suffered this, they reasoned, had they not been held in contempt — and they invaded his kingdom, advancing as far as Beth-horon, where they plundered the country, seized many pack animals, and killed three thousand people.
Amaziah, elated by his victory and successes, began to disregard God, who had granted him these successes, while continuing to worship the gods he had brought back from the land of the Amalekites. The prophet came to him and said he was amazed that he considered these gods, which had done nothing to help their own worshippers or to save them from his hands, but had looked on while many of their people perished and they themselves were taken captive — for they had been brought to Jerusalem in the same manner that one leads a captured enemy in chains.
This roused the king's anger, and he ordered the prophet to keep silent, threatening to punish him if he continued to meddle. The prophet said he would be silent, but declared that God would not fail to punish him for the rebellious course he had undertaken. Amaziah, unable to restrain himself amid the good fortune he had received from God and grew arrogant over, being now filled with pride, wrote to Joash, king of the Israelites, ordering him to submit to him along with his whole people, just as his ancestors had once submitted to David and Solomon, or else, if he was unwilling to be reasonable, to know that the matter of the kingdom would be decided by war.
Joash wrote back as follows: "King Joash to King Amaziah. There was on Mount Lebanon a cypress of enormous size, and a thornbush. The thornbush sent to the cypress, asking for its daughter in marriage to its son. While it was still speaking, a wild animal passing by trampled the thornbush underfoot.
Let this, then, be an example to you not to reach for things beyond your station, nor, because you have had success in your battle against the Amalekites, to grow proud over it and bring dangers upon yourself and your kingdom." On reading this, Amaziah was only further provoked to war — God, I think, spurring him on toward it, so that he might exact punishment from him for his lawless deeds.
When he led out his forces against Joash and the armies were about to join battle, a sudden fear and terror, of the kind that God sends when he is not favorably disposed, threw Amaziah's army into flight; and before they came to close quarters, his men, scattered by their fear, left Amaziah alone, and he was taken captive by the enemy. Joash threatened him with death unless he persuaded the people of Jerusalem to open their gates and receive him and his army into the city.
Under compulsion, and out of fear for his life, Amaziah arranged for the enemy to be let in. Joash broke down a section of the wall, about four hundred cubits, and drove through the breach in a chariot into Jerusalem, bringing Amaziah with him as a captive.
Having in this manner become master of Jerusalem, he seized the treasures of God and carried off all the gold and silver that belonged to Amaziah in the royal palace; and having done this, he released Amaziah from captivity and withdrew to Samaria. This took place in the fourteenth year of Amaziah's reign over the people of Jerusalem. Afterward, plotted against by his friends, Amaziah fled to the city of Lachish, but was killed there by the conspirators, who sent men to put him to death.
His body was brought to Jerusalem and given a royal burial. Thus Amaziah ended his life, through his rebellious neglect of God, having lived fifty-four years and reigned twenty-nine. He was succeeded by his son, named Uzziah.
In the fifteenth year of Amaziah's reign, Jeroboam, son of Joash, became king of the Israelites in Samaria, and reigned forty years. This king was terribly insolent and lawless toward God, worshipping idols and engaging in many strange and outlandish practices, yet he proved the source of countless benefits to the people of Israel. A certain Jonah prophesied to him that he must make war on the Syrians and overpower their forces, extending his kingdom in the north as far as the city of Hamath, and in the south as far as the Dead Sea — for these had originally been the boundaries of Canaan, as the general Joshua had marked them out.
Jeroboam therefore campaigned against the Syrians and conquered the whole of their territory, just as Jonah had prophesied. I have thought it necessary, having promised to hand down an accurate account of events, to relate as well what I have found written about this prophet in the Hebrew books. Commanded by God to go to the kingdom of Nineveh and, once there, to proclaim in the city that it would lose its dominion, he was afraid and did not go, but fled from
fled God, going down to Joppa, where he found a ship and boarded it, sailing for Tarsus in Cilicia. But a violent storm came up, and as the vessel was in danger of sinking, the sailors, the helmsmen, and the ship's owner himself began making vows of thanksgiving, hoping to escape the sea, while Jonah lay hidden below, covering himself, doing none of the things he saw the others doing.
As the swell grew still greater and the sea more violent under the force of the winds, they suspected that one of those on board must be responsible for the storm, and agreed to cast lots to find out who it was. When the lots were cast, the prophet was chosen. Asked where he was from and what business he was on, he said that by race he was a Hebrew, a prophet of the greatest God. He then advised them, if they wished to escape the danger they were in, to throw him into the sea, for he was the cause of the storm for them.
At first they did not dare to do it, judging it an impious act to cast into open destruction a stranger who had entrusted his life to them, but at last, as the disaster grew overwhelming and the ship was on the verge of going under, driven on both by the prophet himself and by fear for their own safety, they threw him into the sea. At once the storm subsided. As for Jonah, the story tells that he was swallowed by a sea monster, and after three days and as many nights was cast up alive on the shore of the Euxine Sea, with no part of his body harmed. There, having begged God's forgiveness for his offenses, he went to the city of Nineveh, and standing where he could be heard, proclaimed that before long they would again lose their dominion over Asia. Having declared this he returned home. I have gone through the account concerning him just as I found it recorded.
King Jeroboam, having lived his whole life in complete prosperity and having reigned forty years, died and was buried in Samaria, and his son Zachariah succeeded him on the throne.
In the same manner Uzziah, son of Amaziah, in the fourteenth year of Jeroboam's reign, became king of the two tribes in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Achiah, a native of the city. He was good and just by nature, high-minded, and most diligent in attending to affairs. He campaigned against the Philistines and, defeating them in battle, took by force their cities Gath and Jamnia and demolished their walls. After this campaign he marched against the Arabs bordering Egypt, and having founded a city on the Red Sea, stationed a garrison there. He then subdued the Ammonites, imposed tribute on them, and having brought under his control the whole territory as far as the borders of Egypt, he turned his attention to Jerusalem for the rest of his reign.
Whatever parts of the walls had fallen down, whether through time or through the neglect of the kings before him, these he rebuilt and restored, along with what had been thrown down by the king of the Israelites when he took his father Amaziah captive and entered the city. He also built onto the walls many towers, each fifty cubits high, and stationed garrisons in the deserted regions, and dug many channels for water. He possessed also an immense number of pack animals and other livestock, for the land was well suited to pasture. Being very devoted to agriculture, he took care of the land, cultivating it with plants and all kinds of seed. He kept about him a select army of three hundred and seventy thousand men, whose commanders — generals, captains, and colonels — numbered two thousand men, brave and irresistible in strength. He organized his whole army into phalanxes and armed each man with a sword, a shield, a bronze breastplate, a bow, and a sling. In addition to these he had many engines built for siege warfare — stone-throwers, spear-throwers, grappling hooks, drag-hooks, and the like.
Having reached this state of organization and preparation, his mind was corrupted by conceit, and puffed up by mortal abundance, he came to disregard the strength that is immortal and lasting through all time — namely, piety toward God and observance of the laws. He was tripped up by his own success and fell into the same sins as his father, into which the brilliance of his achievements and the greatness of his affairs had likewise led his father, since he too had been unable to bear them well.
When a notable day came, one on which a public festival was held, he put on priestly vestments and entered the sanctuary to offer sacrifice to God on the golden altar. The high priest Azariah, with eighty priests present with him, tried to stop him, saying it was not lawful for him to offer sacrifice, since only those of the line of Aaron were permitted to do this. They cried out for him to leave and not to transgress against God. Enraged, he threatened them with death if they did not keep silent. At that very moment a great earthquake shook the ground, and as the temple split apart a brilliant flash of sunlight burst out and struck the king's face, so that leprosy immediately spread over it. Before the city, at the place called Eroge, half of the mountain on the western side broke off and, rolling four stades, came to rest against the eastern mountain, so that the roads were blocked, as were the royal gardens.
When the priests saw the king's face overtaken by leprosy, they told him of the disaster and ordered him to leave the city as one accursed. Out of shame at what had happened, and because he no longer had the standing to resist, he did as he was told, thus paying a wretched and pitiable penalty for his more-than-human pride and the impieties toward God that resulted from it. For some time he lived outside the city as a private citizen, while his son Jotham took over the government; then, from grief and despondency over what had happened, he died, having lived sixty-eight years, of which he had reigned fifty-two. He was buried alone in his own gardens.
Zachariah, Jeroboam's son, reigned over the Israelites for six months and then died, murdered by a friend of his named Shallum, son of Jabesh, who took over the kingship after him but held it no longer than thirty days. For the general Menahem, who was at that time in the city of Tirzah, on hearing what had happened to Zachariah, set out with his whole army and came to Samaria, and joining battle killed Shallum, made himself king, and from there marched to the city of Tappuah.
Its inhabitants barred the gates and would not admit the king. In retaliation he ravaged the surrounding country and took the city itself by storm. Bitterly resenting what the people of Tappuah had done, he put every one of them to death, sparing not even the infants, leaving no excess of cruelty or savagery untried — deeds that it would not even have been pardonable to inflict on some foreigners taken captive, yet he committed them against his own countrymen.
Having become king in this way, Menahem remained for ten years wicked and the cruelest of all men. When Pul, king of the Assyrians, marched against him, he did not go out to face the Assyrians in battle, but persuaded him to withdraw by giving him a thousand talents of silver, and so ended the war. This sum was raised for Menahem from the people, at fifty drachmas a head. After this he died and was buried in Samaria, leaving his son Pekahiah as successor to the kingdom, who, following his father's cruelty, ruled for only two years. He then died, murdered at a banquet with friends by a certain Pekah, a colonel, who plotted against him — Pekah being the son of Remaliah.
This Pekah held power for twenty years, and was impious and lawless. Then Tiglath-Pileser, king of the Assyrians, campaigned against the Israelites, subdued the whole of Gilead and the territory across the Jordan, along with the neighboring region called Galilee, and Kedesh and Hazor, and carrying off their inhabitants captive, resettled them in his own kingdom. Let this suffice for what concerns the king of the Assyrians.
Jotham, son of Uzziah, became king of the tribe of Judah in Jerusalem; his mother was a native of the city, named Jerusha. This king lacked no virtue: he was pious toward God and just toward men, and attentive to the affairs of the city. Whatever needed repair or adornment he carried out zealously, setting up colonnades in the temple and gateways, and rebuilding the fallen sections of the walls with towers of enormous size and difficult to capture, and he took great pains over anything else in the kingdom that had been neglected. He campaigned also against the Ammonites and, defeating them in battle, imposed on them a yearly tribute of a hundred talents, ten thousand cors of wheat, and the same amount of barley. He so increased the kingdom that it was not to be despised by its enemies and was prosperous for its own people.
At this time there was a prophet named Nahum, who prophesied concerning the downfall of the Assyrians and of Nineveh, saying that Nineveh would become like a pool of water stirred up, and that the whole people, thrown into turmoil and tossed about, would flee, people saying to one another, "Stand and stay," and "seize for yourselves gold and silver." But no one would be willing, for they would wish to save their own lives rather than their possessions; terrible strife would seize them against one another, and lamentation, and limbs going slack, and their faces would become utterly black from fear.
"Where now will be the dwelling place of the lions, and the lioness of the cubs? God says to you, Nineveh, that I will make you vanish, and no longer will lions go out from you to give orders to the world." This prophet foretold many other things besides concerning Nineveh, which I have not thought necessary to relate, lest I seem tiresome to my readers, and so I have passed over them. All that had been foretold concerning Nineveh came to pass a hundred and fifteen years later. Let this suffice for our account of these matters.
Jotham died, having lived forty-one years, of which he had reigned sixteen, and was buried in the royal tombs. The kingdom passed to his son Ahaz, who, becoming most impious toward God and transgressing the ancestral laws, imitated the kings of the Israelites, setting up altars in Jerusalem and sacrificing on them to idols, to whom he even burned his own son whole, according to the customs of the Canaanites, and committed other similar acts. While he was in this state, deranged as he was, Rezin, king of the Syrians and Damascenes, and Pekah, king of the Israelites, marched against him, for they were allies.
Driving him into Jerusalem, they besieged it for a long time but accomplished nothing, owing to the strength of the walls. The king of the Syrians, however, took the city of Elath on the Red Sea, killed its inhabitants, and settled Syrians there. He also destroyed those in the fortresses, as well as the Jews in the surrounding country, and driving off a great deal of plunder, withdrew with his army to Damascus.
The king of Jerusalem, learning that the Syrians had gone home and thinking himself a match for the king of the Israelites, led out his forces against him, and joining battle was defeated through the wrath of God, which he had incurred on account of his many and great impieties. For a hundred and twenty thousand of his men were killed by the Israelites on that day, among them Amaziah, the king's son, whom their general killed in the encounter; and they took captive Ercham, steward of the whole kingdom, and Elkanah, general of the tribe of Judah, and led away women and children from the tribe of Benjamin, and after seizing much plunder withdrew to Samaria.
But a certain Oded, who at that time was a prophet in Samaria, met the army before the walls and declared with a loud cry that the victory had come to them not through their own strength but through the wrath of God against King Ahaz. He rebuked them for not being satisfied with their success against him, but daring also to take captive their own kinsmen of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin.
He advised them to release these captives unharmed to their own homes, for if they disobeyed God they would pay the penalty. The people of the Israelites, gathering in assembly, deliberated over the matter. A man named Berechiah, one of those held in honor in public life, stood up, along with three others with him, and said they would not allow the soldiers to bring the captives into the city, "lest we all perish at the hands of God; for it is enough that we have sinned against him, as the prophets say, and we must not commit impieties even worse than these."
On hearing this the soldiers agreed to let the men do as they thought best. So the men named above took the captives, set them free, saw to their care, gave them provisions, and released them unharmed to their own country; and four of them went along with them and, escorting them as far as Jericho, not far from Jerusalem, then turned back to Samaria.
King Ahaz, having suffered this at the hands of the Israelites, sent to Tiglath-Pileser, king of the Assyrians, asking him to come to his aid in the war against the Israelites, Syrians, and Damascenes, promising to give him a great deal of money, and he sent him splendid gifts as well. When the ambassadors reached him, he came as an ally to Ahaz, and campaigning against the Syrians ravaged their country, took Damascus by storm, and killed their king Rezin. He resettled the people of Damascus in upper Media, and transferring some of the Assyrian nations, settled them in Damascus. As for the...
He devastated the land of the Israelites and took many captives from it. Once he had done this to the Syrians, the king took the gold that was in the royal treasuries and the silver in the temple of God, and whatever finest votive offering there was, carried it off, went to Damascus, and gave it to the king of the Assyrians according to their agreement; and having acknowledged his gratitude for it all, he returned to Jerusalem.
The king was so foolish and so incapable of weighing his own advantage that even while the Syrians were making war on him he did not stop worshiping their gods, but kept venerating them as though they would grant him victory. When he was defeated again, he began to honor the gods of the Assyrians instead, and seemed likely to honor practically anyone before his ancestral and true God, who in fact, angered at his defeat, was the one responsible for it. He carried his contempt and disdain so far that he even closed the temple entirely, forbade the customary sacrifices to be offered, and stripped it of its votive offerings. Having thus insulted God, he died, having lived thirty-six years, of which he had reigned sixteen, leaving his son Hezekiah as his successor.
At about the same time Pekah, king of the Israelites, also died, through the plot of a friend of his named Hoshea, who seized the throne and held it for nine years, being wicked and neglectful of what was owed to God. Shalmaneser, king of the Assyrians, campaigned against him and overpowered him -- for Hoshea did not have God's favor -- and made him a subject-ally, imposing on him a fixed tribute to pay.
In the fourth year of Hoshea's reign, Hezekiah began to reign in Jerusalem, son of Ahaz and of Abijah, a woman of citizen birth. His character was good, just, and pious; for on first coming to the throne he judged nothing more urgent or more advantageous, both for himself and for those he ruled, than the worship of God.
So he called together the people, the priests, and the Levites, and addressed them, saying: "You are well aware that because of the sins of my father, who transgressed the reverence and honor owed to God, you suffered many great evils, your minds corrupted by him and persuaded to worship as gods those he himself supposed to be gods. Since you have now learned by experience
how terrible impiety is, I urge you to put that behind you now, and to purify yourselves from the former defilements -- priests and Levites alike -- and, once assembled, to open the temple, and having purified it with the customary sacrifices, to restore it to its ancient and ancestral honor. For in this way we would make God favorable to us again, once he has set aside his anger." When the king had said this,
the priests opened the temple, and having opened it, cast out the vessels and defilements of God's house, and offered the customary sacrifices at the altar. The king then sent throughout the country under his rule, summoning the people to Jerusalem to keep the feast of unleavened bread, which had lapsed for a long time because of the transgressions of the kings mentioned earlier. He also sent word
to the Israelites, urging them to abandon their present way of life and return to the ancient custom of worshiping God; he would permit them, if they came to Jerusalem, to keep the feast of unleavened bread and celebrate it together with his own people. He said he was urging this not so that they would obey him against their will, but for their own good, since they would be blessed by it. But the Israelites,
when the envoys arrived and delivered the message from their own king, were not only unpersuaded but even mocked the envoys as fools, and likewise scorned the prophets who gave them the same counsel and foretold what they would suffer if they did not turn to the reverence of God -- and in the end they seized the prophets and killed them. Nor did their lawlessness stop even there, but they devised things
worse than what has been described, and did not stop until God, avenging their impiety, made them subject to their enemies. Of this we shall speak again later. Many, however, from the tribe of Manasseh, and from Zebulun and Issachar, were persuaded by what the prophets had urged toward piety and changed their ways. All of these came together to Jerusalem, to Hezekiah, so as to worship God. When they arrived,
king Hezekiah went up to the temple with the leaders and all the people, and sacrificed on his own behalf seven bulls, as many rams, seven lambs, and as many goats. The king himself and the leaders laid their hands on the heads of the victims and allowed the priests to carry out the sacrifice properly. Some were offering sacrifices and
whole burnt offerings, while the Levites stood in a circle around them with musical instruments, singing hymns to God and playing as they had been taught by David, and the rest of the priests, holding trumpets, sounded them in accompaniment to the singers of the hymns. While this was happening, the king and the multitude threw themselves face down and worshiped God. He then sacrificed seventy oxen, a hundred rams, two hundred
lambs, and for the feasting of the people he generously gave six hundred oxen and three thousand other animals; and the priests carried out everything in accordance with the law. Delighted with all this, the king feasted together with the people, acknowledging his gratitude to God. When the feast of unleavened bread began, they sacrificed what is called the Passover offering and continued performing the remaining sacrifices for
seven days. Beyond what they themselves had properly sacrificed, the king gave the people two thousand bulls and seven thousand other animals. The leaders did the same, giving them a thousand bulls and a thousand forty other animals. In this way the festival, which had not been kept in this manner since the time of Solomon, was for the first time celebrated with such splendor and generosity.
When the observance of the feast had come to its conclusion, the people went out into the countryside and purified it, and cleansed the city of every defilement from idols. The king ordered that the daily sacrifices be carried out from his own resources according to the law, and fixed that tithes be given to the priests and Levites by the people, along with the firstfruits of the crops, so that
they might always remain devoted to worship and never be cut off from the service of God. The people brought in produce of every kind to the priests and Levites, and the king, having built storehouses and chambers for it, distributed it to each of the priests and Levites and to their children and wives; and in this way they returned once more to the ancient worship. Having settled these matters in the manner described, the king
went to war against the Philistines and, having defeated them, took possession of all the enemy's cities from Gaza to Gath. The king of the Assyrians then sent word threatening to overturn his entire realm unless he paid the tribute his father had originally paid. Hezekiah paid no attention to the threats, but took courage from his
piety toward the divine and from the prophet Isaiah, from whom he learned with precision everything that was to come. Let this suffice for the present concerning this king. Shalmaneser, king of the Assyrians, on learning that Hoshea, king of the Israelites, had secretly sent word to So, king of the Egyptians, urging an alliance against him,
was provoked and campaigned against Samaria in the seventh year of Hoshea's reign. Since the king would not surrender to him, he besieged Samaria for three years and took it by force in the ninth year of Hoshea's reign -- the seventh of Hezekiah, king of the people of Jerusalem -- and utterly wiped out the rule of the Israelites, resettling the whole people in Media and Persia, among whom
he also took king Hoshea alive. He then transferred other nations from a place called Cutha -- for there is a river in Persia bearing this name -- and settled them in Samaria and the land of the Israelites. Thus the ten tribes of the Israelites were removed from Judea after a span of nine hundred and forty-seven years from the time their
ancestors had left Egypt, and eight hundred years from the time they had taken possession of this land under the leadership of Joshua; and from the time they revolted from Rehoboam, grandson of David, and handed the kingdom over to Jeroboam, as I have shown earlier, it was two hundred forty years, seven months, and seven days. Such was the end that overtook the Israelites, who had transgressed the laws and disregarded the prophets who had foretold
this calamity for them if they did not cease their impieties. The beginning of their troubles was the sedition they raised against Rehoboam, grandson of David, when they set up Jeroboam, his own servant, as king over themselves -- a man who, having sinned against the divine, made himself their enemy through this act, which they imitated by copying his own lawlessness. He, at least, suffered the punishment he deserved. The king of the Assyrians
went on to make war throughout all of Syria and Phoenicia as well, and this king's name is recorded in the archives of the Tyrians, for he campaigned against Tyre while Elulaeus was reigning there. Menander, who composed the chronicle and translated the archives of the Tyrians into the Greek language, also confirms this, stating as follows: "And when Elulaeus, on whom
they had conferred the name Pyas, had reigned thirty-six years, the people of Kition revolted, but he sailed against them and brought them back under his authority. In his time Shalmaneser, king of the Assyrians, invaded and made war on all of Phoenicia; and having made peace with all its cities, he withdrew again. But Sidon, Ake, old Tyre, and many other cities broke away from the Tyrians and surrendered themselves to the king of the Assyrians. Because the Tyrians would not submit,
the king turned back against them once more, the Phoenicians having supplied him with sixty ships and eight hundred oarsmen. The Tyrians sailed out against these with twelve ships, scattered the enemy's fleet, and took about five hundred men captive; and from this the standing of everyone in Tyre was raised. Because of this the king of the Assyrians withdrew, having stationed guards at the river and the aqueducts to keep the Tyrians from drawing water,
and this went on for five years, during which they held out by drinking from dug wells." Such is what is recorded in the Tyrian archives concerning Shalmaneser, king of the Assyrians. As for those resettled in Samaria, the Cuthaeans -- for they have used this name down to the present, having been brought from a region called Cutha, which is in Persia, where there is also a river
bearing this same name -- each people brought its own god into Samaria, and there were five of these gods; and by worshiping them according to their ancestral custom, they provoked the greatest God to anger and wrath. He therefore sent a plague upon them, and being destroyed by it and finding no remedy for their troubles, they learned by an oracle to worship the greatest God, since this alone would bring them deliverance. So they sent
envoys to the king of the Assyrians, asking him to send them priests from among the Israelite captives he had taken in the war. When he sent one and they were instructed in the customary laws and the reverence due to this God, they worshiped him zealously and immediately the plague ceased. Continuing to observe these same customs to this day, they are called, in the Hebrew tongue, Cuthaeans, but in Greek,
Samaritans -- people who, whenever it suits a change of fortune, call themselves kinsmen of the Jews when they see them prospering, claiming descent from Joseph and an original kinship with them on that basis; but whenever they see them meeting misfortune, they say they have no connection with them whatsoever, and that no goodwill or kinship is owed to them, declaring themselves instead to be foreign settlers. Of these matters we shall have a more fitting occasion to speak.

======== Antiquities — Book 10 ========

1. The campaign of the Assyrian king Sennacherib against Jerusalem, and his siege of Hezekiah, their king. 2. How the Assyrian army was destroyed by plague in a single night, and their king, after withdrawing home, was killed in a plot by his own sons. 3. How Hezekiah lived out the rest of his life in peace and died, leaving Manasseh as his successor to the kingdom. 4. That the kings of the Chaldeans and Babylonians campaigned against him, defeated him, took him captive, and led him to Babylon, and after holding him there a long time released him again to the same kingdom. 5. How, when the Egyptian king Necho campaigned against the Babylonians and made his way through Judea, King Josiah went out to stop him; a battle took place, and Josiah, carried wounded to Jerusalem, died, and the people of Jerusalem made his son Jehoahaz king. 6. How Necho, after engaging the king of the Babylonians at the Euphrates river and turning back toward Egypt, came to Jerusalem, took Jehoahaz away to Egypt, and made his brother Jehoiakim king of the Jerusalemites. 7. The campaign of Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians, into Syria, and how, after subduing all of it as far as the borders of Egypt, he went up to Jerusalem and forced their king Jehoiakim to become his friend and ally. 8. How, after the Babylonian's withdrawal, Jehoiakim again inclined toward the Egyptians, and Nebuchadnezzar campaigned against him and besieged the city; when it surrendered after a time, he killed Jehoiakim and set up his son Jehoiachin as king. 9. That Nebuchadnezzar, regretting having made Jehoiachin king, campaigned against Jerusalem and gained control of Jehoiachin, who surrendered himself along with his mother and his friends; how the Babylonian took many captives, carried off the temple treasures, and returned to Babylon, setting up Jehoiachin's uncle Zedekiah as king of the people of Jerusalem. 10. How, hearing that this man too wished to make an alliance and friendship with the Egyptians, he campaigned against Jerusalem, took it by force in the siege, burned the temple, deported the people of Jerusalem, and removed Zedekiah to Babylon. 11. How Nebuchadnezzar, on dying, left his son as successor to the kingdom, and how their rule was ended by Cyrus, king of the Persians. 12. What happened to the Jews at this time among the Babylonians. This book covers a period of 182 years, 6 months, and 10 days.
Hezekiah, king of the two tribes, was already in the fourteenth year of his reign when the king of the Assyrians, called Sennacherib, campaigned against him with great preparation, and took by force all the cities of the tribe of Judah and of Benjamin. When he was about to lead his forces against Jerusalem as well, Hezekiah forestalled him by sending envoys, promising to obey him and to pay whatever tribute he might set. Learning this from the envoys, Sennacherib decided not to make war, but accepted the request; on receiving three hundred talents of silver and thirty of gold, he agreed to withdraw as a friend, giving the envoys sworn pledges that, having suffered no wrong, he would return on these terms. Hezekiah, persuaded, emptied his treasuries and sent the money, thinking he would be freed from the war and from the struggle over his kingdom. But the Assyrian, once he had received it, paid no regard whatever to what he had promised; instead he himself campaigned against the Egyptians and the Ethiopians, but left his general Rhapsakes, together with two other officials of rank, with a large force, to ravage Jerusalem. Their names were Tharatha and Aracharis. When they arrived and encamped before the walls, they sent to Hezekiah demanding that he come out to a parley.
He himself, out of fear, did not go out, but sent three of his closest friends: Eliakim, the steward of the kingdom, Shebna, and Joah, the recorder. These went forward and stood opposite the commanders of the Assyrian army. When the general Rhapsakes saw them, he ordered them to go back and tell Hezekiah that the great king Sennacherib wanted to know in what he trusted and relied, that he fled from his master, refused to listen, and would not receive his army into the city; or whether, hoping in the Egyptians, he expected his own army to prevail through them. If that is what he expects, let him be told that he is a fool, like a man who leans on a broken reed, which not only falls but pierces his hand as it falls, so that he feels the injury. Let him know, too, that it is by the will of God that he has made this campaign against him — the God who gave him the kingdom of the Israelites to overthrow as well, so that in the same way he might destroy those under his rule.
Rhapsakes said this in Hebrew — for he was skilled in that tongue — and Eliakim, fearing that the crowd, on hearing it, would fall into confusion, asked him to speak in Aramaic. But the general, understanding his suspicion and the fear behind it, answered in a louder and more piercing voice, speaking in Hebrew all the same, so that on hearing the king's commands all might choose what was to their advantage and surrender themselves to us: "It is clear that you and the king are deceiving the people with empty hopes and persuading them to resist. If you are confident and think you can drive back our forces, I am ready to provide you two thousand horses from those I have here; give them riders in equal number and so display your own strength — though you could not even furnish as many as that, since you do not have them. Why then do you delay handing yourselves over to those who are stronger, and who will take you whether you wish it or not? Yet voluntary surrender is safe for you, while resistance, if you go on fighting against your will, will prove dangerous and the cause of disasters."
Hearing this, the people and the envoys reported to Hezekiah what the Assyrian general had said. In response he took off his royal robe, put on sackcloth, and assumed a posture of humility; and following ancestral custom, falling on his face, he implored God and begged him to help one who had no other hope of safety. He also sent some of his friends and some of the priests to the prophet Isaiah, asking him to entreat God, and, after offering sacrifices for the common safety, to call on him to be indignant at the enemy's hopes and to have mercy on his people. The prophet did this, and when God had given him an oracle, he encouraged the king himself and the friends around him, foretelling that the enemy would be defeated without a battle and would withdraw in disgrace, not with the boldness they now displayed; for God was providing for their destruction. He also foretold that Sennacherib himself, king of the Assyrians, would fail in his design against Egypt, and that on returning home he would perish by the sword.
It happened that at this same time the Assyrian had also written letters to Hezekiah, in which he called him foolish for supposing that he would escape the servitude he imposed, when he had subdued many great and powerful nations, and he threatened to destroy him utterly if he did not willingly open his gates and receive his army into Jerusalem. On reading this, Hezekiah despised it because of his trust in God, and folding up the letters, he laid them up inside the temple. And when he had again offered his prayers to God concerning the city and the safety of all, the prophet Isaiah declared that he had been heard, and that for the present the city would not be besieged by the Syrian; that the people would farm in peace, unafraid of anything he had done, and tend their own property without any fear.
A little time later, the king of the Assyrians, having failed in his design against the Egyptians, withdrew home without success, for the following reason. He had spent much time on the siege of Pelusium, and when the mounds he had raised against the walls were already high and he was on the point of assaulting them, he heard that the king of the Ethiopians, Tharsikes, was coming with a large force to aid the Egyptians, having resolved to march through the desert and fall suddenly upon the Assyrians. Thrown into confusion by this news, King Sennacherib is said to have campaigned against the priest of Hephaestus — since this king had gone against the king of the Egyptians, who was a priest of Hephaestus — and while besieging Pelusium he broke off the siege for the following reason: the king of the Egyptians prayed to his god, who, hearing him, sent a plague upon the Arab. Here too Herodotus errs, calling the king not of the Assyrians but of the Arabians; for he says that a multitude of mice gnawed through the bows and the rest of the weapons of the Assyrians in a single night, and that for this reason, having no bows, the king withdrew his army from Pelusium. This is Herodotus's account.
But Berosus, who wrote the history of the Chaldeans, also mentions King Sennacherib, both that he ruled the Assyrians and that he campaigned against all Asia and Egypt, speaking as follows: "When Sennacherib returned from the wars against the Egyptians to Jerusalem, he found there the force under his general Rhapsakes, upon which God had sent a plague; on the very first night of the siege 185,000 men perished, together with their commanders and officers. Thrown into fear and terrible anguish by this disaster, and fearing for the whole of his remaining army, he fled with the rest of his forces to his own kingdom, called Nineveh. After spending a short time there, he was treacherously murdered by his elder sons Adramelech and Sharezer, and died, and was laid to rest in his own temple, called Araske. Those who fled after the murder of their father, because of the citizens, went off to Armenia, and Esarhaddon, who held Sennacherib in contempt, succeeded to the kingdom after them." Such, then, was the end that befell the Assyrian campaign against the people of Jerusalem.
King Hezekiah, unexpectedly freed from his fears, offered thanksgiving sacrifices to God together with all the people, since it was by no other cause that the enemy had perished — some destroyed outright, others driven away from Jerusalem by fear of a like death — than by the alliance of God. Yet though he showed every zeal and devotion toward God, not long after he fell into a grave illness, and was given up by the physicians, who expected nothing good for him, nor did his friends. To his illness was added a terrible despondency, since the king reckoned that he was childless, and that he would die leaving his house and his rule without a legitimate successor. Suffering above all from this thought, and lamenting, he implored God to grant him a little further span of life, until he should father children, and not to let his soul depart before he became a father.
God took pity on him and accepted his request, since it was not because he was about to be deprived of the good things of his kingdom that he lamented his supposed death, nor because he had begged for more time to live for its own sake, but because he wanted children to succeed to his rule; and he sent the prophet Isaiah to tell him that he would recover from his illness after the third day and would live fifteen years beyond it, and that children would be born to him. When the prophet, by God's command, announced this, Hezekiah, because of the severity of his illness and the strangeness of what was reported, did not believe it, and asked Isaiah for some sign, some marvel, so that he might believe he spoke these things as one come from God; for what is beyond reckoning and greater than hope is confirmed to men by like extraordinary events. When Isaiah asked him what sign he wished to have happen, he asked that the sun, since it had already made the shadow decline ten steps in the house, be made to turn back to the same place again. When the prophet called on God to display this sign to the king, Hezekiah saw what he wanted, and at once, freed from his illness, went up to the temple, and having bowed before God, offered his prayers.
At this same time it happened that the empire of the Assyrians was overthrown by the Medes; I will explain this elsewhere. The king of the Babylonians, whose name was Baladan, sent envoys to Hezekiah bearing gifts, and urged him to become his ally and friend. Hezekiah gladly received the envoys, entertained them, and showed them his treasuries, his store of weapons, and all the rest of his wealth, however much he possessed in precious stones and gold; and after giving them gifts to carry back to Baladan, he sent them home.
When the prophet Isaiah came to him and asked where these visitors had come from, he said they had come from Babylon, sent by God, and that he had shown them everything, so that, seeing his wealth and power, they might form a judgment from it and report accordingly to their king. The prophet, taking this up, said: "Know that not long from now this wealth of yours will be carried off to Babylon, and your descendants will be made eunuchs, and, having lost their manhood, will serve as slaves to the king of Babylon; for this is what God foretells." Hezekiah, grieved at what had been said, replied that he would not wish such disasters to befall his nation, but since it was not possible to alter what God had decreed, he prayed that peace might prevail for the rest of his own life. Berosus too mentions Baladan, king of the Babylonians.
This prophet was, by common consent, divine and marvelous in his truthfulness; trusting that he had never spoken anything false, he set down in writing everything he had prophesied and left it behind, to be recognized by later generations from its fulfillment. And not this prophet alone, but twelve others as well did the same, and whatever misfortune...
But we will report each of these prophecies later, one by one. Hezekiah lived out the time we have mentioned, passing the whole of it in peace, and died at the age of fifty-four, having reigned twenty-nine years. His son Manasseh succeeded to the kingdom; his mother, a native woman, was named Echiba.
Manasseh broke completely with his father's practices and turned to the opposite course, displaying every kind of wickedness in his conduct and omitting no form of impiety, but imitating the transgressions of the Israelites, who had perished for their sins against God. He even dared to defile the temple of God, and the city, and the whole land. Starting from his contempt for God, he set out to kill all the righteous men among the Hebrews, and he spared not even the prophets — some of these he slaughtered daily, so that Jerusalem ran with blood. God, angered by this, sent prophets to the king and to the people, through whom he threatened them with the same disasters that had befallen their Israelite brothers when they insulted him.
They did not believe the words, though by them they could have gained escape from every evil; but by the deeds they learned that what the prophets said was true. For when they persisted in the same course, God stirred up war against them from the king of the Babylonians and Chaldeans, who sent an army into Judea and ravaged their land, and took King Manasseh by treachery, brought him before himself, and held him captive to inflict whatever punishment he wished. Manasseh, now understanding the evils he was in and considering himself the cause of them all, begged God to make his enemy kind and merciful toward him. God, hearing his supplication, granted him this, and Manasseh, released by the king of the Babylonians, was restored safely to his own land.
Once back in Jerusalem, he was eager, so far as it was possible, to cast out from his soul even the memory of his former sins against God, which he had set himself to commit, and he practiced every form of piety toward him. He purified the temple, cleansed the city, and thereafter cared for one thing alone: to render thanks to God for his deliverance and to keep him well disposed toward him for the rest of his life. He also taught the people to do the same, having learned by his own narrow escape what disaster the opposite course brings. He repaired the altar and performed the customary sacrifices, as Moses had ordained. Having set in order the affairs of worship in the manner required,
he also took care for the security of Jerusalem, repairing the old walls with great effort and adding another wall to them, raising very high towers, and making the fortresses before the city, together with all the supplies useful for them, including provisions of every kind, stronger than before. Indeed, so thoroughly did he reform himself in these respects that he passed the remainder of his life in such a way as to be counted blessed and enviable, reckoning his happiness from the time he began to worship God. He lived sixty-seven years in all and ended his life, having reigned fifty-five of them. He was buried in his own gardens, and the kingdom passed to his son Amon, whose mother, named Emaselme, was from the city of Jazabate.
This man imitated the deeds his father had dared while young, and, plotted against by his own servants, he died in his own house, having lived twenty-four years and reigned two of them. The people avenged him on his murderers, and they buried Amon beside his father, and handed the kingdom over to his son Josiah, who was eight years old.
His mother was from the city of Bosketh, and her name was Iedis. Josiah was by nature outstanding and well disposed toward virtue, taking the practices of King David as the aim and standard for the whole conduct of his life. At the age of twelve he already displayed piety and justice: he taught the people wisdom and urged them
to abandon the belief in idols, since they were not gods, and to worship the god of their fathers instead. Reviewing the deeds of his ancestors, he corrected wisely whatever had gone wrong, as one who, though young, was most capable of perceiving what was needed, while whatever he found rightly established he kept in place and imitated. All this he did by wisdom and by a natural gift of understanding, and also
by following the counsel and tradition of his elders. For by adhering to the laws in matters concerning the order of the city and piety toward the divine, he restored the prosperity that, because of the lawlessness of earlier kings, had failed to appear and had in fact vanished. Going about the whole city and the entire land, the king cut down the sacred groves dedicated to foreign gods and demolished
their altars, and whatever votive offering had been dedicated to them by his ancestors he tore down in contempt. In this way he turned the people from devotion to these gods to the worship of God, offering at his altar the customary sacrifices and burnt offerings. He appointed certain judges and overseers to administer the affairs of each community, so that they should
place justice above everything and guard it no less carefully than their own souls. Sending gold and silver throughout the whole land, he ordered those who were willing to bring contributions for the repair of the temple, each according to his wish and his means. When the money had been brought in, he put in charge of the care of the temple and the expenditure for it the governor of the city, Amasias,
the scribe Saphas, the keeper of records Joatos, and the high priest Eliakias, who, without any delay or postponement, provided architects and everything else useful for the repair, and set to work at once. And the temple, thus repaired, made the king's piety plain for all to see. Now in the eighteenth year of his reign he sent to
Eliakias the high priest, ordering him to melt down whatever was surplus and make from it mixing bowls, libation vessels, and cups for the service, and further, whatever gold and silver there was in the treasuries, to bring it forward as well and spend it in the same way on such vessels. As Eliakias the high priest was bringing forward the gold, he came upon the sacred books of Moses lying in the
temple, and taking them out he gave them to the scribe Saphas. He, having read them, went to the king and reported that everything he had ordered done had been completed, and he also read the books aloud to him. Hearing them, the king tore his garments, and calling the high priest Eliakias and the scribe himself, along with some of his closest friends, he sent them to the prophetess Oolda, the wife
of Sallum, a woman of some standing and distinguished by her noble birth, instructing them, once they had come before her, to say: "Propitiate God, and try to make him favorable to us, for there is fear that, since our ancestors transgressed the laws of Moses, we may be in danger of being uprooted and, cast out of our own land into a foreign one, stripped of everything, end our lives in misery." Hearing this from those who had been sent,
the prophetess answered, through those same men whom the king had commissioned, ordering them to go back and tell the king that God had already passed sentence against the people, a sentence that no supplication could annul: to destroy the people, cast them out of their land, and strip them of all the good things now theirs, because they had transgressed the laws and, over so long a time, had not repented, even though the prophets
had urged them to come to their senses and had foretold the punishment for their impieties — a punishment which, so that they might be convinced that he is God and had lied about nothing of what he had announced to them through the prophets, he would certainly bring to pass. Yet for Josiah's own sake, since he had proved himself just, God would hold off the calamities for the present, and only after his death would he send upon the people the sufferings decreed against them. Those who had heard the woman's prophecy
came and reported it to the king. He sent word everywhere ordering the people to gather at Jerusalem, both priests and Levites, commanding that everyone, of every age, be present. Once they had assembled, he first read to them the sacred books, then, standing on the platform in the midst of the crowd, compelled them to swear oaths and give their word that they would indeed worship God and keep
the laws of Moses. They eagerly assented and undertook to do what the king urged, sacrificing at once, and, once the omens proved favorable, they begged God to be gracious and merciful to them. The king also ordered the high priest that any superfluous vessel which their ancestors had set up in the temple for idols and foreign gods should be thrown out. When a great many of these had been gathered together,
he burned them and scattered their ashes, and he killed the priests of the idols who were not of the line of Aaron. Having accomplished this in Jerusalem, he went out into the countryside and destroyed what King Jeroboam had built there in honor of foreign gods, and he burned the bones of the false prophets upon the altar that Jeroboam
had first built. A prophet had foretold this long before, coming down to Jeroboam while he was sacrificing, with the whole people listening, and announcing in advance what would happen: that someone of David's line named Josiah would do the things foretold. This came to pass three hundred and sixty-one years later. After this, King Josiah went also to the rest of the Israelites who
had escaped captivity and slavery under the Assyrians, and persuaded them to give up their impious practices and abandon the honors they paid to foreign gods, and instead to worship the ancestral and greatest God and to hold fast to him. He searched their houses, villages, and cities, in case anyone secretly kept any idols. And not only this, but
he also removed the chariots devoted to worship that stood ready for the kings, which their ancestors had made, and whatever else of that kind there was, to which they bowed down as to a god. Having thus purified the whole land, he called the people together to Jerusalem, and there celebrated the feast of unleavened bread and the one called Passover. For the Passover he gave the people newborn kids and twenty thousand lambs, and for burnt offerings
three thousand oxen. The chief priests too gave, for the Passover, two thousand six hundred lambs to the priests, and their leaders gave five thousand lambs and five hundred oxen to the Levites. With such an abundant supply of sacrificial animals provided, they carried out the sacrifices according to the laws of Moses, with each of the priests instructing and assisting the crowds; and the reason no other festival like it
had been held by the Hebrews since the days of Samuel the prophet was that everything was carried out in accordance with the laws and with the ancient observance of ancestral custom. Josiah lived afterward in peace, in wealth, and in good repute among all, and ended his life in the following way. Necho, king of the Egyptians, raised an army
and marched to the Euphrates to make war on the Medes and the Babylonians, who had overthrown the Assyrian empire, for he desired to rule over Asia. When he reached the city of Mende, which lay within Josiah's kingdom, Josiah barred his way with an army, refusing to let him march through his own land on his campaign against the Medes. Necho sent a herald to him, saying that he was marching not
against him, but toward the Euphrates, and urging him not to provoke him into fighting, when all he was doing was preventing him from proceeding where he had decided to go. But Josiah would not accept Necho's proposal; he stood firm in refusing him passage through his own land — driven to this, I think, by fate, so that Necho might find a pretext against him. For as Josiah was drawing up
his forces and riding in a chariot from wing to wing, one of the Egyptians shot him with an arrow and put an end to his eagerness for battle. In great pain from the wound, he ordered the army recalled and returned to Jerusalem. There he died of the wound and was buried in the tombs of his fathers with great splendor, having lived thirty-nine years and reigned
thirty-one of them. Great mourning was held for him by the whole people for many days, in grief and dejection, and Jeremiah the prophet composed for him a mournful funeral ode, which survives even to this day. This prophet also left in writing predictions of the disasters to come upon the city, including the very capture that has now befallen us in our own time, and the fall
of Babylon as well. Nor was he the only one to foretell these things to the people; so did the prophet Ezekiel, who was the first to leave behind two books written about these matters. Both men were priests by birth, but Jeremiah lived in Jerusalem from the thirteenth year of Josiah's reign until the city and the temple were destroyed. What happened, however, concerning
this prophet we will relate in its proper place. When Josiah died, as we have said, his son succeeded to the kingdom — his name was Joazos, and he had already reached his twenty-third year. He reigned in Jerusalem; his mother was Amitale, from the city of Tomane; he was impious and vile in character. The king of the Egyptians, returning from the battle, sent for Joazos to come to
him at the city called Amatha, in Syria, and when he came, bound him, and gave the kingdom to his elder half-brother, named Eliakim, changing his name to Joakim. On the land he imposed a hundred talents of silver and one of gold. This sum Joakim paid in full, and he led Joazos away to Egypt,
Joachaz died there, having reigned three months and ten days. Joakim's mother was named Zabouda, and she came from a city called Aboumas. He was by nature unjust and wicked, neither pious toward God nor decent toward men. In the fourth year of his reign, a man named Nebuchadnezzar took over the kingdom of Babylon.
At about the same time Nebuchadnezzar marched up with a great force against the city of Carchemish, which lies on the Euphrates river, intending to make war on Necho, king of the Egyptians; for all Syria was under Necho's control. When Necho learned of the Babylonian's intentions and of the campaign being mounted against him, he too did not hold back but set out for the Euphrates with a large force to defend himself against Nebuchadnezzar.
In the battle that followed Necho was defeated and lost many tens of thousands of men. Nebuchadnezzar then crossed the Euphrates and took over Syria as far as Pelusium, with the exception of Judea. When Nebuchadnezzar had already reigned four years, it was the eighth year of Joakim's rule over the Hebrews, and the Babylonian marched against the Jews with a large force, demanding tribute from Joakim and threatening war if he refused.
Joakim, fearing the threat, bought peace at the price of money, bringing him the tribute assessed for three years. In the third year, hearing that the Egyptians were marching against the Babylonian, he withheld the tribute — but his hope was disappointed, for the Egyptians did not dare undertake the campaign.
The prophet Jeremiah foretold these things day after day, warning that it was vain to place hope in the Egyptians, and that the city must be laid waste by the king of Babylon, and King Joakim delivered into his hands. But since none of those who might have been saved by heeding him existed, his words did no good; both the people and the rulers, hearing them, disregarded them, and took offense at what he said,
charging Jeremiah with prophesying evil against the king, as though he were a bird-diviner working against him; and bringing him to trial, they sought his condemnation and punishment. All the others cast their votes against him, condemning him along with the elders, but those of wiser judgment released the prophet from custody and advised the rest to do Jeremiah no harm.
For, they said, he was not the only one who had foretold the city's future; Micah before him had proclaimed the same things, as had many others, none of whom had suffered anything at the hands of the kings of that time, but were rather honored as prophets of God. With these words they calmed the crowd and rescued Jeremiah from the punishment that had been voted against him.
Jeremiah then wrote down all his own prophecies, and while the people were fasting and assembled in the temple, in the ninth month of the fifth year of Joakim's reign, he read aloud the scroll he had composed concerning the things that were going to happen to the city, the temple, and the people. When the officials heard it, they took the scroll from him and ordered both him and his scribe Baruch to remove themselves from sight, so that they would not be found by anyone,
and they themselves carried the scroll and gave it to the king. He, with his friends present, ordered his own scribe to take it and read it. But when the king heard what was in the scroll, he grew angry and tore it apart and threw it into the fire, destroying it, and he ordered that Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch be sought out and brought before him for punishment. These two, however, escaped his wrath.
Not long afterward the king of Babylon marched against him, receiving him without a fight — out of fear at what had been foretold by this prophet, and reckoning that he would suffer nothing terrible, he neither shut his gates nor made war. But once inside, the Babylonian did not keep faith: he put to death the strongest and most handsome of the Jerusalemites, along with King Joakim himself,
whom he ordered to be thrown out unburied before the walls. He set up Joakim's son, also named Joakim, as king of the land and the city, and taking captive three thousand of the men of rank, he led them away to Babylon; among them was the prophet Ezekiel, still a boy. Such was the end that befell King Joakim, who lived thirty-six years and reigned eleven of them.
His successor to the kingship, Joakim, whose mother was named Nehushta and was a native of the city, reigned three months and ten days. But the king of Babylon, having just granted him the kingdom, was at once seized with fear — he feared that Joakim, remembering the killing of his father, might revolt against him — and so he sent a force and besieged Joakim in Jerusalem.
Joakim, being by nature good and just, did not think it right to let the city be endangered on his account, but went out and surrendered himself, his mother, and his relatives to the generals sent by the Babylonian, having first received oaths from them that neither they nor the city would suffer any harm. But that pledge did not even last a year.
The king of Babylon did not keep it, but instructed his generals to take all the people in the city who were young in age and skilled craftsmen, bind them, and bring them to him; these numbered in all eighteen thousand three hundred and thirty-two, along with Joakim himself, his mother, and his friends. These he brought to himself and kept under guard; and Joakim's uncle Zedekiah he appointed king,
first taking an oath from him that he would truly keep the land for him, attempt no rebellion, and show no favor to the Egyptians. Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he took the throne; he was Joakim's brother by the same mother, and he showed contempt for what was right and proper. Indeed those around him, young in years, were impious,
and the whole populace, given free rein, committed whatever outrages they pleased. For this reason the prophet Jeremiah came to him often and admonished him, urging him to abandon his other impieties and lawless acts, to attend to justice, and neither to cling to the leaders because they were wicked among the people, nor to believe the false prophets who deceived him by claiming the Babylonian would no longer make war on the city, and that
the Egyptians would march against him and win. These things, Jeremiah said, were not true, nor were they bound to happen. As long as Zedekiah listened to the prophet saying these things, he was persuaded and agreed that they spoke the truth and that it was to his advantage to believe them; but his friends corrupted him again and drew him away from the prophet's words toward what they themselves wished.
Ezekiel too prophesied in Babylon the calamities that were going to befall the people, and wrote these things down and sent them to Jerusalem. Zedekiah, however, disbelieved their prophecies for the following reason: everything else the two of them said agreed — that the city would be captured and Zedekiah himself taken prisoner — but they disagreed on this point: Ezekiel said Zedekiah would not see Babylon, while Jeremiah told him that
the king of Babylon would lead him there in chains. And because the two did not say the same thing, Zedekiah judged that even the points on which they seemed to agree were not true either — although in fact everything came to pass for him just as the prophecies said, as we shall show at the appropriate point. Having maintained the alliance with the Babylonians for eight years, he then broke faith with them and went over to the Egyptians, hoping
with their help to overthrow the Babylonians, in alliance with whom that hope had arisen. When the king of Babylon learned of this, he marched against him, ravaged his land, took his strongholds, and came against the city of the Jerusalemites to besiege it. The Egyptian king, hearing that his ally Zedekiah was in this position, took a large force and came into Judea to lift the siege.
The Babylonian withdrew from Jerusalem, met the Egyptians, joined battle with them, defeated them, put them to flight, and pursued them out of all Syria. But when the king of Babylon had withdrawn from Jerusalem, the false prophets deceived Zedekiah, telling him that the Babylonian would no longer make war on him and his people, and that those of his countrymen whom he had carried off
from their homeland to Babylon would return, along with all the vessels of the temple which the king had plundered from the shrine. But Jeremiah came forward and prophesied the opposite of this, and the truth: that they were acting wickedly and deceiving the king, that no benefit at all would come to them from the Egyptians, but that the Babylonian, having defeated the Egyptians, was about to march against Jerusalem, and
would besiege it and destroy the people by famine, and would carry off as captives those who survived, and would plunder their property, and would carry away the wealth in the temple and then burn it down and raze the city, and that we would be enslaved to him and his descendants for seventy years. Then the Persians and the Medes would put an end to our slavery under them, having overthrown
the Babylonians, and from them we would be released to return to this land and rebuild the temple again and restore Jerusalem. When Jeremiah said these things, most people believed him, but the officials and the impious dismissed him as out of his mind. Once, when he happened to be going to his home town, called Anathoth, twenty stadia from Jerusalem, he met on the road
one of the officials, who seized and detained him, falsely accusing him of deserting to the Babylonians. Jeremiah said the man was bringing a false charge against him, and insisted he was simply walking to his home town. But the man, not believing him, seized him and brought him to trial before the officials, who, after he endured every kind of abuse and torture, kept him under guard for punishment. For some time
he continued to suffer unjustly in this way. In the ninth year of Zedekiah's reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, the king of Babylon marched a second time against Jerusalem, and having encamped before it, besieged it with the utmost determination for eighteen months. Two of the greatest afflictions struck the besieged people of Jerusalem at the same time: famine and a devastating plague, both raging
fiercely. While confined in prison, the prophet Jeremiah did not keep silent, but cried out and proclaimed, urging the people to open the gates and receive the Babylonian; for by doing this, he said, they would be saved, household and all, but if not, they would perish. He foretold that whoever remained in the city would surely die, either consumed by famine or by the enemy's sword,
but that whoever fled to the enemy would escape death. Even in the midst of these terrible circumstances, the officials who heard this did not believe him, but went to the king in anger to report it, accusing the prophet and demanding he be put to death as a madman who was breaking the people's spirit beforehand and, through the discouraging pronouncements of a coward, undermining the readiness
of the people to risk danger for him and for their homeland. The prophet, they said, was urging them to flee to the enemy, saying the city would be captured and everyone would perish. The king himself, out of decency and justice, was not personally provoked by this, but so as not to offend the officials by opposing their purpose at such a critical moment, he handed the prophet over to them to do with as they wished.
When the king had granted them this, they went straight to the prison, took him, and lowered him into a pit full of mud, so that he might die his own particular death by suffocation. He was there, sunk in the mire up to his neck. But one of the king's household servants, a man held in honor and an Ethiopian by birth, reported the prophet's plight
to the king, saying that his friends and officials had acted wrongly in sinking the prophet into the mud, and that they had thereby devised for him a death more bitter than execution by the sword. Hearing this, the king regretted having handed the prophet over to the officials, and ordered the Ethiopian to take thirty of the royal guard along with ropes and everything
useful for saving the prophet, and to draw Jeremiah up without delay. The Ethiopian, taking the men assigned to him, pulled the prophet out of the mud and released him unguarded. The king then summoned him secretly and asked what he could tell him from God, and what he could reveal concerning the present situation. Jeremiah said he did have something to say, but that if he spoke it he would not be believed,
nor would his advice be heeded — 'instead, as though I had done some great wrong, your friends have resolved to destroy me,' he said. 'And where now are those who told you the Babylonian would never march against us again, and deceived you? I am afraid now to tell the truth, lest you condemn me to death.' When the king swore an oath to him that he would neither kill him himself nor hand him over to
the officials, Jeremiah, taking courage from the pledge given him, advised him to surrender the city to the Babylonians; for God, he said, was prophesying this to him through himself, if indeed the king wished to be saved and escape the danger now threatening him, so that neither the city would fall to the ground nor the temple be burned — for its burning would be the cause of these calamities for the citizens and for himself and his household,
of the disaster. Hearing this, the king said he himself wished to do as Jeremiah advised, and agreed that it would be to his advantage to do so, but that he feared the countrymen who had deserted to the Babylonians, lest he be slandered by them to the king and punished. The prophet reassured him, telling him his fear was groundless, for no harm would come to him at the hands of the Babylonians if he surrendered, neither to himself nor to his
children nor his wives, and the temple too would remain unharmed. Having said this, Jeremiah was released by the king, who instructed him to reveal to none of the citizens — nor even to the officials, should they learn he had been summoned by the king and ask what he had said when called before him — anything of what had been decided between them, but to claim to them, if pressed, that he had merely begged
Zedekiah must not be kept in chains or in prison. This is what he said to the men who had come to the prophet asking what he had gone to the king to plead for. So much for that exchange. As for the siege of Jerusalem, the Babylonian pressed it with the utmost intensity and energy. He built great siege towers and from them kept the men stationed on the walls at bay, and he raised earthworks all around the circuit of the city equal in height to the walls themselves.
The people inside bore the siege with courage and resolve. They were worn down neither by famine nor by the plague that ravaged them, but even while these afflictions drove them within, they kept their spirits strong for the fight, undaunted by the enemy's stratagems and machines, countering everything the Babylonians devised with counter-devices of their own — so that the whole contest, for both the Babylonians and the people of Jerusalem, turned on sharpness of wit and understanding, the one side supposing they could destroy the city more readily by this means, the other placing their hope of survival in nothing but never tiring, never giving up, and matching invention with invention until the enemy's engines were shown to be useless. They held out like this for eighteen months, until they were finally worn down by famine and by the missiles the enemy hurled at them from the towers.
The city was taken in the eleventh year of Zedekiah's reign, on the ninth day of the fourth month. It was the generals of the Babylonians, to whom Nebuchadnezzar had entrusted the siege, who took it — he himself was residing in the city of Arabatha at the time. As for the names of the generals, in case anyone wishes to know who it was that stormed and subdued Jerusalem, they were Regalsaros, Aremantos, Semegaros, Nabosaris, and Acharampsaris.
When the city was taken, around the middle of the night, and the enemy generals had entered the temple, King Zedekiah learned of it and, taking his wives and children, his officers, and his friends, fled with them from the city through the strong ravine and out into the desert. But some deserters told the Babylonians of this, and at daybreak they set out in pursuit and, overtaking him not far from Jericho, surrounded him. The friends and officers who had fled with Zedekiah, when they saw the enemy close at hand, abandoned him and scattered, each man going his own way and looking to save himself.
Zedekiah, left behind with only a few companions, was taken alive by the enemy, and together with his children and wives was brought before the king. When he was brought into his presence, Nebuchadnezzar began to call him impious and a breaker of oaths, and forgetful of the earlier pledges he had made to preserve his rule for him. He reproached him too for his ingratitude — for it was Nebuchadnezzar himself who had taken the kingdom from Jehoiakim and given it to him, and yet he had used the power granted him against the very man who had granted it. "But God is great," he said, "who has hated your conduct and put you in our hands."
Having spoken these words to Zedekiah, he ordered his sons and his friends killed at once, before Zedekiah's own eyes and those of the other captives. Then he had Zedekiah's eyes put out, bound him, and led him away to Babylon. And this is exactly what Jeremiah and Ezekiel had prophesied would happen to him — that he would be seized and brought before the Babylonian, that he would speak with him face to face, and that his eyes would see the eyes of the other. This much Jeremiah had foretold; but once blinded and led to Babylon, Zedekiah did not see that city — just as Ezekiel had foretold.
We have now related events sufficient to reveal the nature of God to those who do not know it — that it is manifold and versatile, and meets each occasion in its due season, foretelling what must come to pass, while the ignorance and unbelief of men, by which they are prevented from foreseeing anything that is to happen, leaves them unguarded and exposed to disaster, so that there is no way for them to escape the trial that comes from it.
So ended the lives of those kings descended from the house of David, twenty-one in all down to the last king, who reigned altogether five hundred and fourteen years, six months, and ten days — of which the first of them, Saul, who was not of that same tribe, held the throne for twenty years.
The Babylonian sent his general Nebuzaradan to Jerusalem to plunder the temple, ordering him at the same time to burn it down along with the palace, to raze the city to the ground, and to remove the people to Babylonia. Nebuzaradan, arriving at Jerusalem in the eleventh year of Zedekiah's reign, plundered the temple and carried off the vessels of God — gold and silver — including the great laver that Solomon had dedicated, and further the bronze pillars and their capitals, the golden tables, and the lampstands. Having removed all this, he set fire to the temple on the new moon of the fifth month, in the eleventh year of Zedekiah's reign and the eighteenth of Nebuchadnezzar's. He also burned the palace and razed the city.
The temple was burned four hundred and seventy years, six months, and ten days after it had been built. From the exodus of the people out of Egypt to that time was one thousand sixty-two years, six months, and ten days. From the flood down to the destruction of the temple the whole span was one thousand nine hundred fifty-seven years, six months, and ten days. And from the birth of Adam to the events surrounding the temple, the years amount to four thousand five hundred thirteen, six months, and ten days. Such, then, is the sum of these years; and as for what happened at each of these occurrences, we have set it out in detail.
The general of the Babylonian king, after razing Jerusalem and removing the people, took captive the high priest Seraiah, the priest next in rank after him, Zephaniah, the officers who guarded the temple — three in number — the eunuch in command of the soldiers, seven of Zedekiah's friends, his scribe, and sixty other officers. All these, together with the vessels he had plundered, he brought to the king at Riblah, a city of Syria.
The king ordered the high priest and the officers beheaded there, but he himself led all the other captives, together with Zedekiah, in chains to Babylon, and also Jehozadak the high priest, son of the high priest Seraiah, whom the Babylonian had put to death at the city of Riblah in Syria, as we have already related.
Now that we have gone through the line of the kings and shown who they were and how long they reigned, I have thought it necessary also to give the names of the high priests and to say who they were, those who held the high priesthood alongside the kings. Zadok, then, was the first high priest of the temple that Solomon built; after him his son Ahimaas succeeded to the honor, and after Ahimaas, Azariah; after him, Joram; after Joram, Ios; after him, Axioramos; after Axioramos, Phideas; after Phideas, Sudaias; after Sudaias, Ioelos; after him, Jotham; after Jotham, Uriah; after Uriah, Neriah; after Neriah, Odaias; after him, Salloumos; after Salloumos, Elkiah; after Elkiah, Azaros; and after him, Jehozadak, who was carried captive to Babylon. All these succeeded to the high priesthood, son after father.
When the king arrived in Babylon, he kept Zedekiah in prison until his death, and after burying him in royal fashion, he dedicated the vessels plundered from the temple of Jerusalem to his own gods, settled the people in the land of Babylonia, and released the high priest from his chains.
The general Nebuzaradan, having taken the people of the Hebrews captive, left behind there the poor and those who had deserted, and appointed as their governor Gedaliah, son of Ahikam, a man of noble birth, moderate and just. He charged them to work the land and pay a fixed tribute to the king. He also took the prophet Jeremiah out of prison and urged him to come with him to Babylon, for the king had ordered that everything be furnished him there; but if he did not wish this, he was to say where he had decided to remain, so that word of it could be sent to the king.
The prophet was unwilling either to follow him or to remain anywhere else; he was content to live out his life among the ruins of his homeland and its wretched remnants. Learning of his choice, the general instructed Gedaliah, whom he had left behind, to take every care of him at once and to supply him with whatever he needed, and after presenting him with costly gifts, he released him. Jeremiah remained behind at Dana, a town in the district called Mosfotha, having asked Nebuzaradan to release along with him his disciple Baruch, son of Neriah, who came from a very distinguished family and had been unusually well educated in his native tongue. Having settled these matters, Nebuzaradan set out for Babylon.
Meanwhile those who had fled Jerusalem during the siege and scattered through the countryside, on hearing that the Babylonians had withdrawn and had left some remnants behind in the land of the people of Jerusalem, along with those who would work it, gathered from every quarter and came to Gedaliah at Mizpah. Among them the leaders were Johanan son of Kareah, Seraiah, and Jaazaniah, along with others besides; and there was among them a certain Ishmael, of the royal family, a wicked and thoroughly treacherous man, who during the siege of Jerusalem had fled to Baalis, king of the Ammonites, and had spent that time with him.
Gedaliah persuaded these men, once they had come to him, to remain at once without any fear of the Babylonians — for if they worked the land, he told them, they would suffer no harm. He swore to this again and again, telling them to regard him as their protector, so that if anyone troubled them they would find him ready to act on their behalf. He advised them to settle, each sending for his own household, in whatever town he wished, to rebuild the ruins and dwell there. He told them to prepare, while there was still time, grain, wine, and oil, so that they would have provisions through the winter. Having said this to them, he sent them off through the country to whatever place each wished to go.
When word spread among the nations around Judea that Gedaliah had welcomed with kindness those who had come to him as fugitives, and had allowed them to settle and work the land on condition of paying tribute to the Babylonian, they too came flocking to Gedaliah and settled in the country. Observing the land and Gedaliah's kindness and generosity, Johanan and the officers with him came to love him greatly. But Baalis, king of the Ammonites, they said, had sent Ishmael to kill him treacherously and in secret, so that he himself might rule over the Israelites, since he was of the royal line.
They said they could save Gedaliah from this plot if he would allow them to kill Ishmael, since no one would know of it; for they said they feared that if Gedaliah were murdered by him, it would mean the utter ruin of what remained of the strength of the Israelites. But Gedaliah declared he did not believe them, that they were bringing such a charge against a man who had done nothing but good to him — it was not reasonable, he said, that a man in such dire straits, having failed to find what he needed nowhere else, should turn out to be so wicked and impious toward his own benefactor as to plot to kill the very man who had saved him from being plotted against by others, when no one else was scheming against him.
Even so, he said, if this should prove true, it would be better for him to die at that man's hand than to destroy a man who had taken refuge with him, trusted him with his own safety, and placed himself in his keeping. So Johanan and the officers with him, unable to persuade Gedaliah, went away. Thirty days later, Ishmael came to Gedaliah at the town of Mizpah with ten men. Gedaliah received them at a lavish table with gifts of hospitality and, growing warm with drink, entertained Ishmael and his companions generously.
But when Ishmael saw him in this state, sunk in insensibility and sleep from the wine, he sprang up with his ten companions and cut down Gedaliah and all who were reclining with him at the banquet. After this slaughter he went out by night and murdered all the Jews in the town, as well as the soldiers the Babylonians had left behind there. The next day, eighty men came from the countryside to Gedaliah bearing gifts, none of them knowing what had happened. Seeing them, Ishmael called them inside as if to see Gedaliah, and once they had entered he shut the outer gate and slaughtered them, throwing their bodies into a deep pit so that they would not be found.
Of these eighty men, those who had begged not to be killed until they had handed over what they had hidden in the fields — furniture, clothing, and grain — were spared. On hearing this, Ishmael spared these men. But the people who were in Mizpah, along with the women and children, he took captive, among them the daughters of King Zedekiah, whom Nebuzaradan, the Babylonian general, had left in Gedaliah's care. Having done all this, he made his way to the king of the Ammonites.
When Johanan and the officers with him heard what Ishmael had done at Mizpah and of Gedaliah's death, they were outraged, and each taking his own armed men, they set out to make war on Ishmael and overtook him by the spring at Hebron. Those whom Ishmael had taken captive, on seeing Johanan and the officers, rejoiced, supposing help had come for them, and abandoning the man who had captured them, went over to Johanan. Ishmael, with eight men, fled to the king of the Ammonites. Johanan, taking those he had rescued from Ishmael's hands, along with the eunuchs, the women, and the children, arrived at a place called Mandra.
He remained there that day, but they had resolved to set out from there for Egypt, fearing that the Babylonians would kill them if they stayed in the country, out of anger over the murder of Gedaliah, whom the Babylonians themselves had appointed governor. This was the situation at that time.
While they were deliberating this course, Johanan son of Kareah and the officers who were with him came to the prophet Jeremiah and urged him to entreat God on their behalf, since they were at a loss what to do, and to show them his will. They swore that they would do whatever Jeremiah told them. When the prophet had promised to intercede for them with God, it happened that after ten days God appeared to him and told him to make known to Johanan and the other officers and all the people that if they remained in that country, he would be present with them, would care for them, and would keep them safe from the Babylonians whom they feared; but if they went to Egypt, he would abandon them and, in anger, would treat them just as they knew their kinsmen had been treated before.
When the prophet reported these words of God to Johanan and the people, they did not believe that God was foretelling this to them; they claimed instead that he was commanding them, in obedience to that same command, to remain in the country, and that he was falsifying God's word only as a favor to his own disciple Baruch, persuading them to stay so that they might be destroyed by the Babylonians. So the people and Johanan disregarded the counsel that God had given them through the prophet, and set out for Egypt, taking with them both Jeremiah and Baruch.
After they arrived there, God revealed to the prophet that the king of the Babylonians was about to march against the Egyptians, and ordered him to foretell to the people both the capture of Egypt and the fact that some of them the king would kill, while others he would take captive and lead away to Babylon. And this came to pass: for in the fifth year after the sack of Jerusalem, which was the twenty-third year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, Nebuchadnezzar marched against Coele-Syria, seized it, and made war also on the Moabites and the Ammanites. Having subdued these nations, he invaded Egypt to conquer it, killed the king then reigning, set up another in his place, and took the Jews who were there captive once again and led them to Babylon.
So the Hebrew people met with this end, having twice crossed the Euphrates as we have recorded: the people of the ten tribes were driven out from Samaria by the Assyrians when Hoshea was their king, and afterward the two tribes were driven out by Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians and the Chaldeans, along with whoever had been left behind after Jerusalem was taken. Now Shalmaneser, having removed the Israelites, settled in their place the nation of the Cuthaeans, who had previously lived in the interior of Persia and Media, but were then called Samaritans, having taken the name of the region into which they were resettled. The king of the Babylonians, however, having led the two tribes away, settled no nation in their country in their place, and for this reason all Judea, Jerusalem, and the temple remained deserted for seventy years. The whole span of time that had elapsed from the captivity of the Israelites to the removal of the two tribes came to one hundred and thirty years, six months, and ten days.
Now Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians, took the noblest of the Jewish children and the kinsmen of Zedekiah their king, who were conspicuous both for the vigor of their bodies and the beauty of their faces, and handed them over to tutors and to be cared for under them, making some of them eunuchs. He did the same with the children of the other nations he had conquered, choosing those taken in the prime of life; he supplied them food from his own table for their diet, and had them educated both in the customs of the country and in Chaldean letters, for they were capable enough in the learning he ordered them to pursue.
Among these were four of the family of Zedekiah, handsome and of good natural gifts, one of whom was called Daniel, another Ananias, another Misael, and the fourth Azarias. The Babylonian gave them new names and ordered them to use these instead: Daniel he called Baltasar, Ananias Sedrach, Misael Misach, and Azarias Abednago. The king, because of their extraordinary natural ability and their diligence in study and the progress they made in wisdom, held them in honor and continued to love them.
Daniel resolved, together with his kinsmen, to discipline himself and to abstain from the food that came from the king's table, and indeed from everything that had life in it. He went to Aschanes, the eunuch entrusted with their care, and asked him to take for himself what was regularly sent to them from the king, and instead to provide them with pulse and dates for their food, and whatever else he wished among things without life; for this was the diet toward which they were inclined, and they had no regard for the other. Aschanes said he was ready to serve their purpose, but was afraid that if they became visibly thin and their features changed, it would become obvious to the king; for their bodies and complexions would necessarily change along with their diet, and since the other children would appear healthy by comparison, he himself might be exposed as responsible and so face danger and punishment.
Being thus apprehensive, Aschanes was persuaded by them to provide this food for ten days as a trial; and if their bodily condition did not change, he was to continue with the same diet, since it would clearly do them no further harm, but if he saw them grow thinner and worse off than the others, he was to return them to their former diet. When it turned out that not only did this food do them no harm at all, but that they became better nourished and larger in body than the others, so that those fed on royal provision seemed the more deficient while Daniel's companions seemed to be living amid abundance and every luxury, from that time on Aschanes safely took for himself what the king daily sent to the children in the customary way, and supplied them instead with the food already mentioned.
Because of this their souls became pure and keen for learning, and their bodies more vigorous for hard exertion, since they were not weighed down by the burden of rich and varied food, nor were their minds made soft by the same cause; and so they readily mastered the whole range of learning that existed among the Hebrews and the Chaldeans. Daniel above all, being by now well versed in wisdom, applied himself earnestly to the interpretation of dreams, and God made himself manifest to him.
In the second year after the sack of Egypt, King Nebuchadnezzar saw a marvelous dream, the meaning of which God himself had revealed to him in his sleep; but on rising from his bed he forgot it. He summoned the Chaldeans, the magicians, and the diviners, told them he had seen a dream, and, explaining that the memory of what he had seen had escaped him, ordered them to tell him what the dream was and what it signified. When they said it was impossible for men to discover this, but that if he would describe the vision of the dream to them, they promised to explain its meaning, he threatened them with death if they did not tell him the dream itself, and ordered that all of them be put to death, since they had admitted they were unable to do what he demanded.
When Daniel heard that the king had ordered all the wise men to be killed, and that he himself, along with his kinsmen, was in danger among them, he went to Arioch, who had been entrusted with command over the king's bodyguard. He asked to learn from him the reason why the king had ordered all the wise men, Chaldeans, and magicians to be put to death, and on learning about the dream, and that they had provoked the king by admitting that, though commanded to reveal it, they were unable to do so because he had forgotten it, he urged Arioch to go in to the king and ask for a single night's delay for the magicians, so as to postpone their execution; for he hoped that by praying to God during that night he would come to know the dream.
Arioch reported this to the king, that Daniel requested this favor, and the king ordered that the execution of the magicians be postponed until he learned Daniel's answer. The young man, withdrawing with his kinsmen to his own quarters, spent the whole night imploring God to reveal to him the dream, and thereby to save also the magicians and Chaldeans who were bound to perish along with them, by disclosing to the king the vision he had seen in his sleep the night before, which he had forgotten, and making it plain to him, and so to rescue them from the king's anger. God, taking pity both on those in danger and admiring Daniel's wisdom, made both the dream and its interpretation known to him, so that he might also inform the king of what it signified.
When Daniel learned this from God, he rose up filled with joy, and telling his brothers, he lifted the spirits of those who had already given up hope of living and had resigned themselves to death, and awakened in them hope for their lives; and having given thanks to God, who had taken pity on them together, when day came he went to Arioch and asked to be brought before the king, saying that he wished to reveal to him the dream he said he had seen the night before.
Brought in before the king, Daniel first asked that the king not think him wiser than the other Chaldeans and magicians simply because, when none of them had been able to discover the dream, he was about to tell it; for this did not come about through his own skill, nor because he had labored over the matter more diligently than they, but because God, taking pity on us who were in danger of death, had made both the dream and its interpretation clear in answer to my prayer on behalf of my own life and that of my countrymen. For I grieved no less than you, who had been condemned by you to die, over your own reputation, that you had ordered men so noble and good to be put to death so unjustly -- men to whom you had demanded nothing that lay within human wisdom, but had required of them what belonged to God alone.
Now then, while you were anxious to know who would rule the whole world after you, God, wishing as you slept to reveal to you all who would reign, showed you a dream of this kind: you seemed to see a great statue standing, whose head was made of gold, whose shoulders and arms were of silver, whose belly and thighs were of bronze, and whose legs and feet were of iron. Then a stone broke off from a mountain, fell upon the statue, threw it down, and shattered it, leaving no part of it whole, so that the gold, the silver, the bronze, and the iron were reduced finer than flour, and, a violent wind rising, these were caught up by its force and scattered abroad, while the stone grew so great that it seemed to fill the whole earth.
This, then, is the dream you saw, and its interpretation is as follows: the golden head signifies you and the kings of Babylon before you; the arms and shoulders signify that your empire will be brought down by two kings; their power in turn another will overthrow, one clad in bronze coming from the west, and this power yet another will end, one like iron, and this one will prevail over all because of the nature of iron, for it is harder than gold, silver, or bronze. Daniel also explained to the king the meaning of the stone, but it did not seem right to me to relate this, since my task is to record what is past and what has already happened, not what is to come. If, however, anyone is eager for such precision and cannot resist inquiring further, wishing to learn also what is still uncertain about the future, let him take the trouble to read the Book of Daniel; he will find it among the sacred writings.
King Nebuchadnezzar, having heard this and recognized the dream, was astonished at Daniel's nature, and falling on his face, paid homage to Daniel in the manner in which men worship God; he even ordered that sacrifice be offered to him as to a god, and moreover, giving him the name of his own god, he made him governor over the whole kingdom, along with his kinsmen -- the very men who, through envy and malice, came into danger through offending the king, for the following reason.
The king had made a golden statue sixty cubits in height and six in breadth, and having set it up in the great plain of Babylon and being about to consecrate it, he summoned the leading men from every land over which he ruled, and instructed them first that, whenever they heard the sound of the trumpet, they should fall down and worship the statue, and he threatened that those who did not do so would be thrown into a furnace of fire. So when all, upon hearing the trumpet sound, fell down and worshiped the statue, Daniel's kinsmen alone, they say, refused to do this, unwilling to transgress their ancestral laws.
And these, once convicted, were immediately thrown into the fire, but by divine providence were saved and escaped death against all expectation. But, in my judgment, the reason was this: since they had done no wrong, when they were thrown into it, the fire did not touch them, and its burning power was too weak, since the children of God had bodies too strong for it to consume by its heat. This event convinced the king that they were righteous men beloved of God, and for this reason they continued afterward to be honored by him with every distinction.
A little while later, the king again saw, in his sleep, another vision: that he would be cast out of his kingdom and would live among wild beasts, and that after spending seven years in this way in the wilderness, he would receive his kingdom back again. Having seen this dream, he again summoned the magicians and asked them to interpret it and tell him what it signified. None of the others was able to discover the meaning of the dream or explain it to the king, but Daniel alone both interpreted it, and it happened just as he had foretold: for after spending the appointed time in the wilderness, with no one daring to seize power during the seven years, he prayed to God to receive back his kingdom, and returned to it. Let no one blame me for reporting each of these matters just as I have found them written.
through the written record, exactly as I find it set down in the ancient books. Indeed, right at the beginning of my history, I guarded myself in advance against anyone who might raise questions or complaints about these matters, by stating that I intended only to translate the Hebrew books into the Greek language and to report their contents, undertaking neither to add anything of my own to the facts nor to take anything away. King Nebuchadnezzar, after reigning forty-three years,
died, a vigorous man who had proved more fortunate than the kings before him. Berossus, too, recalls his achievements, in the third book of his History of Chaldea, where he writes as follows: "His father Nebuchadnezzar, on hearing that the satrap he had appointed over Egypt and the region of Coele-Syria and Phoenicia had revolted from him, and being unable to bear the hardship of campaigning himself, put a portion of his forces under the command of his son Nebuchadnezzar, who was still a young man, and sent him against the rebel. Nebuchadnezzar engaged the rebel in battle, defeated him, and brought the territory back under his own rule as part of that same dominion. At that very time it happened that his father Nebuchadnezzar fell ill and died in the city
of Babylon, having reigned twenty-one years. When, not long afterward, the son learned of his father's death, he settled affairs in Egypt and the rest of the country, and put certain of his friends in charge of bringing the Jewish, Phoenician, and Syrian captives, along with the peoples from Egypt, back to Babylonia, together with the heaviest part of the army and the remaining spoils, while he himself set out with a small escort through the desert and made his way to Babylon. There he found affairs being administered by the Chaldeans and the kingdom preserved by the best man among them; and having taken possession of his father's entire realm, he arranged for the captives who arrived to be settled as colonies in the most suitable places in Babylonia, while he himself, from the spoils
of the war, lavishly adorned both the temple of Bel and the rest of the shrines, and generously endowed the city that already existed from the beginning as well as building others; and, to make it impossible for those besieging the city ever again to turn the river against it and use it in constructing their siege-works, he surrounded the inner city with three circuits of walls, and the outer part with three more, built of baked brick. Having fortified the city
impressively and adorned its gates in a manner befitting a sacred place, he built, adjoining his father's palace, a second palace, whose height and general magnificence it would perhaps be excessive to describe in detail — except to say that these great and towering works were completed in only fifteen days. In this palace he raised up stone terraces, giving them the appearance of mountains, and by planting them with every kind of tree he created
and built what is called the Hanging Garden, because his wife longed for the mountain scenery of her own country, having been raised in the region of Media. Megasthenes, too, mentions these works in the fourth book of his Indica, where he attempts to show that this king surpassed Heracles in courage and in the scale of his achievements, saying that he conquered a great part of Libya
and Iberia. Diocles as well mentions this king in the second book of his Persian History, as does Philostratus in his history of India and Phoenicia, saying that this king besieged Tyre for thirteen years, at a time when Ithobal was reigning over Tyre. Such, then, are the things reported about this king by all the various authors. After
the death of Nebuchadnezzar, his son Evil-Merodach succeeded to the kingdom. He immediately released Jeconiah, king of Jerusalem, from his chains, kept him among his closest friends, gave him many gifts, and set him above the other kings residing in Babylonia — for his father had not kept faith with Jeconiah, who had voluntarily surrendered himself, along with his wives, his children, and
his whole family, for the sake of his homeland, so that the city might not be razed after being taken by siege, as we have already related. When Evil-Merodach died, after reigning eighteen years, his son Neriglissar succeeded to the throne, and after holding it for forty years, he too ended his life. After him the succession passed to his son Labashi-Marduk, and
after he had reigned a total of only nine months, upon his death the throne passed to the man called Belshazzar, known among the Babylonians as Nabonnedus. Cyrus, king of the Persians, and Darius the Mede marched against him. And while the people of Babylon were under siege, an extraordinary and astonishing sight occurred: the king was reclining at dinner, drinking in a great hall built for royal banquets, in the company of his
concubines and his friends. It occurred to him to have brought from his own temple the sacred vessels of God, which Nebuchadnezzar had carried off as plunder from Jerusalem but had never made use of, having simply deposited them in his temple. Belshazzar, however, driven by his own recklessness to make use of them, was in the middle of drinking and blaspheming God when he saw a hand come forth out of the wall and begin writing
certain letters upon it. Thrown into confusion by the sight, he summoned the magicians and the Chaldeans — the whole class of men in Babylon capable of interpreting signs and dreams — so that they might explain to him what had been written. But when the magicians proved unable to discover anything or to say they understood it, the king, in his distress and in the depth of his grief over so
extraordinary an event, issued a proclamation throughout the whole country promising to give to whoever could make plain the writing and the meaning it conveyed a golden collar to wear about his neck, purple robes like those worn by the kings of the Chaldeans, and a third part of his own kingdom. When this proclamation was issued, the magicians redoubled their efforts and competed with one another to discover the meaning of the writing,
yet were no more successful than before. Seeing the king despondent over this, his grandmother began to encourage him, saying that there was a certain captive from Judea, brought from there by Nebuchadnezzar when he sacked Jerusalem, named Daniel — a wise man, skilled at discovering things beyond human reach and known only to God — who, when no one else had been able to tell
Nebuchadnezzar what he wanted to know, had brought to light the things he sought. She urged, therefore, that he send for the man and inquire of him about the writing, and condemn the ignorance of those who had failed to find its meaning, however grim what God was signifying might prove to be. On hearing this, Belshazzar summoned Daniel, and after conversing with him and learning about him and his wisdom — that a divine spirit
was present in him and that he alone was fully capable of discovering what did not occur to the minds of others — he asked him to tell him what had been written and to reveal its meaning; for if he did this, he would give him a purple robe to wear, a golden collar about his neck, and a third part of his own kingdom as an honor and reward for his wisdom, so that through these gifts he might become the most conspicuous of men in the eyes of all who saw him and asked
the reason he had received them. But Daniel asked that he keep his gifts for himself, for wisdom and what is divine, he said, cannot be bought, and ought to benefit those in need without payment; he would, however, reveal to him the meaning of the writing, which foretold the ruin of his life, because he had not learned piety even from the punishments by which his ancestor had been chastised for his outrages against God, nor had he refrained from devising anything beyond what belongs to human
nature. "On the contrary," he said, "even after Nebuchadnezzar was driven to live among the beasts because of his impieties, and after many supplications and entreaties was shown mercy and restored to human life and to his kingdom, and even though because of this he sang hymns to God as one who possesses all power and watches over mankind, right up until his death — you yourself have forgotten all this, and you have blasphemed
the divine many times over, and you have used his sacred vessels to serve wine to your concubines. God, seeing this, has grown angry with you, and through this writing he foretells the kind of end to which you must come. What the writing declares is this: MENE — this word, he said, in the Greek tongue signifies a number, meaning that God has numbered the time of your life and of your reign, and that only a little time
remains to you. TEKEL — this signifies a weight; God, having weighed the time of your reign, declares that it is already sinking down. PERES — this too, in the Greek tongue, signifies a fraction; therefore he will break your kingdom in pieces and divide it between the Medes and the Persians." When Daniel had explained to the king in this way the meaning of the writing on the wall, grief and calamity overtook Belshazzar,
as one would expect given how harsh the message revealed to him had been. Yet he did not, on account of the evils he had been told of, withhold from the man who had prophesied them the gifts he had promised to give, but bestowed them all — reasoning that the circumstances under which they would be given were his own affair and a matter of necessity, and had nothing to do with the man who had made the prophecy, whom he judged, on the strength of what had been agreed, to be a good and just man, even though
what was to come was grim. So he judged rightly: not long afterward he himself was captured, and the city was taken, when Cyrus, king of the Persians, marched against him. For it was under Belshazzar that the fall of Babylon took place, after he had reigned seventeen years. Such, then, is the end that we have learned befell the descendants of King Nebuchadnezzar. As for Darius, who together with his kinsman Cyrus put an end to
the Babylonian empire, he was sixty-two years old when he took Babylon. He was the son of Astyages, though he was known among the Greeks by a different name. He took Daniel the prophet with him to Media, granting him every honor and keeping him at his side; for Daniel was one of the three governors whom he set over the
three hundred and sixty satrapies — for that was the number Darius established for the empire. Now Daniel, holding such honor and enjoying such conspicuous favor with Darius, and being the one man Darius trusted above all others in every matter, as having the divine spirit within him, became, in being so honored, an object of envy; for those who see others held in greater honor than themselves by kings are always inclined to malice. Those who resented his high standing with Darius sought some occasion
for slander and accusation against him, but he gave them no grounds whatever; for being above money and disdaining every kind of profit, he considered it utterly shameful to accept anything even when it might rightly have been given him to take, and so he offered those who envied him no pretext for any charge against him. Since they had nothing they could report to the king that would harm him
in the honor he enjoyed from him, through shame or slander, they sought some other way to remove him from their path. Observing, then, that Daniel prayed to God three times a day, they concluded they had found the pretext by which they would destroy him. They went to Darius and reported to him that it had seemed good to his satraps and governors that for thirty days the populace should be forbidden
to petition or pray to anyone, whether man or god, other than himself, and that whoever transgressed this decree should be condemned to be thrown into the lions' den to perish. The king, not perceiving their treachery, and never suspecting that this scheme had been devised against Daniel, said he was pleased with what they had decided, and promising to ratify their proposal, published an edict
making known to the people what the satraps had resolved. All the rest, taking care not to transgress what had been commanded, kept quiet; but Daniel gave not the slightest thought to any of it, and, as was his custom, stood and prayed to God in full view of everyone. The satraps, once the pretext they had been eager to seize upon against Daniel presented itself, went at once to the king and accused
Daniel of being the only one to have transgressed the decree; for none of the others, they said, had dared to pray to their gods — not out of piety, but out of caution and self-preservation prompted by their envy. Supposing that Darius was acting out of an even greater favor toward Daniel than they had expected, so that he would readily grant him pardon even for defying his own commands, and being jealous of Daniel precisely on this account, they
would not relent toward any gentler course, but insisted that he be thrown, according to the law, into the lions' den. Darius, hoping that the divine power would rescue Daniel and that he would suffer no harm from the beasts, told him to bear what was happening with good courage; and once Daniel had been cast into the den, Darius sealed with his own seal the stone that lay across the opening in place of a door, and withdrew. Through
the whole night he neither ate nor slept, but remained in anguish over Daniel; and at daybreak he rose, went to the den, and finding the seal intact with which he had marked the stone before leaving it, opened it, and cried out, calling to Daniel and asking whether he was safe. When Daniel answered the king and said that he had suffered no harm, Darius ordered him drawn up out of the
den of beasts. His enemies, seeing that Daniel had suffered no harm, refused to attribute it to the divine and to God's providence over him, but claimed instead, thinking the lions had eaten their fill and so had not touched or approached Daniel, that this was the reason, and they said as much to the king. The king, detesting them for their wickedness, ordered a great quantity of meat thrown to the lions, and once
they were satisfied, he commanded that Daniel's enemies be thrown into the den, so that he might learn whether it was because they were full that the lions would not go near them. It became clear to Darius, once the satraps had been thrown to the beasts, that it was the divine power that had saved Daniel; for the lions spared none of them, but tore them all to pieces, as though they were ravenously hungry and starved for food. What provoked them was not
hunger, I think — since only a little before they had been gorged with abundant meat — but rather the wickedness of the men, which was evident even to these unreasoning creatures, for the sake of a punishment that came about by the choice of God. Once those who had plotted against Daniel had perished in this way, King Darius sent word throughout the whole country praising the God whom Daniel worships, and declaring that he alone
true and the only one who holds power over all things. He also held Daniel in the highest honor, appointing him first among his friends. Daniel, so distinguished and so celebrated for his reputation as one beloved of God, built at Ecbatana in Media a fortress, a most handsome piece of work and wonderfully constructed, which survives and is preserved to this day, and to those who see it looks as if it had just been built and finished on the very day someone happens to be viewing it, so fresh and undiminished is its beauty, in no way aged by so much time. For buildings suffer the same fate as men: they grow gray and lose their strength under the years, and their beauty withers. But in this fortress they bury the kings of the Medes and the Persians and the Parthians even to this day, and the man entrusted with its care is a Jewish priest, and this remains the practice down to the present day.
It is worth relating also what is most remarkable about this man, something one would marvel at on hearing it: for he was granted, as few men ever have been, both honor and glory from kings and from the people throughout his lifetime, and after his death he holds an everlasting memory. For the books he wrote and left behind are read among us still today, and from them we are convinced that Daniel spoke with God; for he did not simply go on prophesying future events, as the other prophets also did, but he even fixed the time at which these things would come to pass. And whereas the other prophets, when they foretold the harsher things, were resented by kings and people for it, Daniel was a prophet of good things to them, so that from the favorable character of his predictions he drew goodwill from everyone, while from their fulfillment he won, among the masses, both credit for truthfulness and a reputation for something divine besides. And in what he left in writing he made clear to us that the exactness and unfailing accuracy of his prophecy can be trusted:
for he says that when he was at Susa, the capital of Persia, and had gone out to the plain with his companions, an earthquake and a sudden convulsion of the earth occurred, and he was left alone, his friends having fled; he fell upon his face, thrown down onto his two hands, and then someone touched him and, as he lay there, told him to rise and to see what would happen to his countrymen after many generations. When he had risen, a great ram was shown to him, one that had sprouted many horns, the last of which was taller than the rest. Then, looking toward the west, he saw a he-goat carried through the air from that direction, which clashed with the ram and, striking with its horns, knocked it to the ground twice and trampled it. Then he saw the goat put forth from its forehead a very great horn, which, once it was broken off, gave rise to four horns turned toward each of the four winds. And from these he wrote that another, smaller horn also arose, which, as it grew, the God who was showing him these things told him would make war on his nation and destroy the city by force, and would throw into confusion the affairs of the temple and prevent the sacrifices from being offered for a period of one thousand two hundred and ninety-six days.
These things Daniel wrote that he saw in the plain at Susa, and God made clear to him the meaning of the vision as follows: the ram, he said, signified the kingdoms of the Medes and Persians, and the horns the kings who were to reign, and the last horn signified the last king; for this one would surpass all the others in wealth and glory. The goat signified that a certain king would arise from among the Greeks, who, joining battle with the Persian, would defeat him twice in battle and take over the whole empire. The great horn on the goat's forehead signified the first king, and the sprouting of the four horns after that one had fallen off, and their turning toward the four regions of the earth, signified that his successors would appear after the first king's death, each in one of these regions, and that the kingdom would be divided among them, though these were neither his sons nor his kinsmen, and that they would rule the inhabited world for many years. And from among these, he said, there would arise a certain king who would make war upon the nation and its laws, would take away their constitution based on these laws, would plunder the temple, and would prevent the sacrifices from being carried out for three years.
And indeed these very things our nation suffered at the hands of Antiochus Epiphanes, just as Daniel had seen and had written down many years beforehand that they would happen. In the same way Daniel also wrote concerning the empire of the Romans, and that it would be laid waste by them. All these things, once God had shown them to him, he wrote down and left behind, so that those who read them and observe how events turn out marvel at the honor Daniel received from God, and find from these very things that the Epicureans have gone astray, who cast providence out of life and refuse to hold that God oversees the affairs of the world, or that the universe is governed for its own preservation by that blessed and imperishable being, but say instead that the world, without a guide and without anyone caring for it, is carried along by chance.
But if the world were indeed unsteered in this way, then just as we see ships without pilots sunk by the winds, or chariots overturned when they have no one driving them, it too would long since have been shattered by uncontrolled disaster and destroyed and ruined. It seems to me, then, that those who declare that God exercises no providence at all over human affairs go badly astray from the true opinion, in the light of what was foretold by Daniel; for if the world were governed by mere chance, we would not have seen everything come to pass in accordance with his prophecy. As for myself, I have written of these matters just as I found them and read them; but if anyone wishes to judge them differently, let him hold his differing opinion without reproach from me.

======== Antiquities — Book 11 ========

How Cyrus, king of the Persians, released the Jews from Babylon and let them return home, permitting them to build the Temple and giving them funds for it. How the king's governors obstructed them, hindering the work of building the sanctuary. How, after Cyrus died, his son Cambyses took over the government and absolutely forbade the Jews to build the Temple. How Darius, son of Hystaspes, when he became king of the Persians, honored the Jewish nation and rebuilt their Temple. How, after him, his son Xerxes was likewise well disposed toward the Jews. How, in the reign of Artaxerxes, the whole Jewish nation was placed in danger. How Bagoas, the general of the younger Artaxerxes, committed many outrages against the Jews. How Alexander, king of the Macedonians, treated them kindly once he had conquered Judea. This book covers a period of two hundred and forty-three years and five months.
In the first year of the reign of Cyrus — which was the seventieth from the day our people had been driven from their homeland into Babylon — God took pity on the captivity and misfortune of those unhappy people, and, just as he had foretold them through the prophet Jeremiah before the city was destroyed, that after serving Nebuchadnezzar and his descendants and enduring that slavery for seventy years he would restore them again to their ancestral land, and they would build the Temple and enjoy their former prosperity — this he now brought about for them. For he stirred the spirit of Cyrus and moved him to write throughout all Asia as follows: "King Cyrus says this: Since God Most High has appointed me king of the inhabited world, I am persuaded that he is the one whom the nation of the Israelites worships. For he foretold my name through the prophets, and that I would build his Temple in Jerusalem, in the land of Judea."
Cyrus learned this by reading the book that Isaiah had left behind of his prophecy two hundred and ten years earlier; for Isaiah had said, in a hidden utterance, that God spoke thus: "I wish, having appointed Cyrus king over many great nations, to send my people back to their own land and to have my Temple built." This Isaiah prophesied a hundred and forty years before the Temple was torn down. When Cyrus read this and marveled at the divine word, an eager impulse and ambition seized him to carry out what was written. He summoned the most eminent of the Jews in Babylon and told them he permitted them to go to their own homeland, to rebuild the city of Jerusalem and the Temple of God; for God himself, he said, would be their ally, and he would write to the governors and satraps neighboring that region, so that they might contribute gold and silver toward the building of the Temple, and, besides these, livestock for the sacrifices.
When Cyrus announced this to the Israelites, the leaders of the two tribes, Judah and Benjamin, together with the Levites and the priests, set out eagerly for Jerusalem; for many remained behind in Babylon, unwilling to leave their possessions. And when they arrived, all the king's friends assisted them and contributed to the building of the Temple, some gold, others silver, others great numbers of livestock together with horses. They rendered their vows to God and performed the customary sacrifices according to ancient practice, as though the city were being founded anew for them and the old custom of their worship were coming back to life.
Cyrus also sent back to them the vessels of God which King Nebuchadnezzar had plundered from the Temple and carried off to Babylon. He handed these over to be brought by Mithridates, his treasurer, instructing him to give them to Abassar, so that he might keep them until the building of the Temple was finished, and once it was completed, hand them over to the priests and leaders of the people for deposit in the Temple.
Cyrus also sent a letter to the satraps in Syria, reading as follows: "King Cyrus to Sisines and Sarabasanes, greetings. Of the Jews living in my country, I have permitted those who wish to go back to their own homeland, to rebuild the city and to build the Temple of God in Jerusalem on the same site as before. I have also sent down my treasurer Mithridates and Zerubbabel, the leader of the Jews, so that they may lay the foundations of the Temple and build it sixty cubits high and the same in breadth, with three courses of polished stone and one of native timber, and likewise an altar on which they shall sacrifice to God. I wish the expense for this to be met from my own funds."
"And the vessels which King Nebuchadnezzar plundered from the Temple I have sent, having handed them over to Mithridates the treasurer and to Zerubbabel the leader of the Jews, so that they may carry them to Jerusalem and restore them to the Temple of God. Their number is as follows: fifty golden bowls for cooling wine, four hundred of silver; fifty golden goblets, four hundred of silver; fifty golden pitchers, five hundred of silver; forty golden libation bowls, three hundred of silver; thirty golden phials, two thousand four hundred of silver; and a thousand other large vessels besides. I also grant them the customary allowance from their forefathers' time of livestock and wine and oil — two hundred and fifty-five thousand drachmas — and for fine flour, twenty thousand five hundred artabas of wheat. I order that the supply of these be drawn from the tribute of Samaria."
"The priests in Jerusalem shall offer these sacred things according to the laws of Moses, and in presenting them shall pray to God for the safety of the king and his family, that the kingdom of the Persians may endure. As for those who disobey these orders and set them aside, I wish them to be crucified and their property confiscated to the crown." Such was the content of the letter. Of those who returned from the captivity and gathered at Jerusalem there were forty-two thousand four hundred and sixty-two.
While the foundations of the Temple were being laid and the people were showing great eagerness for its construction, the surrounding nations, and especially the Cutheans, whom Shalmaneser, king of the Assyrians, had brought from Persia and Media and settled in Samaria when he removed the people of Israel from their land, urged the satraps and overseers to hinder the Jews both in restoring the city and in building the Temple. And these officials, being corrupted with money, sold to the Cutheans their own neglect and laxity regarding the Jews' construction; for Cyrus, occupied with other wars, knew nothing of this, and, having gone on campaign against the Massagetae, soon after met his death.
When Cambyses, Cyrus's son, took over the kingdom, the people in Syria, Phoenicia, Ammanitis, Moab, and Samaria wrote a letter to Cambyses stating the following: "Master, your servants Rathymus, who records everything that is done, and Semelius the scribe, and the judges of the council in Syria and Phoenicia. You should know, O king, that the Jews who were led away to Babylon have come into our territory, and are building the rebellious and wicked city, repairing its marketplaces and walls, and raising up a temple. Be assured that once these things are done, they will not consent to pay tribute or submit to authority, but will resist even kings, preferring to rule rather than obey."
"Since, then, the work on the Temple is underway and being pursued eagerly, we thought it right to write to you, O king, and not overlook the matter, so that you might examine the records of your ancestors; for you will find in them that the Jews were rebels and enemies of kings, and that their city — for this very reason — lies desolate even now. We also thought it right to inform you of this, in case you are unaware of it: once the city is resettled in this way and has recovered the circuit of its walls, the road to Coele-Syria and Phoenicia will be closed to you."
When Cambyses read the letter — being by nature wicked — he was stirred by what was reported, and wrote back as follows: "King Cambyses to Rathymus, who records events, and to Beelzemus and Semelius the scribe, and to the rest who are associated with them and who live in Samaria and Phoenicia, says this. Having read the letter you sent, I ordered the records of my ancestors to be examined, and it was found that the city has always been hostile to kings, and that its inhabitants have caused uprisings and wars, and that their kings, whom we know to have been powerful and violent men, exacted tribute from Coele-Syria and Phoenicia. I have therefore given orders not to allow the Jews to build the city, lest their wickedness increase further — the wickedness which they have persistently shown toward kings."
When this letter was read, Rathymus and Semelius the scribe and their associates immediately leapt onto horses and hurried to Jerusalem, bringing a large force with them, and stopped the Jews from building the city and the Temple. And this work was suspended until the second year of the reign of Darius, king of the Persians — that is, for nine more years; for Cambyses, after reigning six years, in the course of which he subdued Egypt, died at Damascus on his way back.
After the killing of the Magi, who for one year had seized the Persian government following the death of Cambyses, the so-called seven noble houses of the Persians appointed Darius, son of Hystaspes, as king. While still a private citizen, he had vowed to God that, if he became king, he would send all the vessels of God still remaining in Babylon to the Temple in Jerusalem. It happened that at that very time Zerubbabel, who had been appointed leader of the captive Jews, had come from Jerusalem to Darius; for he had long enjoyed friendship with the king, on account of which he had, together with two others, been judged worthy to serve as one of his bodyguards, and so obtained the honor he had hoped for.
In the first year of his reign, Darius entertained lavishly and with great preparation both those of his own household and the visitors from abroad, the governors of the Medes, the satraps of Persia, the toparchs of India as far as Ethiopia, and the generals of the hundred and twenty-seven satrapies. When they had feasted to satiety and fullness, they each withdrew to their own quarters to sleep. But King Darius went to his bed and, after resting only a short while in the night, woke up, and, unable to fall asleep again, fell into conversation with his three bodyguards. To whichever of them should speak most truly and wisely on a question he himself intended to put to them, he promised to grant a prize: to wear victor's purple, to drink from golden cups, to sleep on a golden couch, to have a chariot with a golden bridle, a headdress of fine linen, and a golden necklace; and, after himself, this man would hold the seat of highest honor for his wisdom, and, he said, would be called "my kinsman." Having promised them these gifts, he asked the first whether wine is the strongest thing, the second whether kings are, and the third whether women are, or truth rather than these. Having set this question before them to consider, he fell silent.
At dawn he summoned the nobles, satraps, and toparchs of Persia and Media, and, taking his seat where he was accustomed to conduct business, ordered each of the bodyguards, in the hearing of all, to declare his opinion on the question set before them.
The first began to speak, demonstrating the power of wine in this way: "Gentlemen," he said, "in judging the strength of wine, I find that it surpasses everything, in this manner: it deceives the minds of those who drink it and leads them astray, and it makes the mind of a king like that of an orphan child in need of a guardian, and it rouses a slave's spirit to the boldness of a free man, and it makes the poor man's condition equal to the rich man's; for, once it has entered them, it transforms and remakes their souls, and it quenches the grief of those in misfortune, and brings to those burdened with others' debts a forgetting of them, making them seem to themselves the wealthiest of all men, so that they utter nothing trivial but speak only of talents and the sort of names that belong to the fortunate. Moreover, it renders generals and kings insensible, and strips away the memory of friends and companions; for it arms men even against those dearest to them and makes them seem the greatest strangers of all. And when men have become sober again, and wine has left them after a night's sleep, they rise knowing nothing of what they did while drunk. On these grounds I judge wine to be the most overpowering and violent thing of all."
When the first man, having spoken these things, finished declaring his view on the strength of wine, the one after him began to speak about the power of the king, showing this to be the strongest, surpassing all other things that seem to derive their power from either force or intelligence. He took up his demonstration from this point: he said that men rule over all things, and that they force even the land and the sea to be useful to them for whatever they wish; and over these men the kings rule and hold authority; and those who have mastery over the strongest and mightiest creature of all — man — would rightly be judged to have unsurpassed power and strength. Indeed, when they command wars and dangers for their subjects, they are obeyed, and when they send men against their enemies, these men, out of respect for the kings' power, comply; and when kings order mountains to be leveled and walls and towers torn down, those who are ordered submit both to being killed and to killing, so as not to seem to transgress the king's commands, and once victorious they bring the spoils of war to the king. And those who do not serve as soldiers but instead work the land and plow it, once they have labored and endured all the hardship of their work and reaped the harvest and gathered in the crops, bring their tribute to the king. Whatever he says and commands is done without exception, none daring to overstep it. Further, the king himself sleeps steeped in every luxury and pleasure, while he is guarded by men who stay awake, bound as if by fear; for not one of them dares to leave him sleeping and go off to see to his own affairs, but treats guarding the king as his one task,
regarding it as one of his essential duties to keep watch over the king, remains at his post for that reason. How, then, could the king fail to seem to surpass everyone else in power, when so vast a crowd obeys him at his command?
When this man too had fallen silent, the third speaker, Zorobabel, began to instruct them about women and about truth, speaking as follows: "Wine is strong, and so is the king, whom all obey, but women are more powerful still than either. It was a woman who brought the king himself into the light, and women are the ones who planted the vines that make the wine, for they are the ones who bear children and raise them. In short there is nothing we have that does not come from them, for they weave our clothing for us, and it is through them that our households are managed and cared for. We cannot be separated from women. We may amass great quantities of gold and silver and other costly and coveted things, but when we catch sight of a beautiful woman we abandon all of that, gape at the sight before us, and are ready to give up everything we own just to win and enjoy her beauty. We forsake father and mother and the very land that raised us for the sake of women, and we often forget those dearest to us on their account, and endure giving up our lives along with them. You can best appreciate the power of women this way: after all our labor and hardship, over land and sea, when something remains to us from our toil, do we not bring it and hand it over to women as though to mistresses? And I myself once saw the king, master of so much, being slapped by Rhabezacus, daughter of Themasius, his concubine, and enduring it while she took the diadem from his head and set it on her own, and smiling when she smiled and scowling when she was angry, flattering the woman and reconciling with her through these changes of mood, humbling himself utterly whenever he saw her displeased."
While the satraps and governors looked at one another over the matter of truth, he began to speak again: "I have shown," he said, "how strong women are, yet even they, and the king as well, are weaker than truth. For if the earth is vast, and the sky is high, and the sun swift, and all these things move according to the will of God, and he is true and just, then for that same reason truth must be held to be the strongest thing, with nothing unjust able to prevail against it. Furthermore, all other things that possess strength are mortal and short-lived, but truth is a thing immortal and eternal. It offers us not beauty that withers with time, nor wealth that fortune can take away, but justice and lawfulness, distinguishing what is right from what is unjust and refuting the latter."
With this Zorobabel concluded his speech on truth, and when the crowd shouted out that he had spoken best of all, and that truth alone possesses a strength that is unchanging and never grows old, the king ordered him to ask for something beyond what he himself had already promised, for he would grant it to a man proven wise and shown to be more intelligent than the rest: "You shall sit beside me," he said, "and be called my kinsman." When the king said this, Zorobabel reminded him of the vow he had made, should he obtain the kingdom: to build Jerusalem, to construct the temple of God within it, and to restore the vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had plundered and carried off to Babylon. "And this," he said, "is my request, which you now allow me to make as one judged wise and intelligent."
Delighted at this, the king rose and kissed him, and wrote to the toparchs and satraps ordering them to escort Zorobabel and those with him who were about to set out for the building of the temple. He also wrote to the people of Syria and Phoenicia to cut cedar timber and bring it down from Lebanon to Jerusalem, to help build the city with him, and he decreed that all the captives who went off to Judea should be free. He forbade his stewards and satraps to impose royal levies on the Jews, and released to them, free of tribute, the whole of the territory they should be able to occupy. He further ordered the Idumaeans, the Samaritans, and the people of Coele-Syria to give up the villages of the Jews that they held, and moreover that fifty talents be given toward the building of the temple. He permitted them to offer the customary sacrifices, and ordered that the whole provision for them, including the sacred vestments in which the high priest and the priests serve God, be furnished from his own funds, and that instruments be given to the Levites for their hymns to God. He also ordered that allotments of land be given to the guards of the city and of the temple, and a fixed sum of money each year for their sustenance, and that the vessels be sent, and everything that Cyrus before him had intended concerning the restoration of the Jews, Darius likewise ordained.
Having obtained all this from the king, Zorobabel went out from the palace, and looking up to heaven began to give thanks to God for the wisdom and for the victory he had won over it in Darius's presence: "For I would not have been thought worthy of these things," he said, "had you not, Master, granted me your favor." Having given this thanks to God for his present blessings, and having prayed that God show himself the same toward what was to come, he came to Babylon and brought his countrymen the good news of what the king had granted. When they heard it they gave thanks to God for restoring their ancestral land to them once again, and turning to drinking and feasting, they spent seven days in celebration, rejoicing over the recovery and rebirth of their homeland.
After this they chose the leaders who were to go up to Jerusalem from the ancestral tribes, together with their wives, children, and pack animals, and these, with Darius sending an escort, traveled all the way to Jerusalem amid joy and delight, with singing to the harp and the flute and the clash of cymbals around them. The rest of the Jews who remained behind escorted them on their way amid rejoicing. And so they departed, each ancestral house numbering a fixed count. I have not thought it right to list the names of the ancestral houses, so as not to distract the minds of my readers from the connected thread of events and make the narrative hard to follow. The sum total of those who set out, of those twelve years old and above from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, was four hundred sixty-two thousand and eight thousand more, and the Levites numbered seventy-four, while the women and infants together numbered forty-seven thousand seven hundred forty-two. Besides these,
there were Levite singers, one hundred twenty-eight; gatekeepers, one hundred ten; temple slaves, three hundred ninety-two; and, in addition to these, others who claimed to be Israelites but could not demonstrate their lineage, six hundred fifty-two. Also excluded were priests who had taken wives from among those held in dishonor, whose descent neither they themselves could state nor was it found in the genealogies of the Levites and priests; these numbered about five hundred twenty-five. The multitude of servants who accompanied those going up to Jerusalem numbered seven thousand three hundred thirty-seven, male and female singers two hundred forty-five, camels four hundred thirty-five, and pack animals five thousand five hundred twenty-five. The leader of this numbered multitude was Zorobabel, son of Salathiel, one of the sons of David descended from the tribe of Judah, and Jesus son of Josedek the high priest. In addition to these, Mordecai and Serebaeus, chosen leaders from among the people, also contributed a hundred minas of gold and five thousand of silver. In this way the priests, the Levites, and a portion of the whole people of the Jews who had been in Babylon settled in Jerusalem, while the rest of the multitude withdrew to their own homelands.
In the seventh month after their departure from Babylon, the high priest Jesus and Zorobabel the leader sent word around and gathered together those from the countryside to Jerusalem, everyone in full attendance and holding nothing back, and they built an altar on the site where one had previously stood, so that they might offer the customary sacrifices upon it to God according to the laws of Moses. In doing this they were not welcomed by the neighboring nations, all of whom were hostile toward them. They also observed the Feast of Tabernacles at that time, just as the lawgiver had ordained concerning it, and afterward the offerings and the so-called perpetual sacrifices, the sabbath sacrifices, and those of all the sacred feasts, and those who had made vows fulfilled them by sacrificing from the new moon of the seventh month onward. They also began the building of the temple, giving large sums of money to the stonecutters and carpenters and for the provisioning of those brought in for the work, and the Sidonians were glad and eager to bring down the cedar timber from Lebanon, binding the logs together and constructing rafts to carry them to the harbor of Joppa, for this Cyrus had first ordered, and now it was being done at Darius's command.
In the second year of their return to Jerusalem, in the second month, the construction of the temple was pressed forward, and having raised the foundations on the new moon of the second month of the second year, they built it up, placing in charge of the works those of the Levites who had already reached twenty years of age, together with Jesus and his sons and brothers, and Zodmoel, brother of Judas son of Aminadab, and his sons. The temple, thanks to the full diligence of those entrusted with its oversight, was completed sooner than anyone would have expected. When the sanctuary was finished, the priests, adorned in their customary vestments, and the Levites and the sons of Asaph, rose to the sound of trumpets and sang hymns to God, in the manner that David had first established for his praise.
But the priests and Levites and the elders of the ancestral houses, recalling in memory the former temple, how great and costly it had been, and seeing the one now built, poorer because of their poverty than the one built long ago, and reckoning how far they had fallen short of their ancient prosperity and of the temple's worth, grew downcast, and unable to master their grief over this, were driven to weeping and tears. But the people were content with what they had, giving no thought and no memory to the earlier temple, nor tormenting themselves with comparison to it as though what they now had was somehow less, and the crowd's joy drowned out the sound of the trumpets, along with the wailing of the elders and priests, who felt the temple was inferior to the one destroyed.
When the Samaritans heard the sound of the trumpets, they ran together, wanting to learn the cause of the commotion, for they happened to be hostile toward both the tribe of Judah and that of Benjamin. Learning that those who had been carried captive to Babylon were rebuilding the temple, they came to Zorobabel and Jesus and the leaders of the ancestral houses, asking to be permitted to help build the temple with them and to share in the construction. "For we worship God no less than they do," they said, "and we pray to him above all, and we have been devoted to this worship ever since the time when Salmanassar, king of the Assyrians, brought us here from Chouthia and Media."
When they had made these words, Zorobabel and Jesus the high priest and the leaders of the ancestral houses of the Israelites answered them that it was impossible for them to share in the building, since they themselves had been ordered to build the temple, first by Cyrus, and now by Darius, but that they granted them leave to worship, and this alone was to be common between them, if they so wished, and to all people who came to the temple, that they might worship God there. Hearing this, the Chuthaeans, for that is the name the Samaritans bear, took offense, and persuaded the peoples of Syria among the satraps to petition, in the same manner as they had done earlier under Cyrus and then under Cambyses, to halt the construction of the temple, and they worked to bring about delay and postponement for the Jews concerning it.
At this time, when Sisinnes, governor of Syria and Phoenicia, and Sarobazanes, together with certain others, had gone up to Jerusalem, and the leaders of the Jews were asked by what authority they were building the temple in this way, so that it was more like a fortress than a sanctuary, and why they had surrounded the city with such strongly fortified porticoes and walls, Zorobabel and the high priest Jesus said that they were servants of the greatest God, and that this temple had been built for him by a king of theirs, blessed and surpassing all others in virtue, and had stood for a long time. But when their fathers had sinned against God, Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians and Chaldeans, took the city by force, tore it down, plundered and burned the temple, and carried the people off captive to Babylon; and Cyrus, who ruled Babylonia and Persia after him, wrote an order to rebuild the temple, and, handing over to Zorobabel and to Mithridates the treasurer all the votive offerings and vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had carried off from it, ordered them to be brought to Jerusalem and restored again to the temple, once it had been rebuilt. He had ordered this to be done at once,
commanding Sabasares to go up to Jerusalem and take charge of the building of the temple; and this man, after receiving the letter from Cyrus, came at once and laid the foundations, and from that time it has been under construction right up to now, left incomplete because of the malice of its enemies. "If, then, you wish and think it right, write this to Darius, so that upon examining the royal archives he may find that we have said nothing false." When Zorobabel and the high priest had said this, Sisinnes and those with him decided not to halt the building until this had been reported to Darius, and they wrote to him about it at once. Meanwhile the Jews cowered in fear, dreading that the king might change his mind about the building of Jerusalem and the temple,
At that time there were two prophets among them, Haggai and Zechariah, who urged the people to take courage and to fear nothing untoward from the Persians, since God himself was foretelling these things. Trusting the prophets, they pressed on with the building without slackening a single day. But Darius, when the Samaritans wrote to him accusing the Jews by letter, claiming that they were fortifying the city and building the temple to look more like a fortress than a sanctuary, that these proceedings would not be to his advantage, and moreover producing the letters of Cambyses by which he had forbidden the building of the temple, learned from them that the restoration of Jerusalem would not be safe for his affairs. And when he had also read the documents brought by Sisinnes and his companions,
he ordered a search made in the royal records concerning these matters. A scroll was found at Ecbatana, in the fortress in Media, in which the following was written: in the first year of his reign King Cyrus had ordered the temple in Jerusalem built, along with the altar, sixty cubits high and the same in breadth, with courses of stone, three of hewn stone and one of native timber, the expense to be met from the king's own funds; and the vessels which Nebuchadnezzar had plundered and carried off to Babylon were to be restored to the people of Jerusalem. Oversight of these matters was entrusted to Anabassar, prefect and governor of Syria and Phoenicia, and to his colleagues, on condition that they
keep away from the place themselves and allow the servants of God, the Jews and their leaders, to build the temple. He further ordered them to assist the work, and to pay the Jews, from the tribute of the region under their charge, for sacrifices — bulls, rams, lambs, kids, fine flour, oil, wine, and whatever else
the priests should specify — and that the Jews should pray for the safety of the king and of the Persians. Anyone who transgressed any of these orders, once seized, was to be crucified, and his property confiscated to the royal estate. Cyrus had further prayed to God that if anyone should attempt to hinder the building of the temple, God himself would strike him down and restrain him from the wrong. Having found this
in the memoranda of Cyrus, Darius wrote back to Sisinnes and his companions in these words:
"King Darius to Sisinnes the governor, and to Sarabazanes and their colleagues, greeting. I have sent you the copy of the letter which I found among the memoranda of Cyrus, and I wish everything done exactly as it states there. Farewell."
On learning the king's intention from this letter, Sisinnes and his companions resolved to carry out the rest accordingly. They now oversaw the sacred works, joining with the elders of the Jews and the rulers of the community, and the construction of the temple went forward with great zeal, Haggai and Zechariah prophesying by the command of God and with the sanction of both Cyrus and Darius. It was completed
in seven years. In the ninth year of Darius's reign, on the twenty-third of the twelfth month — called Adar among us, Dystros among the Macedonians — the priests, the Levites, and the rest of the multitude of Israelites offered sacrifices renewing their former blessings, now that the captivity was past and the sanctuary had been received back restored: a hundred bulls, two hundred rams,
four hundred lambs, and twelve goats for each tribe — for that is the number of the tribes of Israel — on behalf of the sins each tribe had committed. The priests and Levites also stationed doorkeepers at each gate according to the laws of Moses, for the Jews had also built the colonnades running around the temple, on the inner side of the sanctuary. When the feast of Unleavened Bread arrived, in the first month —
called Xanthicus by the Macedonians, Nisan among us — the whole people streamed in from the villages to the city, and kept the festival, purifying themselves together with their wives and children according to the ancestral law, and having offered the sacrifice called the Passover on the fourteenth of the same month, they feasted for seven days, sparing no expense, but also
bringing burnt offerings to God and performing thank offerings, in return for which the divine will had led them home, longing as they were, to their ancestral land and to the laws it held, and had made the disposition of the Persian king favorable toward them. Those who thus lavished sacrifices and devotion on God settled in Jerusalem, living under a constitution that was aristocratic
with an admixture of oligarchy, for the high priests presided over affairs until it happened that the descendants of the Hasmoneans came to reign as kings. Before the captivity and the exile, they had been governed by kings, beginning first with Saul and David, for five hundred and thirty-two years, six months, and ten days; and before these kings, rulers called judges and single leaders had governed them, and living under this
arrangement they passed more than five hundred years after the death of Moses and of Joshua the general. Such, then, was the state of the Jews who had been brought safely back from the captivity, in the times of Cyrus and Darius. The Samaritans, however, hostile toward them and malicious, did the Jews much harm, relying on their wealth and claiming kinship with the Persians, since
they too came from there. Whatever the king had ordered paid to the Jews out of the tribute for their sacrifices, they were unwilling to provide, having governors who were only too eager to assist and cooperate with them in this; and whatever other harm they could do the Jews, either themselves or through others, they did not shrink from doing. So the people of Jerusalem resolved to send an embassy to King Darius
to bring charges against the Samaritans, and Zerubbabel and four other leaders went as ambassadors. When the king had learned from the ambassadors the accusations and charges they brought against the Samaritans, he gave them a letter to carry to the governors of Samaria, and dismissed the council. What was written was as follows:
"King Darius to Tanganas and Sambas, governors, and to Sadrakes and Boudon of the Samaritans, and to the rest of their fellow servants in Samaria. Zerubbabel, Ananias, and Mordecai, ambassadors of the Jews, have accused you of obstructing them in the building of the temple and of not supplying what I ordered you to spend on their sacrifices. I wish you, therefore, upon reading this letter, to supply them from the royal treasury of the tribute of
Samaria everything useful for sacrifices, as the priests require, so that they may not fail to sacrifice daily nor to pray to God for me and for the Persians." Such was the content of the letter. When Darius died, his son Xerxes succeeded to the kingdom, and inherited from his father his piety and honor toward God, for
he carried on everything concerning worship exactly as his father had, and was most eager in his regard for the Jews. At that time the high priest was Joakim, son of Jeshua. There was also in Babylon a righteous man enjoying a fine reputation among the multitude, called the foremost priest of God, named Ezra, who, being thoroughly versed in the laws of Moses, became a friend
to King Xerxes. Deciding to go up to Jerusalem and to bring with him some of the Jews then living in Babylon, he asked the king to give him a letter to the satraps of Syria, by which he would be made known to them for who he was. The king wrote to the satraps in the following terms:
"King of kings Xerxes to Ezra, priest and reader of the laws of God, greeting. Considering it an act of my own humanity that those who wish, from among the Jewish nation and the Levites in my kingdom, should set out together for Jerusalem, I have given this order, and let whoever wishes depart, as has seemed good both to me and to my seven counselors, so that they may look into the affairs of Judea in accordance with the law of God, and carry gifts to the God of the Israelites,
which I myself and my friends have vowed; and let all the silver and gold found in the country of Babylon that has been dedicated to God be carried to Jerusalem for God, for the sacrifices, and whatever else you wish to have made of silver and gold, you are permitted to do, together with your brethren. The sacred vessels given to you, you shall dedicate, and
whatever further you conceive of, you shall have made as well, drawing the expense from the royal treasury. I have also written to the treasurers of Syria and Phoenicia, that they attend to whatever is requested by Ezra the priest and reader of the laws of God. And so that no anger may fall upon me or my descendants from the divine, I require all
things be fulfilled for God according to the law, up to a hundred cors of wheat. And I say to you further, that you shall impose neither tribute nor anything else oppressive or burdensome upon the priests, the Levites, the sacred singers, the doorkeepers, the temple servants, or the scribes of the temple. And you, Ezra, according to the wisdom of God, appoint judges, so that
they may render judgment in all Syria and Phoenicia for those who know your law, and for those who do not, you shall provide instruction, so that if any of your countrymen transgresses the law of God or the royal law, he shall suffer punishment, as one who transgresses not through ignorance but knowingly, in bold defiance and contempt. They shall be punished either by death or by a fine
of money. Farewell." On receiving this letter, Ezra was overjoyed and began to worship God, acknowledging him as the author of the king's kindness toward him, and for this reason said that all the gratitude belonged to God. Having read the letter to the Jews present in Babylon, he kept the original himself but sent a copy of it to all his countrymen
who lived in Media. When these learned of the king's piety toward God and his goodwill toward Ezra, all of them loved him exceedingly, and many took up their possessions and came to Babylon, longing to go down to Jerusalem. But the whole body of the people of Israel remained in the country; and that is why two tribes now happen
to be subject to the Romans, in Asia and in Europe, while the ten tribes are beyond the Euphrates to this day, countless myriads whose number cannot be known. To Ezra came priests and Levites and doorkeepers and sacred singers and temple servants in great numbers. Having gathered those from the captivity on the far side of the Euphrates, and having spent three
days there, he proclaimed a fast for them, so that they might pray to God for their safety and that nothing untoward should befall them on the road, whether from enemies or from some other difficulty; for Ezra, having already told the king that God would bring them safely through, had not thought it right to ask him for cavalry to escort them. Having made
their prayers, they set out from the Euphrates on the twelfth of the first month, in the seventh year of the reign of Xerxes, and arrived at Jerusalem in the fifth month of the same year. Ezra at once handed over the sacred funds to the treasurers, who were of the priestly family: six hundred and fifty talents of silver, silver vessels weighing a hundred talents, gold vessels weighing twenty talents, and bronze vessels
more valuable than gold, weighing twelve talents; for these had been given by the king, his counselors, and all the Israelites remaining in Babylon. Having handed these over to the priests, Ezra offered to God the sacrifices customarily made from burnt offerings: twelve bulls for the common safety of the people, ninety rams, seventy-two lambs, and twelve goats for the remission of sins committed.
He also delivered the king's letters to the king's stewards and to the governors of Coele-Syria and Phoenicia. Being obliged to do what he had ordered, they honored the nation and cooperated with it in every need. All this, then, Ezra himself had planned, and it succeeded for him, since God, I think, had judged him worthy of
what he desired, on account of his goodness and righteousness. Some time later, however, certain men came to him with accusations, saying that some of the people, and even some of the priests and Levites, had transgressed the constitution and broken the ancestral laws by taking foreign wives, and had thereby thrown the priestly line into confusion, begging him to come to the defense of the laws, lest a common wrath fall on all and cast them once more into calamity. At once, in his grief, he tore
his garment, tore at his hair, tore at his beard in his distress, and threw himself to the ground, because the foremost men of the people had incurred this charge. But reflecting that if he ordered them to cast out their wives and the children born of them, he would not be heeded, he remained lying on the ground. And all the
moderate men ran to him, weeping themselves and sharing in the grief at what had happened. Rising from the ground, Ezra stretched out his hands to heaven and said he was ashamed to lift up his eyes, because of the sins the people had committed, who had cast from memory what had befallen our fathers on account of their impiety; and he called on God to preserve some seed
and remnant out of their present calamity and captivity, and to restore it once more to Jerusalem and to its own land, and to compel the kings of the Persians to take pity on them, and to forgive the sins now committed — worthy of death though they were — and, in view of God's goodness, to release even such men from punishment. And with this he ceased from his prayers.
While all who had come to him with their wives and children were still lamenting, a certain Achonius, a leading man among the Jerusalemites, came forward and said that they had sinned by taking wives from other peoples, and urged Ezra to put them all under oath to send these women away, along with the children born of them, and to have anyone who would not obey the law punished. Persuaded by this, Ezra had the heads of the priestly, Levitical, and Israelite clans swear to send away their wives and children, following Achonius's advice.
Once he had taken the oaths, he went at once from the temple to the chamber of John son of Eliashib, and ate nothing at all that day for grief, remaining there. A proclamation was then made that all who had returned from the captivity should assemble at Jerusalem, and that anyone who failed to appear within two or three days would be excluded from the community and would have his property confiscated by decision of the elders. So they assembled from the territory of Judah and Benjamin within the three days, on the twentieth of the ninth month, which the Hebrews call Xenios and the Macedonians Apellaios. They sat in the open court of the temple, the elders present as well, all miserable from the cold.
Ezra rose and accused them of having broken the law by marrying women not of their own people, but said that they would now do what was pleasing to God and advantageous to themselves by sending their wives away. They all cried out that they would do this, but said that the crowd was large, the season of the year wintry, and the task not one to be finished in a single day, or even a second. "Rather, let the leaders among them, and those living with foreign women, come forward, taking time for it, along with elders chosen from whatever place they wish, who will examine the number of those who have married." This being resolved, they began on the new moon of the tenth month to search out those living with foreign wives, and continued until the new moon of the following month.
In this inquiry they found many among the descendants of the high priest Jeshua, the priests, the Levites, and the Israelites who, giving little weight to observance of the law or to their own affection for these women, at once sent them away, and, seeking to appease God, offered sacrifices, slaughtering rams to him. It did not seem necessary to us to record their names. Having thus corrected this offense concerning the marriages of the men named, Ezra purified the practice surrounding them, so that from then on it remained fixed.
In the seventh month, when they were celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles and nearly the whole people had gathered for it, they went up to the open area of the temple by the gate facing east, and asked Ezra to read them the laws of Moses. Standing in the middle of the crowd, he read from the beginning of the day until midday. As they listened to the laws being read, they were taught to be just for the present and the future, but they grieved over the past and were moved to tears, reflecting among themselves that they would have suffered none of the evils they had experienced if they had kept the law.
Seeing them in this state, Ezra told them to go home and not weep, for it was a festival and weeping was not permitted on it; it was not lawful. He urged them instead to turn to feasting and to do what suited the festival and was pleasing to it, and told them that their repentance and grief over their past offenses would secure them safety and protection against anything similar happening again. At Ezra's urging they began to keep the festival, and doing so for eight days in booths, they returned to their homes with hymns to God, grateful to Ezra for correcting the violations of their civic order. It fell to him, after gaining this reputation among the people, to die in old age and be buried with great honor in Jerusalem. About the same time the high priest Joakim also died, and his son Eliashib succeeded to the high priesthood.
One of the Jews taken captive, a cupbearer of King Xerxes named Nehemiah, was walking before the Persian capital of Susa when he overheard some strangers who had just arrived in the city from a long journey speaking to one another in Hebrew. He approached them and asked where they had come from. When they answered that they had come from Judea, he began to ask further how the people and the capital, Jerusalem, were faring. When they said things were bad—for the walls had been razed to the ground, and the surrounding nations were doing the Jews much harm, overrunning and plundering the country by day and doing damage by night, so that many had been carried off captive from the country and from Jerusalem itself, and the roads were found full of corpses every day—Nehemiah wept in pity for the misfortune of his countrymen, and looking up to heaven said, "How long, Master, will you look on while our nation suffers this, becoming the spoil and plunder of everyone?"
While he lingered at the gate lamenting these things, someone came forward and told him that the king was already about to recline for dinner. He hurried at once, just as he was, without even washing, to attend the king at his drinking. When after dinner the king relaxed and, in a happier mood, looked at Nehemiah and saw him downcast, he asked why he was so gloomy. Nehemiah, having prayed to God to grant him favor and persuasiveness as he spoke, said, "How, O king, can I not appear like this, and not grieve in my soul, when I hear that in my homeland Jerusalem, where the tombs and monuments of my ancestors lie, the walls have been thrown to the ground and its gates burned? Grant me the favor of going there to rebuild the wall and to complete what remains of the temple."
The king agreed to grant the favor, and to send letters to the satraps instructing them to honor him and to provide every supply for whatever he wished. "Stop grieving now," he said, "and serve us joyfully from now on." So Nehemiah, having bowed in worship to God and thanked the king for his promise, cleared the gloom and distress from his face through his pleasure at what had been promised. The next day the king summoned him and gave him a letter to carry to Addaeus, the governor of Syria, Phoenicia, and Samaria, in which he had written concerning the honor due Nehemiah and the supplies for the building work.
So, having come to Babylon and taken with him many of his countrymen who followed him willingly, he arrived at Jerusalem in the twenty-fifth year of Xerxes's reign. Having shown God the letters, he delivered them to Addaeus and the other governors, and, calling together all the people to Jerusalem, he stood in the middle of the temple and addressed them in these words: "Men of Judea, you know that God has remained faithful in remembrance of our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and through their righteousness has not abandoned his providence for you. Indeed, he helped me obtain authority from the king to raise your wall and to complete what remains of the temple."
"I want you to know clearly the hostility of the surrounding nations toward us, and that if they learn we are eager about this building work, they will oppose it and contrive many obstacles against it. So trust in God first, as those who will withstand their hatred as well, and neither by day nor by night give up the building, but with all diligence keep the work going continuously, since the time is our own." Having said this, he at once ordered the officials to measure the wall and to distribute the labor on it among the people by village and by city, according to what each could manage, and, promising that he himself with his own household would join in the building, he dismissed the assembly. And the Jews prepared themselves for the work. They had been called by this name from the day they went up from Babylon, from the tribe of Judah, which, being the first to come to those regions, gave its name to both the people and the land.
When the Ammonites, Moabites, Samaritans, and all who dwelt in Coele-Syria heard that the building of the walls was being pressed forward, they took it hard, and kept contriving plots against the Jews to hinder their purpose. They killed many of the Jews and sought to destroy Nehemiah himself, hiring some foreigners to kill him. They also threw the people into fear and confusion, spreading rumors that many nations were about to make war on them, and, terrified by this, the people came close to abandoning the building. But none of this shook Nehemiah from his zeal for the work; rather, surrounding himself with a body of guards for his protection, he endured tirelessly, insensible to hardship because of his desire for the work.
So intently and providently did he look to his own safety, not out of fear of death, but out of conviction that after his death the walls would never again rise for his fellow citizens. He next ordered the builders to work girded with weapons: the builder carried a sword, as did the one carrying materials, and he had shields set close beside them, and stationed trumpeters at intervals of five hundred feet, instructing them, if the enemy appeared, to signal this to the people so that they might arm themselves and fight, and not be caught unarmed. He himself went about the circuit of the city by night, sparing himself nothing in labor, diet, or sleep, for he did none of these things for pleasure but out of necessity.
And he endured this hardship for two years and four months, for in that time the wall of Jerusalem was rebuilt, in the twenty-eighth year of Xerxes's reign, in the ninth month. When the walls were finished, Nehemiah and the people sacrificed to God for the building of them and spent eight days feasting. The nations settled in Syria were distressed when they heard that the building of the walls had reached its end.
Seeing the city thinly populated, Nehemiah urged the priests and Levites to leave the countryside and move into the city and remain there, building houses for them at his own expense; and he ordered the farming population to bring the tithes of their produce to Jerusalem, so that the priests and Levites, having a continuous supply of food, would not abandon their service. The people gladly obeyed what Nehemiah ordered, and in this way the city of Jerusalem came to be more populous. Having accomplished many other good and praiseworthy things, Nehemiah died, having reached old age. He was a man of good and just nature, and most devoted to his countrymen, leaving behind an eternal monument in the walls of Jerusalem. These things happened, then, in the reign of Xerxes.
When Xerxes died, the kingdom passed to his son Cyrus, whom the Greeks call Artaxerxes. Under his rule the entire nation of the Jews, with their wives and children, came close to perishing. We shall soon explain the reason, for it is fitting to relate first the affairs of the king, how he married a Jewish woman of royal descent, who is said to have saved our nation.
When Artaxerxes had taken the kingdom and appointed governors over the satrapies, one hundred and twenty-seven in number, extending from India to Ethiopia, in the third year of his reign he received his friends, the Persian nobles, and their leaders, and entertained them lavishly, as befits a king wishing to display his wealth, for one hundred and eighty days. Then he feasted the nations and their envoys at Susa for seven days.
The banquet was arranged in this manner: he set up a pavilion of gold and silver columns, over which he spread hangings of linen and purple, so that many thousands could recline there. They were served in golden cups and in vessels made of precious stone, fashioned both for pleasure and for display. He ordered the attendants not to force the drink upon the guests continually, as is done among the Persians, but to let each of those reclining indulge as he wished.
He also sent word throughout the country that people should be released from their labors and hold festival for many days in honor of his reign. Likewise, among the women, Queen Vashti held a banquet in the palace, and the king, wishing to display her to his guests, sent and ordered her to come to the banquet, since she surpassed all women in beauty. But out of observance of the Persian law, which forbade women to be seen by strangers, she did not go to the king, and though he repeatedly sent eunuchs to her, she still refused, declining to come, until the king, roused to anger, broke off the banquet, and, rising, summoned the seven Persians who have the interpretation of the laws among them, and had them accuse the woman, saying that he had been insulted by her, for though summoned by him many times to the banquet she had not once obeyed.
He ordered them to declare what law they determined applied against her. One of them, named Mouchaeus, said that this insult had been done not to him alone but to all Persians, who risked living out their lives despised and scorned by their wives, for no woman would feel any reverence for the husband she lived with if the queen's arrogance toward you, the ruler of all, were held up as an example. He urged that the one who had insulted him so should be made to pay a heavy penalty, and that this being done, word of what had been decreed concerning the queen should be proclaimed to the nations. It was decided to depose Vashti and to give her honor to another woman.
Being now disposed toward her with passionate feeling and unable to bear
The separation from her he could not undo because of the law, but he went on grieving over what he wanted and could not have. Seeing him so distressed, his friends advised him to give up his memory and longing for the woman, since it did him no good, and instead to send men throughout the whole world to search out beautiful young women, of whom whichever was judged best would be his wife; for the affection he felt for the former queen would be quenched by the introduction of another, and the goodwill he had for her would gradually be drawn away by the one now with him.
Persuaded by this counsel, he ordered certain men to select the young women of his kingdom renowned for beauty and bring them to him. When many had been gathered, there was found in Babylon a girl, orphaned of both parents, being raised by her uncle Mordecai — for that was his name. He was of the tribe of Benjamin, one of the leading men among the Jews. Esther, for that was her name, surpassed all the others in beauty, and the grace of her face drew the eyes of those who looked on her more than the rest. She was handed over to one of the eunuchs for care, and she received every attention, with abundance of perfumes and costly ointments with which her body was anointed as required.
Four hundred women in all enjoyed this treatment for six months. When the king judged that the young women had received sufficient care in the appointed time and were now fit to go to the king's bed, he sent one to him each day to spend the night with him. As soon as he had lain with her, he sent her back to the eunuch.
When Esther came to him, he was delighted with her, and falling in love with the girl he took her lawfully as his wife and held the wedding in the twelfth month of the seventh year of his reign, the month called Adar. He sent out the couriers called angaroi to every nation, commanding them to celebrate his marriage, and he himself feasted the Persians, the Medes, and the leading men of the nations for a whole month in honor of his wedding. When she was brought into the palace he set the diadem on her, and so Esther became his consort, without making known to him the people from which she came.
Her uncle moved from Babylon to Susa in Persia and spent every day there, staying near the palace and inquiring after the girl, how she was faring — for he loved her as his own daughter.
The king also made a law that none of his own people should approach him uncalled whenever he sat on his throne. Men bearing axes stood around his throne to punish anyone who approached without being summoned. The king himself, however, sat holding a golden rod, which, whenever he wished to spare one of those who approached uncalled, he extended toward him; and whoever touched it was safe. On these matters we have said enough.
Some time later, when Bagathous and Theodositus plotted against the king, Barnabazus, a servant of one of the eunuchs and by birth a Jew, learned of the plot and reported it to his master's uncle, and Mordecai, through Esther, made the conspirators known to the king. The king, alarmed, investigated and found the truth; he had the eunuchs crucified, but for the moment gave Mordecai nothing for having been the cause of his deliverance, except that he ordered his name to be recorded by those who kept the chronicles, and that he remain at the palace as a most trusted friend of the king.
Now Haman, son of Hammedatha, by race an Amalekite, whenever he came before the king was bowed to by both the foreigners and the Persians, this honor having been ordered for him by Artaxerxes. But Mordecai, because of his wisdom and the law of his own people, would not bow to a man. Watching him closely, Haman asked where he was from, and on learning that he was a Jew, he was indignant and said to himself that while free Persians bowed to him, this man, a mere slave, did not think it right to do so.
Wanting to punish Mordecai, he thought it too small a thing to ask the king for his punishment alone, and resolved instead to wipe out his whole nation; for by nature he hated the Jews, since the people of the Amalekites, from whom he himself descended, had been destroyed by them. So he came before the king and accused the Jews, saying that theirs was a wicked nation, scattered throughout the whole world he ruled, mingling with no one, sharing neither the same religion as others nor using the same laws, hostile in its customs and practices both to his people and to all mankind.
"This nation — if you wish to grant your subjects some benefit — you should order destroyed root and branch, leaving not even a remnant of it, whether kept for slavery or for captivity. But so that you may suffer no loss of the tribute they pay, I myself promise from my own estate to give forty thousand talents of silver, wherever you order. This money I offer gladly, so that from it the kingdom may be freed from these troubles."
When Haman had made this request, the king granted him both the silver and the people, to do with them as he wished. Having obtained what he desired, Haman at once sent out a decree in the king's name to all the nations, worded in this way: "The great king Artaxerxes writes this to the governors of the hundred and twenty-seven satrapies from India to Ethiopia.
"Having ruled many nations and gained mastery of the whole world I wished to control, and having never, through the arrogance that power brings, been forced into harshness toward my subjects, but having shown myself fair and mild, providing for their peace and good order, I have sought how they might all enjoy the benefit of this. Since the man who holds the first place of honor and esteem with me for his prudence and justice,
"and who ranks second after me for his loyalty and steady goodwill — Haman — has shown me, out of his solicitude, that a nation hostile to all mankind, at odds with the laws, disobedient to kings, at variance in its customs, hating monarchy, and ill-disposed to our government, has been mixed in among all peoples, I command that those pointed out by Haman, my second father, be destroyed together with their wives and children, with no pity shown,
"nor should anyone, out of mercy, disobey what has been written by yielding to a plea beyond what has been commanded. I wish this to happen on the fourteenth day of the twelfth month of the present year, so that our enemies everywhere, destroyed in a single day, may henceforth allow us to live out our lives in peace."
When this order had been carried to the cities and the countryside, all were ready for the destruction of the Jews on the appointed day; and this was pressed forward in Susa as well. The king and Haman gave themselves to feasting and drinking, while the city was in turmoil.
Mordecai, on learning what was happening, tore his clothing, put on sackcloth, poured ashes over himself, and went through the city crying out that a nation guilty of no wrong was being destroyed. Still saying this, he came to the palace and stood before it, for he was not permitted to enter clothed in such a garment. All the Jews in the cities where the decree had been posted did the same, mourning and lamenting the calamities announced against them.
When some reported to the queen that Mordecai stood before the court in so pitiable a state, she was troubled at the report and sent men to change his clothing. When he would not consent to remove the sackcloth — for it was no small grief that had forced him to take it up, and it could not simply be laid aside — she summoned the eunuch Achratheus, who happened to be present with her, and sent him to Mordecai to learn what misfortune had befallen him that he mourned and wore this garb, and would not remove it even at her urging.
Mordecai showed the eunuch the cause: the decree against the Jews sent throughout the whole country under the king's rule, and the promise of money by which Haman had bought from the king the destruction of the nation. He gave him also a copy of the notice posted in Susa to bring to Esther, and charged her to petition the king about it and, for the sake of the nation's deliverance, not to think it beneath her to take on a humble bearing by which she might plead for the Jews who were in danger of destruction;
for the man who held second honor with the king, Haman, had accused them and provoked the king against them. Learning this, Esther sent word back to Mordecai that she had not been summoned by the king, and that whoever entered his presence uncalled dies, unless he chooses to spare someone and holds out the golden rod — for the one to whom the king does this when he approaches uncalled does not die but obtains pardon and is saved.
When the eunuch brought these words back to Mordecai from Esther, he told him to say to her that she should not look to her own safety alone but to the common safety of the nation; for if she neglected this now, help would certainly come to him from God, but she and her father's house would be destroyed along with the rest for their neglect.
Esther sent the same servant back to Mordecai with word that he should go to Susa and gather the Jews there into an assembly, and that all should fast, abstaining from everything, on her behalf for three days; she herself, doing the same with her handmaids, would then go in to the king contrary to the law, and if she must die for it, she would endure it.
So Mordecai, following Esther's instructions, made the people fast, and himself entreated God not even now to overlook his nation as it perished, but, just as he had cared for it many times before and forgiven its sins, so now to rescue it from the destruction announced against it; for it was in no wrongdoing of its own that it faced this shameful death, but he himself was the cause of Haman's anger,
since — "because I would not bow down, master," he said, "and give him the honor I give to you, and could not bring myself to grant him that honor, he grew angry and, out of this, has plotted this scheme against those who do not transgress your laws." The people raised the same cries,
calling on God to provide for their safety and to deliver the Israelites in every land from the calamity about to fall on them, for they already saw it before their eyes and were expecting it. Esther too entreated God according to the custom of her people, throwing herself to the ground, putting on mourning garments, and for three days abstaining from food, drink, and every pleasure, asking God to have mercy on her
and to grant that when she was seen by the king she might, by both means at once, be persuasive in her words and lovelier in appearance than she had ever been — so that she might use both her plea to turn aside his anger, should the king be provoked against her, and her advocacy on behalf of her countrymen now tossed on the very edge of ruin, and so that hatred might arise in the king against the enemies of the Jews,
who were contriving destruction for them, should they be neglected by him. Having entreated God in this way for three days, she then took off that mourning garment and changed her appearance, and adorned as a queen ought to be, with two handmaids — one of whom bore her up lightly as she leaned on her, while the other followed, holding up with the tips of her fingers the deep, trailing hem of her gown that spread to the ground —
she came before the king, her face full of a blush, but wearing an expression at once gentle and dignified beneath her beauty. She entered his presence in fear. But when she came opposite him as he sat on the throne, arrayed in his royal ornament — this consisted of richly worked robes, gold, and precious stone — he seemed more terrible,
and all the more so for these very things when she looked at him, and as he too glanced at her rather harshly, his face still inflamed with anger, a faintness at once overcame her, and she collapsed, senseless, into the arms of those standing beside her. But the king, by the will of God I think, changed his mind, and, fearing for the woman lest she suffer some harm from her fright, leapt up from his throne,
and, catching her in his arms, revived her, embracing her and speaking to her gently, urging her to take heart and to suspect nothing grim in the fact that she had come to him uncalled; for that law, he said, was laid down for his subjects, while she, who reigned equally with him, enjoyed complete freedom from it. As he said this he placed her scepter in her hand and extended his rod toward her neck,
releasing her from the fear the law required. Reviving at this, she said, "My lord, I cannot easily tell you what suddenly came over me; for when I saw you, so great, so handsome, and so terrible, my breath at once failed me and I was abandoned by my own spirit." As she said even this with difficulty and in a faint voice,
anguish and agitation seized him too, and he encouraged Esther to take heart and to expect better things, promising that he would grant her even half his kingdom, should she need it. But Esther asked that he come to a banquet with his friend Haman, saying that she had prepared a dinner for him. When he assented and they were present, in the midst of the drinking he told Esther
to make known to him what she wanted, for she would fail in nothing, even if she wished to take half the kingdom. But she put off telling him her wish until the next day, if he would come to her again for a banquet, together with Haman. When the king had agreed, Haman went out overjoyed that he alone had been thought worthy to dine with the king at Esther's table, and because
no one else received such honor from the kings. But seeing Mordecai in the courtyard he grew furious, since Mordecai showed him no mark of honor even on catching sight of him. Going in to his own house, he called for his wife Zeresh and his friends, and in their presence recounted the honor he enjoyed not only from the king but from the queen as well; for that very day
When he had dined with her alone, together with the king, he would be invited back again the next day. He said too that he took no pleasure in seeing the Jew Mordecai in the courtyard. His wife Zosara told him to order a beam cut, sixty cubits long, and in the morning to ask the king for leave to impale Mordecai on it. Pleased with the plan, he ordered his servants to prepare the beam and set it up in
the courtyard, ready for Mordecai's punishment. This was all made ready; but God laughed at Haman's wicked hope, and knowing what was to happen, took pleasure in what was coming. For that very night he took sleep away from the king. Unwilling to let his wakefulness pass idly, but wanting to spend it on some matter of use to the kingdom, the king had his secretary bring
the records of the kings before him and of his own deeds, and ordered him to read them aloud. As the secretary brought them and read, it was found that a certain man had received an estate as a reward for valor, his name being recorded there. He also mentioned another who had been granted a gift for loyalty, and came to the case of Gabathas and Theodestes, the eunuchs who had plotted against the king, whose informer had been Mordecai. When
the secretary had said only this and was moving on to another matter, the king stopped him, asking whether the man had not been given some reward recorded for this. The secretary said there was none. The king ordered him to be silent, and asked those appointed for the purpose what hour of the night it was. Learning that it was already dawn, he ordered that whichever of his friends they should find already present before the courtyard
should be brought in to him. It happened that Haman was the one found there; for he had come earlier than his usual hour to ask the king for Mordecai's death. When the attendants said that Haman was before the courtyard, the king ordered him called in. When he had entered, the king said, "Since I know that you alone are well disposed toward me, I ask your advice: how might I honor someone whom I love greatly,
in a manner worthy of my own greatness of spirit?" Haman, reasoning that whatever counsel he gave would be given on his own behalf—for he supposed himself alone to be loved by the king—made known what he thought was the best plan. He said, "If you wish to surround with glory the man you say you love, have him ride on horseback wearing your own robe and a golden collar, and have
one of your closest friends go before him proclaiming through the whole city that this is the honor bestowed on the man whom the king delights to honor." So Haman gave this counsel, thinking that this reward would fall to himself. The king, pleased with the advice, came forward and said, "You have the horse, the robe, and the collar. Go seek out Mordecai the
Jew, and give these things to him, leading his horse yourself; for you, he said, are my dear friend—be his attendant, since you have proven a good counselor. This shall be his reward from us for saving my life." Hearing this, against all expectation, Haman's mind was thrown into confusion, and, struck with helplessness, he went out leading the horse, the purple robe, and the golden collar, and
finding Mordecai before the courtyard dressed in sackcloth, he ordered him to put it off and put on the purple robe. Mordecai, not knowing the truth but thinking he was being mocked, said, "Worst of men, do you mock our misfortunes like this?" But when he was persuaded that the king had truly given him this honor in return for the safety he had provided by exposing the eunuchs who had plotted against him, he put on the purple robe
which the king himself always wore, and put on the collar, and mounting the horse rode around the city with Haman going before him and proclaiming that this would be done by the king's order for whomever he loved and judged worthy of honor. When they had gone all around the city, Mordecai went in to the king, while Haman, from shame, went home,
and with tears told his wife and friends what had happened. They said he could no longer defend himself against Mordecai, for God was with him. While they were still talking with one another about this, the eunuchs of Esther arrived, hurrying Haman to the banquet. Sabuchadas, one of the eunuchs, having seen the stake set up in Haman's house,
which they had prepared for Mordecai, and having learned from one of the servants for whom it had been prepared, realized it was meant for the queen's uncle—for Haman was intending to ask the king for it, for his punishment—but for the time being he kept quiet. When the king, feasting with Haman, asked the queen to tell him what gift she wished to receive,
assuring her she would obtain whatever she desired, she lamented the danger to her people and said she had been handed over to destruction along with her nation, and that this was why she was speaking of the matter; for she would not have troubled him if they had merely been ordered sold into bitter slavery—that would have been a moderate evil—but she begged to be delivered from this. When the king asked by whom this had been done,
she now openly accused Haman, charging that he, being wicked, had contrived this plot against them. The king, disturbed at this, sprang up from the banquet and went out into the gardens, while Haman began to beg Esther and implore her to forgive his wrongdoing; for he now understood that he was in trouble. He fell upon her couch
and was pleading with the queen when the king came back in, and, all the more provoked at the sight, said, "Worst of all men, do you even try to force my wife?" At this Haman was struck with terror and could no longer say a word. Then Sabuzanes the eunuch came forward and accused Haman, saying he had found a stake set up at Haman's house, prepared for Mordecai—for the servant, when asked,
had told him this, when he had come to summon him to the banquet—and he said the stake was sixty cubits high. When the king heard this, he decided on no other punishment for Haman than the one devised for Mordecai, and ordered that he be hanged from that very stake and put to death at once. Hence I am led to marvel at the divine
and to observe its wisdom and justice, in that it not only punished Haman's wickedness, but made the very punishment he had contrived against another fall upon himself, teaching everyone else to understand that whatever a man prepares against another he unknowingly prepares first against himself. Thus Haman, through the immoderate use of the honor the king gave him, was destroyed in this manner,
and the king gave his estate to the queen. He then summoned Mordecai—for Esther had revealed to him her kinship with him—and gave him the ring he had given to Haman. The queen also gave Mordecai Haman's property, and begged the king to free the Jewish nation from the fear for their lives, disclosing what had been written throughout
the country by Haman son of Hammedatha; for since her homeland had been destroyed and her kinsmen were perishing, she said she could not bear to go on living. The king promised that nothing unpleasant would happen to her, nor anything contrary to what she was eager for, and ordered her to write whatever she wished concerning the Jews in the king's name and, having sealed it with his ring, to send it throughout the kingdom; for
those who read letters secured with the royal seal would not oppose anything written in them. So he summoned the royal scribes and ordered them to write to the nations concerning the Jews, and to the stewards and governors of the hundred and twenty-seven satrapies from India to Ethiopia. What was written ran in this manner: "The great king Artaxerxes, to the governors and those loyal to us,
greetings. Many men, because of the greatness of the benefits and honor which they enjoyed through the excessive kindness of their benefactors, not only grow insolent toward their inferiors, but do not hesitate to wrong even those who benefited them, stripping gratitude from among men, and through tastelessness, thinking that the surfeit of goods they did not expect will let them escape the notice of the divine in these matters and
escape justice from it. And some of these, entrusted by their friends with the management of affairs, and holding private hatred toward certain persons, have deceived those in power with false charges and slanders, and persuaded them to take up anger against people who had done no wrong, by which they were brought into danger of destruction. This is a thing to be seen not from more ancient times nor known to us only by hearsay, but from
what has been dared before our own eyes—so that from now on we should pay no heed to slanders and accusations, nor to what others attempt to persuade us of, but should judge according to what each man himself knows to have been done, punishing where such things are so, but showing favor where matters stand otherwise, holding to the deeds themselves and not to those who speak of them. As for Haman, son of Hammedatha, an Amalekite by race,
a stranger to Persian blood, who, received among us as a guest, enjoyed our kindness toward all so greatly that he came to be called my father and continued to be bowed down to, and to receive after us the second place of royal honor from everyone—he did not bear his good fortune, nor did he manage the greatness of his blessings with sound judgment, but plotted against my kingdom and my life,
seeking to remove from me the man responsible for my authority, and by wicked and deceitful means sought the destruction of my benefactor and savior Mordecai and of Esther, the partner of my life and my rule; for by this means, having stripped me of those loyal to me, he intended to turn the kingdom over to others. But I, having recognized that the Jews handed over to destruction by that accursed man are not wicked,
but conduct themselves in the best manner as citizens and hold fast to God, who has preserved the kingdom for me and for our ancestors, not only release them from the punishment contained in the earlier letters, which you will do well to disregard, but also wish them to receive every honor; and the man who contrived these things against them I have impaled before the gates of Susa, together with
his family, God who watches over all things having brought this judgment upon him. I command you, having set up a copy of this letter throughout the whole kingdom, to allow the Jews to live by their own laws in peace, and to help them so that they may take vengeance on those who wronged them in their time of misfortune, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is Adar, on that same day;
for God has made this day one of salvation instead of destruction for them. It is a good reminder for those loyal to us, and a memorial of the punishment of those who plotted against them. I wish every city and every nation to know that if anyone disregards what has been written, he will be consumed by fire and sword. Let what has been written be posted throughout the whole country subject to us, and let all make ready for
the appointed day, so that they may take vengeance on their enemies." The horsemen carrying the letters set out at once and hastened along the road before them. Mordecai, having put on the royal robe and set the golden crown upon his head and the collar around his neck, went forth; and the Jews in Susa, seeing him so honored by the king, took his good fortune
as shared by all. Joy and a light of salvation attended both the Jews in the city and those throughout the country as the king's letters were published, so much so that many of the other nations, out of fear of the Jews, had themselves circumcised and thereby secured their own safety. For on the thirteenth of the twelfth month, which among the Hebrews is called
Adar, and among the Macedonians Dystros, those who carried the king's letters made known that on the very day they themselves had expected to be in danger, they should instead destroy their enemies. The rulers of the satrapies, the governors, the kings, and the scribes held the Jews in honor; for the fear that came from Mordecai compelled them to act prudently. When the royal
letter had gone throughout the whole country subject to him, it happened that the Jews in Susa killed about five hundred of their enemies. When the king told Esther the number of those who had perished, and asked, being uncertain what had happened in the country and what she wished to be done further—for it would be carried out—she asked that the Jews be permitted
to deal in the same way with the enemies still remaining on the following day as well, and that the ten sons of Haman be impaled. The king granted this to the Jews, being unable to refuse Esther anything; and they, gathering again on the fourteenth of the month of Dystros, killed about three hundred of their opponents, and touched none of the property belonging to them. There also died
at the hands of the Jews in the country and in the other cities seventy-five thousand of their enemies. These they killed on the thirteenth of the month, and made the following day a festival. Likewise the Jews in Susa, gathering on the fourteenth and the day following in the same month, feasted together. For this reason the Jews throughout
the whole world still celebrate these days, sending portions of food to one another. Mordecai wrote to the Jews living in the kingdom of Artaxerxes to observe these days and keep them as a festival, and to hand them down to their descendants so that the festival should last for all time and not be lost through forgetfulness; for it was right,
since they had been intended to perish on these very days at Haman's hands, that having escaped the danger in them and having taken vengeance on their enemies, they should observe them, giving thanks to God. For this reason the Jews celebrate the aforesaid days, calling them Purim. Mordecai was great and illustrious at the king's court, and shared with him the administration of the kingdom, enjoying at the same time
For the Jews, too, things turned out through them far better than anyone had hoped. Such, then, was the outcome of these affairs under the reign of Artaxerxes.
When the high priest Eliashib died, his son Jodas succeeded to the high priesthood. And when he too died, his son John received the office—the same John on whose account Bagoses, the general of the other Artaxerxes, defiled the temple and imposed tribute on the Jews, requiring them, before offering the daily sacrifices, to pay fifty drachmas from the public funds for every lamb.
The cause of this came about as follows. John had a brother named Jesus. Bagoses, being on friendly terms with him, promised to secure the high priesthood for him. Relying on this assurance, Jesus quarreled with John in the temple and provoked his brother to such a pitch that John killed him. It was a terrible thing that a man should commit so monstrous an impiety against his own brother in the sanctuary itself, worse than anything done before it—so much so that neither among the Greeks nor among barbarians had so savage and impious a deed ever occurred. But the divine did not overlook it: the people were enslaved on this very account, and the temple was defiled by the Persians.
Bagoses, the general of Artaxerxes, learning that John the high priest of the Jews had murdered his own brother Jesus in the temple, at once came upon the Jews in a rage and began to say, "You have dared to commit murder in your own temple!" And when he tried to enter the sanctuary, they tried to stop him. But he said to them, "Am I not purer than the man who was killed in the temple?" And having said this, he went into the sanctuary. Using this pretext, Bagoses harassed the Jews for seven years over the death of Jesus.
When John's life came to its end, his son Jaddus succeeded to the high priesthood. He too had a brother, named Manasses. To this man Sanaballetes—a Cuthean by birth, from whom the Samaritans are descended, who had been sent to Samaria as satrap by Darius, the last king—gladly gave in marriage his own daughter, called Nicaso, thinking that this match would serve as a pledge to secure for himself the goodwill of the whole Jewish nation.
At this same time Philip, king of the Macedonians, was treacherously murdered at Aegae by Pausanias, of the family of the Orestae. His son Alexander received the kingdom and, crossing the Hellespont, defeated Darius's generals in battle at the Granicus; then, advancing through Lydia, enslaving Ionia, and overrunning Caria, he pressed on into the regions of Pamphylia, as has been shown elsewhere.
Now the elders of Jerusalem, deeply offended that the brother of the high priest Jaddus was married to a foreign woman and yet shared in the high priesthood, rose up in opposition to him. For they considered his marriage a stepping-stone for those who might wish to transgress the laws concerning marriage to foreign women, and that it would be the beginning of fellowship with foreigners for the whole people. They held, moreover, that their earlier captivity and their misfortunes had been caused precisely by certain men's offenses in the matter of marriages, and by their taking wives who were not of their own people. They therefore demanded that Manasses either divorce his wife or else not approach the altar.
When the high priest, sharing the people's indignation, barred his brother from the altar, Manasses went to his father-in-law Sanaballetes and told him that, though he loved his wife Nicaso, he was unwilling to be deprived, on her account, of the priestly honor, which was the greatest dignity in the nation and remained fixed within his family line. Sanaballetes promised not only to preserve the priesthood for him but also to secure for him the power and honor of a high priest, and to appoint him governor of all the territory he himself ruled, provided he consent to marry his daughter—and he said he would build a temple like the one at Jerusalem on Mount Garizein, the highest of the mountains of Samaria, and that he would do this with the approval of King Darius.
Elated by these promises, Manasses stayed on with Sanaballetes, believing he would obtain the high priesthood as a gift from Darius—for it happened that Sanaballetes was already an old man. But since many priests and Israelites had become entangled in such marriages, no small disturbance gripped the people of Jerusalem, for all of them began to go over to Manasses, Sanaballetes supplying them with money, allotting them land for farming and settlement, and in every way courting favor with his son-in-law.
At this same time Darius, hearing that Alexander had crossed the Hellespont, defeated his satraps in the battle at the Granicus, and was advancing farther, gathered together an army of cavalry and infantry, resolved to meet the Macedonians before they could overrun the whole of Asia. So he crossed the river Euphrates, passed over the Taurus range in Cilicia, and waited at Issus in Cilicia to meet the enemy there in battle.
Sanaballetes, delighted at Darius's advance, at once told Manasses that he would fulfill his promises as soon as Darius, having defeated the enemy, returned—for he was convinced, as were all the people of Asia, that the Macedonians, given the size of the Persian forces, would not even come to close quarters with the Persians. But it turned out otherwise than they expected: the king engaged the Macedonians and was defeated, losing much of his army; his mother, his wife, and his children were taken captive, and he himself fled into Persia.
Alexander, having come into Syria, took Damascus, and after mastering Sidon laid siege to Tyre. He also sent letters demanding that the high priest of the Jews send him aid, supply provisions for his army, and give to him whatever gifts they had previously paid to Darius, choosing the friendship of the Macedonians instead—for otherwise, he said, they would come to regret it. But the high priest answered the letter-bearers that he had given oaths to Darius not to bear arms against him, and that he would not break these oaths so long as Darius remained alive. Hearing this, Alexander was enraged; yet he decided not to abandon Tyre, which was on the point of being taken, but resolved that, once he had reduced it, he would march against the high priest of the Jews and teach everyone whose oaths they ought to keep. Accordingly, prosecuting the siege with still greater vigor, he took Tyre.
Having settled affairs there, he advanced against the city of the people of Gaza and laid siege to Gaza and to its garrison commander, named Babemesis.
Sanaballetes, judging the moment favorable for his design, now openly renounced Darius. Taking eight thousand of his subjects, he went over to Alexander and, finding him just beginning the siege of Tyre, told him that he was handing over to him the territories under his own command and that he would gladly accept him as master in place of King Darius. Alexander received him gladly, and Sanaballetes, now emboldened concerning the matter he had in view, brought the subject to him, explaining that he had as a son-in-law Manasses, brother of Jaddus, the high priest of the Jews, and that many others of his countrymen with him wished now to build a temple in the territory under his rule. This, he said, would also be advantageous to the king, since it would divide the strength of the Jews in two, so that the nation, being neither of one mind nor united, would not prove troublesome to kings should it ever attempt revolt—just as had happened before to the rulers of the Assyrians.
Alexander consented, and Sanaballetes, applying all his energy to the task, built the temple and installed Manasses as its priest, considering this the greatest privilege he could confer on his future grandchildren through his daughter. But when seven months had passed in the siege of Tyre and two in that of Gaza, Sanaballetes died.
Alexander, having taken Gaza, was eager to go up against the city of Jerusalem. When the high priest Jaddus heard this, he was in anguish and fear, at a loss how he should meet the Macedonians, since the king was angered at his earlier refusal to obey. He therefore ordered the people to offer supplication, and together with them offered sacrifice to God, begging him to shield the nation and deliver it from the dangers now approaching. When he had gone to sleep after the sacrifice, God spoke to him in a dream, telling him to take courage, to crown the city with garlands and open its gates, and that the people should go out to meet Alexander dressed in white, while he himself, together with the priests, should go out in their prescribed vestments, expecting to suffer nothing terrible, since God himself was watching over them.
Rising from sleep, he rejoiced greatly, made known to everyone the message he had received, did all that had been commanded him in the dream, and awaited the king's arrival.
Learning that Alexander was not far from the city, he went out with the priests and the body of the citizens to meet him with a reception fitting the sanctuary and unlike that of any other nation, at a place called Sapha. This name, translated into Greek, means "lookout," for from there one could see both Jerusalem and the temple.
Now the Phoenicians and the Chaldeans who accompanied the army, expecting the king's anger to give them license to plunder the city and put the high priest to a shameful death, found the very opposite happen. For Alexander, while still some way off, seeing the multitude clothed in white, the priests standing in front of them in their linen robes, and the high priest himself in his robe of blue and gold, wearing on his head the mitre with the golden plate on which the name of God was inscribed, came forward alone, bowed down before the Name, and greeted the high priest first.
The Jews with one voice, all together, greeted Alexander and surrounded him. The kings of Syria and the rest, seeing him do this, were astonished and supposed the king's mind had been unhinged. Only Parmenio approached him and asked why, when all men bowed down to him, he himself had bowed down to the high priest of the Jews. "It was not him I bowed to," he said, "but the God whose high priesthood he holds. For it was this very man, in this very dress, whom I saw in a dream when I was at Dium in Macedonia; and as I was turning over in my mind how I might master Asia, he urged me not to delay but to cross over boldly, for he himself would lead my army and hand over to me the empire of the Persians. Since, then, I have seen no one else clothed in such a manner, but now behold this man, and remember the vision and the exhortation I received in my sleep, I believe that it is under divine guidance that I have made this expedition, and that I shall defeat Darius, overthrow the power of the Persians, and that everything I intend will succeed as I wish."
Having said this to Parmenio, he clasped the high priest's hand and, with the Jews running alongside, entered the city. Going up to the temple, he offered sacrifice to God under the high priest's direction, and paid fitting honor to the high priest himself and to the priests. When the book of Daniel was shown to him, in which it was declared that one of the Greeks would destroy the empire of the Persians, he supposed that he himself was the one signified; and, pleased at the time, he dismissed the crowd, but the next day summoned them and told them to ask for whatever gifts they wished. When the high priest asked that they be permitted to live by their ancestral laws, and that the seventh year be free of tribute, he granted everything.
They further asked him to allow the Jews in Babylon and Media also to live by their own laws, and he gladly promised to do as they requested. And when he said to the crowd that, if any of them wished to serve with him as soldiers while still keeping their ancestral customs and living according to them, he was ready to take them along, many eagerly welcomed the chance to campaign with him.
Having settled these matters at Jerusalem, Alexander marched on with his army against the neighboring cities. Everywhere he was received with warmth by those to whom he came. But the Samaritans, whose chief city was then Shechem, which lies by Mount Garizein and was inhabited by renegades from the Jewish nation, seeing how splendidly Alexander had honored the Jews, decided to claim that they themselves were Jews. For the Samaritans are of such a character, as we have already shown before: when the Jews are in misfortune, they deny being their kinsmen—thereby confessing the truth of the matter—but whenever they see some stroke of good fortune come to them, they leap at once to claim relationship, saying they belong to them, and tracing their own descent from Ephraim and Manasses, the sons of Joseph.
With great pomp, then, and displaying much eagerness on his behalf, they went out to meet the king, not far from Jerusalem. When Alexander praised them, the people of Shechem came up to him, bringing with them also the soldiers whom Sanaballetes had sent to him, and asked him, when he came to their city, to honor their temple as well. He promised he would look into the matter on his return. But when they asked him to remit the tribute of the sabbatical year, since they did not sow in it, he inquired who they were to be making such a request. When they said they were Hebrews, but were known as the Sidonians of Shechem, he asked them again whether they happened to be Jews. When they said they were not, he replied, "But it was to the Jews that I granted these things. Still, when I return and am more accurately informed by you, I will do what seems best." With these words he dismissed the people of Shechem.
As for the soldiers of Sanaballetes, he ordered them to follow him into Egypt, since there he would give them allotments of land—which shortly afterward he in fact did, in the Thebaid, assigning them to garrison the region.
When Alexander died, his empire was divided among his successors, but the temple on Mount Garizein remained standing. And whenever anyone at Jerusalem was charged with eating forbidden food, or violating the Sabbath, or any other such offense, he would flee to the people of Shechem, claiming he had been unjustly expelled.
By that time the high priest Jaddus, too, had already died, and his son Onias had succeeded to the high priesthood. Such, then, was the state of affairs concerning the people of Jerusalem.

======== Antiquities — Book 12 ========

How Ptolemy son of Lagus took Jerusalem and Judea by trickery and deceit, and resettled many of its people in Egypt. How his son Ptolemy, called Philadelphus, translated the laws of the Jews into the Greek language and released many prisoners as a favor to Eleazar their high priest, and dedicated many offerings to God. How the kings of Asia honored
the Jewish nation and made its people citizens, settling them in the cities they founded. The recovery from the disaster that had befallen them, brought about by Joseph son of Tobias, who made friendship with Ptolemy called Epiphanes. The friendship and alliance of the Spartans with Onias the high priest of the Jews. The factional strife among the powerful men of the Jews, and how they called in Antiochus Epiphanes. How Antiochus, marching against
Jerusalem, took the city and plundered the temple. How, when Antiochus forbade the Jews to observe their ancestral laws, only Mattathias son of Asamonaeus defied the king and defeated Antiochus's generals. The death of Mattathias, already an old man, after he had handed over the leadership of affairs to his sons. How his son Judas, after fighting Antiochus's generals,
brought the Jews back to their ancestral constitution and was appointed high priest by the people. How Apollonius, Antiochus's general, invaded Judea and was defeated and killed. The campaign of Saion and Gorgias against Judea, their defeat, and the dissension in their army. How Judas campaigned against the Ammanites and conquered as far as Gilead. How his brother Simon campaigned against
Tyre and Ptolemais and defeated them. The campaign of Lysias, Antiochus's general, against the Jews, and his defeat. How Antiochus Epiphanes died in Persia. How Antiochus, surnamed Eupator, campaigning against the Jews together with Lysias, won the battle and besieged Judas, shutting him up in the temple. How, after the siege had dragged on a long time, Antiochus made peace with Judas and withdrew from Judea on honorable terms.
How Bacchides, Demetrius's general, campaigned against the Jews and returned to the king having accomplished nothing. How Nicanor, sent as general after Bacchides, perished together with his army. How Bacchides, sent out again against Judea, won. How Judas was killed in battle. This book covers a period of one hundred and seventy years.
Alexander, king of the Macedonians, having overthrown the Persian empire and settled affairs in Judea in the manner just described, ended his life. When the empire passed into the hands of many, Antigonus held Asia, Seleucus held Babylon and the nations there, Lysimachus governed the Hellespont, Cassander held Macedonia, and Ptolemy son of Lagus had taken Egypt. As these men quarreled and vied with one another for their own
dominion, continuous and lengthy wars resulted, and the cities suffered, losing many of their inhabitants in the fighting, so that all Syria, under Ptolemy son of Lagus, then styled Soter, "Savior," suffered the very opposite of what his title promised. This man took Jerusalem too, by trickery and deceit: he entered the city on the Sabbath as if
to sacrifice, and since the Jews offered him no resistance—for they suspected nothing hostile, and because of their unsuspecting nature, and because the day found them at leisure and rest—he gained control of the city without effort and ruled it harshly. Agatharchides of Cnidus, who wrote the history of the Successors, bears witness to this account, reproaching us for a superstition that, he says, cost us our freedom,
in these words: "There is a people called the Jews, who, though they possessed a strong and great city, Jerusalem, let it fall under Ptolemy's power because they refused to take up arms, but through their ill-timed superstition endured having a harsh master." This, then, is what Agatharchides declared about our nation. Ptolemy, having taken many captives from the hill country of Judea, from the region around Jerusalem,
and from Samaria and from the people at Gerizim, settled them all in Egypt, bringing them there. Knowing that the men of Jerusalem were most steadfast in keeping oaths and pledges of loyalty—as had become clear from their answer to Alexander, when he sent an embassy to them after defeating Darius in battle—he enrolled many of them in garrisons and, having granted the Macedonians in Alexandria
equal citizenship, took oaths from them as well, that they would keep faith with the descendants of those to whom this trust had been given. Not a few other Jews also came to Egypt, drawn by the richness of the land and by Ptolemy's generosity. Disputes did arise, however, between their descendants and the Samaritans, who wished to preserve the ancestral practice of their customs, and they made war on
one another, the people of Jerusalem maintaining that their own temple was the holy one and that sacrifices should be sent there, while the men of Shechem insisted on Mount Gerizim. Alexander reigned twelve years, and after him Ptolemy Soter for forty-one; then Philadelphus received the kingdom of Egypt and held it for thirty-nine years,
during which he translated the law and freed those of the people of Jerusalem enslaved in Egypt, about one hundred and twenty thousand of them, for the following reason. Demetrius of Phalerum, who was in charge of the king's libraries, was eager, if it could be done, to gather together all the books in the world, and he bought up anything he heard was worth having, in accordance with
the king's own wish, for he too took great pleasure in the collecting of books, and gave the project his full support. Once, when Ptolemy asked him how many tens of thousands of volumes he had already collected, he answered that there were about two hundred thousand in hand, and that in a short time he would bring the total to five hundred thousand. He said he had also been informed that many writings existed among the Jews as well, worthy of note and belonging to their own laws, and
worth having for the king's library, but that, being written in their own characters and in their own dialect, they would give no small trouble to translate into the Greek tongue. For their script appeared, in its particular form, similar to that of the Syrians, and their language sounded like it as well, yet it had turned out to be a distinct tongue of its own. Nothing, then, he said, prevented having these too translated, since
the king was well supplied with the funds needed for the purpose, so that the library might contain their writings as well. The king, judging Demetrius's proposal for increasing the number of his books to be excellent, wrote to the high priest of the Jews that this should be carried out. Now a certain Aristeas, a particularly close friend of the king and held by him in high regard for his moderation, had often before resolved to entreat the
king to release the Jewish captives held throughout his kingdom, and, judging this a fitting occasion for his request, he first raised the matter with the chief bodyguards, Sosibius of Tarentum and Andreas, asking them to support him in what he intended to put before the king. Having won their agreement as well, Aristeas came before the king and addressed
him in these words: "We ought not, O king, deceive ourselves and overlook the matter, but bring out the truth. Since we have resolved not only to have the laws of the Jews transcribed but also translated, to please you, by what reasoning could we justify this while so many Jews remain enslaved in your kingdom? Act in keeping with your own greatness of soul and generosity, and free them from their misery,
since the God who gave them their laws watches over your kingdom, as I have learned through careful inquiry of my own. For the God who established all things is worshipped by them and by us alike, though we call him Zeus, giving him that name rightly, from his causing life to exist in all things. For this reason, in honor of God, restore to their homeland those who have made their worship of him their particular calling,
and to the life they left behind there. Know, however, O king, that I make this request for them though I am neither related to them by descent nor of their people, but because all men alike are creatures of God; and knowing that he takes pleasure in those who do good, I urge you to this as well." When Aristeas had said this, the king looked up at him with a cheerful and delighted
expression and said, "How many tens of thousands do you suppose there will be of those set free?" Andreas, who stood beside him, answered that there would be a little more than one hundred and ten thousand. "Then it is a small gift you ask of us, Aristeas," said the king. When Sosibius and the others present said that it would befit him, in his greatness of soul, to make a thank-offering to the God who had granted him his kingdom, he was moved by their words and gave orders that,
whenever the soldiers' pay was disbursed, a hundred and twenty drachmas be paid for each of the Jewish captives in their possession. And concerning what had been asked of him, he promised to issue a decree, magnificent in its terms, confirming both Aristeas's proposal and, prior to it, the will of God—by which he declared he would free not only those brought in by his father and his father's army, but
also those already present in the kingdom before them, and any who might yet be brought in. When it was reckoned that the ransom would amount to more than four hundred talents, he agreed to this as well, and it was decided to preserve a copy of the decree as a record of the king's magnanimity. It read as follows: "As many as, campaigning with our father in Syria and Phoenicia, and, after subduing Judea,
took captives and brought them to our cities and country and sold them there, together with those who were already in my kingdom before them and any now brought in—let those who hold them release them, receiving for each person one hundred and twenty drachmas, the soldiers together with their military pay, the rest receiving the ransom from the royal
treasury. For I consider that they were taken captive against my father's intention and against what is right, that their country has been ravaged through the soldiers' license, and that their removal to Egypt has brought great profit to the soldiers. Having regard, therefore, for justice, and taking pity on men wronged beyond what is fitting, I order the release of
the Jews now held in servitude, their owners receiving the sum stated above for each; and let no one deal wrongfully with them in this matter, but let all obey what has been ordered. I wish the registration to be completed within three days of the issuing of this decree, before the officials set over them, with the persons themselves presented at once; for I judge this to serve my own interest. Let anyone who wishes report those who disobey,
whose property I wish to be confiscated to the royal estate." When this decree was read to the king, and found complete in every respect except that it had not made explicit provision for the Jews brought in earlier and those brought in later, he himself, out of his own magnanimity, added this further act of kindness as well, and ordered that the sum owed, though a single lump payment, be apportioned among the officials of
the treasury and the royal bankers. When this had been done, within seven days in all what the king had decreed was accomplished, and the ransom came to more than four hundred and sixty talents—for the owners exacted the hundred and twenty drachmas even for infants, since the king had ordered payment for them too, in prescribing that this sum be received for
each person. Once this had been carried out magnificently, in accordance with the king's wish, he ordered Demetrius to submit his proposal concerning the transcription of the Jewish books as well; for kings did nothing without careful consideration, but conducted everything with great diligence. For this reason both the copy of the proposal and of the letters have been preserved, together with a record of
the offerings that were sent and the workmanship of each, so that the craftsman's skill might be perfectly evident to those who saw them, and so that, by the excellence of what was made, the maker of each piece might at once be recognized. The copy of the proposal was as follows: "To the great king, from Demetrius. Since you have ordered, O king, concerning the writings still needed to complete the library, that they be
gathered, and concerning those that have fallen into decay, that they receive proper care, I, having applied every diligence to this task, report to you that the books of the Jewish legislation are lacking to us, along with certain others; for, being written in Hebrew characters and in the language of that nation, they are unintelligible to us. It has also happened that they have been copied out rather more carelessly than they should have been, since they have not received royal attention. It is necessary that
these too be made accurate and kept in your possession; for their legislation, being God's, turns out to be highly philosophical and pure. For this reason Hecataeus of Abdera says that neither the poets nor the writers of histories made any mention of it, nor of the men who governed themselves by it, since it is holy and ought not to be disclosed by profane lips. If, then, it seems good to you, O king, you should write
to the high priest of the Jews, asking him to send six elders from each tribe, the men most experienced in the laws, from whom, once we have learned the clear and consistent sense of the books and secured an accurate rendering of their content, we may compile them in a manner worthy of your purpose." This proposal having been submitted, the king ordered that a letter be written to Eleazar, the high priest of the Jews, concerning
these matters, informing him at the same time of the release of the Jews enslaved among his people; and for the making of bowls, phials, and libation vessels he sent fifty talents' weight of gold and precious stones in a quantity beyond counting. He also ordered the guards of the chests in which the stones were kept to allow the craftsmen a free choice of whatever kind they wished.
He also arranged that coin worth a hundred talents be given to the priest for sacrifices and other needs. I will describe the objects made, and the manner of their craftsmanship, after first setting out the copy of the letter written to Eleazar the high priest, who received this honor for the following reason: when Onias the high priest died, his son Simon became his successor.
He was called "the Just" for his piety toward God and his goodwill toward his countrymen. When he died and left an infant son named Onias, his brother Eleazar—the man this account concerns—took over the high priesthood. To him Ptolemy wrote in these terms: "King Ptolemy to Eleazar the high priest, greetings.
"Since many Jews are settled in my kingdom—men whom my father honored after they were taken captive by the Persians when the Persians held power, enrolling some of them in the army at higher pay and entrusting others, who had come to Egypt with him, with the garrisons and their guarding, so that they would be feared by the Egyptians—I, on taking over the throne, have treated everyone with kindness, and especially your countrymen. Of these I have freed more than a hundred thousand who were held as slaves, paying their masters ransom from my own funds. Those in the prime of life I have enrolled in the military register, and some of those capable of being trusted at court I have judged worthy of that trust, believing this to be a pleasing offering to God for his providence toward me, and the greatest one I could make. Wishing to show favor to these men and to all the Jews throughout the world, I have resolved to have your law translated, transcribed from Hebrew into Greek characters, and deposited in my library. You will therefore do well to select good men, six from each tribe, already advanced in years, who by reason of their age have expert knowledge of the laws and will be able to produce an accurate translation of them; for I think that when this is accomplished we shall win the greatest renown. I have sent to confer with you about these matters Andreas, the chief bodyguard, and Aristeas, men held in the highest honor by me, through whom I have also sent a hundred talents of silver as first-fruits for offerings to the temple and for sacrifices and other needs. And you, for your part, will do us a favor by writing to us about whatever you wish."
When the king's letter was delivered to Eleazar, he wrote back to it with all the goodwill he could muster: "The high priest Eleazar to King Ptolemy, greetings. If you and Queen Arsinoe and your children are in good health, all is well with us. On receiving your letter we rejoiced greatly at your intention, and we gathered the people and read it to them, showing them the piety you hold toward God. We also displayed to them the bowls you sent, twenty of gold and thirty of silver, and five mixing-bowls, and a table for dedication, together with the hundred talents for sacrifice and for whatever repairs the temple might need—all of which Andreas and Aristeas, the most honored of your friends, brought, men of quality, distinguished in learning and worthy of your virtue. Know that we will endure whatever serves your interest, even if it goes against nature, for we owe it to repay your benefactions, which have been bestowed so abundantly on our citizens. At once, then, we offered sacrifices on behalf of you, your sister, your children, and your friends, and the people made prayers that things might go according to your mind and that your kingdom might be kept in peace, and that the translation of the law might reach the completion you intend, to your advantage. I have also selected elders, six men from each tribe, whom we have sent with the law in hand. It will be a mark of your piety and justice to send the translated law back to us in safety, under the protection of those who bring it. Farewell." This is what the high priest wrote in reply.
I did not think it necessary to give the names of the seventy elders who were sent by Eleazar carrying the law, for these were recorded in the letter itself. But the costliness and workmanship of the offerings which the king sent to God I thought it not unfitting to describe, so that the king's devotion toward God might be made plain to everyone; for in furnishing unstinting expense for this purpose, and by being present continually with the craftsmen and overseeing the work, the king allowed none of the pieces to be made carelessly or casually. I will now describe the costliness of each item, though the history perhaps does not require such a report—still, I take it that the king's love of beauty and his magnanimity will thereby be made evident to my readers.
First I will set out the details of the table. The king had it in mind to make this piece of work of the very largest dimensions, and he ordered that the size of the table dedicated at Jerusalem be ascertained—how large it was, and whether a larger one could be made. On learning what its actual size was, and that nothing prevented a larger one from being made, he said he wished to have one made five times the size of the existing one, but feared that it might become unfit for its ritual use because of its excessive size; for he wished the offerings not merely to be set up for display but also to be serviceable for the rites. And so, reasoning that the earlier table had been made of a proportionate size not for lack of gold, he resolved not to exceed the existing one in size, but to make his more remarkable for the variety and beauty of its material.
Being skilled at grasping the nature of every kind of object and at conceiving new and extraordinary designs, and for whatever had not been recorded in writing supplying the invention himself through his own understanding and showing it to the craftsmen, he ordered these things to be made, and directed that whatever had been written down should likewise be carried out with precision, keeping to the record. Having thus undertaken to make the table two and a half cubits in length, one cubit in width, and one and a half cubits in height, they worked it entirely of gold, laying the whole foundation of the piece in that material. They made the crown-molding a palm's breadth wide, and wrought the wave-mouldings as twisted cable-patterns, marvelously rendered in relief on all three sides; for since these were triangular in shape, each angle bore the same pattern of relief, so that as they were turned, the same design, and not a different one, revolved with them.
Of the crown-molding, the part inclined beneath the table had a beautiful relief pattern, while the outer, projecting part had been worked with still greater beauty of craftsmanship, since it came directly under view and observation. For this reason the raised edges of both parts turned out sharp, and no one of the three angles—as we said before—appeared smaller than the others as the table was turned. Set into the cable-patterned reliefs were costly stones arranged in parallel rows, held fast by golden pins through drilled holes. Along the sides of the crown-molding, rising toward view, an ornament of eggs made from the finest stone had been set in place, worked in relief to resemble close-set rods running around the circle of the table.
Beneath the pattern of the eggs the craftsmen carried around a wreath engraved in the likeness of every kind of fruit, so that clusters of grapes seemed to hang down, ears of grain to stand upright, and pomegranates to be enclosed within their husks. They worked the stones to match every kind of these fruits, so that each bore its own natural color, and fastened them with gold all around the whole table. Below the wreath, in the same way, was set the pattern of the eggs and the relief of fluting, so that on both sides of the table the same display of variety and elegance of workmanship was achieved, with the arrangement of the other wave-mouldings and of the crown-molding showing no difference even when the table was turned to face the other way—the same appearance of craftsmanship extending even down to the feet.
For they made a plate of gold four fingers wide running the whole width of the table, and into this they set the table's legs; then with pins and clasps they fastened these to the table at the crown-molding, so that whichever side the table were set to face, it would present the same appearance of novelty and costliness. On the table itself they engraved a meander pattern, setting into its center notable stones like stars of varied form, the carbuncle and the emerald each casting a most pleasing gleam upon those who looked on them, along with stones of the other kinds that are prized and coveted by all for the costliness of their nature. After the meander came a cable-like plaited pattern running around, resembling a lozenge in its central appearance, into which crystal and amber had been set, their alternating juxtaposition producing a marvelous delight for those who beheld it.
The capitals of the legs were shaped like lilies, with the unfolding of the petals curving back beneath the table while allowing the upward growth to be seen from within. The base beneath them was made of carbuncle stone, a palm's breadth in size, forming the shape of a plinth, and eight fingers wide, on which the whole plate of the legs rested. They carved each of the legs with fine and most painstaking relief work, bringing out on them ivy and vine-tendrils together with clusters of grapes, so lifelike that one would judge them to fall nothing short of reality; for through their fineness, and through the way their outermost extensions moved in the breeze, they created an impression more of things by nature in motion than of imitations by art.
They devised the whole shape of the table as if triple-paneled, the parts fitted together in such harmony with one another that the joints were invisible and could not even be detected. The thickness of the table came to not less than half a cubit. This offering, then, was completed through the king's great devotion, both in the costliness of its material, the variety of its beauty, and the craftsmen's skill in relief work—the king having taken care that, even if it should not surpass in size the table already dedicated to God, it should in workmanship, novelty, and brilliance of construction be made far superior and an object of admiration.
Of the mixing-bowls, two were of gold, worked with scale-like relief from the base to the girdle, with stones of varied colors set into their spirals. Above this a meander a cubit high was worked in a composition of every sort of stone, and upon it fluting was carved in relief, above which a lozenge-shaped lattice pattern, resembling netting, ran up to the rim; the spaces between were filled out in beauty by small shields of stone four fingers wide. The rim of the mixing-bowl was wreathed round with lilies, bindweed, flowers, and clusters of grapes drawn together in cable-patterns forming a circle. In this manner the two golden mixing-bowls, each holding two amphorae, were made; and the silver ones proved far more brilliant in their gleam than mirrors, so that the faces of those who approached them were seen more clearly reflected in them. The king also had thirty bowls made in addition to these, and whatever part of them was gold rather than set with costly stone was shaded with skillfully carved bindweed of ivy and vine-leaves.
These things were achieved partly through the skill of the workmen, who were marvelous in their art, but far more through the king's zeal and devotion, which brought them to completion beyond the ordinary; for he not only supplied the craftsmen with unstinting and generous funding, but, setting aside his attention to affairs of state, was himself present with those making the pieces and oversaw the whole work. This was the reason for the craftsmen's diligence, for looking to the king and his own zeal they applied themselves to the work with greater industry. Such were the offerings sent to Jerusalem by Ptolemy.
The high priest Eleazar dedicated them, honored the men who had brought them, gave gifts to carry back to the king, and sent them off to him. When they arrived in Alexandria, Ptolemy, hearing of their presence and that the seventy elders had come, at once sent for Andreas and Aristeas, the envoys. On their arrival they delivered the letters they were carrying to him from the high priest, and reported all that they had been instructed to say. Eager to meet with the elders who had come from Jerusalem for the translation of the laws, he ordered that the others who happened to be present on various business be dismissed, an unusual step and contrary to custom; for those who came on such business were normally admitted to him only after five days, while envoys waited a month. Having thus dismissed the others, he waited for the men sent by Eleazar.
When the elders arrived, bringing with them the gifts which the high priest had given them to carry to the king, along with the skins on which the laws were written in golden letters, he questioned them about the books. When they unwrapped the coverings and showed them to him, the king marveled at the fineness of the parchment and the imperceptibility of the joins—so skillfully had they been fitted together—and after doing this for a considerable time he said he was grateful to them for coming, and even more to the one who had sent them, but above all to God, whose laws they turned out to be. When the elders and all present cried out together, wishing good things for the king, he broke into tears from the excess of his joy—for it is the nature of great gladness to produce the same signs as grief. Ordering that the books be given to the officials in charge of such matters, he then greeted the men, saying it was right first to speak of the business for which he had summoned them and only then to address them personally. He further promised to make the day on which they had come to him a day of note, celebrated every year for the whole span of his life, since it happened to coincide with the anniversary of his victory over Antigonus in the sea-battle. He also ordered them to dine with him, and directed that the finest lodgings near the citadel be given to them.
Nicanor, who was in charge of receiving foreign guests, summoned Dorotheus, who had responsibility for such matters, and told him to prepare for each man what was needed for his manner of living. This had been arranged by the king in the following way: for every city that followed its own customs in matters of diet, Dorotheus took care of these things, and prepared everything for those who came to him according to the custom of their homeland, so that being entertained in their accustomed manner they might enjoy themselves the more and take no offense as if treated as strangers to anything. This same care was in fact shown to these men as well.
Dorotheus had been put in charge of these matters because of his exactness in the conduct of life. Through him everything needed for such receptions was arranged, and he made the couches in two rows, as the king had ordered: half the men were to recline on one side, the rest after the king's own couch, so that nothing was wanting in the honor paid to the men. Once they were seated in this way,
the king told Dorotheus to serve them according to the customs that all who came to him from Judea regularly observed. For this reason he dismissed the sacred heralds and the sacrificers and the others who normally offered the invocations, and instead asked one of the visitors, a priest named Elisaeus, to say the blessing. He stood in the middle and prayed for the king's welfare
and for that of his subjects. Then applause rose from everyone with joy and shouting, and when it ceased they turned to the feast and to enjoying what had been prepared. After the king judged that enough time had passed, he began to converse philosophically and put questions of natural science to each of them in turn, asking each man in turn to speak with precision on whatever topic was proposed for inquiry.
He took delight in their answers to whatever was put to them, and kept the banquet going for twelve days, so that anyone who wants to learn the particulars of what was discussed at the banquet can do so by reading the book of Aristaeus, which he wrote for this purpose. The king, and Menedemus the philosopher too, marveled at them, declaring that everything is governed by providence and that this was likely why
such power and beauty had been found in their reasoning as well. When they ceased being questioned on these matters, the king said the greatest of blessings had already come to him through their presence, for he had profited by learning from them how a king ought to rule. He ordered that three talents be given to each of them, along with attendants to escort them back to their lodging. Three days later Demetrius took them, and after crossing the seven-stade
causeway from the sea to the island and passing over the bridge, he went on to the northern district and held a meeting in the house built beside the shore, a place well suited to quiet reflection on matters of business. Bringing them there, he urged them to carry out the work of translating the law without hindrance, since everything they might need for the interpretation was at hand. They then, with all the
ambition and diligence they could bring to making the translation exact, continued at the task until the ninth hour, after which they turned to the care of the body, being generously supplied with everything needed for their diet; Dorotheus, moreover, supplied them liberally, for the king had ordered it, with much of what was being prepared for himself. Early each morning they came to the court, greeted Ptolemy, and then went back to
the same place, and after washing their hands in the sea and purifying themselves they turned to the interpretation of the laws. When the law had been transcribed and the work of translation had reached completion in seventy-two days, Demetrius gathered all the Jews at the place where the laws had been translated, with the translators present,
and read the translation to them. The people welcomed the elders who had made the law clear, and they praised Demetrius as well for having conceived so great a benefit for them, and asked that he give their leaders too a reading of the law. All of them requested it — the priest, the elders among the translators, and the leaders of the community — since the translation
had been so well finished, that it should remain as it stood and not be altered. When everyone had approved this resolution, they further ordered that if anyone noticed anything added to or omitted from the law, he should examine it again and, once he had made it clear, correct it, acting prudently in this so that what had once been judged good might remain forever unchanged. The king rejoiced
to see his purpose brought to so useful a completion, and still more, once the laws had been read to him, he was struck with wonder at the intelligence and the wisdom of the lawgiver, and began to put a question to Demetrius: how was it that, the legislation being so admirable, no historian and no poet had ever made mention of it? Demetrius answered that no one had dared to undertake
a written account of these laws, because they were divine and holy, and that some who had already attempted it had been harmed by God. He explained that Theopompus, wishing to relate something about them, had his mind disturbed for more than thirty days, and that in the intervals of relief he kept propitiating God, since he suspected that this was the source of his derangement. He had even seen in a dream
that this had happened to him because he was prying into divine things and wished to publish them to ordinary people; and having drawn back, his mind was restored. Demetrius also reported a similar story told of Theodectes, the tragic poet, who, wishing to make mention in one of his dramas of things written in the sacred book, was struck blind in his eyes, and, once he understood the cause, recovered from his affliction by appeasing God.
Once the king had received these things from Demetrius, as has already been said, he bowed before the books and ordered that great care be taken of them, so that they might be preserved uncorrupted, and he invited the translators to come to him from Judea regularly, since this would benefit them both in the honor he would show them and in the profit from his gifts; for now, he said,
it was only right to send them off, but if they came to him of their own accord in the future they would obtain everything that their wisdom justly deserved and that his own generosity was able to provide. He then sent them off, giving each man three fine robes, two talents of gold, a cup worth a talent, and the couch-furnishings from the banquet. These gifts he bestowed on them;
and to the high priest Eleazar he sent, by their hands, ten couches with silver feet and their accompanying furnishings, a cup worth thirty talents, and besides these ten robes, purple cloth, a splendid crown, a hundred rolls of fine linen, and further bowls, dishes, libation vessels, and two gold mixing-bowls for dedication. He also urged him, in letters, that
if any of these men wished to come to him he should permit it, since he set great store by the company of educated men and was glad to spend his wealth on such people. Such, then, were the honors that came to the Jews from Ptolemy Philadelphus for the glory and dignity of their nation. They also received honor from the kings of Asia, since
they had fought alongside them; for Seleucus Nicator granted them citizenship in the cities he founded in Asia and lower Syria, and in the capital itself, Antioch, and made them equal in privilege to the Macedonians and Greeks settled there, so that this citizenship still remains in force today. The proof of this is that the Jews, unwilling to use foreign oil, receive a fixed
sum of money from the gymnasiarchs in place of the oil allowance, as he had ordered. When the people of Antioch wished to abolish this in the recent war, Mucianus, then governor of Syria, preserved it, and afterward, when Vespasian and his son Titus had become masters of the world, the people of Alexandria and Antioch petitioned that the rights of citizenship no longer remain in force for the Jews, but they did not
succeed. From this one may recognize the fairness and generosity of the Romans, and especially of Vespasian and Titus: although they had suffered greatly in the war against the Jews and were bitterly disposed toward them for not surrendering their weapons but holding out in resistance to the very end, they took away none of their possessions under the citizenship described above; for they mastered both
their earlier anger and the very great pleading of the peoples of Alexandria and Antioch, so that neither their favor toward these petitioners nor their hatred of wrongdoing directed against those they had fought moved them to abolish any of the ancient privileges belonging to the Jews; rather, they said that those who had taken up arms against them and gone to war had paid the penalty, but they did not think it right to deprive those who had done no wrong
of their possessions. We know that Marcus Agrippa held a similar view about the Jews; for when the Ionians rose up against them and pressed Agrippa that the Jews alone should be made to give up the citizenship that Antiochus, the grandson of Seleucus, called Theos among the Greeks, had granted them, on the ground that if the Jews were their kinsmen they ought to worship their gods as well, and when the case
concerning these matters was tried, the Jews won the right to keep their own customs, Nicolaus of Damascus having argued the case on their behalf; for Agrippa declared that it was not permitted to introduce any innovation against them. Anyone wishing to know the details may read Nicolaus's hundred and twenty-third and hundred and twenty-fourth books. As for the judgments Agrippa made, there is perhaps nothing surprising in them, since
our nation was not then at war with the Romans; but one might reasonably marvel at the generosity of Vespasian and Titus, who, after such wars and such great struggles as they had waged against us, still showed moderation. But let me return the narrative to the point from which I digressed. Under the reign of Antiochus the Great, king of Asia, the Jews happened to suffer greatly, their land being ravaged, along with those who inhabited
Coele-Syria. For while he was at war with Ptolemy Philopator and afterward with his son, called Ptolemy Epiphanes, the Jews suffered the same hardships whether Antiochus was victorious or defeated, so that they were left in no better position than a ship tossed and battered by the waves from both sides, caught between Antiochus's good fortune and the turn of events against him. When, however, Antiochus
defeated Ptolemy, he brought Judea over to his side. After the death of Philopator, his son sent out a great force under the general Scopas against the peoples of Coele-Syria, who took many of their cities, and our nation as well; for when war was made against it, it went over to him. Not long afterward Antiochus defeated Scopas in battle at the springs of the Jordan
and destroyed much of his army. Later, when Antiochus had subdued the cities in Coele-Syria that Scopas had held, along with Samaria, the Jews went over to him of their own accord and, receiving him into their city, supplied his whole army and his elephants in abundance, and readily joined him in besieging the garrison Scopas had left in the citadel of Jerusalem.
Antiochus, considering it right to reward the zeal and devotion the Jews had shown toward him, wrote to his generals and his friends, bearing witness to the good he had received from the Jews and setting out the gifts he had resolved to grant them for it. I will set forth the letters written to the generals concerning them, after first noting, as Polybius of Megalopolis confirms
our account in his sixteenth book, where he writes as follows: 'Scopas, the general of Ptolemy, marching up into the highlands, subdued the nation of the Jews during the winter.' He says further in the same book that when Scopas was defeated by Antiochus, Antiochus took over Batanea, Samaria, Abila, and Gadara,
and shortly afterward the Jews who dwelt around the temple called Jerusalem went over to him as well — about which, having much more to say, especially concerning the manifestation that occurred at the temple, I will postpone the account to another occasion. This is what Polybius recorded. Let us now return to the narrative, setting out first the
letters of King Antiochus. King Antiochus to Ptolemy, greeting. Since the Jews, as soon as we entered their territory, showed their devotion toward us, and when we arrived at the city gave us a magnificent welcome, coming out to meet us with the senate, providing abundant supplies for the soldiers and the elephants, and joining in driving out the Egyptian
garrison in the citadel, we have judged it right to repay them in turn for this, to restore their city, ruined as it was by the misfortunes of the war, and to resettle it by gathering back those who had been scattered from it. First, out of regard for their piety, we have decided to provide for the sacrifices a grant of sacrificial animals, wine, oil, and frankincense worth twenty thousand pieces of silver, and sacred fine flour in the amount
of one thousand four hundred sixty measures according to the local law, and three hundred seventy-five measures of salt. I wish these things to be furnished to them, as I have ordered, and the work on the temple to be completed, including the porticoes and whatever else needs to be built; the timber is to be brought in from Judea itself, from the other nations, and from
Lebanon, with no tax levied on it, and likewise for the other materials needed to make the restoration of the temple the more splendid. Let all those of the nation govern themselves according to their ancestral laws, and let the senate, the priests, the temple scribes, and the temple singers be released from the poll tax, the crown tax, and the
tax on other things. And so that the city may be resettled more quickly, I grant to those now living there, and to those who return by the month of Hyperberetaios, exemption from taxes for up to three years. We also release them for the future from a third part of their tribute, so that the damage they have suffered may be made good. And as for those who were carried off from the city and are now enslaved,
we set both them and their children free, and order that their property be restored to them. Such was the content of the letter. And to honor the temple further, he issued a public proclamation throughout the whole kingdom containing the following: that no foreigner should be permitted to enter the enclosure of the temple forbidden to non-Jews, except those for whom it is customary, once purified, according to the ancestral law. Nor into the
No one shall bring horse meat or mule meat into the city, nor the meat of wild or domestic asses, leopards, foxes, or hares, nor in general any of the animals forbidden to the Jews. No one shall bring in their hides, nor even raise any of these animals in the city. Only the sacrificial animals of their ancestors, from which they must also offer sacrifice to God, are they permitted to use. Whoever transgresses any of these provisions shall pay the priests three thousand silver drachmas.
He also wrote, testifying to our piety and good faith, when he learned of the uprisings in Phrygia and Lydia, while he himself was in the upper satrapies at the time, ordering Zeuxis his general and one of his closest friends to send some of our people from Babylon into Phrygia. He wrote as follows:
"King Antiochus to Zeuxis his father, greetings. If you are well, it would be good; I myself am also in good health. Learning that the people of Lydia and Phrygia were rising up, I judged this to require serious attention, and after deliberating with my friends about what should be done, it was decided to transfer two thousand Jewish households, with their property, from Mesopotamia and Babylonia to the forts and the most essential places. For I am persuaded that they will be loyal guardians of our interests because of their piety toward God, and I know, from the testimony borne to them by their ancestors, both their good faith and their eagerness in whatever they are asked to do. I wish, then, though the transfer is a laborious matter, that once they have given their pledge they be allowed to use their own laws. And when you have brought them to the places named, you shall give each of them a plot of land for building houses, land for farming and for planting vines, and you shall exempt them from the produce of the soil for ten years. Let grain also be measured out to them, until they receive the produce of the land, for the sustenance of their servants; and let those serving their needs also be given what is sufficient, so that, receiving our generosity, they may show themselves the more eager on our behalf. Take care of the nation as far as you are able, so that it is troubled by no one."
Concerning the friendship of Antiochus the Great toward the Jews, let this testimony suffice for us. After this Antiochus made friendship and a treaty with Ptolemy, and gave him his daughter Cleopatra in marriage, ceding to him Coele-Syria, Samaria, Judea, and Phoenicia as a dowry, so named. When the taxes were divided between the two kings, each of the notable men bought the right to collect taxes in his own homeland, and having gathered the assessed sum, paid it to the kings.
At this time the Samaritans, being prosperous, did the Jews much harm, cutting up their land and carrying off people. This happened in the high priesthood of Onias. For when Eleazar died, his uncle Manasseh received the high priesthood, and after him, when he too had ended his life, Onias succeeded to the honor, being the son of the Simon called the Just; Simon was the brother of Eleazar, as I have said before. This Onias was small-minded and fond of money, and for this reason, failing to pay the tax on behalf of the people that his fathers had paid the kings from their own resources—twenty talents of silver—he provoked to anger King Ptolemy Euergetes, the father of Philopator. Ptolemy sent an envoy to Jerusalem accusing Onias of not paying the taxes, and threatened, if he did not receive them, to parcel out their land and send soldiers to settle it.
On hearing this message from the king, the Jews were thrown into confusion, but Onias was moved by none of it, out of his love of money. But a certain Joseph, still young in years but enjoying a reputation among the people of Jerusalem for dignity and foresight and justice—his father was Tobias, and his mother was the sister of Onias the high priest, who informed him of the envoy's arrival, since he happened to be away at the time in the village of Phicola, where he had his home—came into the city and rebuked Onias for not caring for the safety of the citizens, but wishing to expose the nation to danger for the sake of withholding money, when it was for that very money that Onias claimed to hold the leadership of the people and to have obtained the honor of the high priesthood.
"If you are so enamored of money," he said, "that you can bear to see your homeland endangered on its account, and your fellow citizens suffer whatever may come, then go to the king and beg him to release you from all the money owed, or a part of it." When Onias answered that he had no wish to hold office at all, and was ready, if it were possible, to lay down the high priesthood, but that he would not go up to the king, since he cared nothing about the matter, Joseph asked him whether he would allow him to go as ambassador to Ptolemy on behalf of the nation. When Onias said he permitted it, Joseph went up to the temple, called the people together in assembly, and urged them not to be troubled or afraid on account of the negligence of his uncle Onias toward them, but to put aside their gloomy expectations and take heart, for he himself promised to go as ambassador to the king and persuade him that they were doing no wrong.
When the people heard this, they thanked Joseph. He then went down from the temple, received the king's envoy as his guest, and after giving him lavish gifts and entertaining him generously for many days, sent him on his way to the king, telling him that he himself would follow. Indeed, the envoy had become even more eager for Joseph's arrival at the king's court, having urged and encouraged him to come to Egypt, and having promised that he would obtain from Ptolemy whatever he might ask; for he had come to love greatly Joseph's noble bearing and the dignity of his character.
When the envoy arrived in Egypt, he reported to the king Onias's ingratitude, and spoke of Joseph's excellence, and said that he was about to come to him to ask pardon for the multitude's offenses, for he was their patron. Indeed, he used such abundance of praise in speaking of the young man that he predisposed both the king and his wife Cleopatra to feel kindly toward Joseph even before he arrived.
Joseph sent word to his friends in Samaria, borrowed money, and prepared what was needed for the journey—clothing, drinking vessels, and pack animals—equipping himself with about twenty thousand drachmas' worth, and arrived in Alexandria. It happened that at that very time all the leading men from the cities of Syria and Phoenicia, along with the magistrates, were going up to bid for the tax farming; for the king sold it each year to the men of standing in each city. Seeing Joseph on the road, they mocked him for his poverty and plain dress. When he arrived in Alexandria and heard that Ptolemy was in Memphis, he went to meet him and joined him there. As the king was sitting in his carriage with his wife and with his friend Athenion—the same man who had gone as envoy to Jerusalem and had been Joseph's guest—Athenion, catching sight of him, at once made him known to the king, saying that this was the man about whom, on returning from Jerusalem, he had reported that he was a good and honorable young man. Ptolemy greeted him first of all and invited him to mount the carriage.
When Joseph had taken his seat, the king began to complain of Onias's conduct. Joseph said, "Forgive him on account of his age; for it surely does not escape you that old men and infants happen to have the same understanding. But from us, the younger men, you shall have everything, so that you have no cause for complaint." Delighted by the young man's charm and wit, Ptolemy began to love him all the more, as if he had already been tested by experience, so that he ordered him to lodge in the palace and to dine daily at his own table.
When the king came to Alexandria, the leading men of Syria, seeing Joseph seated beside him, took it badly.
When the day arrived on which the taxes of the cities were to be sold, those who held the highest rank in their own homelands were bidding. The taxes of Coele-Syria, Phoenicia, Judea, and Samaria together were being assessed at eight thousand talents, when Joseph came forward and accused the bidders of conspiring to offer the king only a low price for the taxes; he himself promised to give double, and to send to the king the property of those who committed offenses against his interest, for this too was sold along with the taxes.
The king, delighted to hear this and considering that it would increase his revenue, declared that the contract for the taxes would be awarded to him. When he asked whether Joseph also had guarantors, he answered most wittily, "I will give you good and honorable men, whom you will not distrust." When the king asked who these were, he said, "You yourself, O king, and your wife—I give you both as guarantors, one for each half." Ptolemy laughed and granted him the taxes without requiring any sureties. This greatly grieved those who had come from the cities to Egypt, feeling themselves outdone, and they returned each to their own homeland in disgrace.
Joseph, having received from the king two thousand foot soldiers—for he had asked for some assistance, so as to be able to compel those in the cities who showed contempt—and having borrowed five hundred talents in Alexandria from the king's friends, set out for Syria. Arriving at Ashkelon, he demanded the taxes from the people of Ashkelon; and when they were unwilling to give anything, and even insulted him, he seized about twenty of their leading men, put them to death, and sent their property, amounting to a thousand talents, to the king, informing him also of what had happened.
Ptolemy, amazed at his spirit, and praising what he had done, allowed him to do as he wished. When the Syrians heard of this, they were struck with terror, and having before them the harsh example of the men of Ashkelon put to death for their disobedience, they opened their gates and received Joseph eagerly, and paid the taxes. When the people of Scythopolis also attempted to insult him and withhold the taxes they had been paying without dispute, he likewise put their leading men to death and sent their property to the king. Having gathered great sums of money and made large profits from the tax farming, he used what he had acquired to secure the position of power he now held, judging it wise to preserve, from his own resources, the foundation and basis of his present good fortune. He sent many gifts, discreetly, to the king and to Cleopatra, and to their friends, and to all the powerful men at court, buying their goodwill through these means.
He enjoyed this good fortune for twenty-two years, becoming the father of seven children by one wife, and of one more, named Hyrcanus, by the daughter of his brother Solymius. He married her under the following circumstances. Once, when he had joined his brother, who was going to Alexandria bringing his daughter, who was of marriageable age, in order to give her in marriage to one of the Jews of standing, and was dining at the king's table, a dancing girl of great beauty came into the banquet, and he fell in love with her. He revealed this to his brother, begging him—since the law forbade Jews to approach a foreign woman—to conceal the offense and, acting as a good servant to him, to arrange things so as to satisfy his desire.
His brother gladly took on this service, adorned his own daughter, and brought her to him by night and had her lie with him. Being drunk, he did not perceive the truth, and lay with his brother's daughter; and this having happened repeatedly, he loved her all the more passionately. He said to his brother that he was risking his life by loving a dancing girl, whom the king would perhaps not allow him to have. His brother told him not to be anxious at all, but to enjoy the woman he loved without fear, and to have her as his wife; and he then made the truth known to him, saying that he had chosen rather to see his own daughter dishonored than to see him brought to shame.
Joseph, praising him for his brotherly love, took his daughter as his wife, and had by her a son, Hyrcanus, as I have said before. When this boy was still thirteen years old, he showed a natural courage and intelligence beyond his years, so that he was bitterly envied by his brothers, being far superior to them and likely to be resented.
When Joseph wished to know which of his sons was best suited by nature for virtue, he sent each in turn to the men then reputed to be teachers. The rest, out of laziness and a lack of diligence for hard work, returned to him foolish and ignorant; but after them, he sent the youngest, Hyrcanus, giving him three hundred yoke of oxen, and sent him a two days' journey into the wilderness to sow the land, having first hidden the yoke-straps.
When Hyrcanus arrived at the place and did not have the straps, he rejected the advice of the drovers, who counseled sending some men to his father to fetch the straps; instead, judging that the time should not be wasted waiting for those who would be sent, he devised a plan both clever and beyond his years. He slaughtered ten yoke of oxen, distributed the meat to the workers, and, cutting up their hides and making straps from them, bound the yokes with these; and in this way, having sown the land his father had assigned him, he returned to him. When his father saw him, he was filled with admiration for his spirit, and praising the sharpness of his mind and the boldness that went with it, he loved him all the more as his only true son, to the vexation of his brothers.
When someone reported to him, at this same time, that a son had been born to King Ptolemy, and that all the leading men of Syria and of the subject country were setting out for Alexandria with great preparation to celebrate the child's birthday, he himself was held back by old age,
He tested his sons to see whether any of them wished to go to the king. The elder ones excused themselves, saying they were too rough in manner for such company, and advised sending their brother Hyrcanus instead. Delighted to hear this, he called Hyrcanus and asked whether he was able and willing to go to the king. When Hyrcanus promised to go and said he needed only a modest sum for the journey—since he could live frugally enough that ten thousand drachmas would suffice him—his father was pleased at the boy's good sense.
After a short interval the boy advised his father not to send gifts to the king directly from home, but instead to give him a letter to the steward in Alexandria, instructing him to supply Hyrcanus with money to buy whatever fine and costly things he might find. His father, thinking the expense for the king's gifts would come to ten talents, and praising his son for the good advice, wrote to the steward Arion, who managed all his funds in Alexandria—no less than three thousand talents, since Joseph sent the revenues from Syria to Alexandria, and when the deadline approached for paying the king's tribute, he would write to Arion to see to it.
So Hyrcanus asked his father for this letter, took it, and set out for Alexandria. As soon as he had left, his brothers wrote to all the king's friends asking them to destroy him.
When he arrived in Alexandria and delivered the letter to Arion, the steward asked him how many talents he wished to receive, expecting him to ask for ten or a little more. But when Hyrcanus said he needed a thousand, Arion grew angry and rebuked him for having resolved to live extravagantly, pointing out how his father had built up his estate through hard labor and self-restraint, and urging him to imitate his father in this. He said he would give him nothing beyond the ten talents, and that only for gifts to the king. Provoked, the boy had Arion thrown into chains.
Arion's wife reported this to Cleopatra and begged her to rebuke the boy, for Arion was held in great honor by her, and Cleopatra made the matter known to the king. Ptolemy sent to Hyrcanus expressing his astonishment that, though sent to him by his father, he had neither come into his presence nor, worse, had thrown the steward into chains; he ordered Hyrcanus to come and explain the reason.
Hyrcanus is said to have replied to the king's messenger that there is a law among them forbidding a newborn child to taste of sacrifices before he has gone to the temple and sacrificed to God; on this same reasoning he himself had not come into the king's presence, waiting instead to bring gifts befitting one who had become his father's benefactor. As for the slave, he had punished him for disobeying his orders, for it makes no difference, he said, whether a master is small or great; if we do not punish such men, you too must expect to be despised by your subjects.
Hearing this, Ptolemy burst into laughter and marveled at the boy's greatness of spirit. When Arion learned that the king was disposed in this way and that no help was coming to him, he gave the boy the thousand talents and was released from his chains.
Three days later Hyrcanus paid his respects to the king and queen. They received him gladly and entertained him warmly out of regard for his father. Then, going privately to the merchants, he bought from them a hundred boys skilled in letters and in the prime of youth, at a talent apiece, and a hundred girls at the same price.
When he was invited to a banquet at the king's table along with the leading men of the country, he was placed below everyone, being despised as still a boy by those who assigned the places according to rank. As all the guests reclining there piled up before Hyrcanus the bones of the portions they had eaten—for they stripped off the meat themselves—until the table set before him was heaped full, Trypho, who served as the king's jester and was known for his quips and for raising laughter at drinking parties, stood beside the king, urged on by the other guests, and said, "Do you see, master, the bones piled before Hyrcanus? From this you may guess that his father stripped all of Syria bare, just as this boy has stripped these bones of their meat."
The king laughed at Trypho's remark and asked Hyrcanus why so many bones lay before him. "Naturally, master," he said. "Dogs eat the bones along with the meat—just as these men are doing, if you look at what lies before them, since nothing remains in front of them—but men eat the meat and throw away the bones, which is what I, being a man, have just done."
The king marveled at how clever his answer was and ordered everyone to applaud, welcoming him warmly for his wit.
The next day, going to each of the king's friends and to the powerful men at court, he greeted some of them, and inquired of their servants what gift they intended to give the king at his son's birthday celebration. When they said that some intended to give ten talents, others an amount suited to the scale of their own fortunes, he pretended to be distressed at being unable to bring so great a gift, since he had no more than five talents.
The servants, hearing this, reported it to their masters, who were glad, supposing that Joseph's family would be disgraced and fall out of favor with the king because of the smallness of the gift.
When the day arrived, the others brought to the king sums of no more than twenty talents even from those thought to be giving most generously, but Hyrcanus had the hundred boys and equally many girls he had purchased carry a talent apiece and brought them forward, presenting the boys to the king and the girls to Cleopatra.
Everyone, including the king and queen themselves, marveled at the unexpected extravagance of the gifts, and he further gave gifts worth many talents to the king's friends and to those attending on the king, so as to escape the danger they posed to him—for it was to these very men that his brothers had written asking them to do away with Hyrcanus.
Ptolemy, admiring the young man's magnanimity, ordered him to receive whatever gift he wished. He asked for nothing more from the king than that he write to his father and brothers on his behalf. So the king, having honored him most lavishly and given him splendid gifts, wrote to his father and brothers and to all his governors and stewards, and sent him off.
When his brothers heard that Hyrcanus had obtained these favors from the king and was returning in great honor, they went out to meet him intending to kill him, and their father knew of it; for he was angry with Hyrcanus over the money spent on the gifts and gave no thought to his safety. Joseph, however, concealed his anger toward his son out of fear of the king.
When his brothers joined battle with him, Hyrcanus killed many of those with them, including two of his brothers, and the rest escaped safely to Jerusalem to their father.
When he came to the city and no one would receive him, he withdrew in fear across the Jordan River and lived there, exacting tribute from the barbarians.
At that time Seleucus, surnamed Soter, son of Antiochus the Great, was king of Asia. And Hyrcanus's father, Joseph, a good and magnanimous man, who had raised the Jewish people from poverty and weak circumstances to a more splendid state of life, died after holding the tax collectorship of Syria, Phoenicia, and Samaria for twenty-two years. His uncle Onias also died, leaving the high priesthood to his son Simon. When Simon too died, his son Onias succeeded him in this honor.
To this Onias, Areus, king of the Lacedaemonians, sent an embassy and a letter, a copy of which reads as follows: "King Areus of the Lacedaemonians to Onias, greetings. We have found in a certain document that the Jews and Lacedaemonians are of one race, being related through Abraham. It is right, therefore, since you are our brothers, that you send to us concerning whatever you wish. We for our part will do the same, and will regard your possessions as our own, and hold what is ours in common with you. Demoteles, who carries this letter, will convey your replies to us. The document is drawn up in a square format, and its seal is an eagle grasping a serpent." Such was the content of the letter sent by the king of the Lacedaemonians.
After Joseph's death, the people fell into strife over his sons. For the elder sons made war on Hyrcanus, who was the youngest of Joseph's children, and the populace was divided. Most sided with the elder brothers, as did the high priest Simon, because of their kinship; but Hyrcanus decided never to return to Jerusalem, and settling across the Jordan, he waged continual war on the Arabs, killing many of them and taking others captive.
He built a strong fortress out of white stone, its whole surface, even the roof, carved with enormous animal figures, and around it he ran a great, deep moat. Cutting into the rock face of the mountain opposite, he carved out caves many stadia in length, and within them he made some rooms for banqueting and others for sleeping and daily life, and he brought in an abundance of running water, both for pleasure and as an ornament to the courtyard. The mouths of the caves he made narrow, so that only one person could pass through at a time, deliberately, as a safeguard against being besieged by his brothers and taken by surprise. He also built courtyards of extraordinary size, adorning them with very long garden parks. Having completed this place, he named it Tyre. This place lies between Arabia and Judea, across the Jordan, not far from the region of Heshbon.
He ruled that district for seven years, for the whole time that Seleucus reigned over Syria. When Seleucus died, his brother Antiochus, called Epiphanes, took the throne after him. Ptolemy, king of Egypt, likewise surnamed Epiphanes, also died, leaving two sons still young in years, of whom the elder was called Philometor and the younger Physcon. Hyrcanus, seeing that Antiochus had great power and fearing that he might be seized and punished for what he had done to the Arabs, took his own life. Antiochus seized his entire estate.
At about the same time, Onias the high priest also died, and Antiochus gave the high priesthood to his brother Jesus, since the son Onias had left behind was still an infant. We will describe what happened to this child in its proper place.
Jesus—for this was the brother of Onias—was deprived of the high priesthood when the king grew angry with him and gave it to his youngest brother, named Onias. For Simon had had these three sons, and the high priesthood passed to all three in turn, as we have shown. Now Jesus renamed himself Jason, and Onias was called Menelaus.
When the former high priest Jesus quarreled with Menelaus, who had been installed after him, the populace split into two factions. On Menelaus's side were the sons of Tobias, while the greater part of the people supported Jason. Hard-pressed by Jason, Menelaus and the sons of Tobias withdrew to Antiochus, informing him that they wished to abandon their ancestral laws and their form of government under them, and instead follow the king's laws and adopt the Greek way of life. They asked him, therefore, to permit them to build a gymnasium in Jerusalem. When he consented, they also concealed the circumcision of their private parts, so that even when stripped for exercise they might appear Greek, and abandoning all else that was ancestral to them, they imitated the practices of the other nations.
Since his kingdom was proceeding according to his wishes, Antiochus resolved to march against Egypt, having conceived a desire for it and because he held the sons of Ptolemy in contempt, since they were still weak and not yet capable of managing affairs of such magnitude. Coming with a large force to Pelusium, he outmaneuvered Ptolemy Philometor by trickery and seized Egypt, and having occupied the region around Memphis, he set out for Alexandria, intending to reduce it by siege and to overpower Ptolemy, who reigned there. But he was driven back not only from Alexandria but from the whole of Egypt, the Romans having ordered him to keep away from the country, as we have already shown elsewhere.
I will now relate in detail the affairs of this king, how he subdued Judea and the temple; for in my earlier work I mentioned these matters only in summary, and I have thought it necessary now to return to a more precise account of them.
Having withdrawn from Egypt out of fear of the Romans, King Antiochus marched against the city of Jerusalem, and arriving there in the hundred and forty-third year after the kings descended from Seleucus, he took the city without a fight, since those of his own party opened its gates to him. Once master of Jerusalem in this way, he killed many of those who held opposing views, and having plundered a great quantity of money, he returned to Antioch.
Two years later, in the hundred and forty-fifth year, on the twenty-fifth day of the month called by us Excelaeus and by the Macedonians Apellaeus, in the hundred and fifty-third Olympiad, it happened that the king went up to Jerusalem with a large force and, feigning peace, took the city by deceit. This time he spared not even those who had let him in, on account of the wealth in the temple, but out of greed—for he saw much gold in the sanctuary and the rest of the votive ornaments of great value—he set out to plunder it, and endured...
He stripped the temple bare, carrying off even the vessels of God—the golden lampstands, the golden altar, the table, and the sacrificial implements—not sparing even the curtains, which were made of fine linen and scarlet. He emptied out the hidden treasuries as well, leaving absolutely nothing behind, and so plunged the Jews into deep mourning. He also stopped them from offering the daily sacrifices they made to God under the law, and after plundering the whole city he killed some of the inhabitants and took others captive along with their wives and children, so that the number of those seized alive came to about ten thousand. He burned the finest parts of the city, tore down its walls, and built a citadel in the lower city, since it stood high and overlooked the temple; fortifying it with high walls and towers, he stationed a Macedonian garrison there. The impious and morally corrupt among the populace nevertheless kept living in the citadel, and through them the citizens suffered many terrible things.
The king also built an altar over the altar of God and slaughtered pigs on it, performing a sacrifice neither lawful nor traditional in the religion of the Jews. He forced them to abandon the worship of their own god and instead venerate the gods he recognized, to build shrines and set up altars in every city and village, and to sacrifice pigs on them daily. He ordered them not to circumcise their children, threatening punishment on anyone found doing so contrary to his decree, and he appointed overseers to compel them to carry out his instructions.
Many of the Jews went along with what the king had ordered, some willingly, others out of fear of the threatened punishment, but the most respected and noble in spirit paid no heed to him, valuing their ancestral customs more than the punishment he threatened against those who disobeyed. For this they were tortured and abused every day and died under bitter torments—scourged and mutilated in body, they were crucified while still alive and breathing; and the wives and children of those who had circumcised their sons against the king's decree were strangled, the children hung from the necks of their own crucified parents. Wherever a sacred book or copy of the law was found, it was destroyed, and whoever was found possessing it perished miserably along with it.
Seeing the Jews suffering these things, the Samaritans no longer admitted to being their kinsmen, nor did they call the temple on Gerizim a temple of the Most High God—acting true to their own nature, as we have shown, and claiming instead to be colonists of the Medes and Persians, which in fact they are. They sent envoys to Antiochus and delivered a letter to him reading as follows: "To King Antiochus, God Manifest, a petition from the Sidonians at Shechem. Our ancestors, on account of certain droughts in their country, and following an ancient superstition, made it their custom to honor the day called among the Jews the sabbath, and they set up an unnamed temple on the mountain called Gerizim, where they offered the appropriate sacrifices. Now that you have dealt with the Jews as their wickedness deserves, the officials administering your affairs, supposing that we do the same things as they do because of kinship, attach the same charges to us, though we are in fact by origin Sidonians, as is plain from our public records. We therefore ask you, our benefactor and savior, to instruct Apollonius the district governor and Nicanor the administrator of royal affairs not to trouble us by attaching to us the charges leveled at the Jews, since we are foreign to them in both race and customs, and to have our unnamed temple named the Temple of Zeus of the Greeks. If this is done, we shall cease being troubled and shall attend to our own affairs in security, thereby increasing your revenues." In response to this petition of the Samaritans, the king wrote back to them as follows:
"King Antiochus to Nicanor. The Sidonians at Shechem have submitted the enclosed petition. Since, when we deliberated on the matter with our friends, the envoys they sent made clear to us that they have nothing to do with the charges brought against the Jews, but choose instead to live by Greek customs, we hereby release them from those charges, and their temple, as they have requested, shall be named the Temple of Zeus of the Greeks." He sent the same instructions to Apollonius the district governor, in the forty-sixth year, on the eighteenth of the month Hecatombaeon, called Hyrcanius.
At about this same time there lived in the village of Modein in Judea a man named Mattathias, son of John, son of Simeon, of the house of Hasmon, a priest of the division of Joarib, a Jerusalemite. He had five sons: John, called Gaddis; Simon, called Thassi; Judas, called Maccabaeus; Eleazar, called Auran; and Jonathan, called Apphus. Mattathias lamented to his children the state of affairs—the plundering of the city, the pillaging of the temple, and the calamities of the people—and told them it was better for them to die for the laws of their fathers than to go on living in such impiety.
When those the king had appointed to compel the Jews to carry out his orders came to the village of Modein and commanded the people there to sacrifice as the king had directed, they asked Mattathias to take the lead in the sacrifices, both because of his reputation on other grounds and because of the excellence of his sons—reasoning that the citizens would follow his example, and that he would thereby be honored by the king. But Mattathias said he would not do it, and that even if every nation obeyed the commands of Antiochus, whether out of fear or a wish to please him, he himself, together with his sons, would never be persuaded to forsake his ancestral worship. When he fell silent, one of the Jews stepped forward and, following Antiochus's orders, offered sacrifice in full view of everyone; enraged, Mattathias rushed at him together with his sons, who carried short swords, and killed him, and along with him the king's officer Apelles, who had been enforcing the order, killing him too with the help of a few followers. He then tore down the altar and cried out, "Whoever is zealous for the customs of our fathers and for the worship of God, let him follow me!" And with these words he set out for the desert with his sons, leaving behind in the village everything he owned.
Others did the same, fleeing with their children and wives into the desert and living in caves there. When the king's officers heard of this, they took the forces stationed in the citadel at Jerusalem and pursued the Jews into the desert. Upon overtaking them, they first tried to persuade them to reconsider and choose what was to their advantage, rather than force them into a position where they would have to be treated by the law of war. When the Jews would not accept these terms but held to their contrary resolve, the officers engaged them in battle on the day of the sabbath, and burned them in the caves just as they were, since they made no defense and did not even block the entrances—for they refrained from defending themselves out of regard for the day, unwilling even amid disaster to violate the honor due the sabbath, on which, they said, it is our law to do no work. About a thousand of them died in this way, suffocated in the caves along with their wives and children, but many survivors went over to Mattathias and made him their leader. He taught them to fight even on the sabbath, telling them that if they did not do this while still observing the law, they would become their own worst enemies—for if the enemy attacked them on that day and they did not defend themselves, nothing would prevent all of them from being destroyed without a fight. By these words he persuaded them, and to this day the practice remains among us that, if ever necessary, fighting on the sabbath is permitted. Having gathered a large force around himself, Mattathias tore down the pagan altars and put to death the transgressors wherever he was able to seize them, for many scattered out of caution into the surrounding nations; he also ordered the uncircumcised children to be circumcised, expelling those who had been appointed to prevent it.
Having led for one year, Mattathias fell ill, and calling his sons to his side and gathering them around him, he said: "I, my children, am going the way appointed by fate, and I entrust to you my own resolve, urging you not to prove poor guardians of it, but, remembering the purpose of the one who fathered and raised you, to preserve our ancestral customs and to restore our ancient way of life, now in danger of being lost, rather than fall in with those who, whether by choice or under compulsion, betray it. I ask you, my sons, to stand firm and rise above every act of violence and compulsion, preparing your souls in such a way that you are ready to die for the laws, if it should come to that, bearing in mind that the divine, seeing you so disposed, will not overlook you, but, admiring your virtue, will restore you to yourselves once more, and to the freedom in which you will live enjoying your own customs in security. Our bodies are mortal and perishable, but through the memory of noble deeds we attain a kind of immortality; it is this that I want you to love and pursue—true glory—and, in undertaking the greatest things, not to shrink from giving up your lives for them. Above all I urge you to be of one mind, and where one of you is by nature superior to another in some respect, to yield to him and to make use of each other's particular strengths as your own. Regard your brother Simon, who excels in judgment, as a father, and follow whatever counsel he gives you; and let Maccabaeus, for his courage and strength, be your general in war, for he will avenge our nation and fight off its enemies. Welcome also the just and god-fearing among the people, and increase their strength." Having said these things to his sons, and having prayed that God would be their ally and would restore to the people their own accustomed way of life, he died not long after, and was buried at Modein amid great mourning by the whole people. His son Judas, called Maccabaeus, succeeded him as leader of affairs in the hundred and forty-sixth year. With the eager support of his brothers and others, he drove the enemy from the land, put to death those of his own people who had transgressed the ancestral law, and cleansed the land of all defilement.
When Apollonius, the general in Samaria, heard of this, he took his forces and set out against Judas. Judas met him in the field, engaged him in battle, and won—killing many of the enemy, including the general Apollonius himself, whose sword, which he had carried, Judas took as spoil and kept for his own use. He wounded still more of them, and after taking much plunder from the enemy's camp he withdrew. Seron, the general of Coele-Syria, on hearing that many had gone over to Judas and that he had already gathered a considerable force fit for contests and wars, judged it right to march against him, thinking he ought to try to punish those who were transgressing the king's commands. Gathering whatever forces he had on hand, and adding to them the Jewish fugitives and the impious among the Jews, he advanced against Judas; pressing on as far as the village of Beth-horon in Judea, he made camp there. Judas went out to meet him, intending to give battle, but when he saw that his soldiers hesitated to fight because of their small numbers and their lack of food—for they had been fasting—he encouraged them, telling them that victory and mastery over the enemy lay not in numbers but in piety toward the divine, and that their own ancestors offered the clearest proof of this, for by their justice and by fighting for their own laws and children they had often defeated many tens of thousands—since to do no wrong is itself a mighty power. By these words he persuaded his men, despite the numbers of their opponents, to close with Seron, and in the engagement he routed the Syrians; for once their general had fallen, all of them rushed to flee, thinking their safety lay in that alone. Pursuing them as far as the plain, he killed about eight hundred of the enemy, while the rest escaped to the coast.
On hearing of this, King Antiochus was greatly enraged at what had happened, and gathering all the forces of his own kingdom, and taking on a great many mercenaries from the islands as well, he prepared to invade Judea at the start of spring. But when, in the course of dividing out his army, he saw that his treasuries were running low and that there was a shortage of funds—since not all the tribute was being collected, owing to the revolts among the subject nations, and since, being generous and open-handed by nature, he was never satisfied with what he had—he decided to go first to Persia and collect the tribute of that region. Leaving in charge of affairs a certain Lysias, a man held in high regard by him, and entrusting to him the territory extending to the borders of Egypt and lower Asia as far as the Euphrates river, together with part of his forces and his elephants, he instructed him to raise his son Antiochus with every care until his return, and, after subduing Judea and enslaving its inhabitants, to destroy Jerusalem and wipe out their entire people. Having given Lysias these instructions, King Antiochus set out for Persia in the hundred and forty-seventh year, and after crossing the Euphrates he went up to the satraps of the upper provinces.
Lysias chose Ptolemy son of Dorymenes, Nicanor, and Gorgias, capable men among the king's friends, and, putting into their hands forty thousand infantry and seven thousand cavalry, sent them against Judea. They advanced as far as the city of Emmaus and made camp there on the plain. Allies joined them from Syria and the surrounding country, along with many of the Jewish fugitives, and even some merchants who came intending to buy up those who would be taken captive, bringing with them fetters to bind their prisoners, and silver and gold to pay their price. When Judas observed the size of the camp and the multitude of the enemy, he urged his own soldiers to take courage, exhorting them, with their hopes of victory fixed on God, to entreat him in the manner of their ancestors, putting on sackcloth—
...to display this to God and so persuade him to grant them mastery over their enemies. Having arranged them in the ancient, ancestral manner, by chiliarchs and taxiarchs, and having released the newly married and those who had recently acquired property, so that these men, clinging to life for the sake of enjoying it, might not fight less boldly, he took his stand and roused his own soldiers to the contest with words like these: “Comrades, no occasion could be more urgent than the present one for courage and contempt of danger.
“For now, by fighting bravely, you can recover your freedom — dear to all men for its own sake, but made still more desirable for you because it carries with it the right to worship God. Since you now stand in a position either to recover this freedom and regain the happy, blessed life you had under the laws and ancestral custom, or else to suffer the most shameful fate and leave not even a remnant of your race, should the battle go badly, fight accordingly. Consider that death awaits you even if you do not fight, but believe that by winning victory for such great prizes — freedom, homeland, laws, piety — you will secure everlasting glory. So prepare your souls, as men who at daybreak tomorrow will meet the enemy.”
So Judas spoke, encouraging his army. Meanwhile the enemy sent Gorgias with five thousand infantry and a thousand cavalry to fall upon Judas by night, having as guides for this some of the Jews who had deserted. But the son of Mattathias learned of it and himself resolved to fall upon the enemy's camp, especially since their force was divided. So, having taken supper at the proper hour and left many fires burning in his own camp, he marched all night against the enemy at Emmaus. Gorgias, not finding the enemy in their camp but supposing they had withdrawn and hidden themselves in the mountains, set out to search for them, wherever they might be.
About dawn Judas appeared before the enemy at Emmaus with three thousand men, poorly armed for want of means; and seeing the enemy superbly equipped and encamped with great professional skill, he urged his own men on, saying that God grants mastery over the many and the armed even to those who must fight with bare bodies, and admiring them for their courage — and he ordered the trumpeters to sound the signal. Then, falling upon the enemy unexpectedly and throwing their minds into confusion, he killed many who resisted, and pursuing the rest came as far as Gazara and the plains of Idumea, and Azotus, and Jamnia; about three thousand of them fell. Judas urged his soldiers not to be eager for the spoils, telling them that a contest and battle still awaited them against Gorgias and the force with him, and that once they had mastered these as well, they would then plunder at their leisure, keeping only this in mind and expecting nothing else.
While he was still saying this to his soldiers, Gorgias' men, peering out, saw that the force they had left in the camp had been routed and the camp itself burned — for the smoke, visible to them from a distance, made plain what had happened. When Gorgias' men learned how things stood and saw Judas' men ready for battle, they too took fright and fled. Judas, since Gorgias' soldiers had been beaten without a fight, turned back and gathered up the spoils, and taking much gold and silver and purple and violet cloth, returned home rejoicing and singing hymns to God for their success — for the victory contributed no small part to their freedom.
Lysias, thrown into confusion by the defeat of the men he had sent, in the following year gathered sixty thousand picked men, took five thousand cavalry besides, and invaded Judea, and going up into the hill country encamped at Bethsura, a village of Judea. Judas met him with ten thousand men, and seeing the enemy's numbers, prayed that God would be his ally, and joining battle with the enemy's advance troops defeated them, killing about five thousand of them, and became a terror to the rest. Lysias, observing the spirit of the Jews — that they were ready to die rather than live enslaved — and fearing their desperation as though it were strength, took the remainder of his force and withdrew to Antioch, where he spent his time recruiting mercenaries and preparing to invade Judea again with a larger army.
With the generals of King Antiochus so many times defeated, Judas called an assembly and said that after the many victories God had given them, they ought to go up to Jerusalem, purify the temple, and offer the customary sacrifices. When he arrived with the whole multitude at Jerusalem, he found the temple deserted, its gates burned down, and plants growing wild in the sanctuary because of the desolation; he began to mourn with his own men, overcome at the sight of the temple. Choosing some of his soldiers, he ordered them to make war on the men guarding the citadel, until he himself should have purified the temple.
Having cleansed it with care, he brought in new vessels — a lampstand, a table, an altar of incense, all made of gold — hung up the curtains of the doors and set the doors themselves in place, and, taking down the altar of burnt offering, built a new one of unhewn stones not cut by iron. On the twenty-fifth of the month Xanthicus, which the Macedonians call Apellaios, they lit the lamps on the lampstand, burned incense on the altar, set loaves upon the table, and offered whole burnt offerings on the new altar. It happened that this took place on the very day on which, three years before, their holy worship had lapsed into profanation and common use; for the temple, laid waste by Antiochus, remained in that state for three years. These events at the temple took place in the hundred and forty-fifth year, on the twenty-fifth of the month Apellaios, in the hundred and fifty-third Olympiad; and it was rededicated on the same day — the twenty-fifth of the month Apellaios — in the hundred and forty-eighth year, in the hundred and fifty-fourth Olympiad. The desolation of the temple came about, in accordance with Daniel's prophecy, four hundred and eight years before it happened; for he had foretold that the Macedonians would destroy it.
Judas celebrated with his fellow citizens the recovery of the temple sacrifices for eight days, omitting no form of pleasure, feasting them with lavish and splendid sacrifices, honoring God with hymns and psalms while delighting the people. So great was the pleasure they took in the renewal of their customs, coming to them unexpectedly after so long a time, once they found themselves in possession of the right to worship, that they made it a law for those who came after them to celebrate the recovery of the temple rites for eight days. From that time to this we keep the festival, calling it Lights — because, I think, this freedom shone upon us beyond our hopes, and so they gave the festival this name. He also walled the city all around and, to guard against enemy raids, built high towers and stationed garrisons in them; he also fortified the town of Bethsura, so that it might serve them as a stronghold against attacks from the enemy.
With these things thus accomplished, the surrounding nations, resentful at the revival and growing strength of the Jews, formed many conspiracies and, gaining the upper hand through ambushes and plots, destroyed them. Judas, waging continual wars against these nations, tried to check their raids and the harm they were doing the Jews. He fell upon the sons of Esau, the Idumeans, in the region of Acrabatene, killed many of them, and took spoil. He also shut in and besieged the sons of Baanus, who had been lying in wait for the Jews, burning their towers and destroying the men. From there he set out against the Ammanites, who had a large and populous force under the command of Timotheus; having overpowered these as well, he took the city of Jazor by storm, and, taking their women and children captive and burning the city, returned to Judea.
When the neighboring nations learned that he had gone back, they gathered in Gilead against the Jews within their borders. These Jews took refuge in the fortress of Dathema and sent word to Judas that Timotheus was eager to capture the place to which they had fled. While these letters were being read, messengers also arrived from Galilee reporting that the people of Ptolemais, Tyre, Sidon, and the other nations of Galilee had banded together. Considering, then, what must be done to meet both these reported needs, Judas ordered his brother Simon to take about three thousand picked men and go to the help of the Jews in Galilee, while he himself, with his other brother Jonathan, set out for Gilead with eight thousand soldiers; he left Joseph son of Zacharias and Azarias in charge of the remaining forces, instructing them to guard Judea carefully and to engage no one in battle until his own return.
Simon, arriving in Galilee and engaging the enemy, put them to flight and pursued them to the gates of Ptolemais, killing about three thousand of them; and taking the spoils of the slain, along with the captive Jews and their baggage, he returned home. Judas Maccabeus and his brother Jonathan crossed the Jordan river and, after a three days' march from it, met the Nabateans, who received them peaceably. When these told them of the plight of the Jews in Gilead — how many of them were suffering, shut up in the fortresses and towns of Gilead — and urged him to hasten against the foreigners and try to save their countrymen from them, Judas was persuaded and turned back into the desert, and, falling first upon the inhabitants of Bosora, took the city, killed every male able to bear arms, and set the city on fire.
Even when night fell he did not stop, but marched on through it to the fortress where the Jews were shut in, which Timotheus with his force was besieging, and arrived there at dawn. Finding the enemy already attacking the walls — some with ladders for scaling them, others bringing up siege engines — he ordered the trumpeter to sound the signal, and, urging his soldiers to risk themselves eagerly for their brothers and kinsmen, divided the army into three parts and fell upon the enemy from the rear. Timotheus' men, perceiving that it was Maccabeus — having already had experience of his courage and his success in war — took to flight; and Judas, pursuing with his army, killed about eight thousand of them. Turning aside to a city called Mella, belonging to the foreigners, he took this too, killed all the males, and burned the city. Setting out from there, he subdued Chasphomake and Bosor and many other cities of Gilead.
Not long afterward Timotheus, having assembled a large force and taken on other allies, including some Arabs whom he had persuaded with pay to join his campaign, came leading his army to the far side of the torrent opposite Raphon — for this was a city — and urged his soldiers, if they should engage the Jews in battle, to fight eagerly and prevent them from crossing the torrent, telling them that defeat awaited them if the Jews crossed. Judas, hearing that Timotheus had made ready for battle, took his whole force and hastened against the enemy; crossing the torrent, he fell upon them, killed those who came to meet him, and, throwing the rest into terror, forced them to throw down their weapons and flee. Some of them escaped, while others fled for refuge into the precinct called Egranai, hoping to find safety there. Judas, taking the town, killed them and burned the precinct, using various means to bring about the enemy's destruction.
Having accomplished this, and gathered together the Jews in Gilead with their children and wives and their belongings, he was ready to lead them back to Judea. When he came to a certain city named Ephron lying on the road — and he could neither turn aside and go another way, nor did he wish to turn back — he sent to the people in it, asking them to open the gates and allow him to pass through the city; for they had blocked the gates with stones and cut off the passage. When the people of Ephron would not agree, he roused his men, surrounded the town, besieged it, and, after pressing the siege day and night, took the city, killing every male in it and burning it entirely, and so won his way through. So great was the number of the slain that one had to walk over the corpses themselves. Crossing the Jordan, they came to the great plain facing the city called Bethshan, known to the Greeks as Scythopolis. Setting out from there, they arrived in Judea, singing psalms and hymns and performing the customary games of victory celebrations, and offered thank-offerings both for their successes and for the safety of the army — for not one of the Jews died in these wars.
Joseph son of Zacharias and Azarias, whom Judas had left as commanders at the time when Simon was in Galilee fighting the people of Ptolemais and Judas himself, with his brother Jonathan, was in Gilead, wished to win a reputation of their own as capable commanders in war, and took the force under their command and came to Jamnia. Gorgias, the general of Jamnia, met them, and in the engagement they lost two thousand of their force and, fleeing, were pursued to the borders of Judea. This setback befell them
They had disobeyed the orders Judas had sent them, not to engage anyone in battle before his own arrival. Beyond his other feats of generalship, one might well marvel at how he foresaw the defeat that Joseph and Azarias would suffer, understanding that it would follow if they departed at all from his instructions. Judas and his brothers, meanwhile, kept up their war against the Idumeans without relenting. They pressed them from every side, took the city of Hebron and tore down whatever was fortified in it, burned its towers, and ravaged the territory of the foreigners, including the city of Marisa. They also came to Azotus, took it, and plundered it. Then, carrying off much spoil and plunder, they returned to Judea.
At about this same time King Antiochus, advancing through the upper country, heard that there was a city in Persia called Elymais renowned for its wealth, and that it had a costly temple of Artemis in it, full of dedications of every kind, and moreover arms and breastplates which, he was told, Alexander, king of the Macedonians and son of Philip, had left behind. Stirred by this report he set out for Elymais, attacked it, and laid siege to it. But the people inside were not frightened by his assault or his siege; they held out stubbornly and dashed his hopes, driving him back from the city and sallying out after him in pursuit, so that he fled to Babylon, having lost much of his army.
While he was grieving over this failure, some brought him word as well of the defeat of the generals he had left behind to fight the Jews, and of the growing strength of the Jewish nation. Weighed down now by this added worry on top of the first, he fell into a despondency so overwhelming that he sank into illness. As the illness dragged on and his sufferings increased, he realized he was going to die, and he called his friends together. He told them plainly that his illness was severe, and he made clear that he was suffering this because he had wronged the Jewish nation, plundering their temple and showing contempt for their God. And with these words he breathed his last.
So it is that Polybius of Megalopolis, a trustworthy writer, expresses astonishment at this: he says Antiochus died because he had intended to plunder the temple of Artemis in Persia — as though merely resolving on a deed he never carried out deserved such punishment. But if Polybius supposes that this is why Antiochus met his end in this way, it is far more likely that the king died on account of his sacrilege against the temple in Jerusalem. On this point, however, I have no quarrel — I hold as true the very cause that the writer from Megalopolis names.
Before he died, Antiochus summoned Philip, one of his companions, and appointed him regent of the kingdom, giving him the diadem, the robe, and the signet ring, with orders to carry these to his son Antiochus and deliver them to him, and he asked Philip to look after the boy's upbringing and to keep the kingdom safe for him. Antiochus died in the hundred and forty-ninth year. Lysias announced his death to the people and proclaimed the king's son — whose care he himself had — as king, calling him Antiochus Eupator.
At this same time the garrison in the citadel of Jerusalem, along with Jewish exiles, did the Jews great harm: whenever people went up to the temple wishing to sacrifice, the garrison would suddenly rush out and kill them, for the citadel overlooked the temple. Because of what was happening to them, Judas resolved to destroy the garrison, and gathering the whole people he laid a determined siege to those in the citadel. This was the hundred and fiftieth year of the Seleucid era. He built siege engines and raised earthworks, and pressed the assault on the citadel with great diligence.
Many of the exiles inside, however, slipped out by night, gathered some other impious men like themselves, and went to King Antiochus. They protested that they should not be looked down upon while suffering terribly at the hands of their own countrymen, and enduring this on account of his father — who had put an end to their ancestral religion, while they themselves had clung to what he had commanded in its place. They said the citadel and the garrison the king had stationed there were in danger of being taken by Judas and his men, unless help were sent from him. Hearing this, the young Antiochus grew angry, summoned his commanders and friends, and ordered them to gather mercenaries and all in the kingdom of military age.
An army was assembled: about a hundred thousand foot soldiers, twenty thousand horsemen, and thirty-two elephants. Taking up this force he marched out from Antioch with Lysias in overall command of the whole army. Arriving in Idumea, he went up from there to Bethsura, a city very strong and hard to capture, and encircling it, laid siege to the town.
The people of Bethsura resisted vigorously and burned the siege equipment he had prepared — for they sallied out against him — so that much time was spent on the siege. Judas, hearing of the king's advance, gave up his siege of the citadel and, going out to meet the king, pitched camp at the pass in a place called Bethzacharia, seventy stades from the enemy. The king set out from Bethsura and led his force to the pass, to the camp of Judas, and at daybreak drew up his army for battle. Because of the narrowness of the terrain, which did not allow them to be arranged abreast, he made the elephants follow one another in single file, and around each elephant advanced a thousand foot soldiers and five hundred horsemen. The elephants carried tall towers and archers. The rest of the force he had climb the hills on either side, with friendly troops posted in front. He ordered the army to raise a war cry and attacked the enemy, baring the golden and bronze shields so that a brilliant gleam shone from them; the hills echoed with the shouting of the men.
Seeing this, Judas was not dismayed, and receiving the enemy bravely he killed about six hundred of their front-line troops. His brother Eleazar, also called Auran, saw the tallest of the elephants armored in royal trappings and, thinking the king was riding on it, charged at it with great courage. He killed many of those around the elephant and scattered the rest, then crept in beneath its belly, struck it, and killed the beast — but it fell on top of Eleazar as it collapsed and crushed him beneath its weight. So he, having bravely destroyed many of the enemy, ended his life in this manner.
Judas, seeing the strength of the enemy, withdrew to Jerusalem and prepared for a siege. Antiochus sent part of his army to Bethsura to besiege it, while he himself came to Jerusalem with the rest of the force. The people of Bethsura, terrified by his strength and seeing their provisions running short, surrendered themselves, taking oaths that they would suffer no harm from the king. Antiochus, on taking the city, did them no other injury, but only sent them out stripped of their possessions, and set his own garrison in the city.
For a long time he besieged the temple in Jerusalem, while those within defended themselves stubbornly — for every siege engine the king set up against them, they built a counter-device in turn. But food failed them, since the produce that existed had been used up, and the land had not been farmed that year because it was the sabbatical year, in which our law requires the land to be left fallow, unsown. Many of the besieged accordingly deserted because of the shortage of necessities, so that only a few were left in the temple. Such, then, was the state of affairs for those besieged in the temple.
Lysias the general and the king, when word reached them that Philip had come back from Persia and was setting things in order to seize power for himself, resolved to abandon the siege and march against Philip, but decided not to make this known to the soldiers and officers. Instead the king ordered Lysias to address him and the officers publicly, saying nothing about Philip, but pointing out that the siege was proving very long, that the place was strongly fortified, that their supplies were already failing, that there was much business in the kingdom needing attention, and that it seemed far better to make a truce with the besieged, to grant friendship to their whole nation, and to allow them to live by their ancestral laws — the laws whose loss had driven them to war — and then to march home. When Lysias said this, both the army and the officers were pleased with the proposal.
So the king sent to Judas and those besieged with him, offering peace and permission to live by their ancestral laws. They received the offer gladly, and taking oaths and pledges, came out of the temple. But when Antiochus entered it and saw how strongly fortified the place was, he broke his oaths and ordered his troops to come forward and level the wall to the ground. Having done this, he returned to Antioch, taking with him the high priest Onias, who was also called Menelaus. For Lysias had advised the king to put Menelaus to death, if he wished the Jews to remain quiet and cause him no further trouble, since it was Menelaus who had begun all the trouble by persuading the king's father to force the Jews to abandon their ancestral religion. So the king sent Menelaus to Beroea in Syria and had him killed there, after he had held the high priesthood for ten years, having proved wicked and impious, and having forced his own people to transgress their own laws so that he himself might rule the nation. After Menelaus's death, Alcimus, also called Jacimus, became high priest.
King Antiochus, seeing that Philip was now in control of affairs, made war on him, took him prisoner, and put him to death. Now Onias, son of the high priest — the boy we mentioned earlier as having been left behind, still a child, when his father died — seeing that the king had killed his uncle Menelaus and given the high priesthood to Alcimus, who was not of the priestly line, but had been persuaded by Lysias to transfer the honor from that family to another house, fled to Ptolemy, king of Egypt. Being honored by Ptolemy and his wife Cleopatra, he obtained a place he had requested in the Heliopolite district, and there built a temple resembling the one in Jerusalem. We shall have a better occasion to discuss this later.
At about this same time Demetrius, son of Seleucus, fled from Rome, and seizing Tripolis in Syria, put the diadem on himself. Gathering some mercenaries around him, he entered upon the kingdom, and everyone gladly received him and gave themselves over to him. They seized King Antiochus and Lysias alive and brought them to him. On Demetrius's order these two were put to death at once, Antiochus having reigned two years, as has already been noted elsewhere.
Many wicked Jews and exiles banded together and went to Demetrius, and with them Alcimus the high priest. They accused the whole nation, and Judas and his brothers in particular, saying that Judas had killed all of Demetrius's friends and all those in the kingdom who favored him and were waiting for him, and had driven them from their own land, making them exiles in a foreign country. They asked him to send one of his own friends to learn for himself what deeds Judas and his men had dared to commit.
Demetrius, provoked, sent out Bacchides, a friend of King Antiochus Epiphanes, an honest man entrusted with the whole of Mesopotamia, giving him an army and placing the high priest Alcimus in his charge, with orders to kill Judas and those with him. Bacchides set out from Antioch with his forces, and on arriving in Judea sent word to Judas and his brothers, speaking of friendship and peace — for he wished to take Judas by treachery. Judas did not trust him, for he saw that he had come with so large an army as one brings to war, not to peace. Some of the people, however, gave heed to what Bacchides proclaimed, and thinking they would suffer no harm from Alcimus, since he was one of their own countrymen, went over to him, and after taking oaths from both sides that neither they nor those of like mind would suffer harm, entrusted themselves to him.
But Bacchides, disregarding the oaths, killed sixty of them, while as for the others who meant to come over to him, he turned back the pledge of good faith he had given the first. When he left Jerusalem and came to a village called Bethzetho, he sent men who seized many of the deserters and some of the people, and after killing all of them, ordered everyone in the region to obey Alcimus. Leaving him with some troops to keep hold of the territory, Bacchides returned to King Demetrius at Antioch.
Alcimus, wishing to secure his position and understanding that he would rule more safely if he won the goodwill of the people, drew everyone over with agreeable words, treating each man with pleasant and gracious speech, and very quickly gathered a large body of supporters and forces. Most of these were drawn from the impious and the exiles, and using them as his agents and soldiers, he went through the country and put to death all those he found there who favored Judas's cause. Seeing that Alcimus was now growing powerful and had destroyed many of the good and pious men of the nation, Judas in turn went through the country and put to death those who shared Alcimus's views. Alcimus, seeing that he was unable to hold his own against Judas but was being overpowered by his strength, decided to turn to King Demetrius for aid, and going to Antioch, he provoked the king against Judas, accusing him of having done him many injuries already and warning that there would be more still, unless he were forestalled and made to pay the penalty by the dispatch of a strong force against him. Demetrius, thinking it now dangerous for his own affairs to overlook Judas...
...into such strength, Demetrius sent out Nicanor, the most loyal and trusted of his friends—this was the man who had fled to Rome together with him—and gave him as large a force as he judged sufficient against Judas, ordering him to show the nation no mercy whatsoever. When Nicanor arrived at Jerusalem, he decided not to fight Judas outright but resolved instead to get him into his power by deceit. He sent him peaceful proposals, saying there was no need for war and danger, and offering him oaths that he would suffer no harm; he had come, he said, with friends in order to make plain to them King Demetrius's true disposition toward their people. When Nicanor had negotiated in this way, Judas and his brothers were persuaded, and suspecting no trickery, exchanged pledges with him and received Nicanor and his force. Nicanor greeted Judas, and in the midst of conversing with him gave his own men a signal to seize him. But Judas, perceiving the plot, sprang away and fled back to his own men. Once his intent and the ambush were exposed, Nicanor resolved to make war on Judas.
He mustered and equipped his forces for battle and engaged Judas near a village called Capharsalama, and having won the victory, forced Judas to flee to the citadel in Jerusalem. As Judas was coming down from the citadel to the Temple, some of the priests and elders met him, greeted him, and showed him the sacrifices they said they were offering to God on the king's behalf. Nicanor cursed them and threatened that, unless the people handed Judas over to him, he would tear down the Temple upon his return. Having made this threat, he left Jerusalem, and the priests broke into tears from grief at what had been said, and begged God to deliver them from their enemies.
When Nicanor had left Jerusalem, he reached a village called Bethhoron and encamped there, having been joined by another force from Syria. Judas encamped at Adasa, another village thirty stades from Bethhoron, with two thousand soldiers. He urged them not to be terrified by the enemy's numbers, nor to calculate how many they were about to fight, but to consider instead who they were and for what prizes they were risking their lives, and so to go boldly to meet the enemy. He led them out to battle and engaged Nicanor; and after a hard-fought battle he defeated the enemy, killing many of them, and at last Nicanor himself fell, fighting gloriously to the end. Once he had fallen, his army did not stand its ground either, but having lost their general they turned to flight, throwing away their weapons. Judas pursued and slaughtered them,
and signaled with trumpets to the surrounding villages that he was defeating the enemy. Those in the villages, hearing this, rushed out armed and, meeting the fugitives face to face, cut them down, so that not one of the nine thousand men in that battle escaped. This victory came about on the thirteenth of the month called Adar by the Jews and Dystros by the Macedonians. They celebrate this day every year as a festival of victory. From that time, for a little while, the Jewish nation rested from war and enjoyed peace, before again being plunged into struggles and dangers.
Alcimus the high priest wished to tear down the wall of the sanctuary, which was ancient and had been built by the prophets of old, but a sudden stroke from God fell upon him: he was struck speechless and cast to the ground, and after being tormented for many days he died, having served as high priest for four years. When he died, the people gave the high priesthood to Judas, who, hearing of the power of the Romans—that they had conquered Gaul, Spain, and Carthage in Libya, and had subdued Greece besides, along with the kings Perseus, Philip, and Antiochus the Great—resolved to make an alliance of friendship with them.
He sent to Rome his friends Eupolemus, son of John, and Jason, son of Eleazar, asking them to secure for him an alliance and friendship, and to have the Romans write to Demetrius not to make war on the Jews. When Judas's envoys arrived in Rome, the Senate received them, and after debating the purpose of their mission, granted the alliance. Having passed a decree on the matter, the Senate sent a copy of it to Judea and had the original inscribed on bronze tablets and set up on the Capitol. It read as follows: a decree of the Senate concerning alliance and friendship with the nation
of the Jews. No one subject to Rome is to make war on the Jewish nation, nor to supply grain, ships, or money to those who make war on them. If anyone attacks the Jews, the Romans are to help them as far as possible; and likewise, if anyone attacks Roman territory, the Jews are to fight alongside them as allies. And if the Jewish nation should wish to add anything to or remove anything from this alliance, this is to be done by common consent of the Roman people, and whatever is added shall be binding. This decree was written by Eupolemus, son of John, and Jason, son of Eleazar, in the high priesthood of Judas over the nation and the generalship of his brother Simon. Thus it was that the first friendship and alliance between Rome and the Jews came about.
When Demetrius was informed of Nicanor's death and the destruction of the force with him, he again sent out Bacchides with an army into Judea. Setting out from Antioch and arriving in Judea, Bacchides encamped at Arbela, a city of Galilee, and besieged those who were in the caves there—for many had taken refuge in them—captured them, and then set out from there in haste for Jerusalem.
Learning that Judas was encamped in a village called Bezeth, he hastened against him with twenty thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry; Judas had only a thousand men in all. Seeing the size of Bacchides's force, these men were afraid, and all but eight hundred abandoned the camp and fled. Left behind by his own soldiers, with the enemy pressing upon him and allowing him no time to gather more troops, Judas was forced to face Bacchides's forces with only the eight hundred. Urging them to bear the danger bravely, he called on them to go into battle. When they said they were not a match for so great an army, and advised that they withdraw for now to save themselves, and later gather their own men together to engage the enemy, he said,
"May the sun never look down on such a thing happening, that I should show my back to the enemy. Even if the present hour brings my death, and I must die fighting no matter what, I will stand my ground nobly, enduring whatever is to come, rather than bring upon my past achievements and their renown the disgrace of this present flight." Having said this to those who remained, disdaining the danger, he urged them to go and meet the enemy. Bacchides led his forces out of camp and drew them up for battle, stationing his cavalry on each wing and placing his light troops and archers in front of the whole phalanx, while he himself commanded the right wing.
Having arrayed his army in this way, when he approached the enemy's camp he ordered the trumpeter to sound the signal, and the army advanced with a battle cry. Judas did the same and engaged the enemy, and as both sides fought fiercely and the battle dragged on until sunset, Judas saw that Bacchides and the strongest part of the army were on the right wing, and taking his bravest men
he charged that part of the line, and attacking those there, broke apart their formation. Pushing into the midst of them, he forced them to flee, and pursued them as far as the mountain called Aza. But those on the left wing, seeing the rout of the men on the right, surrounded Judas as he pursued, coming up behind him and hemming him in.
Unable to flee, but surrounded by the enemy, he stood his ground and fought together with those beside him. He killed many of his opponents, but, utterly worn out, he too fell, ending his life amid successes like those he had achieved before. When Judas fell, those with him, having no one left to look to and bereft of such a general, fled.
Simon and Jonathan, Judas's brothers, obtained his body from the enemy under truce and brought it to the village of Modein, where their father too had been buried, and they buried him there, the people mourning him for many days and honoring him together according to custom. Such was the end that overtook Judas, a man of noble spirit who had proved a great warrior, mindful of his father Mattathias's commands, and who had endured all things, both doing and suffering, for the freedom of his countrymen.
Being such a man in valor, he left behind the greatest renown and monument of himself, having freed his nation and rescued it from slavery under the Macedonians. He died having held the high priesthood for three years.

======== Antiquities — Book 13 ========

How Jonathan, Judas's brother, took over the leadership when Judas died. How, warring against Bacchides, he forced him to make friendship with him and leave the country. That Alexander, son of Antiochus Epiphanes, came to Syria and made war on Demetrius. How Demetrius sent envoys to Jonathan and made an alliance with him, giving many gifts both to him and to our nation. How Alexander, hearing of this and outbidding Demetrius's offers, made Jonathan high priest and persuaded him to become his ally.
The friendship of Onias with Ptolemy Philometor, which arose at the same time, and how he built the temple called Onias's Temple, modeled on the one in Jerusalem. That Alexander, after Demetrius died, honored Jonathan greatly. How Demetrius, son of Demetrius, sailed to Syria from Crete, made war on Alexander, defeated him, and became king himself, making friendship with Jonathan. How Trypho of Apamea, having defeated Demetrius in war, handed the kingdom over to Antiochus, son of Alexander, and made Jonathan his own ally as well. How, when Demetrius was taken captive by the Parthians, Trypho broke faith with Jonathan, seized him by treachery, killed him, and made war on his brother Simon.
How the nation entrusted the command to Simon, Jonathan's brother, and appointed him high priest. How he besieged Trypho at Dora, having become the ally of Antiochus, brother of Demetrius, who was surnamed Eusebes. How, after Trypho was put to death, Antiochus made war on Simon, and Simon, defeating his general Cendebaeus, drove him out of Judea. That Simon was murdered by treachery at a banquet by his son-in-law Ptolemy, and Ptolemy, having bound Simon's wife and children, tried to seize the government for himself.
How Hyrcanus, the youngest of Simon's sons, got ahead of him, took over the leadership, and besieged Ptolemy, shutting him up in a fortress called Dagon. How Antiochus, called Eusebes, campaigned against Hyrcanus and, having sat down before the city of Jerusalem, broke off the siege after taking three hundred talents from Hyrcanus and concluding an alliance and friendship with him.
Hyrcanus's campaign into Syria after the death of Antiochus, who died among the Medes, and how he took many cities by force. The friendship with Hyrcanus of Alexander, called Zabinas. How Antiochus Cyzicenus, defeated by Hyrcanus, was driven out of Judea. How Aristobulus, on taking over the rule, was the first to put on a diadem. How, after Aristobulus died, his brother Alexander took over the rule, campaigned into Syria, Phoenicia, and Arabia, and subdued many of the nations.
The battle and victory of Ptolemy Lathyrus against him. How Demetrius, called Eucaerus, campaigned against Alexander and defeated him. The campaign of Antiochus, also called Dionysus, against Judea, and how he prevailed in the battle. How, after Alexander's death, his wife Alexandra held the kingdom for nine years, and, having lived out her life in peace and honor, died. This book covers a period of eighty-two years.
In what manner, then, the Jewish nation, once the Macedonians had enslaved it, recovered its freedom, and through how many and how great struggles its general Judas went forth and died fighting on their behalf, we have shown in the book before this one.
After the death of Judas, everything among the Jews that was still impious and had transgressed the ancestral constitution sprang up and, flourishing on every side, afflicted them. Famine joined forces with their wickedness and seized the land as well, so that many, for want of necessities and unable to hold out against the twin terrors of famine and enemy, deserted to the Macedonians.
Bacchides gathered together those Jews who had abandoned the ancestral way of life and preferred the common cause with the enemy, and entrusted to them the oversight of the country. These men seized Judas's friends and those loyal to his cause and handed them over to Bacchides, who first tortured them and abused them for his pleasure before putting them to death in this way.
Since so great a calamity had befallen the Jews, of a kind they had not experienced since their return from Babylon, the surviving companions of Judas, seeing the nation perishing so pitiably, came to his brother Jonathan and asked him to imitate his brother and the concern he had shown for their kinsmen, who had died for their freedom, and not to allow the nation to go without a leader nor to be destroyed further.
Jonathan said he was ready to die on their behalf, and, being judged in no way inferior to his brother, was appointed general of the Jews. Bacchides, hearing this, was afraid that Jonathan, like Judas before him, would cause trouble for the king and the Macedonians, and sought to kill him by treachery.
This intention of his did not escape Jonathan or his brother Simon. Learning of it, they took all their companions and fled at once into the wilderness nearest the city, and coming to the water called the Cistern of Asphar, they stayed there. Bacchides, perceiving that they had gone off and were in that place, set out against them
with his whole force, and, encamping beyond the Jordan, let his troops rest. Jonathan, learning that Bacchides was coming against him, sent his brother John, also called Gaddis, to the Nabatean Arabs, so that he might deposit their baggage with them until they had fought Bacchides, for the Nabateans were their friends. But as John was going to the Nabateans, the sons of Amaraeus, out of
the city of Medaba, ambushed him, seized him and those with him, plundered everything he was carrying, and killed John and all his companions. They paid a fitting penalty for this to his brothers, however, which we shall relate shortly. Bacchides, learning that Jonathan was encamped in the marshes of the Jordan, watched for the Sabbath
day and came against him on it, supposing he would not fight because of the law. But Jonathan roused his companions, telling them that their very lives were at stake, hemmed in as they were between the river and the enemy with no way to flee — for the enemy were advancing in front and the river was behind them — and, praying that God would grant them victory,
he joined battle with the enemy. Having cut down many of them, when he saw Bacchides boldly bearing down on him, he stretched out his right hand as if to strike him. But Bacchides saw it coming and dodged the blow, and Jonathan leapt away with his companions and swam across the river, and in this manner they made their escape to the other side of the Jordan, since the enemy no longer crossed the river after Bacchides at once turned back
to the citadel in Jerusalem. He had lost about two thousand of his army. Bacchides then took and fortified many cities of Judea — Jericho, Emmaus, Beth-horon, Bethel, Timnath, Pharatho, Tochoa, and Gazara — and, building towers in each of the cities and surrounding them with strong and remarkably large walls, he stationed a garrison
in them, so that his men, setting out from there, could harass the Jews. Above all he fortified the citadel in Jerusalem. He also took the sons of the leading men of Judea as hostages and shut them up in the citadel, and kept watch over them in this way. At the same time someone came to Jonathan and his brother Simon and reported that the sons of Amaraeus
were celebrating a marriage and bringing the bride from the city of Nabatha — the daughter of one of the notable men among the Arabs — and that a splendid and lavish procession for the girl was about to take place. Jonathan and Simon, thinking this the most fitting occasion to avenge their brother, and supposing they could exact justice for John from these men with great advantage,
set out for Medaba and lay in ambush, waiting in the mountain for their enemies. When they saw them bringing the bride and the bridegroom, along with the crowd of friends that naturally accompanies a wedding, they leapt out of the ambush and killed them all, and, taking the jewelry and all the other plunder that then accompanied the people, withdrew. And so they exacted vengeance for
their brother John from the sons of Amaraeus in this way: these men themselves, along with the friends who had joined them, and their wives and children, perished, four hundred in all. Simon and Jonathan then withdrew to the marshes of the river and stayed there. Bacchides, having secured all of Judea with garrisons, returned to the king, and for two years
the affairs of the Jews remained at peace. But the fugitives and the impious, seeing Jonathan and his companions living in the country in great security because of the peace, sent to King Demetrius, urging him to send Bacchides to capture Jonathan; for they claimed it could be done without effort, and that by falling upon them in a single night, while they did not expect it, he could kill them all.
The king sent Bacchides, who, on arriving in Judea, wrote to all his friends and to the Jews and allies to seize Jonathan for him. But though all made every effort, they could not get hold of Jonathan, for he was on his guard, having learned of the plot. Bacchides, enraged at the fugitives for having deceived both himself and the king, seized fifty of their leaders and put them to death.
Jonathan, together with his brother and their companions, withdrew, out of fear of Bacchides, to Bethalagon, a village in the wilderness, and, building towers and surrounding himself with walls, kept himself securely guarded. Bacchides, hearing of this, took the army with him, along with the Jewish allies he gathered, and came against Jonathan, and, attacking his fortifications, besieged him for many
days. But Jonathan did not yield to the pressure of the siege; standing firm, he left his brother Simon behind in the town to fight Bacchides, while he himself slipped out secretly into the country, and, gathering a large force from those loyal to him, fell by night upon Bacchides's camp, and, destroying a great many of them, made himself known to his brother
Simon as well by falling upon the enemy. For Simon, perceiving that the enemy were being killed by Jonathan, sallied out against them too, burned the siege engines of the Macedonians, and inflicted heavy slaughter on them. Bacchides, seeing himself hemmed in by the enemy, with some pressing him from the front and others from behind, fell into
despondency and confusion of mind, thrown into disorder by this unexpected turn against the siege. He vented his anger over this on the fugitives who had summoned him from the king, as men who had deceived him, and wished, if possible, to bring the siege to an honorable end and return home. Learning his intention, Jonathan sent envoys to him concerning friendship and alliance, so that they might restore
to each other the prisoners each side had taken. Bacchides, judging this the most honorable way to withdraw, made a treaty of friendship with Jonathan, and they swore no longer to campaign against one another; and, having returned the prisoners and recovered his own men, he went back to Antioch to the king, and after this withdrawal he never again invaded Judea. Jonathan, taking hold of this
peace and making his residence in the town of Michmash, governed the people there, punishing the wicked and impious and so cleansing the nation of them. In the hundred and sixtieth year it happened that Alexander, son of Antiochus Epiphanes, went up to Syria and took Ptolemais by the treachery of the soldiers within it; for they held Demetrius in hatred
because of his arrogance and his unwillingness to be approached. For he had shut himself up in a royal residence with four towers, which he had built himself not far from Antioch, and admitted no one, but was careless and negligent about affairs, so that the hatred of his subjects toward him blazed up all the more, as we have already shown elsewhere. Demetrius, hearing that Alexander had arrived at Ptolemais,
gathered his whole army and led it against him. He also sent envoys to Jonathan concerning alliance and goodwill, for he had resolved to forestall Alexander, lest, without prior negotiation with him, Alexander should secure his help instead. He did this out of fear that Jonathan, remembering old grievances against him, might join in the hostilities against him. He therefore ordered him to gather a force, prepare weapons, and recover the hostages
whom Bacchides had shut up from among the Jews in the citadel of Jerusalem. When this message from Demetrius reached him, Jonathan came to Jerusalem and read the king's letter aloud in the hearing of the people and of those guarding the citadel. When it had been read, the impious men and fugitives from the citadel were greatly afraid, since the king had entrusted Jonathan
with gathering an army and recovering the hostages. Jonathan gave each hostage back to his own parents. And so Jonathan made his residence in Jerusalem, renewing the state of the city and arranging everything according to his own wishes. He ordered the walls of the city to be rebuilt with squared stones, so that they would be more secure against attacks. When
the guards of the fortresses in Judea saw this, they all abandoned their posts and fled to Antioch, except those in the town of Bethsura and those in the citadel of Jerusalem; for these were mostly impious and fugitive Jews, and for that reason they did not abandon their garrisons. When Alexander learned of the promises
Demetrius had made to Jonathan, and of Jonathan's courage and all he had accomplished in fighting the Macedonians, and again of all he himself had suffered at the hands of Demetrius and of Bacchides, Demetrius's general, he said that in the present circumstances one could not find a better ally for one's friends than Jonathan, a man who was both brave in war and bore a personal hatred toward Demetrius after all he had suffered
...and had suffered many wrongs at his hands. If, then, it seemed good to make him a friend against Demetrius, now was no less useful a moment than any other to invite him into the alliance." This resolved, Alexander and his friends decided to send to Jonathan, and he wrote him the following letter:
"King Alexander to his brother Jonathan, greetings. We have long heard of your courage and loyalty, and for this reason we have sent to you concerning friendship and alliance. We hereby appoint you high priest of the Jews today, and you are to be called our friend." He sent him gifts as well, a purple robe and a golden crown, and urged him, now that he had been honored by us, to become likewise disposed toward us.
When Jonathan received the letter, he put on the priestly robe at the coming Feast of Tabernacles, four years after his brother Judas had died; for not even during that time had anyone become high priest. He gathered a large force and had a great quantity of weapons forged. Demetrius, on learning of this, was greatly distressed, and blamed himself for his slowness, in that he had not forestalled Alexander by showing kindness to Jonathan himself, but had left the occasion open to him. He too, therefore, wrote a letter to Jonathan and to the people, declaring the following:
"King Demetrius to Jonathan and to the nation of the Jews, greetings. Since you have preserved your friendship toward us, and have not gone over to my enemies though they tested you, we commend you for this loyalty and urge you to remain in the same course, and you shall receive rewards and favors from us in return. I will release most of you from the taxes and the tributes which you used to pay to the kings before me and to me, and I now remit to you the taxes you have always paid. In addition, I grant you exemption from the tax on salt and from the crowns you used to offer us, and instead of a third of the grain and half of the fruit of the trees, the portion that fell to me I remit to you from this day forward.
And as to the tax due to me for each head of those dwelling in Judea, and for the three toparchies attached to Judea — Samaria, Galilee, and Perea — these I concede to you from now for all time. And I wish the city of Jerusalem to be holy and inviolable, and free, together with its territory, from the tithe and from the tolls. I also grant the citadel to your high priest Jonathan, that he may station in it as guards whomever he judges trustworthy and friendly, so that they may keep it for us. And I release free all Jews who have been taken captive and are enslaved in our realm. I also order that the beasts of burden belonging to Jews not be requisitioned for forced service, and that the Sabbaths and every festival, together with three days before each festival, be exempt from taxation.
In the same way I release free and unmolested the Jews dwelling within my realm, and I permit those who wish to serve in my army to do so, up to thirty thousand in number, and these shall receive the same allowances my own army receives. Some of them I will station in the garrisons, others about the guard of my own person, and I will make some of them commanders among those of my court. I also permit them to live by their ancestral laws and to keep them, and I wish them to be subject to the three districts attached to Judea in accordance with those laws. I also charge the high priest to see to it that no Jew has any other temple to worship at except the one in Jerusalem alone. And out of my own funds I give fifteen thousand shekels yearly toward the expense of the sacrifices,
and whatever surplus of the money remains, I wish it to be yours. And the ten thousand drachmas which the kings used to take from the temple, I remit to you, since they properly belong to the priests who serve in the temple. And whoever takes refuge at the temple in Jerusalem, or within its precincts, whether owing money to the royal treasury or for any other cause, let these be released, and let their property remain secure. I also permit the renewing and rebuilding of the temple, the expense for this being met out of my own funds, and I likewise grant that the walls of the city be rebuilt and that high towers be raised, this too at my own expense.
And if there is any fortress that it is advantageous for the country of the Jews to have made secure, let this too be built at my expense." With these promises and favors Demetrius wrote to the Jews. But king Alexander, having gathered a large force of mercenaries and of the soldiers who had joined him from Syria, marched against Demetrius. And when battle was joined, the left wing of Demetrius's army routed the enemy opposite it and pursued them a great distance, killing many of them and plundering their camp; but the right wing, where Demetrius himself happened to be, was defeated.
All the rest fled, but Demetrius, fighting nobly, killed no small number of the enemy, and while pursuing the others drove his horse into a deep and impassable swamp, where it happened that his horse fell and he, unable to escape, was killed there. For the enemy, seeing what had happened to him, turned back and, surrounding Demetrius, all hurled their javelins at him. He, fighting on foot, defended himself nobly, but at last, having received many wounds and no longer able to hold out, he fell. Such was the end that overtook Demetrius, who had reigned eleven years, as we have also shown elsewhere.
Now the son of Onias the high priest, who bore the same name as his father, and who, as we have said before, had fled to Alexandria and was living there with king Ptolemy called Philometor, when he saw Judea being mistreated by the Macedonians and their kings, wishing to secure for himself glory and everlasting remembrance, resolved to send to king Ptolemy and to queen Cleopatra and ask their permission to build a temple in Egypt like the one in Jerusalem, and to install Levites and priests of his own people.
He was moved to this above all by his confidence in the prophet Isaiah, who, having lived more than six hundred years before, had foretold that a temple must certainly be built in Egypt to the Most High God by a Jewish man. Moved by these considerations, then, Onias wrote the following letter to Ptolemy and Cleopatra:
"Having rendered you many great services in matters of war, with God's help, and having been present in Coele-Syria and Phoenicia, and having come with the Jews to the city of Leontopolis in the Heliopolite nome and to other places of the nation, and finding that most of them had shrines that were not fitting and were for this reason at odds with one another — a thing that has also happened to the Egyptians because of the multitude of their shrines and the disagreement among them over their forms of worship — I found a most suitable place in the fortress called that of the wild Bubastis, abounding in varied timber and full of sacred animals, and I ask that I be permitted to cleanse this ownerless and ruined shrine
and to build there a temple to the Most High God, modeled after the one in Jerusalem and of the same dimensions, on behalf of you and your wife and your children, so that the Jews dwelling in Egypt may have a place to gather in harmony with one another and thereby serve your interests; for indeed the prophet Isaiah foretold this too: 'There shall be an altar in Egypt to the Lord God,' and he prophesied many other such things concerning this place."
This, then, is what Onias wrote to king Ptolemy. And one may observe the piety of him and of Cleopatra his sister and wife from the letter they wrote in reply; for they laid the sin and the transgression of the law upon the head of Onias himself. For they wrote back as follows:
"King Ptolemy and Queen Cleopatra to Onias, greetings. We have read your letter asking to be permitted to cleanse the ruined shrine in the city of Leontopolis in the Heliopolite nome, called that of the wild Bubastis. We are amazed, therefore, that a temple should be pleasing to God when set up in so impure a place and one full of sacred animals. But since you say that the prophet Isaiah foretold this a long time ago, we grant you permission, if this is indeed to be in accordance with the law, so that we may not appear to have committed any sin against God."
Having received the place, then, Onias built a temple and an altar to God like the one in Jerusalem, though smaller and poorer. Its dimensions and its furnishings I have not thought it necessary to describe here, for they have been recorded in my seventh book of the Jewish War. And Onias found certain Jews like himself, priests and Levites, to conduct worship there. But concerning this temple enough has now been said by us.
Now the Jews of Alexandria, and the Samaritans, who worshiped at the temple on Gerizim, happened in the time of Alexander to quarrel with one another, and they contended before Ptolemy himself about their respective temples, the Jews maintaining that the one in Jerusalem had been built according to the laws of Moses, and the Samaritans that the one on Gerizim had. They asked the king to sit in judgment with his friends and hear the arguments on these matters, and to punish those who lost the case with death.
The case for the Samaritans was argued by Sabbaeus and Theodosius, and that for the people of Jerusalem and the Jews by Andronicus son of Messalamus. They swore by God and by the king that they would indeed present their proofs according to the law, and they asked Ptolemy that whichever of them he found transgressing the oaths, he should put to death. The king, then, taking many of his friends into his council, sat to hear the arguments of both sides. The Jews then present in Alexandria were greatly anxious for the men,
for it distressed them that anyone should try to overthrow the temple in Jerusalem; for they took it hard that some should attempt to destroy a temple so ancient and so renowned throughout the inhabited world. When Sabbaeus and Theodosius had granted Andronicus the right to speak first, he began his proofs from the law and from the succession of the high priests, showing how each had received the honor from his father and had presided over the temple, and how all the kings of Asia had honored the temple with dedications and the most splendid gifts, while no one had ever taken any account or notice of the temple on Gerizim, as though it did not even exist. By saying these things, and many others like them, Andronicus persuaded the king to decide that the temple in Jerusalem had been built according to the laws of Moses, and to put to death Sabbaeus and Theodosius.
Such, then, were the events that befell the Jews of Alexandria in the time of Ptolemy Philometor. And when Demetrius had died in battle, as we have shown above, Alexander, having taken over the kingdom of Syria, wrote to Ptolemy Philometor asking for his daughter's hand in marriage, saying that it was fitting that he, having recovered his father's kingdom and having been advanced to it by the providence of God, and having overcome Demetrius, and being in every other respect not unworthy of kinship with him, should be joined to him by marriage.
Ptolemy, receiving the proposal of marriage gladly, wrote back saying he rejoiced that Alexander had recovered his father's kingdom, and promised to give him his daughter, and bade him come to Ptolemais to receive the daughter he was about to bring; for he himself would escort her that far from Egypt and there give the girl in marriage to him. Having written this, Ptolemy came in haste to Ptolemais, bringing his daughter Cleopatra. Finding Alexander there, as he had written, already arrived to meet him, he gave him the girl, along with a dowry of silver and gold as much as it was fitting for a king to give. And while the wedding was being celebrated, Alexander wrote to Jonathan the high priest
and ordered him to come to Ptolemais. Jonathan, arriving before the kings and presenting them with gifts, was received with splendid honor from both. Alexander compelled him to take off his own garments and put on the purple, and, having him sit down together with himself on the dais, ordered his commanders to go with him into the middle of the city and proclaim that no one was permitted to speak against him or to cause him trouble.
When the commanders had done this, those who had been prepared to accuse Jonathan and were hostile to him, seeing the honor proclaimed for him by the king, fled away, fearing that they too might suffer some harm. So great was the regard king Alexander showed for Jonathan that he had him enrolled first among his friends. Now in the hundred and sixty-fifth year, Demetrius son of Demetrius, with many mercenaries which Lasthenes the Cretan had supplied him, set out from Crete and sailed to Cilicia.
When Alexander heard of this, he was thrown into anxiety and confusion, and at once hurried from Phoenicia to Antioch, in order to secure affairs there before Demetrius arrived. He left Apollonius the Daosite as governor of Coele-Syria, who, coming to Jamnia with a large force, sent to Jonathan the high priest, saying that it was unjust that he alone should live in security and with full authority, not being subject to the king; that this brought reproach upon him from everyone, that he had not brought Jonathan into subjection to the king.
"Do not, then, deceive yourself by sitting in the mountains and imagining that you have strength; rather, if you trust in your own power, come down into the plain and match yourself against our army, and the outcome of the victory will show who is the bravest. Know, too, that the best men from every city march with me; indeed, these are the very men who have always defeated your ancestors. You will fight your battle against us on such ground that there are no stones with which to defend yourself, only weapons, and no place to which you might flee if defeated."
Provoked by this, Jonathan chose ten thousand soldiers and set out from Jerusalem, together with Simon his brother, and, arriving at Joppa, encamped outside the city, the people of Joppa having shut its gates against him; for they had a garrison inside stationed there by Apollonius. But while Jonathan was preparing to besiege them, the people, fearing that...
When Apollonius heard that Jaffa had been taken by Jonathan, he took three thousand cavalry and eight thousand infantry and marched to Ashdod. From there he set out again, moving slowly and deliberately, and on reaching Jaffa he pulled back, drawing Jonathan out onto the plain, confident in his cavalry and expecting an easy victory. Jonathan advanced and pursued Apollonius toward Ashdod. But once the enemy had reached open ground, Apollonius wheeled around and joined battle. He had stationed a thousand cavalry in ambush in a nearby ravine so that they could appear behind the enemy's lines, but Jonathan noticed them and was not shaken. He drew up his army in a square, facing the enemy on both sides at once, front and rear. As the fighting dragged on until evening, he gave part of his force to his brother Simon and ordered him to engage the enemy's main line, while he himself commanded the rest to lock shields and absorb the cavalry's volleys. His men did as ordered, and although the enemy cavalry kept shooting at them until their quivers were empty, the arrows did no harm: they could not penetrate bodies protected by shields packed so tightly together that the missiles were easily deflected and fell useless. When the enemy had worn themselves out shooting from morning until late afternoon, Simon, seeing that they were exhausted, engaged their infantry line, and with his soldiers fighting eagerly he routed the enemy. Seeing the infantry in flight, the cavalry did not hold their ground either; already exhausted from fighting since dawn, and now with no hope of support from their infantry, they fled in disorder and confusion, scattering across the whole plain. Jonathan pursued them all the way to Ashdod, killing many who had given up hope of escape, and forced the rest to take refuge in the temple of Dagon at Ashdod. Jonathan took the city itself by storm and burned it along with the surrounding villages. He did not spare the temple of Dagon either, but burned that too, destroying everyone who had fled inside for safety. In all, the enemy dead -- those killed in battle and those burned in the temple -- numbered eight thousand. Having won so decisive a victory, Jonathan left Ashdod and marched to Ashkelon, and when he camped outside the city the people of Ashkelon came out to meet him bearing gifts and honoring him. He accepted their goodwill and returned from there to Jerusalem, bringing with him the great quantity of plunder he had taken from the defeated enemy.
When Alexander heard that his general Apollonius had been defeated, he pretended to be pleased, on the grounds that Apollonius had fought against his own wishes with Jonathan, who was his friend and ally. He sent word to Jonathan commending him, and granting him honors and rewards -- a gold clasp, of the kind customarily given to relatives of kings -- and assigning him Ekron and its district as his own holding. About this same time King Ptolemy, surnamed Philometor, arrived in Syria with a naval and land force to support Alexander, since he was his father-in-law. All the cities, at Alexander's command, welcomed him eagerly and escorted him as far as Ashdod, where the people all cried out against him, denouncing Jonathan for destroying their temple of Dagon, burning their territory, and killing many of their people.
Ptolemy heard all this out but said nothing. Jonathan, meanwhile, went to meet Ptolemy at Jaffa, where he received splendid gifts from him and every mark of honor; he then escorted him as far as the river called Eleutherus, before returning again to Jerusalem. When Ptolemy reached Ptolemais, he narrowly escaped assassination -- quite unexpectedly, since the plot against him came from Alexander himself, carried out through Ammonius, who happened to be his friend. Once the plot came to light, Ptolemy wrote to Alexander demanding that Ammonius be handed over for punishment, saying that he had been the target of the man's scheme and insisting he answer for it. When Alexander refused to surrender him, Ptolemy realized that Alexander himself was behind the plot and grew bitterly hostile toward him. The people of Antioch, too, already had a grievance against Alexander over Ammonius, since they had suffered greatly at the man's hands.
Ammonius did in the end pay the penalty for his crimes: he was slaughtered in disgrace like a woman, having tried to hide himself in women's clothing -- as we have related elsewhere. Ptolemy, now regretting that he had given his daughter in marriage to Alexander and joined him in alliance against Demetrius, broke off the family tie; he took his daughter away from Alexander and sent her at once to Demetrius, opening negotiations for an alliance and a marriage. He promised to give Demetrius his daughter as wife and to restore him to his father's kingdom.
Demetrius, delighted by this embassy, accepted both the alliance and the marriage. One task alone remained for Ptolemy: to persuade the people of Antioch, who were hostile toward Demetrius on account of the wrongs his father had done them, to accept him. He accomplished this too. The Antiochenes, hating Alexander because of Ammonius, as we have said, easily drove him out of Antioch, and he, expelled from the city, fled to Cilicia. Ptolemy then came before the Antiochenes and was proclaimed king by them and by the army, and -- reluctantly -- assumed two crowns, that of Asia and that of Egypt. But being naturally decent and just, and having no craving for such grandeur, and moreover shrewd enough to foresee what was coming, he judged it wise to avoid arousing the resentment of the Romans. He therefore called the Antiochenes to an assembly and persuaded them to accept Demetrius instead, saying that, for the benefits their father had shown him, he would bear the son no grudge on their account.
He also pledged that he himself would act as Demetrius's good counselor and guide, and promised not to let him undertake any base course of action, adding that the kingdom of Egypt was enough for him. With these words he persuaded the Antiochenes to accept Demetrius. When Alexander then set out from Cilicia with a large army and great preparations, marched into Syria, and burned and plundered the territory of Antioch, Ptolemy took the field against him together with his son-in-law Demetrius -- for he had by now given him his daughter in marriage -- and together they defeated Alexander and put him to flight. Alexander fled to Arabia. In the course of the battle it happened that Ptolemy's horse, startled by the trumpeting of an elephant, threw him off, and when the enemy saw him fall they rushed at him and struck him with many wounds to the head, bringing him to the point of death; his bodyguards snatched him away, but he was in such a bad state that for four days he could neither recognize anyone nor speak.
The Arab chief Zabdiel cut off Alexander's head and sent it to Ptolemy, who, having by the fifth day recovered enough from his wounds to understand what was set before him, both heard the news of Alexander's death and saw the head -- the most welcome sight and report he could have received. Not long afterward, filled with joy at Alexander's death, he himself also died. Alexander, surnamed Balas, had reigned over Asia for five years, as we have also related elsewhere. Once Demetrius, surnamed Nicator, had taken over the kingdom, in his wickedness he set about undermining Ptolemy's forces, forgetting the alliance between them and the fact that Ptolemy was his father-in-law and kinsman through the marriage to Cleopatra. Ptolemy's soldiers fled his overtures to Alexandria, and Demetrius took possession of the elephants. Meanwhile Jonathan the high priest gathered an army from all of Judea and laid siege to the Akra in Jerusalem, which held a Macedonian garrison and some renegade Jews who had abandoned their ancestral customs.
At first these men scorned Jonathan's efforts against the fortress, trusting in the strength of the place, but some of the wicked men inside slipped out by night and went to Demetrius, informing him of the siege of the citadel. Enraged by this news, Demetrius took his army and marched from Antioch against Jonathan. On reaching Ptolemais he wrote ordering him to come to him there at once. Jonathan did not lift the siege, but taking with him the elders of the people, the priests, gold, silver, clothing, and a great quantity of gifts, he went to Demetrius and, by these presents, won over the king's anger. Honored by him, he secured confirmation of the high priesthood, on the same terms he had held it under the kings before Demetrius. When the exiles brought accusations against him, Demetrius did not believe them; instead, at Jonathan's request that all Judea and the three districts of Samaria, Jaffa, and Galilee should pay three hundred talents, he granted this and issued letters covering the whole matter, which read as follows:
"King Demetrius to his brother Jonathan and to the nation of the Jews, greetings. We are sending you a copy of the letter we wrote to our kinsman Lasthenes concerning you, so that you may be informed of it. King Demetrius to his father Lasthenes, greetings. To the nation of the Jews, being our friend and keeping faith with us, we have decided, out of regard for their goodwill, to grant a favor. We release to them the three districts of Aphairema, Lydda, and Ramathaim, which were added to Judea from the territory of Samaria, along with everything belonging to them; likewise everything that the kings before me received from those who offered sacrifices in Jerusalem, and whatever comes from the produce of the land and from its crops, and all other dues owed to us, together with the salt pools and the crowns brought to us -- all of this we release to them, and none of it shall be revoked from now on for all time. See to it, then, that a copy of this be made and given to Jonathan, and set up in a conspicuous place in the holy temple." Such was the content of the letter.
Once Demetrius saw that peace prevailed and there was no danger or fear of war, he disbanded his army and cut its pay, keeping full pay only for the mercenaries who had come up with him from Crete and the other islands. This earned him the hatred and enmity of the soldiers, whom he no longer supported at all, whereas the kings before him had continued to support them even in peacetime, so as to keep their goodwill and have them ready to fight eagerly if ever the need arose. Noticing this resentment of the soldiers toward Demetrius, a certain general of Alexander's, a native of Apamea named Diodotus, also called Trypho, went to Malchus the Arab, who was raising Alexander's son Antiochus, and, informing him of the army's hostility to Demetrius, urged him to hand Antiochus over to him, promising to make him king and restore to him his father's kingdom.
Malchus at first resisted, distrusting him, but after Trypho had pressed his suit for a long time, he was won over and yielded to what Trypho urged. Such was the state of affairs concerning this man. Meanwhile the high priest Jonathan, wanting to force out those in the Akra of Jerusalem, along with the Jewish exiles and renegades and the garrisons throughout the whole country, sent gifts and envoys to Demetrius asking him to expel those in the Judean strongholds. Demetrius promised not only to grant this but even more once the war he currently had on his hands was settled, since for now he had no time to spare for it. He also asked Jonathan to send him military support, indicating that his own army had deserted him.
So Jonathan chose three thousand soldiers and sent them. The people of Antioch, hating Demetrius for the wrongs he had done them, and hostile to him also on account of his father, who had wronged them greatly, were watching for an opportunity to attack him. Learning that Jonathan's reinforcements had arrived to support Demetrius, and realizing that he would gather a large force unless they moved first to seize him, they took up arms, surrounded his palace in the manner of a siege, blocked the exits, and sought to overpower the king. Seeing the people of Antioch in open war against him and under arms, Demetrius took his mercenaries together with the Jewish troops sent by Jonathan and engaged the Antiochenes, but, overwhelmed by them -- for they were many tens of thousands -- he was defeated.
When the Jews saw the Antiochenes gaining the upper hand, they climbed onto the roofs of the palace buildings and shot down at the Antiochenes from there; being at a great height, they themselves suffered nothing from the enemy, while doing them great harm by fighting from above, and they drove the Antiochenes back from the houses nearby. They then set those houses on fire at once, and since the buildings were closely packed and mostly built of wood, the flame spread and consumed the entire city. Unable to fight the fire or bring help, the Antiochenes turned to flight. As the Jews leapt from rooftop to rooftop in pursuit of them, the chase took on a remarkable character. Seeing the Antiochenes intent on saving their children and wives, and therefore no longer fighting, the king attacked them through other side streets, and in the engagement killed many of them, forcing the rest to throw down their weapons and surrender to Demetrius. He forgave them their audacity and put an end to the uprising. He also rewarded the Jews with the spoils taken, and, thanking them as the ones chiefly responsible for his victory, sent them back to Jonathan in Jerusalem with a testimonial of their loyal service.
Later, however, he turned base toward Jonathan, went back on his promises, and threatened war unless Jonathan paid him all the tribute that the Jewish nation had owed the earlier kings. He would have carried this out had Trypho not held him back, diverting his preparations against Jonathan by drawing his attention to his own affairs instead. For Trypho, returning from Arabia to Syria with Alexander's boy Antiochus -- who was still a mere youth -- placed the crown on him. When the whole army that had abandoned Demetrius for lack of pay came over to Antiochus's side, he opened war against Demetrius, engaged him in battle, and defeated him.
Jonathan's preparations, which Antiochus had drawn together to move against him, were redirected instead toward his own troubles. For Antiochus, returning from Arabia into Syria with his son Antiochus — the boy was still young in years — placed the diadem on him. When the whole army that had abandoned Demetrius for want of pay came over to him, he opened war against Demetrius, met him in battle, and won the day, capturing both the elephants and the city of the Antiochenes. Demetrius, defeated, withdrew into Cilicia, while the boy Antiochus sent envoys and letters to Jonathan, made him his friend and ally, confirmed him in the high priesthood, and ceded to him the four districts that had been added to the territory of the Jews. He further sent him golden vessels and cups, granted him the right to wear purple, gave him a golden clasp, and ranked him among his foremost friends. He also appointed Jonathan's brother Simon general of the forces from the Ladder of Tyre to Egypt.
Jonathan, delighted at Antiochus's favor toward him, sent envoys to him and to Tryphon and pledged to be their friend and ally and to make war alongside them against Demetrius, pointing out that he owed Demetrius no gratitude for the many benefits he claimed to have granted, since in every case where Jonathan had needed his help he had found none, but had instead been wronged in return for the good he had done him. Antiochus therefore allowed him to gather a large force from Syria and Phoenicia to fight Demetrius's generals, and Jonathan set out at once for the cities. They received him splendidly, but gave him no troops. Moving on from there to the city of Ashkelon, where the people of Ashkelon met him eagerly with gifts, he urged them, and every city in Coele-Syria that revolted from Demetrius, to join Antiochus and, by fighting alongside him, to try to exact from Demetrius satisfaction for whatever wrongs he had ever done them; there were, he said, many grounds on which they might wish to think this way.
Having persuaded the cities to agree to ally themselves with Antiochus, he came on to Gaza, meaning to win their goodwill toward Antiochus as well. But he found the people of Gaza far more hostile than he had expected: they shut their gates against him and, abandoning Demetrius, still refused to go over to Antiochus. This provoked Jonathan to besiege them and ravage their land; stationing part of his army around Gaza, he went with the rest through the countryside himself, destroying and burning it. Seeing themselves suffering this, and no help coming from Demetrius, but their present distress immediate while any relief was still far off and uncertain whether it would even come, the people of Gaza judged it wise to let go of that hope and attend instead to what lay before them. They therefore sent to Jonathan and pledged friendship and alliance — for men, before they have felt disaster, rarely grasp their own advantage, but once caught in some misfortune, they choose, too late and to their cost, the course that reasoning could have shown them without any harm at all. Jonathan, having made this pact of friendship with them and taken hostages, sent the hostages to Jerusalem, while he himself passed through the whole country as far as Damascus.
When he heard that Demetrius's generals had advanced with a large force to Kedesh, which lies between the territory of Tyre and Galilee — for they supposed that this would draw him away from Syria to defend the Galileans, since they assumed he would not overlook his own people being attacked while they were in Galilee — he went to meet them, leaving his brother Simon behind in Judea. Simon, gathering as large a force as the country allowed, laid siege to Beth-zur, the strongest fortress in Judea, which a garrison of Demetrius's still held; we have spoken of this place before as well. When Simon had raised earthworks and set up siege engines and was pressing the siege of Beth-zur with great energy, the garrison, fearing that if the place were taken by storm they would be destroyed, sent to Simon and asked, on receiving oaths that they would suffer no harm from him, to be allowed to leave the place and withdraw to Demetrius. Simon gave them this pledge, expelled them from the city, and stationed a garrison of his own there.
Jonathan, meanwhile, broke camp from Galilee, from the waters called the waters of Gennesaret — for he had been encamped there — and advanced to the plain called Hazor, unaware that the enemy were in it. Learning a day beforehand that Jonathan was about to march against them, Demetrius's men set an ambush for him, stationing men to lie in wait in the hills while they themselves, with the army, went out to meet him on the plain. When Jonathan saw them ready for battle, he too made his own soldiers ready for the contest as best he could. But when the men Demetrius's generals had stationed in ambush came up behind the Jews, they were struck with fear that, caught between the two forces, they would be destroyed, and rushed to flee. All the rest abandoned Jonathan, but a few — about fifty in number, with Mattathias son of Absalom and Judas son of Chalphi, commanders of the whole force — pressed forward boldly and in desperation against the enemy, and by their daring struck them with terror and turned them to flight with their own hands. When the men of Jonathan's army who had withdrawn saw the enemy routed, they rallied from their flight and set out in pursuit, chasing them as far as Kedesh, where the enemy's camp had been.
Jonathan, having won this brilliant victory and killed two thousand of the enemy, returned to Jerusalem. Seeing that everything was going according to his wishes by God's providence, he sent envoys to the Romans to renew the friendship that had earlier existed between the nation and them, and instructed the same envoys, on their way back from Rome, to visit the Spartans and remind them of the friendship and kinship between them.
When the envoys reached Rome, they came before the senate, delivered Jonathan the high priest's message — that he had sent them to confirm the alliance — and the senate ratified what it had earlier decreed concerning friendship with the Jews and gave them letters to carry to all the kings of Asia and Europe and to the rulers of the cities, so that they might have safe passage home through their territories. On their way back they came to Sparta and delivered to the Spartans the letters they had received from Jonathan. This was a copy of it: "Jonathan the high priest of the nation of the Jews, and the senate and the body of priests, to the ephors and senate and people of the Lacedaemonians, our brothers, greeting. If you and your public and private affairs are prospering, it is as we would wish; we too are well. In earlier times, when a letter was brought to Onias, who was then high priest among us, from Areus, who was king of your people, through Demoteles, concerning the kinship existing between us — a copy of which is appended below — we received the letter gladly and were well disposed toward Demoteles and Areus, though we had no need of such proof, since it was already a matter of trust from our sacred writings. Still, we did not think it right to be the first to claim the connection, for fear of seeming to snatch for ourselves the honor you offer; and now, though much time has passed since that kinship was first renewed for us, in our sacred and appointed days we offer sacrifice to God and remember you, praying for your safety and victory. Though many wars have surrounded us because of the greed of our neighbors, we judged it right to trouble neither you nor any other of our connections. But having overcome our enemies, we sent Numenius son of Antiochus and Antipater son of Jason, men held in honor among our senate, to the Romans, and through them we also sent letters to you, so that our kinship with you might be renewed. You will therefore do well to write to us as well, and to let us know whatever you may need, since we stand ready to further your purposes in every way." The Lacedaemonians received the envoys warmly and, having passed a decree concerning alliance and friendship, sent it to them.
About this time there were three schools of thought among the Jews, which held differing views concerning human affairs: one was called that of the Pharisees, another that of the Sadducees, and the third that of the Essenes. The Pharisees say that some things, but not all, are the work of fate, and that some things lie within our own power, whether they happen or not. The school of the Essenes declares that fate is sovereign over everything and that nothing at all befalls men except by its decree. The Sadducees, on the other hand, do away with fate altogether, holding that it does not exist and that human affairs do not reach their end according to it, but that everything lies within our own power, so that we ourselves are the cause both of the good things that come to us and of the misfortunes we bring on ourselves through our own poor judgment. But I have given a more precise account of these matters in the second book of my work on Jewish affairs.
Demetrius's generals, wishing to avenge their defeat, gathered a larger force than before and marched against Jonathan. Learning of their advance, he moved swiftly to meet them in the region of Hamath, unwilling to give them the leisure to invade Judea. Encamping fifty stadia from the enemy, he sent men to observe their camp and how they had positioned themselves. When his scouts reported everything to him, and had also captured, by night, some men who disclosed that the enemy intended to attack, he took precautions in advance, setting outposts outside the camp and keeping his whole force under arms through the entire night, having instructed them to be resolute in spirit and prepared in mind to fight even by night if need be, so that their intention should not go unnoticed by the enemy. When Demetrius's generals learned that Jonathan knew of their plan, they were no longer of sound mind, but were thrown into confusion at having been discovered by the enemy and at having no hope of prevailing now that their plot had failed in every other respect — for they did not think themselves a match for Jonathan's men in open combat. They therefore resolved on flight, and, lighting many fires so that the enemy, seeing them, would suppose they had stayed, withdrew. But Jonathan, advancing on their camp at dawn and finding it empty, understood that they had fled and pursued them. He did not, however, manage to overtake them, for they had already crossed the Eleutherus river and were in safety.
Turning back from there toward Arabia, he made war on the Nabateans, drove off a great quantity of their plunder, and, taking captives, went to Damascus and sold everything there. At about the same time his brother Simon, having passed through the whole of Judea and secured Palestine as far as Ashkelon with garrisons, and having made these places, along with their buildings, very strong and well guarded, came to Joppa and, seizing it, brought in a large garrison — for he had heard that the people of Joppa intended to hand over the city to Demetrius's generals. Having settled these matters, Simon and Jonathan came to Jerusalem. Jonathan, gathering the whole people into the temple, took counsel with them to repair the walls of Jerusalem, to rebuild what had been torn down of the wall around the temple, and to strengthen its surroundings with high towers; and in addition, to build another wall through the middle of the city, so as to cut off the garrison in the citadel from access to the city and, in this way, shut them off from a ready supply of provisions; and further, to make the fortresses throughout the countryside far stronger than their present state of security allowed. When the people had approved this plan as sound, Jonathan himself carried out the building work in the city, while he sent Simon out to secure the countryside.
Demetrius, meanwhile, crossed into Mesopotamia, intending to seize both it and Babylon, and, once master of the upper satrapies, to use them as a base for laying claim to the whole kingdom; for the Greeks and Macedonians settled there kept sending envoys to him, promising that if he came to them they would hand themselves over to him and join him in warring down Arsaces, king of the Parthians. Lifted up by these hopes, he set out to join them, resolved, once he had subdued the Parthians and gained an army, to make war on Tryphon and drive him out of Syria. The people of the country received him eagerly, and, gathering a force, he made war on Arsaces; but he lost his whole army and was himself taken alive, as has also been related elsewhere.
When Tryphon learned that things had ended in this way for Demetrius, he was no longer loyal to Antiochus, but plotted to kill him and seize the kingdom for himself. What stood in the way of this design was his fear of Jonathan, who was a friend of Antiochus; and for this reason he resolved to get Jonathan out of the way first, and only then to move against Antiochus's party. Having decided to destroy him by trickery and deceit, he went from Antioch to Beth-shean — called by the Greeks Scythopolis — and Jonathan came to meet him there with forty thousand picked troops, supposing that Tryphon had come to fight him. When Tryphon saw that Jonathan was ready for battle, he tried to win him over with gifts and displays of friendliness, and ordered his own commanders to obey Jonathan, wishing by these means to establish his good will and to remove every suspicion, so as to catch him off his guard, careless and foreseeing nothing, once he had been lulled into contempt. He advised him to dismiss his army, since there was no need to keep it under arms now, with no war on and the situation at peace; he urged him, however, to keep a few men about him and come with them to Ptolemais, for he would hand over the city to him, along with all the other strongholds throughout the country, and would do so on Jonathan's account — indeed, he said, this was the very purpose of his visit. Jonathan, suspecting none of this, but trusting, out of good will and honest judgment, that Tryphon's advice was sincerely meant, dismissed his army, keeping back only three thousand men, of whom
Trypho left two thousand men in Galilee and went on with the remaining thousand to Ptolemais, taking Jonathan with him. But the people of Ptolemais shut the gates, for this had been ordered them by Trypho beforehand, and seized Jonathan alive, while killing all who were with him. Trypho then sent men against the two thousand left behind in Galilee, to destroy them as well.
These men, however, warned by rumor of what had happened to Jonathan, managed to arm themselves and leave the country before Trypho's agents could reach them. The men sent against them, seeing them ready to fight for their lives, did them no harm and returned to Trypho. When the people of Jerusalem heard of Jonathan's arrest and the destruction of the soldiers with him, they mourned bitterly for the man and searched anxiously for news of him everywhere; and a great fear, reasonably enough, fell upon and troubled them, that now that Jonathan's courage and foresight had been taken from them, the surrounding nations, who had been hostile to them but kept quiet on his account, would rise against them and force them into the utmost danger by making war.
And indeed what they suspected came to pass: hearing of Jonathan's death, the neighboring nations began making war on the Jews as men without a leader. Trypho himself gathered an army with the intention of marching up into Judea and warring on its people. Simon, seeing the people of Jerusalem terrified at this, wished to make them bolder, and called the people together at the temple to address them.
"You are not unaware, countrymen, that my father and my brothers and I willingly dared to die for your freedom. Since I have such examples before me, and men of our own house who died for the laws and our worship, no fear will ever be great enough to drive that resolve from my soul and replace it with love of life or contempt for honor. So then, as men who do not lack a leader able to suffer and to do the greatest things on your behalf, follow me eagerly wherever I lead. For I am no better than my brothers, that I should spare my own life, nor am I inferior to them, that I should shrink from and abandon what they judged most noble—to die for the laws and the worship of God. Where I must show myself their true brother, I will prove myself a brother to them in deed. I am confident that I will exact justice from our enemies and rescue all of you, with your wives and children, from their outrage, and that with God's help I will keep the temple from being plundered. For I see that the nations, thinking you have no leader, have grown contemptuous of you and are eager for war."
When Simon had spoken these words the people took heart; their spirits, which had sunk in cowardice, were roused to a better and confident hope, so that the whole people cried out together that Simon should lead them, taking the place of his brothers Judas and Jonathan, and that they would obey whatever he commanded. He at once gathered every man fit for war among his own forces and hurried to rebuild the city walls, securing them with very high and strong towers. He sent a friend of his, Jonathan the son of Absalom, with an army to Joppa, ordering him to expel its inhabitants, for he feared they might hand the city over to Trypho. He himself remained behind to guard Jerusalem.
Trypho set out from Ptolemais with a large army and came into Judea, bringing Jonathan with him in chains. Simon met him with his own forces at the town of Addida, which lies on a hill overlooking the plains of Judea. Learning that Simon had been made leader by the Jews, Trypho sent to him, wishing to deceive and outmaneuver him: he told Simon that if he wished his brother Jonathan released, he should send a hundred talents of silver and two of Jonathan's sons as hostages, so that once freed he would not lead Judea to revolt from the king—for Jonathan, he said, was being held bound because of money he owed the king from a loan.
Simon was not ignorant of Trypho's trick. He understood that if he gave the money he would lose it and still not free his brother, and would besides hand over the boys to the enemy along with him. Yet, fearing he would be blamed by the people as the one responsible for his brother's death, since he had given neither the money nor the sons on his behalf, he gathered the army and told them what Trypho demanded, saying that it concealed a trap and a plot; nevertheless it was preferable to send the money and the sons than to refuse Trypho's demands and be blamed for having been unwilling to save his brother.
So Simon sent off both Jonathan's sons and the money. But Trypho, once he had received them, did not keep his word: he neither freed Jonathan nor released the sons, but took his army and marched around the country, having decided to go up to Jerusalem next by way of Idumea. He advanced as far as Adora, a town of Idumea, with Simon always moving parallel to him and encamping opposite. When those in the citadel sent to Trypho urging him to hurry to them and send provisions, he prepared his cavalry to be in Jerusalem that very night. But heavy snow fell during the night, covering the roads and making the march impassable for horses because of its depth, and this prevented him from reaching Jerusalem.
For this reason Trypho set out from there and came into Coele-Syria; hastening into Gilead, he killed Jonathan there and ordered him buried, then returned to Antioch. Simon sent to the town of Basca and had his brother's bones brought back, and buried them at Modein, their native place, and the whole people made great mourning for him. Simon built a very great monument for his father and brothers out of white, polished stone, raising it to a great and conspicuous height, and set up porticoes around it, and erected monolithic columns, a wonder to behold, and besides these built seven pyramids, one for each of his parents and brothers, made to inspire awe by their size and beauty—monuments that survive to this day. Such, we know, was the devotion shown by Simon's family to Jonathan's burial and the building of these monuments. Jonathan died after serving four years as high priest and leader of the nation. So much for the circumstances of his death.
Simon, established as high priest by the people, in the first year of his high priesthood freed the nation from servitude to the Macedonians, so that they no longer paid them tribute; this freedom and exemption from tribute came to the Jews after a hundred and seventy years from the time Seleucus, called Nicator, had taken possession of Syria. So great was the people's devotion to Simon that in their contracts with one another and in public documents they wrote, in the first year, "of Simon, benefactor and ethnarch of the Jews"; for under him they prospered greatly and overcame the enemies around them. Simon subdued the cities of Gazara, Joppa, and Jamnia, and after besieging and taking the citadel in Jerusalem, razed it to the ground, so that it might not serve as a base for enemies to occupy and use to harm the city, as it had before.
Having done this, he judged it best and most advantageous also to level the hill on which the citadel had stood, so that the temple might be higher than everything around it. He persuaded the people of this by calling an assembly and reminding them of what they had suffered from the garrison and from the Jewish exiles, and what they would suffer again if a foreign garrison were ever established there once more, should the kingdom fall back into enemy hands. By saying this he persuaded the people, urging on them what was to their advantage. All of them together set to work leveling the hill, and, never resting from the labor by night or day, over three full years brought it down level with the plain. From then on the temple stood out above everything, once the citadel and the hill on which it stood had been demolished. Such was the course of events under Simon.
Not long afterward, Trypho, acting as his guardian, murdered Antiochus the son of Alexander—who was also called "the God"—after he had reigned four years, and announced that he had died under medical treatment. Trypho then sent his closest friends to the soldiers, promising them great sums of money if they would proclaim him king, telling them that Demetrius had been taken captive by the Parthians and that his brother Antiochus, if he came to power, would do them great harm in revenge for their revolt. The soldiers, hoping to profit from the kingdom given to Trypho, declared him ruler.
But once Trypho had gained control of affairs, he revealed his true, wicked nature. As a private citizen he had courted the people and feigned moderation, using it to draw them toward whatever he wanted; but once he had taken the kingship he cast off the pretense, and the real Trypho stood revealed. Through this he made his enemies stronger, for the army, hating him, deserted to Cleopatra, the wife of Demetrius, who was then shut up with her children in Seleucia. And when Antiochus, Demetrius's brother, called Soter, was wandering about with no city willing to receive him because of Trypho, Cleopatra sent for him, inviting him to marriage and to the kingship—partly because his friends had persuaded her to it, and partly because she feared that some in Seleucia would hand the city over to Trypho.
Once Antiochus had come to Seleucia, and his strength grew daily, he set out to make war on Trypho, and, defeating him in battle, drove him out of upper Syria into Phoenicia, pursuing him as far as Dora, a fortress hard to capture, where he besieged him after Trypho had taken refuge there. He also sent envoys to Simon, the high priest of the Jews, concerning friendship and alliance. Simon eagerly welcomed his request, and sent much money and provisions to the soldiers besieging Dora, supplying Antiochus generously, so that for a short time he was counted among his most essential friends. Trypho, fleeing from Dora to Apamea, was captured there under siege and died, after reigning three years.
Antiochus, out of greed and baseness, forgot the services Simon had rendered him in his time of need, and, putting an army under the command of his friend Cendebaeus, sent him to ravage Judea and capture Simon. Simon, hearing of Antiochus's lawlessness, though already an old man, was roused by the injustice of Antiochus's actions and, taking on a spirit greater than his years, commanded the war with youthful vigor. He sent his sons ahead with the more warlike of the soldiers, while he himself advanced with the rest of the force by another route, setting many ambushes for the enemy in the ravines of the mountains; he failed in none of his undertakings, and having prevailed over the enemy on every front, spent the rest of his life in peace, having also made an alliance with the Romans.
He ruled the Jews eight years in all, and died through a plot laid against him at a banquet by Ptolemy, his son-in-law, who seized Simon's wife and two of his sons, held them bound, and sent men also against the third son, John—who was also named Hyrcanus—to kill him. But the young man, learning of their approach, escaped the danger and hurried into the city, trusting in the people because of his father's benefactions and because of the people's hatred of Ptolemy. Ptolemy also tried eagerly to enter by another gate, but the people, having already welcomed Hyrcanus, drove him back.
So Ptolemy withdrew to one of the strongholds above Jericho, called Dagon. Hyrcanus, having recovered the ancestral high priesthood and offered the first sacrifices to God, marched out against Ptolemy, and attacking the stronghold got the better of him everywhere except in the one respect of his pity for his mother and brothers. For Ptolemy brought them up onto the wall in full view and tortured them, threatening to hurl them down if Hyrcanus did not abandon the siege. Hyrcanus's eagerness for taking the place would slacken by exactly as much as he thought he was sparing his loved ones further suffering by relenting; but his mother, stretching out her hands, begged him not to soften on her account, but rather to press on all the harder in his anger to take the place and punish the enemy once he had him in his power, avenging their loved ones—for death by torture would be sweet to her, she said, if the man who had done such lawless things to them paid the penalty for it. Hearing his mother say this, Hyrcanus felt some impulse to press the siege, but whenever he saw her being struck and torn, he weakened and gave way to pity for what was being done to her.
As the siege thus dragged on, the year arrived in which the Jews observe rest, for they keep this practice every seven years, as on the days of the week. And Ptolemy, relieved from the war by this, killed the brothers of Hyrcanus and their mother.
his mother, and having done this he fled to Zeno, called Cotylas, the tyrant of the city of Philadelphia. Antiochus, angry at what he had suffered at Simon's hands, invaded Judea in the fourth year of his own reign, the first year of Hyrcanus's rule, in the hundred and sixty-second Olympiad. He ravaged the countryside and shut Hyrcanus up in the city itself,
which he surrounded with seven camps, but at first he accomplished nothing at all, both because of the strength of the walls and the valor of the besieged—and also, for a time, because of a shortage of water, from which a heavy rainstorm at the setting of the Pleiades released them. On the north side of the wall, where the ground happened to be level, he raised a hundred three-story towers and set
military detachments on them. Making daily assaults, and cutting a deep and very wide double trench, he walled the inhabitants off completely. They devised many sallies in response: whenever they fell upon the enemy unguarded, they did them great damage, but when the enemy took notice they withdrew with ease. When Hyrcanus realized that the great number of people inside was a liability—since provisions were being consumed too quickly by it and no work worth mentioning
was being done by so many idle hands—he separated out the useless part of the population and cast it out, keeping only those who were in their prime and fit for fighting. Antiochus, for his part, would not let those who had been expelled leave the siege lines, and they, caught between the walls and abused with such hardships, died miserably. But when the Feast of Tabernacles came round, those inside took pity on them and let them back in again.
When Hyrcanus sent to Antiochus and asked that a truce of seven days be granted for the festival, Antiochus yielded, out of reverence for the divine, and granted the truce; more than that, he sent in a magnificent sacrifice—bulls with gilded horns and cups full of every kind of spice, of gold and of silver. Those stationed at the gates received the sacrifice from the men bringing it and carried it into the temple, while Antiochus feasted his army,
in this differing enormously from Antiochus Epiphanes, who, when he took the city, sacrificed pigs on the altar and sprinkled the temple with their broth, throwing Jewish law and their ancestral piety into confusion—for which the nation was provoked to war against him and remained irreconcilable. This Antiochus, however, everyone called Eusebes, the Pious, on account of the excess of his reverence. Hyrcanus, welcoming his fair dealing
and recognizing his zeal for the divine, sent envoys to him asking that he restore to them their ancestral constitution. He rejected the plot against them: though some urged him to wipe out the nation because of its refusal to mix its way of life with that of others, he paid them no heed, and being persuaded to act in all things out of reverence, he answered the envoys that the besieged should surrender their weapons and pay tribute
for Jaffa and the other cities outside Judea, and that upon accepting a garrison on these terms they would be released from the war. They agreed to everything else, but would not consent to the garrison, since because of their refusal to mix with others they had no dealings with outsiders. In place of the garrison, however, they gave hostages and five hundred talents of silver, of which the king immediately received three hundred along with the hostages,
among whom was Hyrcanus's own brother; and he also tore down the city's crown-work. On these terms Antiochus lifted the siege and withdrew. Hyrcanus then opened the tomb of David, who had surpassed all kings before him in wealth, and took out three thousand talents of silver; and with this money he became the first of the Jews to begin maintaining foreign mercenaries. He also came to be on terms of friendship
and alliance with Antiochus, and receiving him into the city he provided everything for his army generously and with great munificence. When Antiochus made his campaign against the Parthians, Hyrcanus joined the expedition with him. Nicolaus of Damascus bears witness to this for us, recording it as follows: after setting up a trophy at the Lycus river upon defeating Indates, the Parthian general, Antiochus remained there two days at the request of Hyrcanus
the Jew, because of a certain ancestral festival, during which it was not lawful for Jews to travel. And in saying this Nicolaus does not lie, for the feast of Pentecost had fallen right after the Sabbath, and it is not permitted for us to travel either on the Sabbath or on a festival. Antiochus, however, engaged Arsaces the Parthian, lost a great part of his army, and himself perished; and
his brother Demetrius succeeded to the kingdom of the Syrians, Arsaces having released him from captivity at the very time when Antiochus was invading Parthia, as we have already shown elsewhere. When Hyrcanus heard of Antiochus's death he at once marched out against the cities of Syria, expecting to find them—as indeed he did—stripped of fighting men able to defend them. Medaba,
after his army had suffered greatly there, he took in the sixth month; then he immediately took Samoga and the places nearby, and besides these Shechem and Gerizim, and the nation of the Cuthaeans, who dwell around the temple built in imitation of the one at Jerusalem, which Alexander had permitted Sanballat the governor to build for the sake of his son-in-law Manasseh, brother of Jaddus the high priest, as we have shown before.
It happened that this temple was left desolate two hundred years after its founding. Hyrcanus also took the cities of Adora and Marisa in Idumea, and having brought all the Idumeans under his power he allowed them to remain in the land on condition that they circumcise themselves and adopt the laws of the Jews. And out of longing for their ancestral land they submitted to circumcision and to the rest
of the Jewish way of life, and from that time on they came to count as Jews. Hyrcanus the high priest, wishing to renew friendship with the Romans, sent an embassy to them. The senate, receiving the letter from him, made a treaty of friendship with him in this manner: Fannius son of Marcus, praetor, convened the senate eight days before
the Ides of February, in the Comitium, in the presence of Lucius Manlius son of Lucius, of the Mentine tribe, and Gaius Sempronius, son of Pennus, of the Falernian tribe, concerning the matters on which Simon son of Dositheus and Apollonius son of Alexander and Diodorus son of Jason, honorable men sent by the people of the Jews, had spoken, having discussed the friendship and alliance existing between them and the Romans, and matters of state, asking that Jaffa and
its harbors and Gazara and its springs and whatever other cities and territories of theirs Antiochus had taken by war contrary to the decree of the senate be restored to them, and that it not be permitted for the king's soldiers to pass through their territory and that of their subjects, and that whatever had been decreed against them in that war by Antiochus contrary to the decree of the senate
be rendered void, and that ambassadors be sent to see that what had been taken from them by Antiochus be restored, and that the land ravaged in the war be assessed for compensation, and that letters be given to them for kings and free peoples for the safety of their return home. It was resolved concerning these matters as follows: to renew friendship and alliance with good men
sent by a good and friendly people; but concerning the letters, they answered that they would deliberate on this once the senate had leisure from its own affairs, and that they would take care that no such injustice be done to them in future, and that Fannius the praetor should give them money from the public treasury for their return home. Fannius accordingly dismissed the Jewish envoys in this way, having given them money
from the public treasury and a decree of the senate for those who would escort them and see to their safe arrival home. Such, then, was the state of affairs concerning Hyrcanus the high priest. As for King Demetrius, though eager to march against Hyrcanus, he had neither the occasion nor the means to do so, since the Syrians and his own soldiers hated him, for he was a wicked man; and when they sent envoys to Ptolemy
called Physcon, asking that he hand over to them one of the descendants of Seleucus to take the kingdom, Ptolemy sent Alexander, called Zabinas, with an army, and when battle was joined with Demetrius, Demetrius, defeated in the battle, fled to his wife Cleopatra at Ptolemais; and when his wife would not receive him, he went from there to Tyre, was seized,
and after suffering much at the hands of those who hated him, died. Alexander, having taken the kingdom, made friendship with Hyrcanus the high priest. Then, when Demetrius's son, called Antiochus Grypus, made war on him, he was defeated in battle and destroyed. When Antiochus took over the kingdom of Syria he was wary of campaigning against Judea, hearing that his half-brother—also called Antiochus—
was gathering a force against him from Cyzicus. Remaining where he was, he set about preparing himself against his brother's attack—the brother who was called Cyzicenus because he had been raised in that city, and whose father was Antiochus called Soter, who had died among the Parthians; this man was the brother of Grypus's father. As it happened, one and the same Cleopatra had married
both brothers, as we have related elsewhere. Cyzicenus Antiochus, arriving in Syria, spent many years continuing to make war on his brother. All that time Hyrcanus lived in peace, for after Antiochus's death he had broken away from the Macedonians and no longer offered them anything, whether as subject or as friend, but his
affairs prospered greatly and reached their height in the time of Alexander Zabinas, and especially amid the strife of these two brothers; for their war against one another gave Hyrcanus the leisure to enjoy Judea in safety, so that he amassed a boundless quantity of wealth. When Cyzicenus openly ravaged his land, Hyrcanus in turn showed his own resolve, and
seeing Antiochus deprived of his allies from Egypt, and both him and his brother faring badly in their struggles against one another, he despised them both. And he marched against Samaria, a very well-fortified city—concerning which, since it is now called Sebaste, having been founded by Herod, we shall speak in its proper place. Attacking it vigorously he laid siege to it, out of hatred of wrongdoing toward the Samaritans, on behalf of the people of Marisa, colonists of the Jews
and their allies, whom the Samaritans had wronged while obeying the kings of Syria. Surrounding the city on every side with a trench and a double wall about eighty stadia in circumference, he set his sons Antigonus and Aristobulus over the siege. Under this pressure, the Samaritans were driven by necessity of famine to such extremes that they touched even forbidden foods, and called on Antiochus Cyzicenus for help. He readily came to their aid
but was defeated by Aristobulus's forces, and, pursued by the brothers as far as Scythopolis, made his escape. Those besieging the Samaritans, turning back, shut them up again within their wall, so that they sent a second time to call on the same Antiochus as their ally. He, having summoned from Ptolemy Lathyrus about six thousand men, whom Ptolemy's mother sent out unbeknownst to him—she was on the verge of driving him from his throne—
at first advanced and plundered Hyrcanus's territory like a bandit together with the Egyptians, not daring to meet him face to face, since his forces were not equal to it, but thinking that by ravaging the land he would force Hyrcanus to abandon the siege of Samaria. But when he lost many of his soldiers by falling into ambushes, he withdrew to Tripolis, entrusting
the war against the Jews to Callimander and Epicrates. Callimander, engaging the enemy too rashly, was routed and killed on the spot. Epicrates, out of love of money, openly betrayed Scythopolis and the other places near it to the Jews, but was unable to break up the siege of Samaria. Hyrcanus, then, took the city after besieging it for a year, and was not content with this alone, but
utterly destroyed it, making it subject to flooding by the winter torrents; for he dug it out so thoroughly, turning it into ravines, that he removed every trace of its ever having been a city. A strange thing is also told concerning the high priest Hyrcanus, how the divine came to speak with him: they say that on that very day on which his sons fought against Cyzicenus,
he himself, while alone in the temple burning incense as high priest, heard a voice saying that his sons had just now defeated Antiochus. And coming out of the temple he made this known to the whole assembled people, and so indeed it turned out to be. Such, then, was the state of affairs concerning Hyrcanus. At this same time it happened that not only the Jews in Jerusalem and the countryside
were prospering, but also those living in Alexandria and in Egypt and Cyprus; for Queen Cleopatra, at odds with her son Ptolemy called Lathyrus, appointed as commanders Chelkias and Ananias, sons of Onias who had built the temple in the district of Heliopolis in imitation of the one in Jerusalem, as we have shown before. Cleopatra entrusted to these men
her army and did nothing apart from their counsel, as Strabo of Cappadocia also testifies for us, saying as follows: 'For most of the men, both those who had joined originally and those later sent by Cleopatra to Cyprus, went over at once to Ptolemy; only the Jews descended from Onias remained loyal, because their fellow citizens Chelkias and Ananias were held in especially high esteem by the
queen.' So much, then, Strabo says. But prosperity stirred up envy of Hyrcanus among the Jews, and above all the Pharisees, one sect of the Jews, as we have shown above, were ill-disposed toward him. So great is their influence with the populace that even when they say anything against a king or
a high priest, they are believed at once. Hyrcanus too had been a disciple of theirs and was greatly loved by them. And once, when he had invited them to a banquet and entertained them warmly, seeing that they were thoroughly enjoying themselves, he began to say to them that they knew he wished to be righteous and to do everything by which he might please God and them—for the Pharisees are philosophers—he asked further
He said, however, that if they saw him doing wrong and straying from the path of justice, they should bring him back to it and set him right. When they had all testified to his complete virtue, he was delighted with their praise; but one of the guests reclining there, a man named Eleazar, malicious by nature and fond of strife, said, "Since you have asked to know the truth, and wish to be a just man, lay down the high priesthood, and be content to rule the people alone."
When Hyrcanus asked his reason for demanding that he give up the high priesthood, Eleazar answered, "Because we hear from our elders that your mother was a captive in the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes." The story was false, and Hyrcanus was furious at him, and all the Pharisees were bitterly indignant as well.
Among the Sadducees, whose party holds the opposite views to the Pharisees, a certain Jonathan, one of Hyrcanus's closest friends, said that Eleazar had spoken his slander with the backing of the whole body of the Pharisees, and that this would become clear if Hyrcanus asked them what penalty they thought the man deserved for what he had said. So Hyrcanus asked the Pharisees what punishment they thought he deserved — for he would judge, he said, that the slander had not been spoken with their sanction if they set a penalty proportioned to the offense — and they replied that he deserved stripes and chains; for they did not think it right to punish a man with death for mere abuse, and besides, the Pharisees are by nature lenient in matters of punishment.
At this Hyrcanus grew very angry, and became convinced that the man had indeed spoken his slander with their approval. Jonathan in particular kept inflaming him further, and worked on him to such effect that he induced him to go over to the Sadducean party, abandoning the Pharisees, to repeal the ordinances they had established for the people, and to punish those who observed them.
From this arose the hatred that the people bore toward him and his sons. But of these matters we shall speak again later. For now I wish to explain that the Pharisees had handed down to the people certain regulations from the tradition of their fathers which are not recorded in the laws of Moses, and for this reason the Sadducean party rejects them, holding that only what is written should be considered binding, while what comes from the tradition of the fathers need not be observed. Concerning these matters great disputes and disagreements arose between them, the Sadducees persuading only the wealthy, without the common people following them, while the Pharisees had the mass of the people as their allies. But I have set out the details concerning these two parties, and the Essenes as well, with precision in the second book of my Jewish War.
Hyrcanus, having put an end to the sedition and afterward lived happily, and having administered his rule in the best possible manner for thirty-one years, died, leaving five sons. He had been judged by God worthy of the three greatest things: rule of the nation, the honor of the high priesthood, and the gift of prophecy. For the divine presence was with him, and gave him foreknowledge of the future, so that he knew and foretold things to come — indeed he even predicted, concerning his two elder sons, that they would not remain masters of affairs. It is worth relating the disaster that befell them, to show how far short they fell of their father's good fortune.
When their father died, the eldest, Aristobulus, decided to change the government into a monarchy — for this was his judgment — and was the first to place a diadem on his head, four hundred and eighty-one years and three months after the people, freed from servitude to the Babylonians, had returned to their own land. Of his brothers he loved the one next to him in age, Antigonus, and treated him as an equal, but kept the others in chains.
He also imprisoned his mother, who had quarreled with him over the rule — for Hyrcanus had left her mistress of the whole realm — and he carried his cruelty so far that he starved her to death in her bonds. He added to his mother's fate his brother Antigonus as well, whom he seemed to love most of all and had made his partner in the kingship, having been estranged from him by slanders which at first he did not believe, partly because his affection for him kept him from paying attention to what was said, and partly because he supposed the slander arose from envy of him.
But once, when Antigonus had returned splendidly from a campaign at the very time of the festival on which they build booths for God, it happened that Aristobulus fell ill, while Antigonus went up to the temple to celebrate the festival, magnificently arrayed, with armed men about him, and prayed at length for his brother's recovery. But wicked men, eager to destroy the harmony between the brothers, seized on the opportunity presented by the ostentation of Antigonus's procession and by his own successes, went to the king, and maliciously exaggerated the display made at the procession during the festival, saying that none of what had happened befitted a private citizen, but that his actions showed the ambition of a king, and that he intended to kill Aristobulus, having come with a strong body of guards — reasoning, foolishly, that though it was in his power to be king himself, he was content to seem to receive great honor by accepting a lesser rank.
Aristobulus, reluctantly persuaded by this, and at the same time wishing to appear free of suspicion toward his brother while also taking care for his own safety, stationed his bodyguards in a certain unlit underground passage — he himself lay ill in the fortress later renamed Antonia — and ordered them to lay hands on no one who was unarmed, but to kill Antigonus if he came in to him armed. He sent word to Antigonus, however, asking him to come to him unarmed. But the queen and those conspiring with her against Antigonus persuaded the messenger to say the opposite: that his brother, having heard he had procured weapons and equipment of war, urged him to come to him armed, so that he might see the equipment.
Antigonus, suspecting no treachery but trusting in his brother's goodwill toward him, came to Aristobulus just as he was, dressed in full armor, to show him the weapons. When he reached the place called the Tower of Strato, where the passage happened to be very dark, the bodyguards killed him.
His death showed clearly that nothing is stronger than envy and slander, and nothing more capable of destroying goodwill and natural kinship than these passions. One may especially marvel at a certain Judas, an Essene by birth, who never once spoke falsely in his predictions. For this man, seeing Antigonus passing by the temple, cried out to his companions and disciples, who stayed with him to learn how to foretell the future, that it would be good for him to die now, since he had been proved false, Antigonus being still alive — the man whom he had predicted would die that day at the place called the Tower of Strato, though he now saw him alive, and though that place was about six hundred stadia distant, and most of the day had already passed, so that his prophecy was in danger of proving false.
While he was saying this, downcast, word came that Antigonus had died in the underground chamber that was also called the Tower of Strato, sharing its name with the coastal city of Caesarea. This news threw the prophet into confusion. As for Aristobulus, remorse for the killing of his brother seized him at once, along with an illness brought on by it, his mind so afflicted by the pollution that the unmixed force of his anguish caused blood to rise within him and be brought up.
One of the servant boys attending him, by what I take to be divine providence, slipped while carrying this blood away to the very spot where the stains of Antigonus's blood still remained from his murder, and spilled it there. A cry arose from those who saw it, supposing that the boy had deliberately poured the blood there. Aristobulus, hearing this, asked the reason for the outcry, and when they would not tell him, he pressed all the more to learn it — for it is human nature to suspect that things kept silent in such circumstances are worse than they are.
When, by threats and by forcing them with fear, they told him the truth, many tears burst from him, his mind stricken by the awareness of his own guilt, and with a deep groan he said, "So it was not, after all, going to escape the notice of God, that I should attempt such impious and abominable crimes — but a swift penalty for a kinsman's murder has overtaken me. And how long, most shameless body, will you hold a soul owed to a brother and a mother, delivering it to the powers below? Why do you not give it back all at once, rather than pouring out my blood drop by drop as a libation to those I have murdered?" With these words he died, having reigned for one year.
He was called a Philhellene, and he did much good for his country, waging war against the Ituraeans and adding a large part of their territory to Judea, and compelling the inhabitants, if they wished to remain in the country, to be circumcised and to live according to the laws of the Jews. He was naturally of a mild disposition and remarkably modest, as Strabo also attests, quoting Timagenes, in these words: "This man was of a mild character and of great service to the Jews; for he added territory to their land, and he brought a portion of the Ituraean nation into kinship with them by the bond of circumcision of their private parts."
When Aristobulus died, his wife Salina — called Alexandra by the Greeks — released his brothers, whom Aristobulus had kept in chains, as we have said, and made Jannaeus, also called Alexander, king, since he was the eldest and the most moderate in temperament.
It happened that as soon as he was born he was hated by his father, and never once came into his sight until his father's death. The reason for this hatred is said to have been as follows: Hyrcanus, loving most among his sons the elder ones, Antigonus and Aristobulus, once asked God in a dream which of his sons was to succeed him. When God showed him this one's features, Hyrcanus was grieved that he was to be heir to all his goods, and allowed him, once born, to be raised in Galilee.
God, however, did not deceive Hyrcanus. This son, taking over the kingdom after Aristobulus's death, put to death the one brother who attempted to seize the throne, and kept the other, who chose to live quietly, in honor.
Having established the government in the manner he thought advantageous to himself, he marched against Ptolemais, and having prevailed in battle he shut the people up within the city, surrounded them, and besieged them. For along the coast only Ptolemais and Gaza remained to be subdued by him, along with Zoilus, the tyrant who held the Tower of Strato, and Dora. Since Antiochus Philometor and his brother Antiochus, surnamed Cyzicenus, were at war with one another and destroying their own forces, no help could come to the people of Ptolemais from them.
But while they were being worn down by the siege, Zoilus, who held the Tower of Strato, and who maintained a body of soldiers at Dora and was attempting to set up a tyranny, gave them some small assistance because of the rivalry between the two kings — for the kings were not on such friendly terms with the Ptolemaeans that they could hope for any help from them. Both kings were in the same case as athletes who, having given up hope of victory through their own strength but ashamed to withdraw, continue the contest through inactivity and delay. Their remaining hope lay with the kings of Egypt and with Ptolemy Lathyrus, who held Cyprus, having been driven from his throne by his mother Cleopatra and taken refuge there.
The people of Ptolemais therefore sent to him and urged him to come as an ally and rescue them from the hands of Alexander, since they were in danger. The envoys raised his hopes, telling him that once he crossed into Syria he would find the people of Gaza allied with the Ptolemaeans and with Zoilus, and the Sidonians too, and many others ready to join him; and, elated at this, he hastened to set sail.
Meanwhile, however, a certain Demaenetus, a persuasive man who held sway with the people of Ptolemais at the time and swayed the assembly, made them change their minds, saying it was better to run the risk of an uncertain outcome fighting the Jews than to accept open slavery by handing themselves over to a master, and that besides, they would face not only their present war but a far greater one from Egypt as well. For Cleopatra would not stand by and allow Ptolemy to build up a force so close to her borders, but would come against them with a great army, since she was eager even to drive her son out of Cyprus; and if Ptolemy's hopes failed, Cyprus remained open to him as a refuge, while for them it meant the utmost danger.
Ptolemy, learning during his crossing of the change of mind among the people of Ptolemais, sailed on nonetheless, and putting in at the place called Sycaminon, disembarked his forces there. His whole army numbered about thirty thousand, infantry and cavalry together, and leading them up near Ptolemais he encamped, but since the city would not receive his envoys nor listen to his proposals, he was greatly troubled.
When Zoilus and the people of Gaza came to him and begged him to join them as an ally, since their territory was being ravaged by the Jews and by Alexander, Alexander, fearing Ptolemy, lifted the siege and withdrew his army to his own territory, where he continued to maneuver, secretly summoning Cleopatra against Ptolemy while openly pretending friendship and alliance with him. He even promised to pay four hundred talents of silver in return for a favor: that Ptolemy remove the tyrant Zoilus and hand over his territory to the Jews.
At that time Ptolemy, gladly making friendship with Alexander, seized Zoilus. But afterward, hearing that Alexander had secretly sent word to his mother Cleopatra, he broke the oaths he had made with him, attacked, and besieged Ptolemais, since it had refused to receive him. Leaving generals in charge of the siege along with part of his forces, he himself set out with the rest to subdue Judea.
Alexander, learning Ptolemy's intention, gathered about fifty thousand of his own countrymen — some writers say eighty thousand — and taking this force went to meet Ptolemy. Ptolemy fell suddenly upon Asochis, a city of Galilee, on the Sabbath, took it by storm, and captured about ten thousand people along with much other plunder.
Having also made an attempt on Sepphoris, a little distance from the city he had ravaged, and lost many men there, he set out to fight Alexander. Alexander met him near the Jordan river, at a place called Asophon, not far from the Jordan, and pitched his camp near the enemy. He had eight thousand men in his front line, whom he called the Hundred-Fighters, equipped with bronze armor,
Ptolemy's front-line troops also carried bronze-plated shields, but the rest of his men were more lightly armed, and so they went into the fight more cautiously. Their courage was greatly bolstered, though, by the tactician Philostephanus, who ordered them to cross the river between the two camps. Alexander did not think it worth preventing the crossing, since he calculated that if he pinned the enemy against the river at their backs, he would more easily defeat them, as they would have no way to flee the battle.
At first the fighting on both sides was matched in effort and determination, and heavy slaughter fell on both armies alike. But when Alexander's men began to gain the advantage, Philostephanus split his force and sent reinforcements to the wing that was giving way. Since none of the Jews on the collapsing side received support from their neighbors—who instead of helping them joined in the flight—they broke and ran. Ptolemy's men did the opposite: they pressed the pursuit and cut the Jews down, chasing and killing the routed troops until their swords grew blunt with the killing and their arms gave out from exhaustion. It was said that thirty thousand of them died—Timagenes puts the number at fifty thousand—while of the rest some were taken captive and others escaped to their own towns.
After the victory Ptolemy overran the countryside, and when evening came on he encamped in some villages of Judea. Finding them full of women and infants, he ordered his soldiers to butcher them, cut them into pieces, and then throw the limbs into boiling cauldrons and taste them. He gave this order so that those who escaped the battle and came upon the scene would believe their enemies were cannibals, and be all the more terrified at the sight. Strabo and Nicolaus both report that this is indeed how he treated them, exactly as I have already stated. Ptolemy's forces also took Ptolemais by storm, as I have made clear elsewhere.
Cleopatra, seeing her son growing in power, freely ravaging Judea, and holding the city of Gaza in submission, would not stand by while he stood at her gates, hungry to make himself greater than the Egyptians. She set out against him at once with both a naval and a land force, appointing the Jews Chelkias and Ananias as commanders of the whole army, while she sent most of her wealth, her grandsons, and her will ahead to be deposited on Cos.
She ordered her son Alexander to sail with a great fleet along the coast to Phoenicia, while she herself came to Ptolemais with the rest of her army. When the people of Ptolemais refused to receive her, she laid siege to the city. Ptolemy meanwhile left Syria and hurried to Egypt, supposing he could seize it by surprise while it lay empty of troops—but he was mistaken in that hope.
At this same time it happened that Chelkias, the other of Cleopatra's commanders, died while pursuing Ptolemy near Coele-Syria. When Cleopatra learned of her son's venture and that things in Egypt had not gone for him as he expected, she sent part of her army and drove him out of the country. He turned back from Egypt and spent the winter in Gaza.
Meanwhile Cleopatra took the garrison at Ptolemais by siege, along with the city itself. Alexander approached her with gifts and whatever courtesies were fitting for a man who had suffered badly at Ptolemy's hands and had no refuge but hers. Some of her friends advised her to take the country as well, now that she had come into it, and not to let so great a wealth of goods belonging to the Jews rest in the hands of one man.
Ananias, however, advised against this, saying that she would be doing wrong if she stripped of his own authority a man who was her ally and, what is more, a kinsman of ours. "I do not want you to be unaware," he said, "that if you commit this injustice against him, you will turn all of us Jews into your enemies."
Persuaded by this advice from Ananias, Cleopatra decided to do Alexander no wrong, and instead made an alliance with him at Scythopolis in Coele-Syria. Freed now from his fear of Ptolemy, Alexander at once campaigned into Coele-Syria. He took Gadara after besieging it for ten months, and he also took Amathus, the greatest of the strongholds beyond the Jordan, where Theodorus son of Zeno kept his finest and most valuable possessions.
Theodorus fell upon the Jews when they were not expecting it, killed ten thousand of them, and plundered Alexander's baggage train. This did not daunt Alexander; instead he marched against the coastal towns of Raphia and Anthedon—which King Herod later renamed Agrippias—and took this one too by storm. Seeing that Ptolemy had withdrawn from Gaza to Cyprus and his mother Cleopatra to Egypt, and being angry at the people of Gaza for having called in Ptolemy as their ally, he besieged their city and plundered their territory beforehand.
Apollodotus, the general of the Gazans, attacked the Jewish camp by night with two thousand mercenaries and ten thousand of his own household troops, and for as long as the darkness lasted the Gazans had the better of it, giving the enemy the impression that Ptolemy himself had come against them. But when day broke and the deception was exposed, the Jews, learning the truth, rallied and attacked the Gazans, killing about a thousand of them. The Gazans held their ground, giving way neither from want nor from the number of their dead—for they were prepared to suffer anything rather than fall under the enemy—and their resolve was further strengthened by the hope that Aretas, king of the Arabs, would soon arrive as their ally.
But it happened that Apollodotus was killed first: his own brother Lysimachus, jealous of his standing among the citizens, murdered him, gathered a body of soldiers, and handed the city over to Alexander. Alexander, once inside, kept quiet at first, but afterward he unleashed his troops on the Gazans and let them take their revenge.
The others scattered through the city, killing Gazans wherever they turned; but the Gazans too were not lacking in courage, and in defending themselves against those who fell upon them they destroyed no fewer of the Jews than they lost themselves. Some, isolated, set fire to their own houses so that the enemy would find no plunder in them; others became the killers of their own children and wives, driven to spare them in this way from slavery under the enemy.
The members of the city council, five hundred in all, had fled together to the temple of Apollo, for it happened that the attack came while they were in session there. Alexander killed them, razed the city to the ground on top of them, and returned to Jerusalem after a siege of a full year. At about this same time Antiochus, called Grypus, died, the victim of a plot by Heracleon, having lived forty-five years and reigned twenty-nine.
His son Seleucus succeeded to the kingdom and went to war with his father's brother Antiochus, who was called Cyzicenus; he defeated him, took him captive, and had him killed. Not long afterward, Cyzicenus's son Antiochus, called Eusebes, arrived at Aradus, put on the diadem, and made war on Seleucus. He prevailed and drove him out of the whole of Syria; Seleucus fled to Cilicia, and once settled at the shrine of Mopsus he began again to extort money from the people there. The people of Mopsuestia, enraged, set fire to his palace and killed him along with his friends.
While Antiochus, son of Cyzicenus, was reigning over Syria, Antiochus the brother of Seleucus made war against him and, being defeated, perished along with his army. After him his brother Philip put on the diadem and ruled over part of Syria. Ptolemy Lathyrus summoned their third brother, Demetrius, called Akairos, from Cnidus and set him up as king in Damascus. Antiochus, resisting these two brothers with vigor, soon died: he had gone as an ally to Laodice, queen of the Samenians, in her war against the Parthians, and fell fighting bravely.
Syria was now held by the two brothers, Demetrius and Philip, as I have related elsewhere. As for Alexander, his own people rose in rebellion against him. It happened at a festival, while he was standing at the altar about to offer sacrifice, that the people pelted him with citrons—for it is the law among the Jews that at the Feast of Tabernacles each man should carry branches of palm and citron, as I have also explained elsewhere.
They further heaped abuse on him, saying he was descended from captives and unworthy of his honor and of the priesthood. Enraged at this, he killed about six thousand of them, and he built a wooden barrier around the altar and the temple, up to the balustrade beyond which only priests were permitted to go, and by means of this barrier he shut off the crowd's access to him.
He also kept foreign mercenaries, Pisidians and Cilicians, since he was at war with the Syrians and so made no use of them. After subduing the Moabites and Gileadites among the Arabs and reducing them to tribute, he tore down Amathus as well, since Theodorus did not dare to face him in battle. But when he joined battle against Obedas, king of the Arabs, he fell into an ambush in rough and difficult country and was driven by a mass of camels into a deep ravine near the village of Gadara in Gaulanitis, barely escaping with his life; from there he fled and made his way to Jerusalem.
Since the nation attacked him precisely because of his misfortune, he fought against them for six years and killed no fewer than fifty thousand Jews. When he called on them to end their hostility toward him, they hated him only the more because of what had already happened. Asked what they wanted, they all cried out that he should die, and they sent to Demetrius Akairos asking for his alliance.
Demetrius came with an army, took under his command those who had summoned him, and encamped near the city of Shechem. Alexander, taking with him six thousand two hundred mercenaries and about twenty thousand Jews who supported him, marched out against Demetrius.
Demetrius had three thousand cavalry and forty thousand infantry. Both sides worked hard, Alexander trying to win over the mercenaries to desert since they were Greeks, Demetrius trying to win over the Jews who were with Alexander. Neither succeeded in persuading the other's men, and when they joined battle Demetrius won. All of Alexander's mercenaries died, giving proof at once of their loyalty and their courage, and many of Demetrius's soldiers fell as well.
As Alexander fled into the mountains, six thousand Jews gathered to his side out of pity at his reversal of fortune. Demetrius, alarmed at this, withdrew. Afterward the Jews continued to make war on Alexander, and being defeated, many of them died in the fighting. He shut up the strongest of them in the city of Bethome and besieged it; when he took the city and gained control of them,
he brought them up to Jerusalem and there committed the most brutal act of all: while feasting in full view of everyone with his concubines, he ordered about eight hundred of them crucified, and while they still hung there alive he had their children and wives slaughtered before their eyes. He did this in revenge for the wrongs he had suffered, but the punishment he exacted went beyond what any human being should inflict—even granting, as was likely enough,
that he had been worn down by his wars against them and had come to the very brink of losing both his life and his kingdom, since they were not content to fight him themselves but brought in foreigners as well, and in the end forced things to such a point that he had to hand over to the Arab king the land he had conquered in Gilead and Moab, along with the Arab territories, so that the king would not join them in the war against him—along with countless other insults and injuries they inflicted on him.
Even so, he does not seem to have acted properly in this, so that because of the excess of his cruelty the Jews nicknamed him Thrakidas. His opponents, about eight thousand in number, fled by night, and for as long as Alexander lived they remained in exile. And so he, rid of this turmoil, ruled from then on in complete peace.
Demetrius, after leaving Judea, went to Beroea and besieged his brother Philip there, having with him ten thousand infantry and a thousand cavalry. Straton, the tyrant of Beroea, an ally of Philip's, called in Azizus, phylarch of the Arabs, and Mithridates Sinaces, the Parthian governor. These arrived with a large force and besieged Demetrius within his own entrenchment, pressing him inside with arrows and thirst until they forced him and his men to surrender.
After plundering the countryside and taking Demetrius captive, they sent him to Mithridates, then king of the Parthians, and returned free of charge to the Antiochenes those of the prisoners who turned out to be citizens of Antioch. Mithridates, king of the Parthians, held Demetrius in every honor until Demetrius ended his life through illness.
Philip, immediately after the battle, went to Antioch, took possession of it, and became king of Syria. Then Antiochus, called Dionysus, Philip's brother, laid claim to the rule and came to Damascus; gaining control of affairs there, he made himself king. When he set out on campaign against the Arabs, his brother Philip, hearing of it, came to Damascus.
Antiochus met them and fought hard, and though winning he died coming to the aid of the hard-pressed wing. When Antiochus fell, his army fled to the village of Cana, where most of them perished from hunger.
After him Aretas was made king of Coele-Syria, called to the throne by the people who held Damascus because of their hatred of Ptolemy son of Mennaeus. Marching from there against Judea, he defeated Alexander in battle near the village of Adida and withdrew from Judea under a treaty. Alexander then marched again against the city of Dium and took it, and campaigning against Essa, where Zeno kept most of his valuables, he surrounded the place with three walls and took the city without a fight, then set out against Gaulane and Seleucia.
Taking these as well, he seized also the ravine called Antiochus's and the fortress of Gamala. Bringing many charges against Demetrius, the ruler of the region, he stripped him of his post, and having now completed the third year of the campaign he returned home, welcomed eagerly by the Jews because of his success.
At this time the Jews already held cities of the Syrians, Idumeans, and Phoenicians: on the coast, Strato's Tower, Apollonia, Joppa, Jamnia, Azotus, Gaza, Anthedon, Raphia, and Rhinocorura; inland in Idumea, Adora and Marisa and all of Idumea; Samaria, Mount Carmel, Mount Tabor, Scythopolis, and Gadara; in Gaulanitis, Seleucia and Gabala; in Moab, Heshbon, Medaba, Lemba, Oronaim, Gelithon, and Zoar; the valley of the Cilicians, and Pella - this last city he razed to the ground because its inhabitants would not promise to adopt the ancestral customs of the Jews. Other leading cities of Syria had likewise been overthrown.
After this, King Alexander fell from heavy drinking into sickness, and for three years, gripped by a quartan fever, he did not give up his campaigns, until, worn out by his hardships, he died in the territory of Gerasa while besieging the fortress of Ragaba across the Jordan.
Seeing him at the point of death, with no hope of recovery left to hold to, the queen wept and beat her breast, lamenting the desolation to come for herself and her children, and said to him, "To whom do you leave me and my children like this, in need of help from others - and this though you know how hostile the nation is toward you?"
He advised her to be guided by whatever counsel would let her hold the kingdom securely with her children, and to conceal his death from the soldiers until she had taken the fortress; then, arriving at Jerusalem as if in splendor from a victory, to grant the Pharisees some measure of power. For since they would praise her in return for the honor, they would make the nation well disposed toward her; the Pharisees, he said, had great influence among the Jews, both to harm those they hated and to help those they favored, since the people trusted them above all when they said anything harsh out of envy against someone. He said that he himself had come into collision with the nation because of them, since they had felt insulted by him.
"You, then," he said, "once you are at Jerusalem, send for their leaders, and showing them my body, allow them, with full assurance of your good faith, to do with it whatever they wish - whether they choose to disgrace my corpse by leaving it unburied, as one who has made them suffer much, or to inflict some other outrage on my body out of anger. Promise them, too, that you will do nothing in the kingdom apart from their judgment. If you say this to them, I will be honored with a more splendid funeral at their hands than I would have received from you, and they will do nothing to abuse my body though it lies in their power, while you will rule securely."
Having given his wife this advice, he died, having reigned twenty-seven years and lived fifty-one in all. Alexandra took the fortress in accordance with her husband's instructions, and conferred with the Pharisees, placing in their hands everything concerning both the corpse and the kingdom; by this she put an end to their anger against Alexander and made them well disposed and friendly.
Coming before the people, they made speeches recounting Alexander's deeds, and declared that a just king had died on their behalf, and by their praises stirred the people to mourning and grief for him, so that they gave him a more splendid funeral than any king before him.
Alexander, however, left two sons, Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, and settled the kingdom on Alexandra. Of his sons, Hyrcanus was too weak to manage affairs and preferred a quiet life, while the younger, Aristobulus, was vigorous and bold. The people were fond of the woman, because she seemed displeased at the wrongs her husband had committed.
She appointed Hyrcanus high priest because of his age, but far more because of his lack of energy, and entrusted everything to the Pharisees, whom she also ordered the people to obey. And whatever of the traditional ordinances her father-in-law Hyrcanus had abolished - ordinances which the Pharisees had introduced according to the tradition of the fathers - this she restored again.
So the title of the kingdom was hers, but the power belonged to the Pharisees: for they recalled exiles, released prisoners, and in short differed in nothing from rulers. The queen, for her part, also took thought for the kingdom: she raised a large force of mercenaries and doubled her own army, so as to overawe the neighboring rulers and take hostages from them.
The whole country was at peace, except for the Pharisees; for they kept stirring up the queen, urging her to put to death those who had advised Alexander to kill the eight hundred men. They themselves then slaughtered one of these men, Diogenes, and after him others one after another, until the men of influence, together with Aristobulus - who plainly could not bear what was happening and made this evident, being determined, should he ever get the chance, not to let his mother continue - came before the palace and reminded her of the great deeds they had accomplished amid so many dangers, by which they had shown the firmness of their loyalty to their master, deeds for which they had been most highly honored by him.
They begged her not to turn their hopes entirely to the opposite course; for having escaped the danger of enemies, they were being cut down at home by their foes like cattle, with no one to avenge them. They said that if their accusers were satisfied with those already killed, they would bear what had happened with moderation, out of loyalty to their rulers; but if the accusers meant to pursue the same course further, they asked above all to be granted release - for they could not bring themselves to secure their safety apart from it, but would gladly die before the palace rather than be thought guilty of disloyalty toward her.
"It would be a disgrace," they said, "both to us and to the reigning queen, if, neglected by her, we were handed over to our master's enemies; for Aretas the Arab and the other rulers would pay any price to hire away so many men, men whose very name had perhaps once struck terror before it was even heard. But if not, then at the very least, if she has resolved to give the Pharisees preference, let her station each of us in the fortresses; for if some divine anger has indeed fallen in this way upon the house of Alexander, we ourselves can at least show that we are living in a humble condition."
While they said many such things, invoking the spirits of Alexander to pity the dead and those in danger, all who stood around broke into tears, and above all Aristobulus made his feelings plain, reproaching his mother at length.
But in truth those men had themselves become the cause of their own misfortunes, having allowed, out of a woman's love of power, one who by rights should not have reigned to rule while the royal line was in its prime. She, for her part, not knowing what else to do while keeping up appearances, entrusted the guarding of the fortresses to them, except for Hyrcania, Alexandreion, and Machaerus, where her most valuable possessions were kept.
Not long after, she sent her son Aristobulus with an army against Damascus, against the man called Ptolemy son of Mennaeus, who was a troublesome neighbor to the city; but they accomplished nothing worth the effort and returned. At this time word came that Tigranes had invaded Syria with three hundred thousand troops and was about to arrive in Judea. This, as was natural, alarmed the queen and the nation.
They sent him many gifts, worth mentioning, along with envoys, while he was besieging Ptolemais; for Queen Selene, also called Cleopatra, who then held sway over parts of Syria - the one who had induced the inhabitants to shut Tigranes out - was the object of his siege, and the envoys begged him to look kindly on the queen and the nation. He received them and, though keeping his distance in his dealings, held out good hopes to them.
Ptolemais had only just been captured when word came to Tigranes that Lucullus, pursuing Mithridates, had failed to catch him, since he had fled to the Iberians, but that Lucullus had ravaged Armenia and was besieging it. Learning this as well, Tigranes withdrew homeward.
After this, when the queen fell into a serious illness, Aristobulus resolved to seize control of affairs. Slipping away by night with one of his servants, he went to the fortresses where his father's friends had been stationed; for he had long chafed at what his mother was doing, and feared far more that, once she died, the whole family would fall into the hands of the Pharisees - he saw the impossibility of his brother, who was to succeed to the rule, actually holding it. Only his wife knew of the plan, and he left her behind there with their children.
Arriving first at Agaba, where Galaestes, one of the powerful men, was in command, he was received by him. The next day the queen learned of Aristobulus's flight, and for a time supposed that his withdrawal was not aimed at revolution; but when messenger after messenger came reporting that he had seized the first fortress, and the second, and all of them in turn - for once one had begun, everything rushed swiftly toward fulfilling his purpose - then indeed the queen and the nation fell into the greatest turmoil.
For they knew that Aristobulus was not far from being able to secure the throne for himself, and they feared he would exact punishment for the wrongs they had urged upon his household. It was resolved, then, to place his wife and children in the fortress above the Temple.
As for Aristobulus, since he was joined by great numbers from many quarters, from whom he now had a royal retinue about him, he mastered, in about fifteen days, twenty-two strongholds; and having gained this advantage, he gathered an army from Lebanon, Trachonitis, and the local rulers - for these men, being easily swayed by superior numbers, readily obeyed him, and besides, they reckoned that if they joined forces with him they would reap no less a share of the kingdom than he himself, since they had become the occasion of his rising to power.
The elders of the Jews, together with Hyrcanus, went to the queen and begged her to give her judgment on the present situation; for Aristobulus, they said, was now virtually master of everything, since he had gained control of so many strongholds; and it was absurd, even if she were gravely ill, that they should have to deliberate on their own while she still lived, when the danger stood close upon them, not far off.
She told them to do whatever seemed useful to them; many resources, she said, were still left to them - the nation strong, the army intact, and the money in the treasuries - for she herself now cared little for affairs, since her body was already failing.
Having said this, she died not long after, having reigned nine years and lived seventy-three years in all - a woman who in nothing made use of the weakness proper to her sex. For being especially formidable in her love of power, she proved by her deeds both the practical strength of her own judgment and the folly of men who forever stumble in their pursuit of dominion, valuing the present above the future and putting everything second to ruling with a firm hand, with no regard for what was honorable or just on its own account.
At all events, she reduced her house to such a pitch of misfortune that the rule which she had acquired amid the greatest dangers and hardships, through a desire for what did not befit a woman, was taken away not long after - adding to those already hostile toward her family a like resentment, and leaving the throne bereft of those who might have watched over it. She filled both her own reign and, after her death, the kingdom with troubles and turmoil arising from the policies of her lifetime. Nevertheless, for all that, she kept the nation in peace and quiet while she ruled.
Such, then, was the end of the story of Queen Alexandra. I now go on to relate what happened to her sons, Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, after her death, in the book that follows this one.

======== Antiquities — Book 14 ========

How, after the death of Alexandra, her younger son Aristobulus made war on his brother Hyrcanus for the throne, defeated him, and drove him back into the fortress at Jerusalem; how, when they then met and came to terms, they agreed that Aristobulus should be king and Hyrcanus should live as a private citizen. Concerning Antipater and his family, and how, from a small and ordinary beginning, he rose, together with his sons, to splendor, reputation, and great power; and how, when Antipater persuaded Hyrcanus to flee Jerusalem for Aretas, king of the Arabs, he went and begged Aretas to restore him to the kingdom, promising him much land and money in return.
How Aretas, having taken in Hyrcanus, marched against Aristobulus, joined battle, defeated him, and pursued him to Jerusalem, where he encamped his army and besieged the city. How, when Pompey sent Scaurus from Armenia into Syria, envoys came to Scaurus from both Hyrcanus and Aristobulus asking for his alliance. How Scaurus, bribed with four hundred talents, sided with Aristobulus. How Hyrcanus and Aristobulus pleaded their case for the kingdom before Pompey. How, when Pompey came from Armenia to Damascus, Aristobulus and Hyrcanus
came before him to plead their case for the kingdom; how Pompey put off deciding the charges they brought against each other until he should reach their own country; and how Aristobulus, sensing what Pompey intended, withdrew into Judea, and how, when Pompey grew angry and marched against him to Alexandreion, Aristobulus retreated into that fortress, which was strong and hard to take by force. How Pompey, seeing this, resorted to a stratagem
and persuaded Aristobulus to leave the fortress and come down to him, on the understanding that he would confirm his rule; and how Aristobulus, won over by this and after pleading his case many times before his brother, was forced to write with his own hand to the garrison commanders, ordering them to hand the fortresses over to Pompey. How Aristobulus, having done this out of fear and then growing bitter at obtaining none of what he had expected from Pompey, withdrew to Jerusalem.
How, when Pompey pursued close on his heels with his army, Aristobulus changed his mind, came out as far as Jericho to meet him, begged pardon for his offenses, and promised to hand over the city and its treasures; and how, when Pompey sent Gabinius with a picked force to take possession of the city and the money, the people of Jerusalem, seeing Aristobulus held under guard, shut
the gates against the Romans. How Pompey, provoked by this, put Aristobulus in chains, brought up his forces, and besieged the city; how the partisans of Hyrcanus admitted him into the upper city, while the partisans of Aristobulus fled into the temple; and how Pompey took the temple and the lower city by storm in the third month of the siege.
Concerning his moderation and reverence for God, in that he laid hands on none of the great treasures within the temple. How, having accomplished all this, made Judea tributary, and appointed Hyrcanus ethnarch, he led Aristobulus off in chains to Rome together with his family, and left Scaurus behind as governor of Syria. How, when Scaurus campaigned against Petra, the royal seat of the
Arabs, and besieged it, and his soldiers fell into want, Antipater persuaded the Arab king to make an alliance with Scaurus by giving him three hundred talents. How Alexander, son of Aristobulus, having fled from Pompey and come into Judea and gathered a large force, made war on Hyrcanus and Antipater. How, defeated in battle by Gabinius and shut up in the fortress of Alexandreion, he was besieged there.
How Gabinius, when Alexander's mother persuaded him to hand over both her son and the fortress, let Alexander go, and also wrote to the Senate that Alexander's brothers, who were held prisoner along with their father Aristobulus, should be released and sent to their mother, pointing out her loyalty to Rome and that she deserved this favor. How afterward,
when Aristobulus fled from Rome into Judea, Gabinius took him and sent him back once more as a prisoner to Rome. Crassus's advance into Judea in the course of his campaign against the Parthians, and his plundering of the temple treasures. Pompey's flight to Epirus, and the arrival of Scipio, sent by him into Syria with orders to kill Alexander. How Caesar, having released Aristobulus, was ready to send him
into Judea with two legions, but Aristobulus was destroyed beforehand by poison, at the hands of Pompey's partisans. Caesar's campaign into Egypt, and how Hyrcanus and Antipater fought at his side and brought the Jews in as his allies. Antipater's eager and distinguished conduct in the battle, and the friendship with Caesar it earned him; and how Caesar, rejoicing in the victory, honored Hyrcanus
greatly, allowing him to rebuild the walls of his homeland, and entrusted the administration of Judea to Antipater. Caesar's letters and the Senate's decrees concerning friendship with the Jews. How Antipater assigned to his sons — to Herod the charge of Galilee, to Phasael that of Jerusalem. How Caesar's governor in Syria, Sextus, bribed by Herod, made Herod great and renowned,
appointing him ruler of Coele-Syria. How Cassius, after Caesar's death, went up into Judea, ravaged the country, and exacted eight hundred talents from its people, and how Herod, through his zeal in collecting the money, won Cassius's favor. The death of Malichus, who had stirred up faction against Herod, on Cassius's order. The killing of the envoys from Judea by Antony after his victory in Macedonia,
once he had come to Syria and grown angry at the charges brought against Herod — charges he in fact dismissed because Herod won him over with money. The Parthian invasion of Syria, in the course of which they restored Antigonus, son of Aristobulus, to the throne, and took Hyrcanus and Phasael, Herod's brother, captive. How Herod, fleeing from there to Italy, reached Rome, and, on appealing to Antony
and promising him much money, was declared king of Judea by the Senate and by Caesar. Herod's voyage afterward from Rome to Judea, and his battle against Antigonus with a Roman force under the command of Silo at his side. How, after Silo besieged Jerusalem, Antigonus was destroyed by Sosius and Herod. This book covers a period of thirty-two years.
Now that the events concerning Queen Alexandra and her death have been set out by us in the previous book, we shall now relate what follows on from them and connects with them, with no other aim than to leave nothing of these matters out, whether through ignorance or through weariness of memory. For history, and the disclosure of matters unknown to most people because of their antiquity, must indeed
offer its readers whatever beauty of expression it possesses — so far as that consists in the choice of words, their harmony, and whatever else lends adornment to the account — so that they may take in the knowledge with a certain grace and pleasure; but above all, writers must aim at accuracy, and give greater weight to telling the truth than to anything else, for the sake of those who are going to trust them about matters they themselves do not know.
For when Hyrcanus had received the kingdom, in the third year of the hundred and seventy-seventh Olympiad, in the consulship at Rome of Quintus Hortensius and Quintus Metellus — the one also called Creticus — Aristobulus at once made war against him, and when battle was joined near Jericho, many of Hyrcanus's soldiers deserted to his brother. When this happened, Hyrcanus fled to the
citadel, where, as we have already said, Aristobulus's wife and children happened to be held prisoner by their mother; and Aristobulus, attacking the opposing faction who had taken refuge within the temple precinct, took the position. Then, after conferring with his brother about a settlement, he ended the hostility on the terms that Aristobulus should be king, while he himself should live free of public affairs, enjoying without fear the property he already possessed.
Having agreed to these terms in the temple, confirmed the agreement with oaths and handclasps, and embraced each other before the eyes of the whole assembled crowd, they parted — Aristobulus to the palace, Hyrcanus, now a private citizen, to Aristobulus's house. Now Hyrcanus had a certain friend, an Idumaean named Antipater, a man well supplied with money, active by nature, and given to faction,
who was hostile to Aristobulus and at odds with him because of his own goodwill toward Hyrcanus. Nicolaus of Damascus, however, says that this man was descended from the leading Jews who had come from Babylon into Judea — a claim he makes to flatter Herod, Antipater's son, who by a turn of fortune became king of the Jews, as we shall relate in due course. This
Antipater — whose father bore the same name and was first called Antipas — was the man whom King Alexander and his wife had appointed general of the whole of Idumea; and they say he made friends with the neighboring Arabs, Gazans, and Ascalonites by winning them over with many great gifts. The younger Antipater, then, viewing Aristobulus's power with suspicion and fearing
that he might come to harm because of Aristobulus's hatred of him, secretly worked against him, speaking privately with the leading men among the Jews and arguing that it was wrong to overlook Aristobulus holding power unjustly, having driven out his brother, who was the elder, and holding what rightfully belonged to Hyrcanus by seniority. He kept up this argument with Hyrcanus continually,
telling him that his life was in danger unless he took precautions by getting Aristobulus out of the way; for Aristobulus's friends, he said, let no opportunity pass in urging him to kill Hyrcanus, so that he might then hold power securely. Hyrcanus did not believe these words, being naturally decent and not one to accept slander readily, out of fairness of mind. But it was just this passivity and slackness of spirit that made him seem, to those who saw him,
low and unmanly, whereas Aristobulus was of the opposite temper, active and alert in spirit. So when Antipater saw that Hyrcanus was paying no attention to his words, he did not let up, but day after day kept fabricating charges and slandering Aristobulus to him as wanting to kill him, until, by sheer persistence, he persuaded him — advising him to flee to Aretas, king of the Arabs; for if Hyrcanus agreed to this,
Antipater promised he would himself become his ally as well. Hyrcanus, hearing this, judged it advantageous to escape to Aretas — Arabia lies next to Judea — and so Hyrcanus first sent Antipater to the king of the Arabs to secure pledges that he would not surrender him, a suppliant, to his enemies. Having obtained these pledges, Antipater returned to Hyrcanus at Jerusalem, and not long
after, he took Hyrcanus with him, slipped out of the city by night, and, after covering a long stretch of road, brought him to the place called Petra, where Aretas had his palace. Being on especially close terms with the king, he urged him to restore Hyrcanus to Judea, and by doing this every day without letting up, and even offering gifts, he won Aretas over. And for his part
Hyrcanus promised that, once restored and in possession of the kingdom again, he would give back the territory and the twelve cities which his father Alexander had taken from the Arabs. These were Medaba, Libba, Nabaloth, Arabatha, Galanthone, Zoara, Oronaidigobasilissarydda, Alousa, and Oryba. Once these promises had been made to him, Aretas marched against Aristobulus with fifty thousand cavalry together with
his infantry, and won the battle. After the victory many deserted to Hyrcanus, and Aristobulus, left isolated, fled to Jerusalem. The Arab king, bringing up his whole army and attacking the temple, besieged Aristobulus there, the people too joining Hyrcanus and helping press the siege, while only the priests stood by Aristobulus.
Aretas, having set his camps of Arabs and Jews one after another around the temple, pressed the siege vigorously. While this was happening, at the time of the feast of unleavened bread, which we call Passover, the most respected of the Jews abandoned the country and fled to Egypt. Now there was a certain Onias, a righteous man beloved of God, who had once, in a time of drought, prayed to God to end the dryness,
and God had heard him and sent rain. This man had hidden himself, seeing that the strife continued fiercely; but he was brought up to the camp of the Jews, and they demanded that, just as he had ended the drought by his prayer, so now he should likewise pronounce curses against Aristobulus and his fellow rebels. When he protested and refused, the crowd forced him, and, standing in their midst, he said:
"O God, king of all things, since those standing with me are your people, and those under siege are your priests, I beg you: do not listen to these men against those, nor bring to pass what these men are asking against those."
When he had prayed in these words, the wicked among the Jews gathered around him and stoned him. But God at once punished them for this cruelty and exacted justice for the murder of Onias
in the following way: while the priests and Aristobulus were still under siege, the feast called Phaska came round, at which it is our custom to offer God many sacrifices. Lacking animals for sacrifice, Aristobulus's party asked their countrymen to supply them, offering to take whatever payment they wanted in exchange. When the others agreed to supply them, but demanded a thousand drachmas for each animal,
Aristobulus and the priests eagerly accepted, and, lowering the money down over the walls, handed it to them. But those men, having taken the money, did not deliver the animals; indeed, they went so far in wickedness as to break their word and offend God by failing to provide what was needed for the sacrifices to those who had asked. Having been cheated of the agreement, the priests prayed to God to exact justice from
their countrymen on their behalf, and God did not delay the punishment, but sent a great and violent wind that destroyed the crops of the whole land, so that at that time a bushel of wheat had to be bought for eleven drachmas. Meanwhile, Pompey, still in Armenia and still at war with Tigranes, sent Scaurus into Syria; and Scaurus, on arriving at Damascus, took it over from Lollius and Metellus, who had only recently
When Scaurus, arriving at Damascus, found that Lollius and Metellus had just taken the city, he pressed on himself into Judea. On his approach, envoys came to him from both Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, each side asking that he fight as their ally. Aristobulus promised to give four hundred talents, and Hyrcanus promised no less, but Scaurus accepted Aristobulus's offer, for Aristobulus was wealthy and high-minded and expected to be treated on fairly moderate terms, while Hyrcanus was poor and stingy and had made his incredible promise about a far larger sum without meaning to keep it. Besides, it was no equal matter to take by force a city among the strongest and best defended, or to drive out a band of exiles backed by a mass of Nabateans who were poorly disposed toward war. Scaurus therefore sided with Aristobulus for these reasons, took the money, and lifted the siege, ordering Aretas to withdraw or be declared an enemy of Rome.
Scaurus then went back to Damascus, while Aristobulus marched with a large force against Aretas and Hyrcanus, met them near a place called Papyron, defeated them in battle, and killed about six thousand of the enemy, among whom fell Phallion, the brother of Antipater.
Not long afterward, when Pompey arrived at Damascus and was advancing through Coele-Syria, envoys came to him from all of Syria and Egypt and from Judea as well; for Aristobulus sent him a great gift, a golden vine worth five hundred talents. Strabo the Cappadocian also mentions this gift, writing as follows: "There came also an embassy from Egypt, with a crown worth four thousand gold pieces, and from Judea either a vine or a garden — they called the piece of work Terpole, 'Delight.'" I myself have seen this gift on display in Rome, dedicated in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, bearing the inscription "of Alexander, king of the Jews." It was valued at five hundred talents. It is said that Aristobulus, ruler of the Jews, was the one who sent it.
Not long after this, envoys came to Pompey again, Antipater on behalf of Hyrcanus, and Nicodemus on behalf of Aristobulus. Nicodemus went so far as to accuse those who had taken bribes, Gabinius earlier and Scaurus later — three hundred talents from the one, four hundred from the other — thereby making enemies of these men too, in addition to his other opponents. Pompey ordered the disputants to appear before him, and as spring was setting in, he took up his army from its winter quarters and set out for the territory of Damascus. On the way he demolished the citadel at Apamea that Antiochus Cyzicenus had built, and took note of the territory of Ptolemy son of Mennaeus, a man no less wicked than Dionysius of Tripolis, who had been beheaded — indeed Ptolemy had been related to him by marriage — though Ptolemy had bought off punishment for his crimes with a thousand talents, which Pompey used to pay his soldiers. He also captured the stronghold of Lysias, where Silas the Jew had been ruler. Passing through the cities of Heliopolis and Chalcis, and crossing the mountain range that divides off the region called Coele-Syria from the rest, he came from there to Damascus.
There he gave a hearing to the Jews and to their leaders, who were at odds with one another — Hyrcanus and Aristobulus — and to the nation, which was at odds with both of them. The people did not wish to be ruled by a king at all, holding that it was ancestral for them to obey the priests of the god they worshipped, and that these two men, though descended from the priests, were seeking to transfer the nation to a different kind of government, so that it might become enslaved. Hyrcanus, for his part, charged that though he was the elder, he had been robbed of his birthright by Aristobulus, and now held only a small portion of the territory under his own control, Aristobulus having seized the rest by force. He also accused Aristobulus of being responsible for the raids on neighboring peoples and for the piracy at sea, saying that the nation would never have revolted from him if he had not been a violent and troublesome man. More than a thousand of the most respected Jews, whom Antipater had arranged to be present, supported him as he made these charges.
Aristobulus, in reply, blamed his brother's ineffectual character for his loss of power, and said it made him an object of contempt. As for himself, he said he had taken up the rule only under compulsion, out of fear that it might pass to others, and that he bore the same title his father Alexander had borne. As witnesses to this he called forward the younger and more arrogant men of his party, whose purple robes, long hair, silver ornaments on their weapons, and other finery the older men found disgusting — they wore this display as though going out in a procession rather than as men about to stand trial.
When Pompey had heard all this, and had judged Aristobulus's conduct to be violent, he dismissed them for the time being with mild words, but said that when he came into their country he would settle everything, once he had first dealt with the Nabateans. Meanwhile he ordered them to remain quiet, and in the same breath he courted Aristobulus, so that Aristobulus would not draw the country into revolt and block the mountain passes. But this is exactly what happened at Aristobulus's hands: without waiting for anything Pompey had discussed with him, he went off to the city of Dium, and from there set out for Judea.
Pompey was angered by this, and taking the army he had gathered against the Nabateans, together with auxiliaries from Damascus and the rest of Syria and the Roman legions he already had with him, he marched against Aristobulus. Passing by Pella and Scythopolis, he came to Corea, which is the beginning of Judea for one traveling through the interior. There, since Aristobulus had taken refuge in a very beautiful stronghold set on the peak of a mountain, Alexandreion, Pompey sent word ordering him to come to him. Though many advised him not to make war on Rome, he came down, and after pleading his case against his brother for the rule, went back up again into the citadel, with Pompey's consent. He did this two or three times, at once flattering Pompey with the hope he held out concerning the kingship and pretending to obey each of Pompey's commands, while withdrawing again to his stronghold in order not to abandon it and to secure himself a base for making war, since he feared Pompey would turn the rule over to Hyrcanus.
When Pompey ordered him to hand over the strongholds and to write to their garrison commanders in his own hand — for he had forbidden any other manner of surrender — Aristobulus obeyed, but withdrew in great distress to Jerusalem and set about preparing for war. Not long after, as Pompey was leading his army against him, some men arrived on the road from Pontus with news of the death of Mithridates, who had been killed by his son Pharnaces. Pompey then camped near Jericho, where the palm tree grows, and where the balsam-oil, the finest of perfumes, oozes out like resin when the shrubs are cut with a sharp stone; from there he set out at dawn for Jerusalem. Aristobulus, having had a change of heart, came to Pompey, and offering him money and admitting him into Jerusalem, begged him to stop the war and to conduct affairs peaceably as he pleased. Pompey, granting his request, sent Gabinius with soldiers to collect the money and take possession of the city. Nothing came of this, however; Gabinius returned, shut out of the city and without the money, since Aristobulus's soldiers would not allow the agreement to be carried out.
Pompey grew angry at this, put Aristobulus under guard, and advanced against the city himself. It was well fortified on every side except the north, which was weakly defended, since there a wide, deep ravine runs around it, enclosing the temple within a stone wall built very strongly. Inside the city there was factional strife, the people disagreeing among themselves about the present crisis: some thought the city should be surrendered to Pompey, while those who favored Aristobulus urged that it be shut and defended, so that he too might be freed from his imprisonment. This latter party moved first, seized the temple, and cut away the bridge leading from it into the city, preparing for a siege. The others received Pompey's army and handed over to him both the city and the palace.
Pompey sent his lieutenant Piso ahead with a force to garrison the city and the palace, and he fortified the houses adjoining the temple and whatever lay outside it around the temple precinct. At first he offered terms of settlement to those inside, but when they would not yield to what he proposed, he began walling off the surrounding area, Hyrcanus assisting him eagerly in every way. Pompey himself camped at dawn on the north side of the temple, where it was open to attack. Great towers had been raised there too, and a trench had been dug, and the site was enclosed by a deep ravine; for on the side toward the city as well the bridge had been broken down, on which Pompey, laboring day after day, kept raising an earthwork, the Romans cutting down the surrounding timber. When this had been brought high enough — the trench having with great difficulty been filled in, given its immense depth — he brought up siege engines and machines carried in from Tyre, set them in position, and began battering the temple with his stone-throwers.
Had it not been our ancestral custom to rest on the seventh day, the earthwork could not have been completed, since our people would have hindered it; for the Law permits us to defend ourselves against those who begin a fight and strike us, but does not allow us to act against an enemy doing anything else. The Romans, well aware of this, on the days we call Sabbaths neither shot at the Jews nor came to close quarters with them, but raised earthworks and towers and brought up their machines, so that these would be ready for use on the following day. One may judge from this the extraordinary piety we show toward God and our devotion to the Law, since the men were not at all hindered by fear during the siege from carrying out the sacred rites, but twice a day, in the morning and about the ninth hour, went on offering sacrifice at the altar, and did not let go of the sacrifices even when things grew difficult during the assaults. Indeed, when the city was captured, in the third month, on the very day of the fast, in the hundred and seventy-ninth Olympiad, in the consulship of Gaius Antonius and Marcus Tullius Cicero, the enemy burst in and were slaughtering those in the temple, yet those attending to the sacrifices went on performing them no less, neither driven by fear for their lives nor by the number of those already being killed to flee, but judging it better to endure at those very altars whatever they must suffer than to pass over any point of the Law.
That this is no mere claim glorifying a false piety, but the truth, is attested by all who have written the history of Pompey's campaigns, among them Strabo and Nicolaus, and besides them Titus Livius, the author of the Roman History.
When the battering ram had been brought up and the largest of the towers, shaken, came crashing down, breaching part of the wall, the enemy poured in, and first among them Cornelius Faustus, son of Sulla, mounted the wall with his own soldiers, and after him the centurion Furius with those following him on the other side, and through the middle Fabius, likewise a centurion, with a strong company. Everywhere was filled with slaughter. Some of the Jews were killed by the Romans, others by one another; some hurled themselves down from the cliffs, and others, setting fire to their houses, burned to death in them, unable to bear what was happening. About twelve thousand of the Jews fell, but very few of the Romans. Among the captives taken was Absalom, both uncle and father-in-law of Aristobulus.
No small violation of custom occurred with regard to the sanctuary, which had until then been untrodden and unseen; for Pompey went into the inner chamber, and not a few of those with him, and saw what was lawful for no one to see but the high priests alone. There stood a golden table, a sacred lampstand, libation vessels, and a great quantity of spices, and besides these, in the treasuries, sacred funds amounting to nearly two thousand talents. Pompey touched none of it, out of piety, and in this too acted in a manner worthy of his own excellence of character. The next day he ordered the temple servants to purify the temple and to offer the customary sacrifices to God, and he restored the high priesthood to Hyrcanus, both because of the other services Hyrcanus had rendered him and because he had kept the Jews of the countryside from fighting alongside Aristobulus; and he put to death by the axe those responsible for the war. To Faustus and the others who had mounted the wall with such courage he awarded fitting prizes for valor.
Jerusalem he made tributary to the Romans, and the cities of Coele-Syria that its inhabitants had previously subdued he took away and placed under his own governor, thereby confining within its own borders the whole nation, which had before been raised to great power. Gadara, which had recently been destroyed, he rebuilt, as a favor to Demetrius of Gadara, his own freedman; and the rest — Hippos, Scythopolis, Pella, Dium, and Samaria, as well as Marisa, Ashdod, Jamnia, and Arethusa — he restored to their inhabitants. These he restored in the interior, apart from the cities that had been demolished; and on the coast, Gaza, Joppa, Dora, and Strato's Tower — which, after Herod rebuilt it magnificently and adorned it with harbors and temples, was renamed Caesarea — all these Pompey set free and attached to the province.
For this disaster that befell Jerusalem, Hyrcanus and Aristobulus were responsible, through their quarrel with each other; for we lost our freedom and became subject to the Romans, and the territory we had won by arms, taking it from the Syrians, we were forced to give back to the Syrians. In addition, the Romans in a short time exacted from us more than ten thousand talents, and the kingship, formerly given to those who were high priests by descent, became an honor held by commoners. Of these matters we will speak in their proper place.
Pompey, having handed over the rest of Coele-Syria as far as the Euphrates and Egypt to Scaurus, together with two Roman legions, hastened on to Cilicia on his way to Rome. He brought with him Aristobulus in chains, together with his family; for Aristobulus had two daughters and as many sons, of whom Alexander escaped, while the younger, Antigonus, was carried off to Rome along with his sisters. When Scaurus had marched against Petra in Arabia, and, because it was hard to take, was ravaging the country around it, and his army was suffering from famine, Antipater
On Hyrcanus's instructions, Antipater kept supplying Scaurus with grain from Judea and whatever else his army lacked. When Scaurus sent him as an envoy to Aretas, on the strength of an existing bond of hospitality, Antipater persuaded the king to pay money so that his country would not be ravaged, and he himself stood as guarantor for three hundred talents. On these terms Scaurus ended the war, no less willingly than Aretas himself wanted this outcome.
Some time later, when Alexander the son of Aristobulus was overrunning Judea, Gabinius arrived from Rome as governor of Syria. Among other notable achievements, he marched against Alexander, since Hyrcanus was no longer able to resist Alexander's strength and Alexander was already attempting to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, which Pompey had torn down. The Romans stationed there stopped him from that. But as he moved about the country he armed many of the Jews and quickly gathered ten thousand heavy infantry and fifteen hundred cavalry, and he fortified Alexandreion, the stronghold near Corea, and Machaerus, on the Arabian mountains.
Gabinius therefore marched against him, sending Mark Antony ahead with other commanders. These men armed the Romans who followed them, and along with them the subject Jews, led by Peitholaus and Malichus, and adding also Antipater's own company, they went to meet Alexander; Gabinius followed with the main body of troops. Alexander withdrew near Jerusalem, and when the two sides met there and a battle took place, the Romans killed about three thousand of the enemy and took no fewer prisoner.
Meanwhile Gabinius came to Alexandreion and invited those inside to negotiate, promising to pardon their past offenses. Since a large enemy force was encamped before the fortress, the Romans advanced against them, and Mark Antony fought brilliantly, killing many and winning distinction for valor. Gabinius then left part of his army there to besiege the place until it was taken, while he himself advanced through the rest of Judea, and wherever he came upon cities that had been demolished, he ordered them rebuilt. So Samaria, Azotus, Scythopolis, Anthedon, Raphia, Adora, Marisa, Gaza, and many others were rebuilt. Because the people obeyed what Gabinius commanded, cities that had lain empty for a long time were now securely resettled.
Having accomplished this throughout the country, he returned to Alexandreion, and as he was pressing the siege there, Alexander sent envoys asking to be pardoned for his offenses and surrendering the strongholds of Hyrcania and Machaerus, and later Alexandreion as well. Gabinius razed all of these. When Alexander's mother came to him — she favored the Roman side, since her husband and her other children were held in Rome — Gabinius granted her everything she asked, and after settling matters with her he brought Hyrcanus down to Jerusalem to take charge of the care of the temple.
Gabinius set up five councils and divided the nation into equal districts accordingly: some governed themselves from Jerusalem, others from Gadara, others from Amathus, a fourth group from Jericho, and the fifth from Sepphoris in Galilee. Freed from the rule of a single dynasty, the people lived under an aristocracy.
When Aristobulus escaped from Rome to Judea and set about rebuilding Alexandreion, which had recently been demolished, Gabinius sent soldiers and commanders against him — Sisenna, Antony, and Servilius — to prevent him from occupying the place and to capture him. Many of the Jews flocked to Aristobulus out of their old regard for his family, and also because they always delighted in new upheavals. Peitholaus, a subordinate commander in Jerusalem, deserted to him with a thousand men; but most of those who joined him were unarmed. Aristobulus had decided to withdraw to Machaerus; the unarmed men, being of no use to him for his undertaking, he dismissed, since they could not help him, while he took with him the armed men, about eight thousand in number, and set out.
When the Romans attacked them fiercely, the Jews were defeated in battle, though they fought nobly and with spirit; forced back by the enemy, they turned to flight. About five thousand of them were killed, and the rest scattered and tried to save themselves as best they could. Aristobulus, with more than a thousand men still with him, fled to Machaerus, fortified the place, and despite his misfortune clung no less to good hope. After holding out under siege for two days and suffering many wounds, he was taken prisoner, together with his son Antigonus, who had likewise fled with him from Rome, and brought to Gabinius. Having met with such a turn of fortune, Aristobulus was sent back once more to Rome and kept there in chains — a man who had reigned and served as high priest for three years and six months, and who had shown himself brilliant and magnanimous. His children, however, were released by the Senate, because Gabinius had written that he had promised this to their mother in exchange for her surrendering the strongholds. So matters returned to their former state in Judea.
While Gabinius was campaigning against the Parthians and had already crossed the Euphrates, he changed his mind and turned back to Egypt to install Ptolemy on its throne. This too has been related elsewhere. During the expedition Gabinius undertook against Hyrcanus's enemies, Antipater supplied him with grain, weapons, and money, and won over to him the Jews who lived beyond Pelusium, making them allies who guarded the approaches into Egypt.
On returning from Egypt, Gabinius found Syria sick with faction and disorder: Alexander, Aristobulus's son, had again come forward by force to seize power, driven many of the Jews to revolt, and, advancing through the country with a large army, was killing every Roman he came upon and pressing the siege of those who had taken refuge on the mountain called Gerizim. Finding Syria in this state, Gabinius — a shrewd man — sent Antipater to those in revolt, to see whether he could check their madness and persuade them to return to better judgment.
Antipater went and brought many to their senses and won them over as needed, but he could not restrain Alexander; for Alexander, with an army of thirty thousand Jews, met Gabinius in battle and was defeated, losing ten thousand men near Mount Tabor. Having settled affairs in Jerusalem as Antipater wished, Gabinius marched against the Nabataeans and defeated them in battle. He also received Parthian refugees, Mithridates and Orsanes, sending them on ahead under the pretext that they had escaped from him. Having accomplished great and brilliant deeds in his command, Gabinius set out for Rome, handing over his office to Crassus. Concerning the campaigns of Pompey and Gabinius against the Jews, Nicolaus of Damascus and Strabo of Cappadocia both write, neither saying anything different from the other.
Crassus, about to campaign against the Parthians, came to Judea and carried off the money in the temple that Pompey had left untouched — two thousand talents — and was prepared to strip the temple of all its gold as well, which amounted to eight thousand talents. He also took a solid gold beam made from three hundred minas — a mina among us weighing two and a half pounds. The priest in charge of the treasures, a man named Eleazar, handed this beam over to him, not out of wickedness — for he was a good and just man — but because he had been entrusted with guarding the temple curtains, which were wondrously beautiful and costly in their workmanship and hung from this beam. When he saw Crassus intent on gathering the gold, fearing for the whole adornment of the temple, he gave him this golden beam as a ransom for everything else, taking oaths from him that he would move nothing else from the temple and would be satisfied with this one gift alone, worth a great many thousands. This beam was concealed inside a hollow wooden beam, a fact unknown to everyone else — Eleazar alone knew it.
Crassus nevertheless took this beam too, as though he would touch nothing else in the temple, and then, breaking his oaths, carried off all the gold in the temple. Let no one wonder that there was so great a wealth in our temple, belonging to Jews from every part of the inhabited world and to those who worshiped God, and contributed as well by Jews from Asia and Europe over a very long time. Nor is the size of these sums unattested, nor is it exaggerated to such a figure out of our own boastfulness and love of embellishment — many other historians bear witness to it besides ourselves, and Strabo of Cappadocia, who writes as follows: "Mithridates, having sent to Cos, took the money that Queen Cleopatra had deposited there, and the eight hundred talents belonging to the Jews."
"We have no public funds except those belonging to God, and it is clear that the Jews in Asia moved this money to Cos out of fear of Mithridates; for it is not likely that those in Judea, who had a fortified city and the temple, would send money to Cos, nor is it plausible that the Jews living in Alexandria would do this either, having no fear of Mithridates." The same Strabo bears witness elsewhere too, that at the time when Sulla crossed into Greece to make war on Mithridates, and sent Lucullus to put down the revolt of our nation in Cyrene, the whole inhabited world was full of it, saying as follows: "There were four classes in the city of the Cyrenaeans: that of the citizens, that of the farmers, a third of resident aliens, and a fourth of the Jews. This class has already spread into every city, and it is not easy to find a place in the inhabited world that has not received this people and come under its influence."
"Egypt and Cyrene, since they had the same rulers, came to emulate many other things and in particular to nurture and increase the Jewish communities, which followed the ancestral laws of the Jews. In Egypt, indeed, a district has been set apart for the Jews to inhabit, and a large part of the city of Alexandria has been marked off for this people. An ethnarch of their own is also appointed, who governs the nation, adjudicates disputes, and oversees contracts and decrees, as though he were the ruler of an independent state. In Egypt the nation grew strong because the Jews were originally Egyptians, and because those who left from there would settle nearby; it spread to Cyrene because this region too bordered on Egyptian territory, just as Judea did, or rather was formerly part of that territory." So much Strabo says.
Crassus, having settled everything as he himself wished, set out for Parthia; there he perished with his entire army, as has been related elsewhere. Cassius, fleeing to Syria and securing it, stood in the way of the Parthians as they rushed to invade it after their victory over Crassus. He later came again to Tyre and went up into Judea as well. He immediately fell upon Tarichaeae, took it, and enslaved about thirty thousand people. He killed Peitholaus, who had taken up Aristobulus's cause, at Antipater's urging, for Antipater's influence with him was great, and he was then held in the highest regard by the Jews as well.
While he was there, Antipater married a woman of noble Arab birth named Cypros, by whom he had four sons — Phasael and Herod, who later became king, Joseph and Pheroras — and a daughter, Salome. This Antipater had also formed ties of friendship and hospitality with the other rulers, especially with the king of the Arabs, to whom he entrusted his children while he was at war with Aristobulus.
Cassius then marched out toward the Euphrates to meet the Parthian forces advancing from there, as has been related by others as well. Some time later, Caesar, having taken possession of Rome after Pompey and the Senate fled across the Ionian Sea, released Aristobulus from his chains and decided to send him to Syria, giving him two legions, so that he might use his ability to prepare matters there.
But Aristobulus did not enjoy the hopes he had gained from Caesar's grant of authority; instead, Pompey's partisans got to him first and killed him by poison. Those who managed Caesar's affairs buried him, and his body lay embalmed in honey for a long time, until Antony later sent it to Judea and had it placed in the royal tombs. Scipio, on Pompey's instructions, had Alexander, Aristobulus's son, put to death by the axe, charging the young man with the wrongs he had first committed against the Romans. So he died at Antioch.
Ptolemy, son of Mennaeus, ruler of Chalcis under Mount Lebanon, took charge of his brothers, and sending his son Philippion to Ascalon to Aristobulus's wife, ordered her to send back with him her son Antigonus and her daughters. Philippion fell in love with one of them, Alexandra, and took her as his wife. Afterward his own father Ptolemy killed him and married Alexandra himself, continuing thereafter to look after her siblings.
After Pompey's death and the victory over him, Antipater, the overseer of the Jews acting on Hyrcanus's orders, rendered much valuable service to Caesar as he warred in Egypt. For when Mithridates of Pergamum, bringing reinforcements, was unable to make his way through Pelusium and was delayed near Ascalon, Antipater came to him leading three thousand Jewish infantry and arranged for allies to come from Arabia among the leading men there; and because of him all those throughout Syria helped as well, unwilling to be left behind in their zeal for Caesar's cause — Iamblichus the ruler, Ptolemy son of Soaemus, who lived on Mount Lebanon, and almost all the cities.
Mithridates, setting out from Syria, arrived at Pelusium, and when its people would not receive him, he besieged the city. Antipater distinguished himself, tearing down part of the wall and providing a way for the others to force their way into the city. And so Pelusium
That was the situation. As Antipater and Mithridates set out to Caesar, the Jews who lived in the district called the Land of Onias tried to stop them. But Antipater won these men over too, appealing to their common origin, and above all by showing them letters from the high priest Hyrcanus urging them to be friends to Caesar and to supply his army with gifts and everything it needed. Once they saw Antipater and the high priest in agreement, they obeyed. When the Jews around Memphis heard that this group had come over, they too summoned Mithridates to join them, and he came and took them in as well. When the region called the Delta had already been circled, he met the enemy near the place called the Camp of the Jews. Mithridates held the right wing, Antipater the left.
When the armies clashed, Mithridates' wing gave way and would have suffered the worst disaster, had not Antipater, running along the riverbank with his own soldiers after already defeating the enemy facing him, come to the rescue and turned the victorious Egyptians to flight. He also captured their camp by continuing the pursuit, and he sent for Mithridates, who had fallen far behind in the rout. Eight hundred of Mithridates' men died, but only fifty of Antipater's. Mithridates wrote to Caesar about all this, declaring Antipater responsible for both the victory and his own survival, so that Caesar not only praised him at the time but employed him in the most dangerous undertakings throughout the rest of the war. In the fighting Antipater was in fact wounded.
When Caesar had finally brought the war to an end and sailed to Syria, he honored him greatly: he confirmed Hyrcanus in the high priesthood, and granted Antipater Roman citizenship and exemption from taxation everywhere. Many say that Hyrcanus also took part in this campaign and went to Egypt, and my account is confirmed by Strabo of Cappadocia, who writes, quoting Asinius: "After Mithridates invaded Egypt, so did Hyrcanus, the high priest of the Jews." The same Strabo, elsewhere, quoting Hypsicrates, says: "Mithridates went out alone, but Antipater, the administrator of Judea, was summoned by him to Ascalon and provided him with three thousand soldiers, and also persuaded the other rulers to join; and Hyrcanus the high priest also took part in the campaign." So much for what Strabo says.
Antigonus son of Aristobulus also came to Caesar and lamented his father's fate — how Aristobulus had been killed by poison on his account, and how his brother had been beheaded by Scipio — and he begged Caesar to take pity on him, since he had been driven out of his rule. He also accused Hyrcanus and Antipater of governing the nation by force and of wronging him. Antipater, who was present, defended himself against the charge brought against him, and showed that Antigonus and his party were revolutionaries and troublemakers, recalling everything he himself had done and contributed on campaign, matters to which he himself was a witness. He said, and rightly, that Aristobulus had been carried off to Rome as an enemy who had always been hostile and never well disposed to the Romans, and that his brother, punished for piracy by Scipio, had gotten only what he deserved, and had not suffered this through force or injustice on the part of the one who did it.
After Antipater made this speech, Caesar appointed Hyrcanus high priest, and gave Antipater whatever position of authority he himself might choose. Leaving the choice to Antipater, Caesar appointed him procurator of Judea. He also permitted Hyrcanus, at his request, to rebuild the walls of his native city, for they still lay in ruins since Pompey had torn them down. And he instructed the consuls in Rome to have this recorded on the Capitol. The decree passed by the senate runs as follows: "Lucius Valerius, son of Lucius, praetor, brought this before the senate on the Ides of December, in the temple of Concord. Present at the drafting of the decree were Lucius Coponius son of Lucius, of the Collina tribe, and Papirius of the Quirina tribe. Concerning the matters that Alexander son of Jason, Numenius son of Antiochus, and Alexander son of Dorotheus, envoys of the Jews, good men and allies, discussed, renewing the favors and friendship previously established with the Romans, and concerning the golden shield they brought as a token of the alliance, worth fifty thousand gold pieces, and concerning their request that letters be given to the self-governing cities and to kings on behalf of the safety of their land and harbors, so that they should suffer no wrong — it was resolved to establish friendship and favors with them, to grant them whatever they asked, and to accept the shield they brought. This was done in the ninth year of Hyrcanus as high priest and ethnarch, in the month of Panemus."
Hyrcanus also won honors from the people of Athens, having himself been of great service to them, and they sent him a decree worded as follows: "In the term of the prytany-president and priest Dionysius son of Asclepiades, on the fifth of the month Panemus counting backward, a decree of the Athenians was submitted to the generals. In the archonship of Agathocles, Eucles son of Menander of Halimous being secretary, on the eleventh of Munychion, in an assembly held in the theater during the eleventh prytany, of the presiding officers Dorotheus of Erchia and his fellow presiding officers put the question to the people. Dionysius son of Dionysius proposed: Since Hyrcanus son of Alexander, high priest and ethnarch of the Jews, continues to show goodwill both to the people in common and to each citizen individually, treating them with every kindness, and welcomes and sends off with care for their safe return those Athenians who come to him whether on embassy or on private business — this has been attested before, and it is now resolved, on the motion of Dionysius son of Theodorus of Sounion, who also reminded the people of the man's virtue and of his readiness to do us whatever good he can, to honor the man with a gold crown for his valor according to the law, and to set up a bronze statue of him in the precinct of the People and the Graces, and to proclaim the crown in the theater at the Dionysia, during the performance of the new tragedies, and at the Panathenaea and the Eleusinia and at the athletic games, and that the generals see to it that, so long as he remains and preserves his goodwill toward us, everything we can devise be done to honor and reward the man's zeal and generosity, so that by these actions our people may be seen to welcome good men and to deem them worthy of due recompense, and so that he may be moved to emulate the goodwill toward us shown by those already honored; and to choose envoys from all the Athenians, who will deliver the decree to him and urge him, once he has accepted these honors, to try always to do some good for our city."
Such, then, were the honors paid to Hyrcanus the high priest by the Romans and by the people of Athens, as we have now shown. Caesar, having settled matters in Syria, sailed away. When Antipater, after seeing Caesar off from Syria, returned to Judea, he at once began rebuilding the wall that Pompey had torn down, and went around suppressing the unrest in the countryside, both threatening and advising people to stay calm. Those who favored Hyrcanus, he said, would live in peace and enjoy their own property undisturbed, but those who clung to hopes of revolution and to the gains such hopes promised would find in him a master instead of a protector, in Hyrcanus a tyrant instead of a king, and in the Romans and Caesar bitter enemies instead of rulers — for they would not tolerate the removal of the man they themselves had installed. By speaking in this way he restored order in the country.
Seeing that Hyrcanus was slow and sluggish, Antipater appointed Phasael, the eldest of his sons, governor of Jerusalem and its surroundings, and entrusted Galilee to the next in age, Herod, who was still altogether young — he was only fifteen years old. But his youth was no hindrance to him: being naturally noble in spirit, the young man at once found an opportunity to display his valor. Catching Ezekias, the chief bandit, overrunning the borders of Syria with a large band, he seized and killed him along with many of the bandits with him. The Syrians were overjoyed at this deed, since they longed to be rid of the bandits, and he cleared the country of them. They sang his praises for it in villages and towns, as one who had given them peace and secure enjoyment of their property. Because of this he also became known to Sextus Caesar, a relative of the great Caesar and governor of Syria.
Envy of Herod's achievements fell upon his brother Phasael, and stirred by Herod's growing reputation, he too was eager not to fall short of the same good name, and he won over the people of Jerusalem to greater goodwill, holding the city through his own influence but conducting himself neither tastelessly in his dealings nor abusing his power. Because of all this Antipater received from the nation the deference due a king and honors of the kind a man might expect who was master of everything; yet, for all this splendor, he never — as often happens — departed from his loyalty and goodwill toward Hyrcanus.
The leading men of the Jews, seeing Antipater and his sons growing so greatly in power through the goodwill of the nation and through the revenues both of Judea and of Hyrcanus's own funds, were ill-disposed toward him. For Antipater had made friends among the Roman commanders, and having persuaded Hyrcanus to send them money, he took it himself and pocketed the gift, sending it as though it were his own rather than as a gift from Hyrcanus. Hyrcanus heard of this but paid it no mind. The leading Jews, however, were afraid, seeing that Herod was violent, bold, and grasping for tyranny, and they came to Hyrcanus and now openly accused Antipater, saying: "How long will you sit quiet at what is being done? Do you not see that Antipater and his sons have girded on the government, while you have only the name of kingship left to hear? Do not let this escape you, and do not think yourself safe by being careless about yourself and the kingdom — for Antipater and his sons are no longer stewards of your affairs for you; do not deceive yourself into thinking so, but they have openly declared themselves masters. His son Herod, for instance, killed Ezekias and many with him, in violation of our law, which forbids putting a man to death, however wicked, unless he has first been condemned to suffer this by the council. He dared this without receiving authority from you." Hearing this, Hyrcanus was persuaded; and the mothers of those Herod had killed further inflamed his anger, for day after day in the Temple they kept begging the king and the people that Herod be made to answer for his deeds before the council. Moved by them, Hyrcanus summoned Herod to stand trial for the charges against him.
Herod came, but only after his father advised him not to come as a private citizen, but with a safe and armed escort for his person, and after he had first secured Galilee in whatever way he judged advantageous to himself. Having arranged things this way, and with a force sufficient for the journey, so that he would seem neither threatening to Hyrcanus by arriving with too large a company nor exposed and unguarded, he went to face trial. Sextus, however, the governor of Syria, wrote urging Hyrcanus to release Herod from the charge, adding threats if he disobeyed. This letter from Sextus gave Hyrcanus an excuse to release Herod without his suffering any penalty from the council, for he loved him like a son. When Herod took his place before the council with his armed company, he struck them all with fear, and none of those who had brought accusations against him before his arrival any longer dared to accuse him; there was only silence, and uncertainty about what to do.
While matters stood thus, a certain Samaias, a just man and for that reason above fear, rose and said: "Councilors, and King — I do not know of anyone ever summoned before you for trial who has stood as this man stands, nor do I suppose you can name one either; rather, whoever comes before this council to be judged appears humbled, in the dress and bearing of one afraid, seeking your pity, with hair grown long and wearing black clothing. But this excellent Herod, on trial for his life on such a charge, stands here wearing purple, his hair elaborately arranged, and armed men around him, so that if we condemn him according to the law, he may kill us and save himself by doing violence to justice. Yet I would not blame Herod for this, if he values his own advantage above the law; it is you and the king I blame, for granting him such license. Know well, however, that God is great, and this man, whom you now wish to release for Hyrcanus's sake, will one day punish both you and the king himself." And nothing he said proved false. For when Herod took the kingdom, he put to death all the members of the council, and Hyrcanus himself — except for Samaias, whom he honored greatly for his righteousness, and also because, when the city was later besieged by Herod and Sosius, he urged the people to admit Herod, saying that because of their sins they could not escape him. We shall speak of these matters in their proper place.
Hyrcanus, seeing that the council was set on Herod's death, adjourned the trial to another day, and secretly sent word to Herod advising him to flee the city, since that was the only way he would escape the danger. So Herod withdrew to Damascus, as though fleeing from the king, and having gone to Sextus Caesar and secured his own position with him, he settled there resolved that if he were summoned again before the council for trial, he would not obey. The members of the council were indignant and tried to make Hyrcanus understand that all this was directed against him. He was not unaware of it, but through cowardice could do nothing about it.
...and folly. Sextus made Herod governor of Coele-Syria — he sold him the post for money — and Hyrcanus lived in fear that Herod would march against him. His fear was not long delayed: Herod came against him leading an army, furious at the trial and at having been summoned to answer for himself before the council. But his father Antipater and his brother met him and kept him from attacking Jerusalem, checked his impulse, and urged him to attempt nothing by force, but to frighten the man who had raised him to this rank with a threat only, and go no further. They asked him, in his anger at having been summoned to trial, to remember also his release, and to be grateful for it, not to meet harsh treatment with harshness while being ungrateful for his deliverance.
He should consider, they said, that even though God governs the outcome of wars, the injustice weighs on the side of this campaign, and so he should not count altogether on victory if he meant to make war on a king who had been raised with him, who had done him many benefits and no harm, and whose grounds for complaint against him arose from wicked advisers, not from the king himself, who had given him only a suspicion and shadow of some difficulty.
Herod was persuaded by this, judging that it was enough for his purposes simply to have displayed his strength to the nation. Such was the state of affairs in Judea.
Caesar, on coming to Rome, was ready to sail to Africa to make war on Scipio and Cato, and Hyrcanus sent to him asking him to confirm his friendship and alliance.
At this point it seemed necessary to me to set out all the honors and alliances that the Romans and their commanders made with our nation, so that it should not escape everyone else's notice that the kings of Asia and of Europe too held us in high regard, prizing our courage and our loyalty.
Since many, out of hostility toward us, disbelieve what the Persians and Macedonians recorded about us, on the ground that these records are no longer preserved everywhere in public places but only among ourselves and certain other barbarian peoples, there is no gainsaying the decrees of the Romans: these stand set up in the public places of the cities, and to this day are inscribed on bronze tablets in the Capitol. Furthermore, Julius Caesar had a bronze tablet made for the Jews of Alexandria declaring that they are citizens of Alexandria; it is from documents like these that I shall construct my proof. I will set out the decrees passed by the senate and by Julius Caesar concerning Hyrcanus and our nation.
"Gaius Julius Caesar, commander and high priest, dictator for the second time, to the magistrates, council, and people of Sidon, greetings. If you are well, it is well; I too am well, together with the army. I have sent you a copy of the record inscribed on the tablet concerning Hyrcanus son of Alexander, high priest and ethnarch of the Jews, so that it may be deposited among your public records. I wish this to be set up on a bronze tablet in both Greek and Latin."
It reads as follows: "I, Julius Caesar, commander for the second time and high priest, have ruled, after consulting my council: since Hyrcanus son of Alexander the Jew has shown, both now and in earlier times, in peace and in war, loyalty and zeal toward our affairs, as many commanders have testified on his behalf, and since in the recent war at Alexandria he came to my aid with fifteen hundred soldiers, and when sent by me to Mithridates surpassed in courage every man in the ranks — for these reasons I decree that Hyrcanus son of Alexander and his children shall be ethnarchs of the Jews and shall hold the high priesthood of the Jews in perpetuity according to their ancestral customs, and that he and his sons shall be our allies and further be numbered among our personal friends, and whatever privileges belong to the high priesthood under their own laws, I order that he and his children retain these; and if any dispute should arise concerning the way of life of the Jews, I rule that judgment be given among themselves. I do not approve that winter quarters be assigned to them or money exacted from them."
The grants, concessions, and rulings of Gaius Caesar, commander and consul, are as follows: that his children shall rule the nation of the Jews, and shall enjoy the fruits of the territories granted to them, and that the high priest and ethnarch of the Jews himself shall stand as protector of those who are wronged. Ambassadors are to be sent to Hyrcanus son of Alexander, high priest of the Jews, to discuss friendship and alliance; and a bronze tablet containing these provisions is to be set up in the Capitol and in Sidon, Tyre, and Ascalon, and in the temples, inscribed in Latin and Greek letters. And this decree is to be brought to the attention of our friends by all the city quaestors and their superiors, and hospitality gifts are to be provided to the ambassadors, and the edicts are to be sent out everywhere.
Gaius Caesar, commander, dictator, and consul, on account of Hyrcanus's honor, virtue, and benevolence, and for the advantage of the senate and people of Rome, granted that Hyrcanus son of Alexander and his children should be high priests and priests of Jerusalem and of the nation, holding the same rights by which their ancestors held the high priesthood.
Gaius Caesar, consul for the fifth time, ruled that they should hold this right, and that the city of Jerusalem should be walled, and that Hyrcanus son of Alexander, high priest and ethnarch of the Jews, should hold it as he himself sees fit. And that the Jews should have a reduction of one kor of revenue in the second year of the lease, and that no one should farm the taxes from them, nor should they pay the same tribute as before.
Gaius Caesar, commander for the second time, established that they should pay tribute yearly for the city of Jerusalem, excepting Joppa, apart from the seventh year, which they call the sabbatical year, since in that year they neither gather the fruit of the trees nor sow. And that in the second year they should pay to Sidon as tribute a fourth of what is sown; and further, that they should pay to Hyrcanus and his children the tithes that they used to pay to their ancestors.
And that no magistrate, deputy magistrate, general, or legate should be permitted, in raising an allied force or soldiers within the borders of the Jews, to exact money from them either for winter quarters or under any other pretext, but that they be free from molestation in every respect. And whatever they afterward acquired, or bought, held, and enjoyed, all this they are to keep; and as for the city of Joppa, which the Jews possessed from the beginning when they made their friendship with the Romans, it is our pleasure that it belong to them, just as it did at first, and that Hyrcanus son of Alexander and his children should receive as tribute for this city, from those who work the land, a harbor export duty of twenty thousand six hundred seventy-five modii yearly, paid to Sidon, excepting the seventh year, which they call the sabbatical year, in which they neither plow nor gather the fruit of the trees.
As for the villages in the great plain which Hyrcanus and his ancestors previously held, it is the pleasure of the senate that Hyrcanus and the Jews keep these on the same terms as they held them before. The original rights are also to remain in force — whatever privileges existed between the Jews and their high priests and priests, and whatever they obtained by vote of the people and of the senate. And they are permitted to enjoy these same rights at Lydda. As for the places, territory, and settlements which the kings of Syria and Phoenicia, being allies of the Romans, had the right to enjoy as a gift, the senate resolves that Hyrcanus the ethnarch and the Jews should hold these.
It is granted to Hyrcanus and his sons, and to the ambassadors sent by him, to sit with the senators when watching gladiatorial combats and beast-hunts; and that, upon their request to the dictator or the master of horse, they be admitted to the senate, and that answers be given to them within ten days in all, from the time the decree is passed.
Gaius Caesar, commander, dictator for the fourth time, consul for the fifth time, dictator appointed for life, made the following statement concerning the rights of Hyrcanus son of Alexander, high priest and ethnarch of the Jews: since the commanders before me testified in the provinces on behalf of Hyrcanus, high priest of the Jews, and of the Jews, before the senate and people of Rome, and since the people and the senate expressed their gratitude to them, it is right that we too should remember and provide, so that gratitude worthy of their goodwill toward us, and of the benefits they conferred on us, may be repaid to Hyrcanus and the nation of the Jews and Hyrcanus's children by the senate and people of Rome.
Julius Gaius, praetor and consul of the Romans, to the magistrates, council, and people of the Parians, greetings. The Jews on Delos, together with some of the resident Jews, came before me, with your envoys also present, and made clear that you are preventing them by decree from following their ancestral customs and rites.
It does not please me, then, that such decrees be passed against our friends and allies, and that they be prevented from living according to their own customs and from contributing money for common meals and sacred rites, when they are not even prevented from doing this in Rome. For Gaius Caesar, our praetor and consul, in his edict forbidding associations to gather in the city, did not forbid these alone from contributing money or holding common meals. In the same way, while I forbid other associations, I permit these alone to gather and to feast together according to their ancestral customs and laws.
It is therefore right that you too, if you have passed any decree against our friends and allies, should annul it, on account of their virtue and goodwill toward us.
After Gaius's death, Marcus Antonius and Publius Dolabella, being consuls, convened the senate, brought forward Hyrcanus's ambassadors, discussed the matters they requested, and made an alliance with them; and the senate voted to grant them everything they wished to obtain. I have appended the decree as well, so that readers of this work may have close at hand the proof of what I report. It read as follows:
Decree of the senate, copied from the treasury, from the public records of the quaestors, in the custody of Quintus Rutilius and Quintus Cornelius, city quaestors, tablet two, and first of the first series. Three days before the Ides of April, in the temple of Concord. Present at the drafting were: Lucius Calpurnius Piso of the Menenian tribe; Servinius Papinius Quintus of the Lemonian tribe; Gaius Caninius Rebilus of the Teretine tribe; Publius Tedetius, son of Lucius, of the Pollian tribe; Lucius Apuleius, son of Lucius, of the Sergian tribe; Flavius, son of Lucius, of the Lemonian tribe; Publius Plautius, son of Publius, of the Papirian tribe; Marcus Sellius, son of Marcus, of the Maecian tribe; Lucius Erucius of the Stellatine tribe; Marcus Quintus, son of Marcus, Plancinus, of the Pollian tribe; Publius Serrius —
— Publius Dolabella and Marcus Antonius, consuls, addressed the matters that Gaius Caesar had decided by senatorial decree on behalf of the Jews but which had not yet been entered into the treasury records; it is our pleasure that these be recorded, as Publius Dolabella and Marcus Antonius the consuls resolved, and that they be entered on tablets and forwarded to the city quaestors, so that they too may take care to inscribe them on double-leaved tablets. This was done five days before the Ides of February, in the temple of Concord. The ambassadors from Hyrcanus the high priest were these: Lysimachus son of Pausanias, Alexander son of Theodorus, Patroclus son of Chaereas, and John son of Onias.
Hyrcanus sent one of these ambassadors also to Dolabella, then governor of Asia, asking him to exempt the Jews from military service and to allow them to keep their ancestral customs and to live according to them. This he obtained easily, for Dolabella, on receiving Hyrcanus's letter, without even deliberating, wrote to all the communities of Asia, addressing the city of Ephesus, the leading city of Asia, concerning the Jews.
The letter ran as follows: In the prytany of Artemon, first day of the month Lenaeon. Dolabella, commander, to the magistrates, council, and people of Ephesus, greetings. Alexander son of Theodorus, ambassador of Hyrcanus son of Alexander, high priest and ethnarch of the Jews, brought to my attention that his fellow citizens cannot perform military service, because they cannot bear arms or march on the days of the Sabbath, nor can they procure the ancestral and customary food during these days.
I, therefore, just as the governors before me did, grant them exemption from military service, and allow them to follow their ancestral customs, gathering for their sacred rites as is lawful for them, and for the offerings set apart for sacrifices; and I wish you to write this to the cities.
These, then, were the favors Dolabella granted to our people at the embassy of Hyrcanus.
Lucius Lentulus the consul declared: Roman citizens who are Jews, observing Jewish rites and practicing them before the tribunal at Ephesus, I have exempted from military service on grounds of religious scruple, twelve days before the Kalends of October, in the consulship of Lucius Lentulus and Gaius Marcellus. Present were: Titus Ampius Balbus, son of Titus, of the Horatian tribe, legate; Titus Tongius, son of Titus, of the Crustumine tribe; Quintus Caesius, son of Quintus; Titus Pompeius Longinus, son of Titus; Gaius Servilius Bracchus, son of Gaius, of the Teretine tribe, military tribune; Publius Clusius Gallus, son of Publius, of the Aetorian tribe; Gaius Sentius, son of Gaius, of the Sabatine tribe.
Titus Ampius Balbus, son of Titus, legate and propraetor, to the magistrates, council, and people of Ephesus, greetings. Lucius Lentulus the consul, at my petition, exempted the Jews in Asia from military service. Afterward I made the same request of Fannius the propraetor and of Lucius Antonius the proquaestor, and I obtained it from them as well; and I wish you to take care that no one troubles them.
Decree of the Delians. In the archonship of Boeotus, the twentieth of the month Thargelion, an official communication from the generals. Marcus Piso, legate residing in our city and placed in charge of levying troops, summoned us and a sufficient number of the citizens and instructed that, if there are any Jews who are Roman citizens, no one is to trouble them concerning military service, since the consul Lucius Cornelius Lentulus exempted the Jews from military service on grounds of religious scruple. We must therefore obey the legate. The people of Sardis passed a similar decree concerning us as well.
Gaius Fannius, son of Gaius, praetor and consul, to the magistrates of Cos, greetings. I wish you...
I want you to know that envoys of the Jews have come to me asking to receive the senate's decrees concerning them. The resolutions are appended below. I want you, then, to see to it and take care of these people according to the senate's decree, so that they may be brought home safely through your territory.
Lucius Lentulus, consul, declares: Roman citizens who are Jews, and who appeared to me to hold and perform Jewish rites at Ephesus, I have released on grounds of religious scruple. This was done twelve days before the Kalends of Quintilis.
Lucius Antonius, son of Marcus, quaestor and propraetor, to the magistrates, council, and people of Sardis, greeting. Jewish citizens of ours came to me and showed that they have had their own assembly from the beginning, governed by their ancestral laws, and their own place, in which they settle both their affairs and their disputes with one another. Since they asked that they be permitted to keep doing this, I decided to allow and grant it.
Marcus Publius, son of Spurius, and Marcus, son of Marcus Publius, of the Lucian tribe, declare: We approached the proconsul Lentulus and informed him about the matters on which Dositheus, son of Cleopatris, of Alexandria, had spoken — that he should, if it seemed good to him, release on grounds of religious scruple those Roman citizens who are Jews and are accustomed to perform Jewish rites. And he did release them, twelve days before the Kalends of Quintilis, in the consulship of Lucius Lentulus and Gaius Marcellus.
Present were Titus Ampius Balbus, son of Titus, of the Horatian tribe, legate; Titus Tongius, of the Crustumina tribe; Quintus Caesius, son of Quintus; Titus Pesius Longinus, son of Titus, of the Cornelian tribe; Gaius Servilius Brocchus, of the Teretina tribe, military tribune; Publius Clusius Gallus, son of Publius, of the Etruria tribe; Gaius Teutius, of the Aemilian tribe, military tribune; Sextus Atilius Serranus, son of Sextus, of the Aemilian tribe; Gaius Pompeius, son of Gaius, of the Sabatina tribe; Titus Ampius Menander, son of Titus; Publius Servilius Strabo, son of Publius; Lucius Paccius Capito, of the Collina tribe, son of Lucius; Aulus Furius Tertius, son of Aulus; Appius Menas.
In the presence of these men Lentulus issued his decree: Roman citizens who are Jews and are accustomed to perform Jewish rites, I have released on grounds of religious scruple, before my tribunal at Ephesus.
The magistrates of Laodicea to Gaius Rabellius, son of Gaius, consul, greeting. Sopater, envoy of Hyrcanus the high priest, delivered to us the letter you sent, in which you informed us that men had come from Hyrcanus, high priest of the Jews, bringing a document concerning their nation, to the effect that they should be allowed to keep the Sabbath and perform their other sacred rites according to their ancestral laws, and that no one should give them orders, since they are our friends and allies, nor should anyone wrong them in our province — since the people of Tralles had objected face to face that they were not pleased with the decisions made concerning them, you ordered that things stand as decreed, and asked that we too write to you about the matter. We, therefore, following your instructions, have received the letter delivered to us and entered it in our public records, and we will see to the other matters you have written about, so that no fault may be found.
Publius Servilius Galba, son of Publius, proconsul, to the magistrates, council, and people of Miletus, greeting. Prytanis, son of Hermas, a citizen of yours, approached me while I was holding court at Tralles and reported that, contrary to our judgment, you were treating the Jews harshly and preventing them from keeping the Sabbath, performing their ancestral rites, and managing their produce as is their custom, and that he himself had, in accordance with the laws, given a ruling on the just decree. I therefore want you to know that, having heard the arguments presented by both sides, I have decided that the Jews are not to be prevented from following their own customs.
Decree of the people of Pergamum. In the prytany of Cratippus, on the first of the month Daisios, on the motion of the magistrates: Since the Romans, following the practice of their ancestors, take upon themselves dangers on behalf of the common safety of all mankind, and are eager to establish their allies and friends in prosperity and lasting peace, and since the nation of the Jews and Hyrcanus their high priest sent envoys to them — Straton son of Theodotus, Apollonius son of Alexander, Aeneas son of Antipater, Aristobulus son of Amyntas, Sosipater son of Philip, men of worth and good standing — and the senate passed decrees concerning the particular matters they laid before it, to the effect that King Antiochus, son of Antiochus, should do no wrong to the Jews, who are allies of the Romans;
and that the forts, harbors, territory, and anything else taken from them should be restored, and that they should be permitted to export from their harbors, and that no king or people, nor Ptolemy alone, king of the Alexandrians, should be exempt from paying dues when exporting from the territory or harbors of the Jews, because he is our ally and friend; and that the garrison at Joppa should be removed, as they had requested — Lucius Pettius, a man of worth and good standing, one of our senators, directed that we should see to it that these things be carried out as the senate decreed, and provide for the safe return home of the envoys. We have also received Theodorus before the council and assembly,
and having taken from him the letter and the senate's decree, and since he spoke at great length and with much earnestness, setting forth Hyrcanus's virtue and greatness of spirit, and how he benefits all in common and each in particular who come to him, we have deposited the documents in our public records, and we, being allies of the Romans, have decreed for ourselves to do everything on behalf of the Jews in accordance with the senate's decree.
Theodorus also asked, when he delivered us the letter, that it be sent by our magistrates to Hyrcanus — a copy of the decree, along with envoys to declare the eagerness of our people and to urge him to preserve and increase his friendship toward us, and to be the cause of some good, since he will receive the fitting recompense, remembering also that even in the time of Abraham, who was the father of all the Hebrews, our ancestors were friends to them, as we also find recorded in our public documents.
Decree of the people of Halicarnassus. In the priesthood of Memnon son of Aristides, and, by another reckoning, of Euonymus, in the month Anthesterion, it was resolved by the people, on the motion of Marcus Alexander: Since we have always held piety and reverence toward the divine in the highest regard, following the practice of the Roman people, who are benefactors of all mankind, and following what they have written concerning the friendship and alliance of the Jews with our city, so that the sacred rites they perform for their God, and their customary festivals and gatherings, may be carried out for them, it has been resolved also by us that those Jewish men and women who wish may keep the Sabbath and perform the sacred rites according to the laws of the Jews,
and hold their prayer meetings by the sea, in accordance with their ancestral custom. And if any magistrate or private person prevents this, he shall be liable to this penalty and shall owe it to the city.
Decree of the people of Sardis. It was resolved by the council and the people, on the motion of the magistrates: Since the Jewish citizens dwelling in our city from the beginning have received many great benefits at all times from the people, and now, coming before the council and the people, have petitioned that, their laws and freedom having been restored to them by the senate and people of Rome, they be allowed, according to their accustomed usages, to assemble, govern themselves, and settle disputes among themselves, and that a place be given to them in which they may gather, together with their wives and children,
and perform their ancestral prayers and sacrifices to God — it has been resolved by the council and the people that permission be granted them to gather on their appointed days and to conduct their affairs according to their own laws, and that a place also be set apart for them by the magistrates, for building and dwelling, whatever place they judge suitable for this purpose; and that the market officials of the city take care to see that provisions suitable for their food are brought in for them.
Decree of the people of Ephesus. In the prytany of Menophilus, in the month Artemisios, on the day before the first, it was resolved by the people, Nicanor son of Euphemus having spoken, on the motion of the magistrates: Since the Jews in the city, petitioning Marcus Julius Brutus, son of Pontius, the proconsul, that they might keep the Sabbath and do everything according to their ancestral customs without anyone hindering them, the proconsul granted this — it has been resolved by the people that, since the matter concerns the Romans, no one shall be prevented from observing the sabbath day, nor shall any penalty be exacted for it, but they are permitted to do everything according to their own laws.
There are, then, many other decrees of this kind made by the senate and the Roman emperors in favor of Hyrcanus and our nation, as well as resolutions and letters of cities in answer to the governors concerning the rights owed to us; and from what we have set down it should be possible for those who read it to believe our account without suspicion of malice.
For since we offer clear and visible proofs of the friendship that came to exist between us and the Romans, displaying them still standing to this day, engraved on bronze pillars and tablets on the Capitol, and to remain there,
I have declined to set down every one of them, as both superfluous and tedious, since I do not consider anyone so churlish as not to trust us also concerning the goodwill of the Romans, seeing that they demonstrated it through so many decrees toward us, and will not suppose that what we claim to be true is untrue, given what we have shown. I have, then, made clear the friendship and alliance with the Romans that came about in those times.
It happened that at the same period affairs in Syria were thrown into turmoil, for this reason: Caecilius Bassus, one of Pompey's partisans, having formed a plot against Sextus Caesar, killed him, and then took over his army himself and held power; a great war then broke out around Apamea, as Caesar's generals came against him with cavalry and infantry.
Antipater sent them an auxiliary force together with his sons, in memory of the benefits he had received from Caesar, and because he thought it right to avenge him and exact justice from his murderer. As the war dragged on, Murcus came from Rome to take over Sextus's province, and Caesar was killed in the senate house by the party of Cassius and Brutus, having held power three years and six months — this has also been related elsewhere.
When the war that followed Caesar's death broke out, and all those in power were scattered here and there gathering armies, Cassius arrived in Syria to take over the forces stationed around Apamea; and lifting the siege there,
he won over both Bassus and Murcus, and marching through the cities gathered arms and soldiers and imposed heavy tribute on them; he especially oppressed Judaea, exacting seven hundred talents of silver. Antipater, seeing affairs in great fear and turmoil, divided the collection of the money and assigned each of his sons to gather part of it,
assigning some to Malichus, who was ill-disposed toward him, and ordering others to collect the rest. Herod was the first to complete the collection, from Galilee, of everything assigned to him, and so became a close friend of Cassius; for it seemed to him prudent already to court the Romans and to build up goodwill from them at others' expense. The stewards of the other cities, together with their households, were sold as slaves, and Cassius then reduced four cities to slavery,
the strongest of which were Gophna and Emmaus, and besides these Lydda and Thamna. Cassius, in his anger, would have gone so far as to kill Malichus too, for he had set out against him, had not Hyrcanus, through Antipater, sent him a hundred talents from his own funds and so restrained his fury. But when Cassius had left Judaea, Malichus plotted against Antipater,
thinking that his death would secure Hyrcanus's rule. But Antipater did not fail to notice his intentions; rather, perceiving them, he withdrew across the Jordan and gathered a force of Arabs together with local troops. Malichus, clever man that he was, denied the plot, defending himself under oath to Antipater and to his sons, and arguing that, with Phasael guarding Jerusalem and Herod in charge of the arms,
he would never have entertained any such scheme, seeing no opportunity for it. He then reconciled with Antipater, and they came to terms while Murcus was governing Syria, who, learning that Malichus was stirring up trouble in Judaea, came close to killing him, but spared him at Antipater's request.
So it turned out that Antipater had spared the very man who would murder him. For Cassius and Murcus, while gathering their army, entrusted the entire administration to Herod and made him governor of Coele-Syria, giving him ships and cavalry and infantry forces, and promising also to proclaim him king of Judaea after the war; for a conflict was then brewing against Antony and the young Caesar. Malichus, now fearing Antipater more than ever, tried to get him out of the way,
and having bribed with money Hyrcanus's cup-bearer, in whose house the two of them used to dine together, he killed the man with poison, and having armed men ready, prepared to seize control of the city. But when Herod and Phasael learned of the plot against their father and were bitterly angered, Malichus again denied it and disclaimed the murder. Antipater, who had been distinguished for piety and justice and his devotion to his country, met his end in this manner.
Of his sons, Herod at once resolved to avenge his father and marched against Malichus with an army. But Phasael, the elder, thought it better to overcome the man by cunning, so that they might not be thought to have started a civil war. He therefore accepted Malichus's defense and pretended to believe that he had done nothing wicked concerning Antipater's death, and even had a monument built for his father.
Herod, arriving in Samaria and finding it in a ruined state, restored it and settled the quarrels among its people. Not long after, when the festival at Jerusalem was at hand, he came to the city with his soldiers, and Malichus, in fear, persuaded Hyrcanus not to allow him to enter. Hyrcanus complied, and the reason put forward for refusing him entry was that the crowd of foreigners ought not to be admitted while the people were engaged in purification.
But Herod, paying little heed to the messengers, entered the city by night and struck fear into Malichus, who nevertheless did not abandon his pretense, but wept for Antipater and openly called on him as a friend, while secretly arranging a bodyguard for himself. It also seemed good to Herod's men not
They decided not to expose Malichus's pretense, but instead to answer his overtures with equal warmth, so as to give him no cause for suspicion. Herod, however, wrote to Cassius about his father's death, and Cassius, who knew Malichus's character well, wrote back ordering him to avenge Antipater. He also sent secret instructions to the military tribunes at Tyre, telling them to cooperate with Herod, who was about to do a just thing. When Cassius had taken Laodicea, the local dignitaries went to him in a body bringing crowns and money, and Herod expected that Malichus would be made to pay for his crime there. But the tribune stationed at Tyre in Phoenicia, suspecting what was afoot, took bolder measures still: since Malichus's son was being held hostage at Tyre, he came into the city determined both to spirit the young man away and to hasten to Judea, once Cassius had set out to join Antony, and there to detach the nation from Herod's control and seize the government for himself.
But fortune worked against these plans, and Herod, who was quick to read the man's intentions, sent a servant ahead under the pretense of preparing a banquet — for he had in fact announced that he would entertain them all — while in truth he was arranging with the tribunes to have Malichus lured outside armed with daggers. They went out, met him near the city on the shore, and stabbed the man to death. Hyrcanus was so stunned by what had happened that he was struck speechless; when at last he recovered himself, he asked Herod's men what exactly had occurred and who had killed Malichus. When they told him that Cassius had ordered it, he approved of the deed, saying that the man had been thoroughly wicked and a schemer against his own country. And so Malichus paid this penalty for his crime against Antipater.
After Cassius left Syria, disturbance broke out in Judea: Helix, who had been left behind at Jerusalem with a force of soldiers, marched against Phasael, and the populace took up arms. Herod had gone to Damascus to see Fabius, the governor there, and though he wanted to rush to his brother's aid, illness held him back, until Phasael, with Herod's help, got the better of Helix, shut him up in a tower, and then released him under truce. Phasael also reproached Hyrcanus, who had received many benefits from them yet was cooperating with their enemies — for Malichus's brother had at that time raised a revolt in a number of places and was holding Masada, the strongest fortress of all. Once Herod had recovered from his illness he marched against this man, stripped him of every stronghold he held, and released him under truce as well.
Meanwhile Ptolemy son of Mennaeus, because of his marriage connection, brought back Antigonus son of Aristobulus, who had raised an army and won over Fabius with bribes. Marion, whom Cassius had left as tyrant of Tyre, also fought alongside him — for this man had carved up Syria into a set of petty tyrannies and held it under guard. Marion also invaded neighboring Galilee and seized three strongholds, which he kept garrisoned. Herod marched against him too, took everything away from him, and released the Tyrian garrison troops with kindness, even giving gifts to some of them, out of his goodwill toward the city. Having accomplished this, he then met Antigonus in battle, defeated him, and drove him out just as he was about to set foot on the borders of Judea. When Herod returned to Jerusalem, Hyrcanus and the people crowned him with garlands.
He had by now, under a formal agreement, become connected by marriage to Hyrcanus's family, which further strengthened his position, since he was to marry Mariamme, daughter of Alexander son of Aristobulus and granddaughter of Hyrcanus — a marriage from which he would become father of three sons and two daughters. Earlier he had also taken a wife from among the common people of his own nation, named Doris, by whom his eldest son Antipater was born.
Antony and Caesar defeated Cassius near Philippi, as has been recorded elsewhere. After the victory Caesar set out for Italy, while Antony departed for Asia. When he reached Bithynia, embassies from every quarter came to meet him; among them were also leading men of the Jews, bringing charges against Phasael and Herod, claiming that Hyrcanus held only the outward show of kingship while these two possessed all the real power. But Antony held Herod in high honor when he came before him to answer the accusers, and as a result the opposing party did not even get a hearing — Herod had arranged this beforehand with money paid to Antony. When Antony reached Ephesus, Hyrcanus the high priest and our nation sent an embassy to him bearing a gold crown and asking him to write to the governors of the provinces ordering the release, as free men and not by right of war, of the Jews taken captive by Cassius, and the restoration of the territory taken from them in Cassius's time. Antony judged the Jews' request just, and wrote at once to Hyrcanus and to the Jews; he also wrote to the Tyrians and sent out an edict containing the following.
"Marcus Antonius, imperator, to Hyrcanus, high priest and ethnarch, and to the nation of the Jews, greetings. If you are well, it is well; I myself am well, along with the army. Lysimachus son of Pausanias, Josephus son of Mennaeus, and Alexander son of Theodorus, ambassadors, met me at Ephesus and renewed the embassy earlier concluded on your behalf at Rome, and have now earnestly conducted the present one on your and the nation's behalf, making plain the goodwill you bear toward us. Being persuaded, both by the facts and by their words, that you stand in closest relation to us, and having recognized your steadfast and pious character, I have come to regard it as a matter close to my own concern that, since those who opposed both us and the Roman people overran the whole of Asia, sparing neither cities nor sanctuaries nor keeping the oaths they had sworn, we — fighting not merely for our own cause but as it were for the common cause of all — took vengeance on those responsible both for the crimes against men and for the offenses against the gods. Because of these things we believe the sun itself turned away in horror, since it too looked with displeasure on the pollution committed against Caesar. But their god-defying plots, which Macedonia harbored as though it were their own native air for unholy daring, and the confusion of their half-mad wickedness which they mustered at Philippi in Macedonia, seizing places naturally strong and walled off by mountains all the way to the sea, so that the passage could be controlled through a single gate — the gods themselves having already condemned them for their unjust undertakings — we overcame. And Brutus, who fled for refuge to Philippi and was shut in by us there, shared in Cassius's destruction. Now that these men have been punished, we hope to enjoy peace for the future, and for Asia to find rest from war. We therefore extend to our allies as well the peace given to us by god; and just as the body of Asia is now recovering from a great sickness through our victory, so, keeping you too in mind, I will take care to promote what is advantageous for your nation. I have also posted edicts in the cities providing that any free persons or slaves sold at spear-point by Gaius Cassius or those serving under him be released, and I wish you to enjoy the privileges granted by me and by Dolabella. I forbid the Tyrians to use force against you, and I order them to restore whatever Jewish property they are holding. The crown you sent I have received. Marcus"
"Antonius, imperator, to the magistrates, council, and people of Tyre, greetings. Since the ambassadors of Hyrcanus the high priest and ethnarch have informed me at Ephesus that you are holding territory of theirs which you entered upon during the ascendancy of those who opposed us — for since we undertook the war for supremacy we have, out of regard for piety and justice, taken vengeance on those who remembered neither favor nor kept their oaths — I wish the peace deriving from you to be extended to our allies as well, and I do not consent that you keep whatever you received from our adversaries, but that these things be restored to those from whom they were taken. For none of those men received provinces or armies by grant of the senate, but seized them by force and bestowed them, likewise by force, on those useful to their wrongdoing. Now that they have paid the penalty, I require that our allies keep unhindered whatever they formerly held, and that you, if you now hold any territories belonging to Hyrcanus the ethnarch of the Jews, seized on the day before Gaius Cassius, waging an unsanctioned war, invaded our province, restore them to him, and that you do them no violence, with the aim of weakening their hold on their own property. But if you have any claim to make against him, when we come to those parts you shall be free to press it, since we preserve for our allies alike the outcome of our judgments in each case. Marcus Antonius, imperator, to the magistrates, council, and people of Tyre, greetings. I have sent you an edict of mine, concerning which I wish you to take care that it be entered in the public records in Roman and Greek letters and displayed in the most conspicuous place, so that it may be read by all."
"Marcus Antonius, imperator, one of the triumvirs for the ordering of public affairs, declares: since Gaius Cassius, on this pretext, plundered a province not his own, held down as it was by his armies, and men who were our allies, and besieged the nation of the Jews, which was a friend of the Roman people, we, having overcome his madness by force of arms, are through edicts and judgments setting right what was plundered by him, so that it be restored to our allies; and whatever Jewish persons or property was sold, let it be released — the persons as free, as they were from the beginning, and the property to its former owners. Whoever does not obey my edict I intend to bring to justice, and if he is convicted I shall see to it that the offender is punished according to the gravity of the matter." He wrote the same thing to the Sidonians, Antiochenes, and Aradians. We have set these documents down here as timely proof of the care we say the Romans took for our nation.
After this, Antony came to Syria, and Cleopatra, meeting him in Cilicia, captivated him through love. And once again the hundred most powerful of the Jews came before him to accuse Herod and his associates, putting forward their ablest speakers to represent them. Messalas spoke in defense of the young men, with Hyrcanus present as well, who was by now Herod's father-in-law. Having listened to both sides at Daphne, Antony asked Hyrcanus which men were better fit to lead the nation. When Hyrcanus answered in favor of Herod and his brother, Antony, who already felt kindly toward them because of the hospitality his father had shown them when he himself had been in the country with Gabinius, appointed both of them tetrarchs and entrusted the affairs of the Jews to them; he also wrote letters and had fifteen of their opponents bound in chains, and when he was about to have them killed as well, Herod's party interceded for them.
Even after returning from this embassy the opposing party did not stay quiet, but again a thousand of them met Antony, who was thought to have gone to Tyre. Antony, already corrupted with much money by Herod and his brother, ordered the local governor to punish the Jewish ambassadors, who were bent on revolution, and to help establish Herod's party in power. Herod acted quickly — for they were encamped on the sand in front of the city — and going out urged them to leave; Hyrcanus was with him too, since he thought great harm would come if they pressed their quarrel further. But they would not be persuaded. At once Romans rushed out with daggers, killed some of them, wounded many more, and the rest fled and kept quiet at home. When the populace cried out against Herod, Antony, provoked, had the men in chains put to death.
In the second year, Pacorus the king's son and Barzapharnes, a Parthian satrap, occupied Syria. Ptolemy son of Mennaeus also died, and his son Lysanias, taking over the rule, arranged a friendship with Antigonus son of Aristobulus, enlisting for this purpose the satrap, who was useful to him and who held great influence with Pacorus. Antigonus promised to give the Parthians a thousand talents and five hundred women if they would take the government from Hyrcanus and hand it over to him, and kill Herod and his associates. He did not, in fact, pay this — but the Parthians nevertheless marched on Judea for this reason, bringing back Antigonus, Pacorus advancing along the coast and Barzapharnes the satrap through the interior. The Tyrians shut Pacorus out, but the Sidonians and people of Ptolemais received him. Pacorus also sent a squadron of cavalry into Judea to reconnoiter the country and assist Antigonus, under a commander who shared the king's name, a cupbearer.
When the Jews around Mount Carmel went over to Antigonus and were ready to join the invasion at once, Antigonus expected to gain a portion of the country called Drymoi; and when some met them in opposition, the men broke through to Jerusalem. As more joined them, a large number banded together, came to the palace, and laid siege to it. Phasael and Herod came to its defense, and in a battle fought in the marketplace the young men defeated the enemy; pursuing them as far as the temple, they sent some armed men to the nearby houses to guard them, but the people rose up against these men, who had been left without support from their allies, and burned them along with the houses. Herod took revenge for this outrage on the opposing faction shortly afterward, engaging them in battle and killing many of them.
As skirmishes went on day after day between them, the enemy waited for the crowds coming in from the countryside for the festival called Pentecost, which was about to arrive. When the day came, many tens of thousands of people, both armed and unarmed, gathered around the temple. Those present held the city and the temple, except for the palace, for this Herod's men guarded with a small force of soldiers. Phasael kept watch over the wall, while Herod, with a company of troops, went out against the enemy near the suburb, and fighting fiercely routed many tens of thousands of them, some fleeing into the city, others into the temple, and others into the outer entrenchment — for there was one there. Phasael also came to his aid.
Pacorus, the Parthian general, at Antigonus's request, came into the city with a small body of cavalry, ostensibly to put an end to the strife, but in truth to help secure the government for Antigonus. Phasael went out to meet him and received him hospitably, and Pacorus persuaded him to go as an envoy to Barzapharnes, weaving this as a piece of treachery. Phasael, suspecting nothing, was persuaded, though Herod did not approve.
Herod did not trust what was happening, because barbarians keep no faith, and he urged that they attack Pacorus and those who had come with him. Hyrcanus and Phasael nevertheless set out as envoys, and Pacorus, leaving two hundred cavalry with Herod along with ten of the so-called Free Parthians, sent the rest ahead. When they reached Galilee under arms, the enemy forces stationed there met them, and Bazaphranes at first
received them warmly and gave them gifts, but afterward began to plot against them. Nearby, on the coast, Phasael's party put in, and there they heard that Antigonus had promised the Parthians a thousand talents and five hundred women in exchange for their help against them; from that point they held the barbarians under suspicion. All the same, someone reported that they were being plotted against by night, guards quietly surrounding them, and they were seized—
or would have been, had they not waited until the Parthians at Jerusalem had captured Herod, for fear that if these men were killed first, he would learn of it and escape. And so things stood, and their guards were already visible. Some urged Phasael to ride off at once and not wait, and Ofellius in particular pressed him to do this, having heard from Saramalla, the richest man in Syria at that time,
who was promising ships for their flight, since the sea was near. But Phasael refused to abandon Hyrcanus or expose his brother to danger. Instead he went to Bazaphranes and told him that he was acting unjustly in plotting such things against them; for he would receive more money from Phasael than Antigonus was offering him, and besides it was monstrous to kill envoys who had come to him under a pledge of good faith,
when they had done no wrong. The barbarian, hearing this, swore that none of what was suspected was true, and that false suspicions had disturbed him, and he went off to Pacorus. Once the Parthian had gone, some men bound Hyrcanus and Phasael, who bitterly reproached the Parthians for their perjury. The eunuch who had been sent for Herod had orders to lure him outside the wall and seize him. But by chance
messengers sent by Phasael to reveal the Parthians' treachery arrived, and when the enemy seized them, Herod, learning of this, went to Pacorus and to the leading Parthians as though they were masters over the others. They, knowing the whole plan, dissembled deceitfully and said that he must go out with them before the wall to meet those bringing the letters, for these had not yet been captured by
the rebels, but were coming to report what success Phasael had achieved. Herod did not believe them, for he had already heard of his brother's capture from others; and when Hyrcanus's daughter, to whose child he was betrothed, also warned him, he grew still more suspicious of the Parthians. The others paid no attention to her, but Herod himself trusted a woman of such good sense completely. While the Parthians were deliberating what to do—for
they did not think it wise to attack so great a man openly, and put it off until the next day—Herod, caught up in such turmoil and giving more weight to what he had heard about his brother and the Parthian plot than to the reassurances of his enemies, decided, once evening came, to make his escape then and not delay, since the dangers from the enemy were unknown. So he set out with the men-at-arms he had,
putting the women on pack animals—his mother, his sister, the daughter of Alexander son of Aristobulus whom he intended to marry, and her mother, who was Hyrcanus's daughter, along with his youngest brother, all his attendants, and the rest of the crowd with them—and made for Idumea, slipping past the enemy unnoticed. There was no one
so hard of nature that, had he been present at these events, he would not have pitied their fortune: women carrying infant children, leaving their homeland in tears and lamentation, and friends left behind in chains with no good outcome expected for them. But Herod, rising above the blow of that disaster, kept up his own spirit against the danger,
and as he went along the road he urged each one to take courage and not surrender himself to grief, for this, he said, would harm them in their flight, in which alone their safety lay. And they tried to bear the calamity as Herod urged. He himself nearly killed himself when the wagon overturned and his mother came near to death,
both from grief over her and from fear that the enemy pursuing them might catch up while they were delayed by the accident. He drew his sword, meaning to run himself through, but those present held him back, overpowering him by their numbers and telling him it was wrong to abandon them to fall into the enemy's hands; for it was not the mark of a noble man,
having freed his friends, to abandon them among their enemies. Forced, then, to give up his attempt, both from shame at their words and from the sheer numbers who would not let him do with his own hand what he had resolved, he recovered his mother, and having seen to the care that the moment required, went on along the road before him, pressing the march more quickly, toward the fortress of Masada. He fought many battles against
the Parthians who sallied out and pursued him, and won every one of them. Even the Jews gave him no safety in his flight; they too attacked him, when he was sixty stadia from the city, falling upon him and coming to blows along the road. These too he routed and defeated, not as one reduced to helplessness and forced by such necessity,
but as one prepared for war in the finest style and with great resources to spare. On that very spot where he defeated the Jews, he later, once he was king, built a fortress after some time and constructed a most notable palace there, naming the town around it Herodium. When he reached a place in Idumea called Thressa, his brother Joseph met him, and they took counsel together about the whole situation, what
to do, since a great crowd had gathered besides the mercenaries, and the fortress of Masada, to which they meant to flee, was too small to receive so great a multitude. So he released most of them, over nine thousand in number, telling them to make their own way to safety through Idumea, each by a different route, and giving them provisions; but those who were fit and could travel light, together with the most necessary people, he took with him and reached the stronghold,
and having settled there the women and those who followed him, about eight hundred in number, since there was grain in the place and water and everything else needed in sufficient supply for them, he himself set out for Petra in Arabia. At daybreak the Parthians plundered everything else in Jerusalem, including the palace, sparing only the money belonging to Hyrcanus,
which came to about three hundred talents. Much of Herod's property escaped them, especially whatever had been sent ahead into Idumea by the man's foresight. Nor did the Parthians stop with the city; they went out and ravaged the countryside as well, and destroyed Marisa, a powerful town. And Antigonus, thus brought back into Judea by the
king of the Parthians, took charge of Hyrcanus and Phasael as prisoners. He was deeply distressed that the women had escaped him, since he had intended to hand them over to the enemy, having promised them as payment along with the money. Fearing Hyrcanus, lest the people restore the kingdom to him, he came up to him—Hyrcanus being kept under Parthian guard—and cut off his ears, contriving that he could never again
hold the high priesthood, since he was now mutilated, and the law required that the honor belong only to men whole in body. As for Phasael, one might well marvel at his courage: knowing he was about to be put to death, he did not regard death itself as terrible, but thought it most bitter and shameful to suffer it at an enemy's hands. With his hands bound and unable to kill himself in the usual way, he dashed his head against a rock, and so brought
his own life to what seemed to him the finest possible end amid such helplessness, and thereby took from his enemy the pleasure of killing him himself. Some say that, since the wound was severe, Antigonus secretly sent physicians who, under pretense of treating him, applied fatal drugs to the wound and so destroyed him. But before he finally gave up his life, Phasael, hearing from some woman that his brother
Herod had escaped the enemy, met his end in very good spirits, leaving behind him a man able to avenge his death and punish his enemies. Herod himself was not overwhelmed by the magnitude of the evils surrounding him, but they made him resourceful in devising bold undertakings. He set out to Malchus, king of the Arabs, who had received many benefits from him before, to collect repayment now, when he needed it most, meaning to obtain money
either as a loan or as a gift, since he had done that man many favors. Not yet knowing what had happened to his brother, he was eager to ransom him from the enemy, and he had already paid out as much as three hundred talents of coin on his account. He also brought with him, for this reason, Phasael's son, then seven years old, whom he offered as a hostage to the Arabs. But messengers met him from Malchus
with orders for him to turn back, saying that the Parthians had commanded Malchus not to receive Herod; this was in fact a pretext for not repaying his debts, urged on him by leading men among the Arabs who wanted to keep for themselves the deposits they had received from Antipater. He replied that he would go to them and give them no trouble, but only wished to discuss with them matters most urgent to him.
Then, having decided to withdraw, he set off quite prudently for Egypt. At first he took shelter in a certain temple, having left many of his followers there, and the next day, arriving at Rhinocorura, he there heard the news about his brother. Malchus, having changed his mind, sent after Herod, but gained nothing by it, for Herod was already far on his way toward Pelusium.
When he arrived there, ships lying at anchor prevented him from sailing on to Alexandria, so he approached their commanders, who, out of respect and great deference, sent him on to the city, where he was received by Cleopatra. She could not persuade him to stay, however, since he was hurrying to Rome, it being winter and affairs in Italy being reported in great turmoil and unrest. Setting sail from there
for Pamphylia, he met with a violent storm and barely made it safely to Rhodes, after losing part of his cargo. There two of his friends met him, Sappinus and Ptolemy. Finding the city damaged by the war against Cassius, though himself not well off, he did not hesitate to help it, but restored it beyond his means. Having had a trireme built, he set sail from there
with his friends for Italy and put in at Brundisium. From there he went on to Rome, where he first told Antony everything that had happened to him in Judea: how his brother Phasael had been seized and killed by the Parthians, how Hyrcanus was held captive by them, how they had set up Antigonus as king on his promise to pay a thousand talents and five hundred women, who were to be drawn from
the leading families and from their own line; and how Antigonus had carried these women off by night and how he himself had escaped the enemy's hands after enduring many hardships. He told, too, how his own household, besieged, were undergoing further danger on his account, and how he had sailed through the storm and scorned every peril, hurrying toward the hopes and the only help that lay with Antony. Antony was moved to pity by the reversal in Herod's fortunes, and,
reasoning as men commonly do about those established in such high position, that they too are subject to fortune, was eager to assist him with what he asked—partly in memory of his hospitality to Antipater, partly because of money that Herod promised to give him if he became king, just as he had promised before, when he was appointed tetrarch, but much more because of his hatred for Antigonus, whom he regarded as a rebel and an enemy of the Romans.
As for Caesar, both because of Antipater's campaigns, in which he had fought alongside Caesar's own father in Egypt, and because of his hospitality and goodwill in all things, and also as a favor to Antony, who was so eager on Herod's behalf, he was all the readier to grant the request and cooperate in what Herod wanted. Messala, and after him Atratinus, brought Herod before the assembled Senate,
set out the benefits his father had conferred on them, and reminded them of Herod's own goodwill toward the Romans, at the same time accusing Antigonus and declaring him an enemy—not only for the offense he had first given them, but because he had taken power from the Parthians, showing contempt for the Romans. When the Senate had been roused to anger by this, Antony came forward and explained to them
that it was also to their advantage, for the war against the Parthians, that Herod should be king. This being resolved, they all voted for it. And this was the greatest mark of Antony's zeal on Herod's behalf: he secured the kingdom for him even though Herod had not expected it—he had not even gone up to Rome to ask for it for himself, since he did not think the Romans would grant it to him, when it was their custom
to give it to members of the royal house, but rather intended to ask that it be given to his wife's brother Alexander, who was grandson to Aristobulus on his father's side and to Hyrcanus on his mother's—but because in the space of just seven days Antony obtained for him what he had not even expected on leaving Italy. This young man, Herod later put to death, as we shall relate at the proper time. When the Senate was dismissed, Antony and Caesar walked out with Herod between them,
with the consuls and the other magistrates leading the way, going to offer sacrifice and to deposit the decree in the Capitol. Antony gave a banquet on the first day of Herod's reign. And thus Herod received the kingdom, having obtained it in the hundred and eighty-fourth Olympiad, when Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus was consul for the second time, together with Gaius
Asinius Pollio. All this time Antigonus was besieging those in Masada, who had everything else they needed but were short only of water; because of this Herod's brother Joseph, together with two hundred of his household, resolved to flee to the Arabs, for he had heard that Malchus regretted the wrongs he had done Herod. But rain, falling through the night, held him back
...God. When the cisterns had filled with water, they no longer needed to flee. Instead, now emboldened, and more confident than the shortage warranted, since they took this abundance to be a provision of God himself, they sallied out and grappled with Antigonus's men, some openly, some by stealth, and destroyed many of them.
At this point Ventidius, the Roman general, was sent from Syria to drive back the Parthians, and after doing so he crossed into Judea, ostensibly to support Joseph, but his whole design was in fact to extract money from Antigonus. Encamping very close to Jerusalem, he squeezed Antigonus for as much silver as he could get. He himself then withdrew with the greater part of his force, but to keep the extortion from becoming obvious he left behind Silo with a detachment of soldiers, whom Antigonus likewise cultivated, so that he would cause no trouble, expecting that the Parthians would again come to his aid.
Herod, meanwhile, had already sailed back from Italy to Ptolemais, and after gathering a considerable force of both foreign mercenaries and his own countrymen, he marched through Galilee against Antigonus. Silo and Ventidius joined him, having been persuaded by Dellius, who had been sent by Antony, to help restore Herod. Ventidius, for his part, was occupied in settling the disturbances the Parthians had caused in the cities, while Silo remained in Judea, corrupted by Antigonus's money. Yet as Herod advanced, his forces grew day by day, and all Galilee, except for a few places, came over to him.
He had set his mind on the men besieged at Masada, for it was urgent to save the relatives shut up in that fortress, but Joppa stood in his way; since it was hostile, he had to reduce it first, so that as he advanced on Jerusalem no stronghold would be left at his back for the enemy. Silo used this as a pretext to withdraw his troops, and when the Jews pursued him, Herod sallied out with a small body of men, routed the Jews, and rescued Silo, who was defending himself badly. Having taken Joppa, he hurried on to relieve his relatives at Masada.
Of the people of the region, some came over to him out of loyalty to his father, others because of his own reputation, others still in return for benefits received from both father and son, but most because of the hopes they now held, seeing in him a king firmly established for the future. A formidable force had thus been gathered, and as he advanced Antigonus occupied the favorable positions along the roads with ambushes and detachments, but accomplished nothing against the enemy from this, or only slight damage. Herod, taking along his relatives from Masada and the fortress of Rhesa, marched on Jerusalem, and the troops that had been with Silo joined him, along with many from the city who were struck by his strength.
When he had encamped on the western side of the city, the guards stationed there shot arrows and javelins at his men, and some even sallied out in bands and came to close quarters with his advance guard. Herod at first ordered a proclamation made around the wall, that he had come for the people's good and the city's safety, bearing no grudge even against his open enemies, but ready to grant amnesty even to his bitterest opponents for their offenses against him.
When Antigonus, in response to Herod's proclamation, spoke to Silo and the Roman army, he said that it would be contrary to their own sense of justice to give the kingdom to Herod, who was a private citizen and an Idumean, that is, a half-Jew, when it was proper to give it to men of the royal line, as was their custom. Even if they were now angry with him and had resolved to strip him of the kingdom he had received from the Parthians, there were still many of his own family who, under the law, would take the kingship, men who had done nothing wrong against Rome, and who, being priests as well, ought not suffer the indignity of being deprived of that honor.
While they were exchanging these words, and the exchange was turning to abuse, Antigonus ordered his own men on the wall to defend themselves, and they, shooting with great spirit, easily drove Herod's men back from the towers.
It was then that Silo revealed his corruption openly: he let a good number of his own soldiers cry out about the shortage of supplies, demand money for food, and clamor to be led off to winter quarters, since the country around the city had been stripped bare by Antigonus's soldiers. He then broke camp and tried to withdraw. But Herod pressed him, urging both the officers under Silo and the soldiers themselves not to abandon him, while Caesar, Antony, and the Senate had likewise pressed Silo to stay, for Herod would see to their supplies and readily provide them with all they lacked in abundance.
Immediately after this appeal Herod set out into the countryside and left Silo no further pretext for withdrawal, for he brought in a quantity of provisions beyond anyone's hope, and he wrote to his connections around Samaria instructing them to bring down grain, wine, oil, cattle, and everything else to Jericho, so that the soldiers would lack nothing for their supply even in the days to come.
This did not escape Antigonus's notice, and he at once sent men into the countryside to intercept and ambush those bringing in the grain. Obeying Antigonus's orders, they gathered a large force of infantry around Jericho and lay in wait on the hills to watch for those carrying the supplies. Herod, however, did not remain idle while this was being done. Taking ten cohorts, five of them Roman, five Jewish, along with mixed mercenaries and a few cavalry, he came to Jericho and found the city abandoned. Five hundred men who had occupied the heights with their wives and children he released after taking them prisoner, while the Romans burst in and plundered the city, finding the houses full of every kind of valuable. Leaving a garrison at Jericho, the king then withdrew and dispersed the Roman army, which was to winter there, into Idumea, Galilee, and Samaria, all of which had already submitted.
Antigonus, in return for his bribe, had also managed to get a portion of Silo's army billeted at Lydda, as a courtesy to Antony. And so the Romans lived in abundance, freed from their weapons. Herod, however, was not inclined to remain at rest, but sent his brother Joseph against Idumea with two thousand infantry and four hundred cavalry, while he himself went to Samaria, and after settling there his mother and relatives, who had by now come out from Masada, he set off for Galilee to reduce certain places held by Antigonus's garrisons.
Passing through Sepphoris while God sent snow, and with Antigonus's garrisons having withdrawn, he found abundant supplies there. From there he next sent a squadron of cavalry and three companies of infantry against some bandits living in caves, intending to put an end to their depredations; these caves were very near a village called Arbela. On the fortieth day he himself arrived with the whole army, and when the enemy boldly came out, the left wing of their line gave way; but Herod himself, appearing with a body of troops, put to flight those who had until then been winning, and turned back those of his own men who were fleeing.
He pressed the pursuit of the enemy as far as the Jordan river, as they fled by various roads, and he brought over all of Galilee except for those living in the caves. He also distributed money, giving each man a hundred and fifty drachmas, and much more to the officers, and sent them off to their winter quarters.
Meanwhile Silo came to him, along with the officers of those in winter quarters, since Antigonus was unwilling to provide their food, he had fed them for no more than a month, and had also sent word to those around to strip the countryside and flee to the mountains, so that the Romans, having nothing, might perish of famine. Herod entrusted the care of this matter to Pheroras, the youngest of his brothers, ordering him at the same time to fortify Alexandreion as well. Pheroras quickly supplied the soldiers with an abundance of necessities and rebuilt Alexandreion, which had been left in ruins.
At this same time Antony was staying in Athens, while in Syria Ventidius, summoning Silo against the Parthians, wrote instructing him first to assist Herod in the war, and then to call the allies to his own side. Silo, however, eager to move against the bandits in the caves, sent Silo on to Ventidius and set out himself against them.
The caves were in mountains that broke off sheer, with paths in the middle that were precipitous, and hemmed in by sharp cliffs; in these the bandits lurked with all their families. The king had chests built for use against them, and lowered these on iron chains by machine from the mountaintop, since the men could neither climb up from below because of the steepness of the mountain, nor crawl down to them from above. The chests were full of armed men carrying large hooks, with which they meant to drag out and kill any bandits who resisted as they were lowered. Lowering the chests, however, proved a hazardous business, since it took place over an unfathomable depth; yet the men inside had provisions with them as well.
When the chests had been let down, no one dared approach the men at the mouths of the caves, and all held back in fear, until one armed man, girding on his sword and gripping the chain from which the chest hung with both hands, went down to the mouths of the caves, indignant at the hesitation of those who did not dare go out against the enemy.
Coming level with one mouth, he first drove back with javelins most of those at the entrance, then, hooking those who resisted with his grapple, thrust them down over the cliff; then, going in upon those inside, he cut down many of them, and going into the chest himself, he took his rest. Fear seized the rest at hearing the wailing, and despair of their safety, but the whole action was in fact halted by those who had come out against them; and many, with the king's consent, sent heralds and surrendered themselves to be his subjects.
They used the same method against the caves on the following day, since those in the wooden structures pressed out against them even more, fighting at the entrances and hurling fire in. When the caves caught fire, for there was much timber inside them, an old man, trapped within with seven children and his wife, when they begged him to let them go out to the enemy, stood at the mouth of the cave and cut down each of his sons in turn as he came out first, until he had killed them all, and then his wife as well; and hurling the bodies down over the cliff, he threw himself down after them, choosing death over slavery.
But first he heaped much reproach on Herod for his lowly birth, even though the king, for the events were visible to him from a distance, was holding out his right hand and offering complete safety. With this, all the caves had by now been subdued.
Having appointed Ptolemy general over the region, the king went off to Samaria with six hundred cavalry and three thousand infantry, intending to settle matters with Antigonus by battle. Things did not go well for Ptolemy in his command, however; those who had earlier stirred up trouble in Galilee attacked and killed him, and having done this fled into the marshes and the impassable parts of the country, driving off and plundering everything there.
Herod punished them on his return: some of the rebels he put to death, and others who had fled to strongholds he reduced by siege, killing them and razing their forts. Having thus ended the unrest, he also fined the cities a hundred talents.
In the meantime, since Pacorus had fallen in battle and the Parthians had suffered a reverse, Ventidius, urged on by Antony, sent Machaeras to Herod's aid with two legions and a thousand cavalry. Machaeras, however, having been bribed by Antigonus, went off against Herod's judgment, ostensibly to reconnoiter his affairs, when Antigonus summoned him. But Antigonus, suspecting his purpose in coming, would not even receive him, but drove him off with slingers, thereby making his own intentions clear.
When Machaeras realized that Herod had been advising him for the best, and that he himself had gone wrong in disregarding Herod's counsel, he withdrew to the city of Ammaus, and any Jews he met along the road he slaughtered, whether enemies or friends, out of anger at what he had suffered.
Provoked by this, the king went to Samaria, for he had resolved to go to Antony about these matters, since he needed no such allies as would harm him more than the enemy; he was sufficient by himself for the overthrow of Antigonus. Machaeras, following after him, begged him to stay; but if he was so set on going, at least to leave his brother Joseph behind to join them in fighting Antigonus.
He was won over after much pleading from Machaeras, and leaving Joseph there with an army, he counseled him not to take any risks nor to quarrel with Machaeras. He himself hastened to Antony, who happened to be besieging Samosata, the place on the Euphrates, with cavalry and infantry present to support him as allies. Arriving at Antioch and finding many men gathered there eager to march to Antony but afraid to set out because the barbarians attacked along the roads and killed many, he encouraged them and himself became leader of the march.
At the second stage from Samosata, some of the barbarians lay in ambush there for those on their way to Antony; since thickets blocked the entrances into the plains, a good number of their cavalry lay concealed there, waiting until those passing through should come out onto open ground fit for horsemen. When the first men had passed through, Herod brought up the rear, and those from the ambush, about five hundred in number, suddenly fell upon them; but when the first ranks had been routed, the king charged in with the momentum of his own men, at once checked the enemy, roused the spirit of his own troops, and made them bold again,
and as those who had long been fleeing turned and fought once more, the barbarians were cut down on every side. The king pressed on, recovering the plunder, there was much baggage and many captives, and having recovered it all, advanced. When still more of those in the thickets attacked them, being close to the point where the road opened onto the plain, he engaged these as well with a strong body of men, routed them, and killed many of them
Killing them, he opened a safe road for those who followed him, and they called him their savior and protector. When he came near Samosata, Antony sent his army out to meet him, doing Herod this honor with all due ceremony and also to give him support, for he had heard of the barbarians' attack on him. Antony was glad to see him arrive, and when he learned what had happened to him on the road he welcomed him warmly and admired his courage; he embraced him and, having just proclaimed him king, greeted him with new distinction.
Not long afterward Antiochus surrendered his fortress, and the war there came to an end. Antony handed the command to Sossius, and, instructing him to fight alongside Herod, himself set out for Egypt. Sossius sent ahead two legions to reinforce Herod in Judea, while he himself followed with the greater part of the army.
Meanwhile in Judea Joseph had already died, in the following manner. He had forgotten the instructions his brother had given him on leaving for Antony, and while he was encamped in the hills — Machaeras had given him five cohorts — he pressed on toward Jericho, wanting to harvest their grain. The Roman troops were newly levied and inexperienced in war, for most of the contingent had been drawn from Syria. When the enemy attacked him there, he was caught in difficult ground and died fighting bravely, losing his whole force; six cohorts were destroyed. Antigonus, having gotten possession of the dead, cut off Joseph's head, though his brother Pheroras offered fifty talents to redeem it. After this the Galileans revolted and drowned in the lake the leading men among them who favored Herod's cause, and much of Judea was thrown into upheaval. Machaeras fortified a place called Hetton.
Messengers came to the king with news of these events, and at Daphne, near Antioch, they told him of his brother's fate — though he had already been expecting it, for certain dream-visions had clearly foretold his brother's death. He hurried his march, and when he reached Mount Lebanon he took on eight hundred men from the local people, and, having also one Roman legion, arrived at Ptolemais; from there he set out by night with his army and advanced through Galilee.
The enemy met him and, defeated in battle, were shut up in the stronghold from which they had set out the day before. From there he began assaults at daybreak, but when a heavy storm broke and he could do nothing, he withdrew his troops to the nearby villages. When a second legion arrived from Antony, the men holding the stronghold took fright and abandoned it by night. The king then hastened to Jericho, intending to take vengeance on them for his brother's sake.
When he had made camp there, he gave a banquet for the men in office, and after the gathering broke up he withdrew to his bedroom, having dismissed those present. There one could see the favor God showed the king: the roof of the room collapsed, but it killed no one it might have caught, so that everyone believed Herod was beloved of God, having escaped so great and extraordinary a danger.
The next day six thousand of the enemy came down from the mountain heights to give battle and struck fear into the Romans. The light-armed troops advanced, hurling javelins and stones at the king's men as they came out, and someone struck the king himself with a javelin near his side.
Antigonus sent a general named Pappus with a large force against Samaria, wishing to give the impression to the enemy that he was fighting from a position of strength. But Pappus took up a position opposite the general Machaeras, while Herod, after capturing five towns, killed about two thousand men caught inside and burned the towns themselves, then turned back against Pappus. Pappus had encamped near a village called Isanae, and many had flocked to him from Jericho and the rest of Judea. When Herod drew near, the enemy came out against him rashly; he engaged them and won the battle, and, avenging his brother, pursued them as they fled into the village, killing as he went.
The houses were packed with armed men, and some fled up onto the roofs; he overcame these too, and, tearing open the roofs of the houses, saw the rooms below crammed full of soldiers huddled together. His men hurled stones down on them from above and killed them in heaps, one upon another — the most terrible sight of that whole war, the countless dead lying one on another within the walls.
This action above all broke the enemy's spirit as they waited to see what would happen next, for they could see the great numbers who had gathered near the village fleeing. Had a deep storm not held it back, the king's army, emboldened by its victory, would have reached Jerusalem itself and finished the whole business — indeed Antigonus was already considering complete flight and abandoning the city. But as it was late, the king ordered his soldiers to take their meal, while he himself, exhausted, went into a room to bathe.
There too the greatest danger befell him, from which he escaped by God's providence: while he was naked, bathing with only one attendant boy, in the inner room, some of the enemy, armed, had fled there in fear; and in the midst of his bathing the first of them slipped out holding a bare sword and went through the doors, and after him a second and a third, likewise armed, doing the king no harm out of sheer shock, content only to escape unharmed themselves.
The next day he cut off Pappus's head — for he had been killed — and sent it to Pheroras as payment for what his brother had suffered, since Pappus had been the very one who killed him. When the storm ended, he broke camp and came near Jerusalem, encamping close to the city; this was now the third year since he had been proclaimed king at Rome. He shifted his camp and, coming near the wall at its most vulnerable point, encamped before the Temple, intending to assault it there, just as Pompey once had before him.
Dividing the ground with three earthworks, he raised towers, employing a great workforce for the task and cutting down the surrounding timber. Having set suitable men in charge of the works, while the army was still encamped there he himself went off to Samaria for his wedding, to marry the daughter of Alexander son of Aristobulus, to whom he had been betrothed, as I have said before.
After the wedding Sossius came through Phoenicia, having sent his forces ahead through the interior, and the army arrived as well, a great number of horse and foot; the king too came from Samaria bringing no small force in addition to his earlier army — together they numbered about thirty thousand. All of them gathered before the wall of Jerusalem and took up position by the north wall of the city: the army consisted of eleven legions of infantry, six thousand cavalry, and other auxiliaries from Syria, under two commanders — Sossius, sent by Antony as an ally, and Herod on his own behalf, since the Senate had stripped Antigonus of power, declared him an enemy, and made Herod king in his place by decree of the Senate.
With great eagerness and rivalry, since the whole multitude had assembled together, the Jews fought against Herod's forces, shut in as they were within the wall. They kept proclaiming many things about the Temple and many words meant to encourage the people, insisting that God would rescue them from their dangers. They removed everything outside the city, so that nothing that could serve as food would be left for men or beasts, and by secretly resorting to brigandage they created great scarcity.
When Herod noticed this, he set ambushes against the raiders at the most strategic points, and, to secure supplies, sent detachments of soldiers far off to bring in provisions, so that in a short time abundance of necessities was restored. The three earthworks rose steadily, since a large workforce was employed and progress was easy: it was summer, and nothing hindered the work, neither weather nor the laborers. They brought up siege engines and began to batter the wall, trying every kind of assault.
Yet they did not overawe those inside; the defenders devised no few countermeasures of their own against what was being done to them, sallying out to burn the half-finished works as well as those already completed. When it came to hand-to-hand fighting, they proved no less bold than the Romans, though inferior in skill. Against the siege engines they built counter-walls as the first structures were demolished, met the besiegers underground in mining operations, and fought on, driven more by desperation than foresight, clinging to the war to the very end — even though a great army surrounded them and they were worn down by hunger and lack of provisions, for it happened to be a sabbatical year.
Twenty picked men were the first to climb onto the wall, followed by Sossius's centurions; the first wall was taken after forty days, the second after fifteen. Some of the porticoes around the Temple were burned — Herod accused Antigonus of setting the fire, seeking thereby to earn himself hatred from the Jews. Once the outer Temple and the lower city had been taken, the Jews fled into the inner Temple and the upper city.
Fearing that the Romans would prevent them from carrying out their daily sacrifices to God, they sent envoys asking to be allowed only to bring in animals for sacrifice. Herod granted this, expecting that they would thereby give in; but when he saw that nothing of what he had hoped for was happening, and that they were holding out firmly for Antigonus's kingship, he pressed the attack with full force and took the city.
At once everything was filled with slaughter, the Romans enraged at the length of the siege, and Herod's Jewish forces determined to leave none of their rivals alive. Vast numbers were butchered, crowded together in the alleys and in the houses, and taking refuge in the Temple itself; there was no pity for infants, none for old age, none sparing for the weakness of women — though the king sent word around urging restraint, no one held his hand, but as if possessed they cut down every age alike.
At this point Antigonus, giving no thought to either his former or his present fortune, came down from the fortress and fell at Sossius's feet; Sossius, feeling no pity for his change of fortune, laughed at him without restraint and called him "Antigone," yet did not release him free from guard as one would a woman, but kept him bound and under watch.
Once he had mastered the enemy, Herod took care also to master his foreign allies, for the mass of foreign troops was eager to view the Temple and the holy things within the sanctuary. The king restrained them, some by persuasion, some by threats, and some even by force of arms, judging that such a victory would be worse than a defeat if any of the things forbidden to be seen were seen by them. He also put a stop to the plundering of the city, protesting strongly to Sossius, asking whether, after the Romans had stripped the city of money and men, they meant to leave him king of a desert — and whether, given so great a slaughter of citizens, he reckoned even mastery of the whole world too small a price.
When Sossius replied that it was only just to allow the soldiers plunder in place of the hardships of the siege, Herod said he himself would pay each man his reward out of his own funds. Thus, having in effect bought back the rest of the city, he made good his promises: he rewarded each soldier handsomely, the officers in proportion, and Sossius himself most royally of all, so that all went away well provided with money.
This calamity befell the city of Jerusalem when Marcus Agrippa and Canidius Gallus were consuls at Rome, in the hundred and eighty-fifth Olympiad, in the third month, on the feast of the fast — as if by a cyclical repetition of the disaster that had befallen the Jews under Pompey, for they had been taken by him on that very same day, twenty-seven years before.
Sossius dedicated a golden crown to God and then withdrew from Jerusalem, taking Antigonus in chains to Antony. Herod, fearing that if Antigonus were kept under guard by Antony and brought to Rome he might plead his case before the Senate — showing that he himself was of royal descent and Herod a commoner, and that his sons ought by birthright to reign, even if he himself had offended against the Romans — fearing all this, persuaded Antony with a large sum of money to put Antigonus to death.
Once this was done, Herod was freed of his fear, and so the rule of the house of Asamonaeus came to an end, after one hundred and twenty-six years. It had been an illustrious and distinguished house, both for its lineage and for the honor of the priesthood, and for what its founders had achieved on the nation's behalf; but these men lost their rule through their strife against one another, and it passed to Herod son of Antipater, of a commoner's house and private origin, a family that had been subject to kings. And this, as we have received it, was the end of the Asamonaean line.

======== Antiquities — Book 15 ========

How, when the city of Jerusalem had been taken by Sossius and Herod, Antony beheaded Antigonus at Antioch, and Herod put to death forty-five of the leading men among Antigonus's partisans in Jerusalem and extorted money from the city. How Hyrcanus, first king of the Jews and high priest, was released by Arsaces, king of the Parthians, and returned to Herod. How Herod, having appointed Aristobulus, his wife Mariamme's brother, high priest, arranged not long after to have him destroyed. How Cleopatra, scheming against the kingdoms of the Jews and the Arabs, managed to obtain portions of them from Antony. Cleopatra's visit to Judea. How Herod made war on Aretas at the time when Antony was defeated by Caesar in the battle at Actium. Concerning the earthquake that occurred in Judea, and the destruction of men and livestock. Herod's speech to the Jews, who were disheartened by their sufferings and the defeat they had suffered. How Herod, being obliged to go to Caesar after his victory, put Hyrcanus to death. How he received the kingdom from Caesar as well, and escorted him as far as Egypt. How Herod, on arriving at Alexandria, was honored by Caesar. How, on his return, he was provoked by false accusations to kill his wife Mariamme. Concerning the famine that occurred in Judea and Syria, and how Herod saved the populace and the cities. The Greek cities Herod founded. How he tore down the ancient temple in Jerusalem and, six hundred years later, raised another in its place, double the former in its dimensions. This book covers a period of eighteen years.
Sossius and Herod, then, having by force taken Jerusalem and captured Antigonus besides — this the previous book has already told us; what follows on from it we shall now relate. When Herod had been entrusted with rule over the whole of Judea, as for the populace in the city, all those private citizens who still favored Antigonus's cause he advanced and promoted, while those who had chosen the side of his opponents he never ceased punishing and chastising day by day.
Above all others he honored Pollion the Pharisee and Samaias, his disciple: for while Jerusalem was under siege these two had advised the citizens to receive Herod, and for this they now received their reward. This same Pollion, at the time Herod was once on trial for his life, had foretold — rebuking Hyrcanus and the judges — that Herod, once he escaped, would take vengeance on all of them, and in time this came to pass, God bringing his words to fulfillment.
At that time, once he had gained control of Jerusalem, Herod gathered up every ornament in the kingdom, stripping the wealthy of their property besides, and having amassed a great quantity of silver and gold, he gave it all as gifts to Antony and the friends around him. He put to death the forty-five leading men of Antigonus's faction, stationing guards at the gates of the walls so that nothing might be smuggled out along with the dead, and had the corpses searched: whatever silver or gold or any treasure was found on them was brought up to the king. There was no end to the hardships: on one hand the greed of a ruler who found himself in need consumed everything, while on the other the sabbatical year was forcing the land to lie unworked, for that year had then arrived, and sowing the land during it is forbidden to us.
Antony, having taken Antigonus prisoner, at first decided to keep him in chains until his triumph; but when he heard that the nation was in revolt and remained loyal to Antigonus out of its hatred for Herod, he decided to behead him at Antioch — for the Jews were scarcely able to keep still at all. My account is confirmed by Strabo of Cappadocia, who writes as follows: "Antony beheaded Antigonus the Jew, after he had been brought to Antioch. And he was thought to be the first Roman to behead a king, since he supposed there was no other way to change the disposition of the Jews so that they would accept Herod, set up in his place; for not even under torture would they consent to acclaim him king — so exalted was their regard for their former king. He therefore reckoned that the disgrace would diminish the memory of Antigonus, and would also diminish the hatred felt toward Herod." So much for Strabo.
Now when Hyrcanus the high priest, who was a prisoner among the Parthians, learned that Herod had gained control of the kingdom, he came to Herod, having been released from his captivity in the following manner. Barzapharnes and Pacorus, the Parthian generals, had taken captive Hyrcanus — who had first become high priest and then king — along with Herod's brother Phasael, and were leading them off to Parthia. Phasael, unable to bear the disgrace of his chains, and judging a death with honor preferable to any life, became his own murderer, as I have already related. But when Hyrcanus was brought before him, Phraates, king of the Parthians, treated him more leniently, having learned beforehand of the distinction of his noble birth. For this reason he released him from his chains and allowed him to take up residence in Babylon, where a large community of Jews also lived. These honored Hyrcanus as high priest and king, as did the whole Jewish nation settled as far as the Euphrates; and this was gratifying to him.
But when he learned that Herod had taken possession of the kingdom, his hopes shifted course: he had from the start been affectionately disposed toward Herod, and expected that Herod would remember the favor he owed him, since he — Hyrcanus — had, when Herod was on trial and about to be punished with death, rescued him from the danger and the penalty. He therefore made overtures, being eager that the Jews there let him go to Herod. But they clung to him and urged him to stay, citing both the services and the honors due him, saying that nothing was lacking in the honor they showed him, such as is due to high priests or kings, and, more importantly, that there — in Judea — he could not even share in these honors on account of the mutilation of his body, which he had suffered at the hands of Antigonus, and that kings do not repay favors in the same way once received, as they did when they were still private citizens — fortune not unreasonably changing men's character.
Though they urged such considerations, appealing to his own advantage, Hyrcanus longed to leave; and Herod, writing to him, urged him to entreat Phraates and the Jews there not to begrudge him — since he would share the kingdom with him with all his power — for now, he said, was the time for him to repay the favors for which he was indebted, having been raised and preserved by Hyrcanus, and for Hyrcanus to receive them in turn. Writing this to Hyrcanus, he also sent to Phraates an envoy, Saramalla, along with many gifts, asking him, out of the same generosity, not to hinder the favors owed to his own benefactor.
But his zeal did not spring from this motive: rather, because he feared that his own rule was not held by right — reversals brought about for good reasons — he was anxious to have Hyrcanus in his own hands, or else to remove him altogether; and this indeed he did later. At that time, however, once Hyrcanus had arrived, persuaded to come, with the Parthian's consent and after the Jews there had contributed money for the journey, Herod received him with every honor, gave him the first place in assemblies, and, seating him ahead of himself at banquets, deceived him by calling him father, and by every means contriving that his plot go unsuspected.
He also arranged other matters to suit the interests of his rule, and from these arose the strife within his own household as well: for, wary of appointing any man of distinction as high priest of God, he sent for a priest of no great standing from Babylon, named Ananel, and gave him the high priesthood.
Alexandra could not bear this insult at once — she being the daughter of Hyrcanus and wife of Alexander, son of king Aristobulus, and had by Alexander two children: a son, Aristobulus, of striking beauty, and a daughter, Mariamme, married to Herod, remarkable for her loveliness. She was troubled and took hard the dishonor done her son, that while he was still living some outsider should be judged worthy of the high priesthood, and she wrote to Cleopatra — a certain musician assisting her in arranging the delivery of the letter — asking Antony to obtain the high priesthood for her son.
When Antony responded rather half-heartedly, his friend Dellius, who had come to Judea on some business, saw Aristobulus and was struck with admiration at his youthful bloom, marveling at the boy's stature and beauty, and no less at Mariamme, the king's wife; and he made it clear he considered Alexandra the mother of remarkably beautiful children. When she entered into conversation with him, he persuaded her to have portraits of both painted and sent to Antony, since — once he had seen them — he would refuse her nothing she asked. Elated by these words, Alexandra sent the portraits to Antony. And Dellius embellished the matter, declaring that in his opinion these children seemed born not of mortals but of some god — all the while scheming on his own account to draw Antony toward pleasure.
Antony, however, was ashamed to send for the girl, married as she was to Herod, and, guarding against the accusations such a summons would provoke from Cleopatra, wrote instead asking that the boy be sent, with due honor, adding — if it did not seem burdensome. When this message was brought to Herod, he judged it unsafe to send Aristobulus, who was of striking beauty (he happened to be sixteen years old) and of eminent birth, to Antony, who held more power than any other Roman at that time, and who was ready to submit him to his own passions, procuring his pleasures openly by virtue of his power. He therefore wrote back that, should the young man once leave the country, everything would be filled with war and turmoil, the Jews hoping for a change of regime and a revolt in favor of another king.
Having thus put Antony off with these excuses, he decided not to keep dishonoring the boy and Alexandra any longer — and, since his wife Mariamme was also urgently pressing him, to give the high priesthood back to her brother, judging it moreover to his own advantage, since once honored with the office the young man could not travel abroad. He convened an assembly of his friends and accused Alexandra at length, claiming she had secretly plotted against the kingdom and was working through Cleopatra to have him stripped of his rule so that the young man might take over affairs in his place through Antony. And in wanting this, he said, she acted unjustly, since in doing so she would also be depriving her own daughter of the honor she held, and would be stirring up turmoil over a kingdom he himself had won through great toil and no ordinary dangers.
Yet he would not, he said, let his memory of her misconduct turn him from dealing justly with them; rather, even now he was giving the boy the high priesthood, and explaining that he had appointed Ananel earlier only because Aristobulus was then still an infant. He said all this deliberately, calculating precisely — exactly what he intended — so as to deceive the women and the friends present with him; and Alexandra, overcome at once by joy at this unexpected turn and by fear born of suspicion, defended herself with tears, saying that regarding the priesthood she had pursued every possible course only out of the dishonor she felt, but as for the kingdom she neither had designs upon it, nor would wish to take it even were it offered to her, and that now she had honor enough through his rule, and security enough, since his ability to rule more effectively than others benefited the whole family.
Now, overcome by his kindnesses, she said she would accept the honor for her son and would be obedient in every respect, and she begged pardon in advance for anything she might have done rashly out of resentment at ill-treatment, prompted by her rank and the freedom of speech it allowed her. Having spoken to one another in this way, they parted — more solemnly than swiftly — clasping hands, with, as they supposed, all suspicion now removed.
King Herod at once took the high priesthood away from Ananel, who was, as we said before, not a native but one of the Jews settled beyond the Euphrates — for no small number of this people had settled in Babylonia. From there Ananel came, of high-priestly stock, and had long been on close terms with Herod. Herod himself had honored him when he took the kingdom, and now dismissed him himself, in order to quell the strife within his household, thereby acting against the law: for no one else had ever been deprived of the office once he had received it. Rather, the first to violate the law was Antiochus Epiphanes, who removed Jesus from office and installed his brother Onias in his place; the second was Aristobulus, who removed his brother Hyrcanus; and Herod was the third, who transferred the office to the young Aristobulus in his turn.
For the moment, then, it seemed he had healed the troubles within his household. Yet, as one might expect, the reconciliation did not proceed free of suspicion, for he feared Alexandra — both on account of what she had already attempted and lest, should she find the occasion, she might again venture some revolutionary undertaking. He therefore ordered her to remain confined to the palace and to do nothing on her own authority, and careful watch was kept over her, so that nothing she did, even in the course of her daily routine, escaped notice.
All this gradually provoked her and bred hatred in her, for, being full of a woman's proud spirit, she chafed under this surveillance born of suspicion, and thought herself deserving of anything rather than living out her life deprived of her freedom of speech, under the mere trappings of honor while in servitude and fear. She therefore sent repeated letters to Cleopatra, lamenting her situation and appealing to her to help as far as she was able. Cleopatra told her to escape secretly to her in Egypt, taking her son with her.
This plan was adopted, and she contrived the following scheme: she had two coffins prepared, as though for the removal of corpses, and placed herself and her son inside them, ordering the servants who were in on the secret to carry them out by night. From there a road led to the sea, where a ship stood ready to carry them across to Egypt. Aesop, a servant of hers, blurted this out to Sabbio, one of her friends, thinking he already knew and could be told.
But Sabbio, who had formerly been an enemy of Herod's — being reckoned one of those who had conspired against Antipater in the poisoning affair — expected to exchange his enmity for goodwill by informing on her, and reported Alexandra's plot to the king. Herod let the attempt proceed as far as the actual undertaking and caught her in the very act of the escape, but let the offense pass — not that it would have been at all difficult for him, however much he might have wished it, to deal harshly with her; but he did not dare, since he knew Cleopatra would not tolerate being given cause for her hatred against himself. Instead, he made a display of magnanimity, forgiving them out of consideration.
He was, however, fully resolved to remove the young man from his path altogether; but he judged it more plausible, for the sake of concealment, not to act quickly or immediately after these events. And when the Feast of Tabernacles fell due — a festival observed among us with the utmost strictness — he let those days go by, and gave himself over to festivity, he and the rest of the people along with him.
Yet even amid these very festivities something occurred that stirred him and openly spurred on his resolve — envy. For the young Aristobulus, now seventeen years old, when he went up to the altar according to the law to perform the sacrifices, wearing the vestments of the high priests and carrying out the rites of worship,
He was the handsomest of men, and taller than his years would suggest, and in his very features he showed plainly the nobility of his lineage. A surge of goodwill toward him ran through the crowd, and the vivid memory of what his grandfather Aristobulus had accomplished rose before them; little by little they were overcome and betrayed their feelings, rejoicing and weeping together, and sending up toward him cries of blessing mixed with prayers, so that the people's goodwill became plain to see, and their open acknowledgment of what they had suffered seemed too bold to make under a king's eye. After all this Herod resolved to carry through the design he had formed against the youth. When the festival had ended, he was entertained at Jericho, Alexandra receiving them there, and, showing the young man every kindness and drawing him on to unguarded drinking, he was ready to join in his games and to play the youth's part in whatever pleased him. Since the climate of that place ran rather hot, the company, gathered together, soon went out in high spirits and stood by the pools, which were large, around the courtyard, to cool themselves in the fiercest heat of noon. At first they watched the servants and friends swimming; then, when the young man too was drawn in — for that too Herod had contrived — the friends to whom the task had been assigned, as darkness came down, kept pressing him and holding him under, as if in sport while he swam, and did not let go until they had drowned him utterly.
So Aristobulus perished, not having lived out eighteen years, having held the high priesthood one year, which Ananel now recovered again. When the disaster was reported to the women, at once, with the sudden change, mourning arose over the body laid out before them, and grief beyond bearing; and the city, when the news spread, was in anguish throughout, every household making the calamity its own, as though it had happened to no stranger. Alexandra was seized with grief even more, because she understood the full truth of the loss: the pain of knowing how it had been done pressed on her all the more, yet she forced herself to endure it, looking ahead to a still greater evil. Many times she came close to taking her own life with her own hand, but she held back, asking herself whether by living she might yet be of use to the one destroyed by so lawless a plot; and she reckoned that giving no hint of her suspicion that her son had been deliberately murdered would serve her better when the time came for revenge. So she bore her suspicion with self-command.
Herod, for his part, worked to persuade everyone around him, plausibly enough, that the boy's death had not come about by design, not only observing every outward form of mourning but shedding tears and displaying a genuine turmoil of soul — perhaps because the horror of what he had done overcame him at the sight of the boy's youth and beauty, even though he had judged the boy's death necessary for his own safety, but clearly also because he was working to construct his own defense. As for the expense of the funeral, he made an even greater display of it, providing lavishly for the bier and for the quantity of spices, and burying with him a great store of ornaments, so as to stun the women out of their grief and console them by this means. None of it, however, moved Alexandra; the memory of the wrong, ever more present to her, only sharpened her pain into open lament and a hunger for vengeance, and she wrote to Cleopatra of Herod's plot and of the boy's destruction. Cleopatra, who had long been eager to help her at her request and pitied Alexandra's misfortunes, took the whole matter as her own and kept urging Antony not to let the murder of the boy go unpunished; for it was not fitting, she said, that Herod, who owed his kingship to Antony and had no rightful claim to it among the truly royal houses, should get away with such lawless acts against them.
Persuaded by these arguments, Antony, who happened then to be at Laodicea, sent orders that Herod should come to clear himself of the charges concerning Aristobulus, since the plot, if indeed it had been his doing, had not been rightly carried out. Herod, fearing both the accusation and Cleopatra's hostility — she never let up in working to turn Antony against him — resolved to obey, since there was nothing else he could do; but he left his uncle Joseph as guardian of the government and of affairs there, and gave him a secret order that if anything should happen to him at Antony's hands, Mariamme should at once be put to death. For he himself, he said, loved his wife with deep affection, and he dreaded the outrage of her being courted by someone else for her beauty once he was dead; and in fact everything pointed to Antony's own desire for the woman, since he had long since heard reports of her beauty. So Herod, having given these instructions, and holding no secure hope for the outcome of the whole affair, set out for Antony. Joseph, meanwhile, in charge of the administration of the kingdom's affairs and for that reason in constant contact with Mariamme, kept up frequent conversations with her about Herod's business and, out of the respect due to her as queen, spoke often of his devotion and affection for her. When the women — Alexandra above all — mocked these words in their womanish way, Joseph, overeager to demonstrate the king's true state of mind, was carried so far as to reveal the order he had been given, offering it as proof that Herod could not live without her and, even should some terrible thing befall him, could not bear to be parted from her even by death. So much for Joseph. The women, as one might expect, took from this not the devotion in Herod's feelings toward Mariamme but the harshness of it — that not even in dying would he spare her the same ruin and violent death — and, seizing on this, they were filled with a grim foreboding at what had been said.
Meanwhile a rumor arose in the city of Jerusalem, put about by those who hated Herod, that Antony had tortured and killed him. The report threw everyone around the palace into alarm, as one would expect, and the women most of all. Alexandra persuaded Joseph to go out with them from the palace and take refuge with the standards of the Roman legion which was then encamped near the city to guard the kingdom, under the command of the son of Judas; for by this, first, if any disturbance should arise about the court, they would be safer having the Romans well disposed toward them, and further, she hoped that if Antony should set eyes on Mariamme he would grant everything, and that through this she would recover the kingdom and lack nothing that was due to those of royal birth. While they were caught up in these calculations, a letter arrived from Herod concerning the whole affair, contradicting the rumor and everything that had been said before. For when he had come before Antony, he quickly won him over with the gifts he had brought from Jerusalem, and quickly, through their conversations, brought him to a friendlier disposition toward him, and Cleopatra's arguments carried less weight in turning Antony against him; for Antony said it was not right for a king to be called to account for what he had done within his own realm — that would make him no king at all — but that, having granted him the honor and judged him worthy of the power, one should let him use it as he saw fit. The same held, he said, for Cleopatra's own interest, that the affairs of rulers not be pried into. On these matters Herod wrote, and went on to list the other honors he enjoyed with Antony, sharing his seat at hearings and dining with him every day, and how, though Cleopatra's slanders against him were bitter on this account, he came through them unscathed; for out of desire for his country she had been pressing to have his kingdom added to her own, and was working by every means to have him removed. Still, finding Antony just, he expected no further trouble, but rather that Antony's goodwill toward him and his kingdom and its affairs would now be firmer than before, since Antony, in place of what Cleopatra had asked for, had given her Coele-Syria instead, and by this had both placated her and put an end to the pleas she kept making regarding Judaea.
When this letter arrived, they gave up the impulse that had seized them, to flee to the Romans as though all were lost — yet their intention did not go unnoticed. When the king, having escorted Antony as far as against the Parthians, returned to Judaea, at once his sister Salome and his mother reported to him the plan Alexandra's party had formed, and Salome went further, bringing a charge against her own husband Joseph, making it out as slander that he had continued in intimacy with Mariamme. She said this out of a long-standing resentment toward Mariamme, because in their quarrels Mariamme, carrying herself with too much pride, would throw their low birth in their faces. Herod, who was always passionately and jealously devoted to Mariamme, was at once thrown into turmoil and could not bear the jealousy; yet, holding himself back from doing anything rash out of his love, driven hard by passion and jealousy together, he questioned Mariamme privately about her dealings with Joseph. She swore her innocence and set out, in her own defense, everything that could be said for one who had done no wrong, and little by little the king was won over and, overcome by his tenderness for her, moved past his anger, so that he began to apologize for having believed what he had heard, and to acknowledge with much gratitude her chastity. He confessed, for his part, how deep his affection and devotion to her ran, and at last, as happens in matters of love, they fell to tears, clinging to each other with great feeling. But as the king, more and more, kept affirming his devotion, insisting that it was not mere fondness, Mariamme spoke of the order he had given — that if he should suffer some harm at Antony's hands, she too, guilty of nothing, should perish with him.
At this word, once it had slipped out, the king was overcome with anguish; at once he let her go from his arms, cried aloud, and tore at his own hair, saying that here was plain proof that Joseph had shared intimacy with her — for she would never have revealed what he had told her in private unless great trust had grown up between them. In this state he came close to killing his wife, but, mastered still by his love for her, he checked that impulse, though the struggle cost him bitter and painful effort; Joseph, however, he ordered killed without even being brought before him, and Alexandra, as responsible for it all, he had bound and kept under guard.
Meanwhile trouble had also arisen concerning Syria, since Cleopatra would not let Antony rest from seizing everything; for she kept urging him to strip each ruler of his domain and give it to her, and she had great power over him through his desire for her. By nature delighting in greed, she left no wrongdoing undone: she had already had her own brother poisoned, foreseeing that the kingdom would fall to him, when he was but fifteen years old, and had her sister Arsinoe killed at Ephesus, where she had taken refuge as a suppliant at the temple of Artemis, through Antony's agency; for the sake of money, wherever she thought there was any hope of it, she spared neither temples nor tombs from plunder, no shrine being thought so inviolable that its treasures were not stripped from it, nor anything profane so forbidden that it was not touched, if only it promised to enrich her wrongful greed. In short, nothing was ever enough for a woman so extravagant and so enslaved to her desires, unless everything she set her mind on fell short of nothing she craved. For this reason she kept pressing Antony always to strip something more from others and grant it to her, and, crossing Syria together with him, she planned to make it her own possession. Lysanias, son of Ptolemy, she had put to death, charging him with bringing in the Parthians against the state's interests, and she asked Antony for Judaea and the land of the Arabs, demanding that their kings be stripped of their thrones. Antony, as it happened, was altogether mastered by the woman, so that he seemed to obey her wishes not merely through their intimacy but as though under the power of drugs; yet the sheer visibility of the injustice held him back from going so far, in his complete submission to her, as to commit the very worst wrongs. So, in order neither to refuse her outright nor to appear openly wicked by doing everything she demanded, he took portions of territory from each ruler and made her a gift of these instead.
He also gave her the cities within the Eleutherus river as far as Egypt, apart from Tyre and Sidon, which he knew from their ancestors to be free cities, though she pressed hard to have these too given to her. Having obtained these, Cleopatra escorted Antony as far as the Euphrates on his campaign against Armenia, then turned back and came to Apamea and Damascus, and passed also into Judaea, where Herod met her and leased from her both the portions given her in Arabia and the revenues around Jericho; for that land produces the balsam, the most valuable of all things that grow there and found nowhere else, and also great quantities of fine date-palm. While she was in these parts, and her familiarity with Herod grew, she tried to draw the king into intimacy with her, whether by nature simply indulging without concealment the pleasures that came her way, or perhaps feeling some real passion for him, or, what is more likely, laying the groundwork for a plot, preparing in advance the outrage that would then be done to him; in any case her whole conduct showed her mastered by desire.
Herod, who had never been well disposed toward Cleopatra, knowing her to be harsh toward everyone, and who now thought it right even to hate her, if out of sheer wantonness she had gone so far, and to strike first in punishing her, should she in fact set such a trap for him, brushed aside her advances, and took counsel with his friends, having her in his power, to kill her; for he would rid everyone of many evils, all those to whom she had already been harsh and to whom she still threatened to be so, and the same act, he thought, would serve Antony's interest too, since she would prove no more faithful to him either, should any occasion or need arise in which he required such loyalty. His friends, however, dissuaded him from this plan, first pointing out that it was not right, when he already faced graver dangers, to take on the most conspicuous risk of all, and pressing him earnestly to do nothing out of rashness; for Antony, they said, would never put up with it, not even if someone set his true interest plainly before his eyes, since the very belief that she had been taken from him by force and by plot would only inflame his passion the more, and no defense would appear moderate enough, given that the attempt had been made against a woman who held, in that age, the very highest rank, while any benefit claimed from it would only seem, alongside such presumption, a condemnation of Antony's own disposition toward her. From all this it was clear that great and unending troubles would engulf his kingdom and his house, when he could instead, by turning aside the
...the wrongdoing into which she was urging him, and to bring the crisis to a decent conclusion. By frightening him in this way, and pointing out plausibly how dangerous the venture was, they held him back from the attempt. He, however, courted Cleopatra with gifts and escorted her on her way to Egypt.
Antony, having taken Armenia, sent Artabazes son of Tigranes to Egypt in chains along with his sons, the satraps, presenting them to Cleopatra together with the whole splendor of the kingdom he had taken from him. Artaxias, the eldest of his sons, escaped at that time and became king of Armenia. Later Archelaus and Nero Caesar drove him out and restored his younger brother Tigranes to the throne — but that belongs to a later time.
As for the tribute owed on the territory Antony had granted him, Herod, thinking it unsafe to give Cleopatra any pretext for hostility, was scrupulous in paying it. The Arab, however, though he had undertaken to Herod to pay the tribute, supplied the two hundred talents for a time, but afterward grew malicious and slow in his payments, and even when he settled some part of it he seemed to do so grudgingly. When he went on behaving this way, and in the end was unwilling to do anything just at all, Herod was minded to move against him, but waited for his opportunity until the Roman war.
For with the battle of Actium expected — which took place in the hundred and eighty-seventh Olympiad — Caesar was about to contend with Antony for the whole of the empire, while Herod, since his land had long enjoyed good pasture and he had built up revenues and forces, mustered an allied force for Antony, attending most carefully to the preparations. Antony, however, said he had no need at all of his alliance, and instead ordered him to move against the Arab — for he had heard of the man's treachery both from Herod and from Cleopatra herself, who judged it to her advantage that each of them should suffer harm from the other.
When this message came to him from Antony, Herod turned back and mustered his soldiery as though about to invade Arabia at once; and once cavalry and infantry forces had been prepared, he arrived at Diospolis, where the Arabs met him, for the preparations for war had not escaped their notice. A fierce battle took place, and the Jews prevailed. After this a large Arab army gathered at Kanatha, places belonging to Coele-Syria.
Herod, having learned of this in advance, came bringing against them the greater part of the force he had, and drawing near he resolved to encamp in a good position, throw up a rampart, and attack from an advantageous position at the right moment. While he was arranging this, the mass of the Jews shouted for him to set aside delay and lead them against the Arabs; they were eager, trusting in their good order and buoyed by the spirit of those who had already won the first battle without even letting the enemy come to close quarters.
Since they were in an uproar and showing every kind of eagerness, the king decided to make use of the crowd's enthusiasm, and after declaring beforehand that he would not fall short of their courage, he led the way himself under arms at the front of them all, with everyone following in their proper units. Terror fell at once upon the Arabs; they held their ground briefly, but when they saw how irresistible and full of spirit the Jews were, most of them broke and fled,
and they would have been destroyed, had not Athenion done harm to Herod and the Jews. This man, a general of Cleopatra's stationed in the region and hostile to Herod, had watched events with careful preparation: if the Arabs achieved some brilliant success he had resolved to remain quiet, but if they were defeated — which is in fact what happened — he had made ready, with the men of the district who had gathered to him, to fall upon the Jews.
And so, at that moment, falling unexpectedly upon them when they were exhausted and thought they had won, he caused great slaughter. For the Jews, having spent their eagerness on their acknowledged enemies and now acting carelessly in the confidence of victory, were quickly overcome by these new attackers and suffered many blows in terrain impassable to horses and full of rocks, ground of which those making the attack had far greater experience.
While the Jews were faring badly, the Arabs took heart again, and turning back began killing those who were now in flight. Losses of every kind occurred among the slain, and not many of those who broke away made it safely back to the camp together. King Herod, having given up on the battle, rode off to bring help, but for all his haste he did not arrive in time; the Jewish camp was captured, and the Arabs, for their part,
had by no means enjoyed unmixed good fortune, having recovered against all expectation a victory that had very nearly slipped from them, and having stripped much strength from their opponents. From that point on, Herod turned to raiding, and by frequent incursions did great damage to Arab territory while encamping on the border; though in the open he generally avoided coming to close quarters, he made himself far from harmless through the relentlessness and diligence with which he attended in every way to his own men, repairing the setback.
Meanwhile, as the battle of Actium was being joined between Caesar and Antony, in the seventh year of Herod's reign, the land of the Jews was shaken by an earthquake as had never happened before, causing great destruction among the livestock of the country. About thirty thousand people also perished, crushed beneath collapsed houses; the army, however, since it was quartered in the open, suffered no harm at all from the disaster.
When the Arabs learned of this — and it was reported to them far worse than the truth by those eager to gratify the hatred of their listeners — they grew still more confident, believing that the country had been overturned to their enemies' ruin and the people destroyed, so that nothing remained standing against them any longer.
They seized the Jewish envoys, who had come to them concerning what had happened, and killed them, and advanced with the utmost eagerness against the Jewish forces. These did not wait for the attack, but, disheartened by their misfortunes and fallen into the deepest despair, abandoned the field. They had no hope of holding their own after being beaten in battle, nor of receiving help, given how badly things stood for them at home.
Matters standing thus, the king came forward, persuading the officers with argument and trying to restore their fallen spirits. Having first stirred and encouraged some of the better men, he now ventured — something he had earlier hesitated to do, fearing they might prove difficult under their misfortunes — to address the mass of the people as well. He made the following appeal to the crowd:
"I am not unaware, men, that many things have happened in this crisis to work against our undertakings, and it is natural that in such circumstances even those most distinguished for courage should not feel confident. But since the necessity of war presses upon us, and there is nothing among the things that have happened that a single deed well done cannot set right, I have chosen to encourage you and, at the same time, to show you the means by which you might hold fast to your own resolve.
I wish first to demonstrate, concerning the war, that we wage it justly, driven to it by the insolence of our enemies — for if you learn this, it will be the greatest cause of eagerness in you — and after that to show that there is nothing formidable in our own position, and that we have every hope of victory. I will begin with the first point, calling you yourselves as witnesses of what I say.
You know, surely, the lawlessness of the Arabs — men who deal so faithlessly even with everyone else, as one would expect of people who are barbarous and give no thought to God — but who have offended against us most of all, through greed and envy, lying in wait for our troubles at every opportunity. Why should I mention their many other offenses? When they themselves stood in danger of losing their own rule and becoming slaves to Cleopatra, who but we delivered them from that fear?
For my friendship with Antony, and his disposition toward us, were the reason these men suffered nothing irreparable, since the man took care to do nothing that might arouse our suspicion. Yet when he was nevertheless willing to grant Cleopatra certain portions from each of our kingdoms, I myself arranged even this, and by giving many gifts privately I secured safety for us both, taking the expense upon myself — paying two hundred talents outright and standing surety for two hundred more.
These sums went to swell her revenue, but we ourselves were robbed of them by these very men. And yet it would have been fitting for the Jews to pay tribute or a share of their land to no one at all — but if that could not be, certainly not on behalf of those whom we ourselves had saved — nor should the Arabs, who admitted they owed us this much consideration and gratitude, have thought it right to wrong us by defrauding us, and that though we were not their enemies but their friends.
Good faith, which is kept even toward the bitterest enemies, ought all the more to be preserved toward friends — but not among these men, who have taken it for the finest thing to profit by any means whatsoever, and hold that injustice brings no penalty, so long as profit can be had. There remains, then, a question for you: whether the unjust ought to be punished — a thing God himself wishes and always commands, that insolence and injustice be hated — and this when we go out to a war that is not only just but necessary.
For what is agreed to be most lawless among both Greeks and barbarians, they have done to our envoys, slaughtering them — though the Greeks say their heralds are sacred and inviolable, and we have learned the finest of our teachings and the holiest of our laws through messengers sent by God. For it is this very name that brings God into the sight of men and has power to reconcile enemies to enemies. What greater impiety, then, could there be than to kill envoys who speak on behalf of justice?
How could such men, after doing such things, ever again enjoy stability in their lives or success in war? To me they seem altogether unable to. Perhaps, then, holiness and justice are on our side, but they may claim greater courage or greater numbers. But it is unworthy of you even to say this — for where justice is, God is with it, and where God is present, both numbers and courage are present as well.
But let us also examine our own record. We won the first battle; when they engaged us a second time, they could not even withstand us, but fled at once, unable to bear our onset and our spirit. And when we were winning, Athenion attacked us, waging an unheralded war. Is this courage on their part, or a second act of lawlessness and ambush?
Why then should we think any less of ourselves, when we ought rather to have greater hopes? How could we be terrified of men who, whenever they fight honestly, are always beaten, and who, whenever they are thought to prevail, do so only through injustice? And even if one supposes them noble, should this not spur us on all the more? For true courage lies not in attacking the weaker, but in being able to overcome even the stronger.
And if anyone is dismayed by our own misfortunes and by what happened in the earthquake, let him first consider that this very thing has deceived the Arabs too, who have taken what happened to be greater than it really was; and next, that it would not be fitting for the same event to produce boldness in them and cowardice in us. For their courage springs not from any strength of their own, but from the hope that we are already crippled by our misfortunes,
whereas we, by advancing against them, will strip them of their overconfidence and recover for ourselves the courage to fight without further fear. For in truth we have not been so badly damaged, nor — as some suppose — does what has happened show the wrath of God; these things are accidents and sufferings that occur in the course of nature. And if it had been done by God's design, it is clear that it has also ceased by his design, since he is satisfied with what has occurred; for had he wished to wrong us further, he would not have relented.
And that he wishes this war to go forward, and knows it to be just, he has made plain himself: though some perished in the earthquake out in the country, not one of those under arms suffered anything at all, but all of you were preserved — God making it clear that even if you had gone to war with your whole people, together with children and wives, you would have come through without irreparable harm.
Bearing this in mind, and above all that you have God as your protector at every moment, go out against the unjust with righteous courage — men who broke faith with friendship, who show no truce in battle, who are impious toward envoys, and who are always overcome by your valor."
Hearing this, the Jews became far more confident in spirit for the battle. Herod, after offering sacrifices according to custom, quickly gathered his men and led them against the Arabs, crossing the Jordan and encamping near the enemy. He decided to seize a fortress that lay between the two camps, reckoning that in this way he would both gain an advantage in bringing the battle to a swifter conclusion and, should delay prove necessary, would have secured for himself a well-fortified camp.
Since the Arabs had the same idea, a contest arose over the position — first with skirmishing at a distance, then with more men coming to close quarters on both sides, until the Arabs were defeated and withdrew. This at once gave no small encouragement to the Jews.
And considering the enemy's disposition — men who wished to do anything rather than come to battle — he ventured all the more boldly to tear apart their rampart and press up against their camp; forced back by this, they came out in disorder, having lost all eagerness and hope of victory. Nevertheless they came to close quarters, being more numerous and, under the pressure of necessity, driven to boldness,
and a fierce battle took place, with no small numbers falling on both sides, until at last the Arabs turned and fled. There was great slaughter among those in flight, so that they died not only at the hands of the enemy but also became the cause of their own destruction, trampled by their own numbers and disorderly rush and falling upon their own weapons; at any rate, five thousand of them lay dead.
The rest of their number managed to escape into their fortified camp, but had no secure hope of safety, for lack of provisions and especially of water. The Jews, pursuing them, were not strong enough to break in with them, but surrounded the rampart and, keeping watch, barred both those who wished to bring relief from entering and those who wished to flee from leaving. Being in such straits, then, the...
So the Arabs sent envoys to Herod, at first to negotiate terms, and then, since thirst was pressing them hard, to accept any condition whatever and to beg only for their present safety. But Herod would not receive envoys, ransom for the captives, or any other reasonable offer, so bent was he on avenging the crimes they had committed against his people. Driven by necessity, and above all by thirst, they came forward and surrendered themselves to be led away and bound, and in five days four thousand of them were captured in this way. On the sixth day all who remained resolved to sally out and, in the manner of war, engage the enemy, choosing, if they must suffer, to die fighting rather than perish ingloriously a few at a time. Having decided this, they came out of their camp but held out no time at all in the battle, for their souls and bodies were already broken by ill use and had no strength left, though they made a brilliant show of fighting, counting it a gain, in their wretched state, even to die. About seven thousand of them fell in that first engagement. Struck by such a blow, they lost what spirit had remained to them, and, amazed at Herod's generalship in the very disasters he had inflicted, they yielded from then on and proclaimed him champion of their nation. Herod, having formed too high an opinion of himself from these successes, returned home, having gained honor as well through this display of courage.
Everything else, then, had gone well for him, since he had proved himself formidable in every undertaking, but danger now fell upon him as the decision over the whole world was reached, with Antony defeated by Caesar in the battle at Actium. At that time both Herod himself and those around him, enemies and friends alike, gave up his cause for lost, for it was not to be expected that he would escape unpunished after so great a friendship with Antony. His friends therefore despaired of any hope for him, while those who were hostile to him pretended openly to share in his distress but privately nursed a hidden pleasure, expecting to profit from the change of fortune. Herod himself, seeing that Hyrcanus was the only man of royal rank left, thought it in his interest no longer to leave him in his way: if he himself should come through safely and escape the danger, he judged it safer that no man more worthy of the throne be waiting in ambush for such a crisis as his; but if he should suffer some harm at Caesar's hands, he was eager, out of jealousy, to remove the one man who would then be left to obtain the kingdom.
While Herod was turning this over in his mind, an opening was given him by the others as well. Hyrcanus, being a man of mild character, did not think it right, either then or at any other time, to meddle in affairs or to grasp at anything new, but yielded to fortune and was content to accept whatever it brought about. But Alexandra was contentious, and, carried away without restraint by the hope of a change of fortune, she kept urging her father not to wait indefinitely for Herod's lawlessness to fall upon their house, but to forestall it by securing their future hopes in advance. She pressed him to write on the matter to Malchus, who held the office of Arabarch, asking him to receive Hyrcanus and keep him in safety, since if they withdrew and matters concerning Herod turned out as was likely, given his enmity with Caesar, they alone would be left to recover the throne, both because of their lineage and because of the goodwill of the people.
Although she urged this, Hyrcanus rejected her words at first, but since she was possessed by a kind of stubborn, womanish passion and would not let the matter rest by night or day, but was forever speaking of these things and of Herod's plot against them, he was at last persuaded to give a letter to a certain Dositheus, one of his friends, in which he had arranged for the Arab to send horsemen to receive him and escort him to the Sea of Asphaltitis, which lies three hundred stades from the borders of Jerusalem. He trusted Dositheus because the man was in attendance on him and on Alexandra, and had no small grievance against Herod: he was a kinsman of Joseph, whom Herod had put to death, and a brother of those killed at Tyre earlier by Antony.
Yet none of this induced Dositheus to remain faithful to Hyrcanus in this service; instead, preferring the hopes to be had from the reigning king over those of Hyrcanus, he handed the letter over to Herod. Herod, welcoming this show of loyalty, urged him to render one further service: to fold the letter, seal it, and deliver it to Malchus, and then to bring back whatever reply he received, since it mattered a great deal to know Malchus's own intentions.
Dositheus carried this out eagerly, and the Arab wrote back that he would receive Hyrcanus and all who were with him, and all the Jews who shared his views, and that he would send a force to bring them safely to him, and that Hyrcanus would lack nothing he might require. When Herod received this letter too, he at once summoned Hyrcanus and questioned him about the agreement he had made with Malchus. Hyrcanus denied it, but Herod showed the letters to the council and had the man put to death.
This is the account we give, as it is preserved in the memoirs of King Herod. But other writers do not agree with it in these particulars; they hold that Herod did not put Hyrcanus to death on such grounds, but rather brought the charge against him out of a plot devised in his own manner. For they write it this way: that at a certain banquet, giving no hint of suspicion, Herod put a question to Hyrcanus, asking whether he had received any letters from Malchus; and Hyrcanus admitted that he had received letters of greeting, and when asked further whether he had also received any gift, he replied that he had received nothing more than four riding animals sent to him. Herod, they say, twisted this into a charge of bribery and treason and ordered the man strangled. As evidence that he met such an end though guilty of nothing, they cite the mildness of his character, and the fact that he had shown no sign of rashness or impetuosity either in his youth or when he himself held the kingship, but even then had handed over most of the administration of affairs to Antipater. At that time, moreover, he was more than eighty years old, and he knew that Herod's power was now secure in every way; he had even crossed the Euphrates, leaving behind those on the far side who honored him, as though he meant to belong wholly to Herod from then on. It was, they argue, altogether implausible that a man of his nature would undertake anything or lay hold of any innovation, and that this charge was merely a pretext contrived by Herod.
Such, then, was the end that befell Hyrcanus, a man who experienced many and varied turns of fortune in the course of his life. At the very outset, while his mother Alexandra was queen, he was made high priest of the Jewish nation and held that honor for nine years. When he succeeded to the throne after his mother's death, he held it for only three months before he was driven out by his brother Aristobulus, and was afterward restored by Pompey, recovering all his honors, in which he continued for forty years. Deprived of them a second time by Antigonus and mutilated in body, he was taken captive by the Parthians. From there he returned home in due course, drawn by the hopes held out to him by Herod, none of which came to pass as he expected, so full of suffering was his life; and, most grievous of all, as we have already said, in his old age he met an end he did not deserve. For he seems in every way to have been a fair and moderate man, content to let most of the government be conducted by his ministers, being neither meddlesome nor skilled in the direction of a kingdom; and it was through his mildness that Antipater and Herod were able to advance to the position they reached, yet in the end they found from him no reward either just or pious for such an end as this.
When Herod had thus removed Hyrcanus from his path, he hastened to meet Caesar, unable to hope for anything good regarding his own position from the friendship he had had with Antony. He held Alexandra under suspicion, fearing that she might seize the opportunity to stir up the people to revolt and throw the affairs of the kingdom into turmoil. He therefore entrusted everything to his brother Pheroras, and settled his mother Cypros and his sister and his whole family at Masada, instructing them, if they should hear anything untoward concerning him, to hold fast to their position. As for his wife Mariamme, since it was not possible, given the ill feeling between her and his sister and mother, for her to share the same household with them, he settled her at Alexandreion together with her mother Alexandra, leaving Joseph the treasurer and Soaemus the Ituraean in charge of them there. These men had from the start been most loyal to him, and were now left, ostensibly to guard the women out of honor to them. But they had also received a secret order: if they should learn anything untoward concerning him, to make away with both women at once, and to preserve the kingdom, so far as lay in their power, for his children together with his brother Pheroras.
Having given these instructions, he himself hastened to Rhodes to meet Caesar. When he had sailed into the city, though he had laid aside his diadem, he yielded nothing of the rest of his dignity, and when he was granted an audience in the course of their meeting, he displayed all the more clearly the greatness of his spirit. He turned neither to entreaty, as might have been expected of one in such a position, nor did he offer any plea as a man who had done wrong, but gave an account of his actions without any attempt to minimize them.
He told Caesar that he had indeed enjoyed the greatest friendship with Antony, and had done everything within his power to see the outcome fall in Antony's favor, though he had not personally taken part in the campaign against the Arabs, but had instead sent him money and grain. Even this, he said, was less than what was owed by him; for a man who acknowledged himself a friend, and who knew Antony to be his benefactor, ought to have risked his whole self, in soul and body and possessions, on his behalf, in ways he himself had fallen short of doing as he should have. Yet, he said, he could take this much comfort in his own conduct, that he had not abandoned Antony after his defeat at Actium, nor gone over with his hopes to the winning side once fortune had plainly begun to shift; instead, he had kept himself, if not a worthy ally in arms, at least the most loyal counselor he could be to Antony, pointing out to him the one course by which he might still be saved and not fall from power altogether — to put Cleopatra to death; for with her removed, it would have been open to him both to rule his own affairs and more easily to reach an accommodation with Caesar in place of hostility. But Antony, giving no thought to any of this, chose folly, to his own ruin but to Caesar's advantage. "Now, therefore," he said, "if you judge my zeal by your anger at Antony, I will not deny what I have done, nor will I refuse to declare my goodwill toward him openly. But if you set the person aside and ask instead who I am toward my benefactors and what sort of friend I prove to be, you will be able to know us by the experience of what has already occurred; for though the name may change, the constancy of the friendship itself will be no less able to prove its worth in us."
By speaking in this way, and showing throughout the free and noble bearing of his spirit, he won no small hold over Caesar, who was himself a man of high ambition and magnanimity, so that the very charges brought against him now became grounds for building goodwill toward him. Caesar restored the diadem to him and, encouraging him to show himself no less devoted than he had formerly been toward Antony, held him thereafter in every honor, adding that Quintus Didius had written to him that Herod had given his full support, with every eagerness, in the affair of the gladiators. Held in such high regard, and seeing his kingdom, beyond all expectation, established once more on firmer ground than before, by the gift of Caesar and the decree of the Roman people, which Caesar had arranged for him to secure that stability, he escorted Caesar as far as Egypt, bestowing gifts beyond his means both on Caesar himself and on his friends, and displaying every kind of magnanimity.
He also asked, on behalf of one of Antony's intimate friends, that Alexander be spared any irreversible harm, but did not obtain this, since Caesar was already bound by an oath. He then returned to Judea with greater honor and confidence than before, and gave those who had expected the opposite outcome cause for astonishment, since he always seemed, by the favor of God, to come away from danger with even greater brilliance. Soon after this he was occupied with receiving Caesar, who was about to cross from Syria into Egypt. When Caesar arrived, Herod received him at Ptolemais with every mark of royal attendance, and furnished the army too with entertainment and abundance of provisions. He was ranked among Caesar's most devoted supporters, riding alongside him as he drew up his forces, and entertaining him and his friends, one hundred and fifty in number, all served in a manner of great expense and luxury.
He also supplied, to those crossing the waterless region, whatever provisions were urgently needed, so that neither wine nor water — the latter being in even greater demand among the soldiers — ran short. Caesar himself he presented with eight hundred talents, and gave everyone occasion to reflect that the resources he displayed in these services were far greater and more splendid than the kingdom he actually possessed. This did all the more to establish confidence in his goodwill and zeal, and he gained the greatest benefit from the needs of the moment by matching them with his own magnanimity. And when the leading men were returning again from Egypt, he showed himself inferior to none of them in the services he rendered.
At that time, however, once he was back in his kingdom, he found his household in turmoil, and his wife Mariamme and her mother Alexandra in a state of deep resentment. They believed — and their suspicion was not unfounded — that they had been placed in that stronghold not for the safety of their persons but, under guard, so that they might have no power over anything, not even over themselves, and they bore this bitterly. Mariamme, for her part, took the king's love for her to be nothing but pretense and a deception practiced for his own advantage, and she was distressed that, even if some harm should befall him, he had left her no hope of surviving on his account, recalling the orders that had been given to Joseph. So already she was working through flattery on the guards, and especially on Soaemus, since she perceived that everything lay in his hands. Soaemus, at first, was faithful, holding back nothing of what Herod had entrusted to him; but, worn down little by little through the words and gifts with which the women lavishly courted him more assiduously than he could resist, he at last disclosed every one of the king's instructions, above all because he did not expect Herod to return to the same position of power again; and in doing so he supposed he would gain no small favor with the women, who were likely, either as queens or as close kin to the king, not to fail of the standing they still held, but to have all the more reason to reward him if they should come to reign, or come near to the one who reigned. He was also encouraged in this hope
and would be no less unwilling, even if Herod returned having managed everything to his own satisfaction, to refuse his wife anything she wanted; for he knew that the king's love for Mariamme went beyond words. Mariamme was distressed to hear that these instructions had leaked out, seeing that there would be no end to the dangers she faced from Herod, and she was greatly troubled, praying not that she would meet with the same fate as the others, but judging that a life spent with him, if it came to that, would be unbearable.
She showed this later without concealing anything of what she felt. For when Herod, having succeeded in the great matters he had, beyond hope, brought off, sailed back and, as was natural, first brought the good news to his wife, singling her out above everyone else because of his love and their long intimacy, and greeted her warmly, she neither rejoiced at his account of his good fortune nor could conceal her feelings. Instead, out of a sense of her own degradation and abiding nobility, she groaned at his embraces and made it plain that his stories vexed her more than they pleased her, so that it became not merely suspicious but obvious, and it disturbed Herod. He was distressed to see his wife's inexplicable hatred of him showing so openly, and he was troubled by the whole affair; unable to bear his love for her, he could not settle either into anger or reconciliation, but kept passing from one to the other, and found himself in great perplexity over both. Caught in this way between hatred and affection, and often ready to punish her arrogance, because his soul had already been captured he grew too weak to remove the woman. In sum, he would gladly have punished her, yet he feared that in doing so he would unwittingly exact from himself, by her death, a greater penalty than hers.
His sister and his mother, seeing him disposed in this way toward Mariamme, thought this the best opportunity to bring their hatred of her to bear, and talked a great deal, provoking Herod with slanders capable of stirring up both hatred and jealousy at once. He did not receive such talk unwillingly, yet he did not feel confident enough, believing what he heard, to act against his wife; still, he grew ever worse disposed toward her, and their mutual passion kept rekindling itself, she not concealing her feelings and he always turning his love into anger. And some fatal act would have been done at once, had not news then arrived that Caesar was victorious in the war and that, with Antony and Cleopatra dead, he now held Egypt; hastening to meet Caesar, Herod left matters at home as they stood. As he was leaving, Mariamme came to see Soaemus off, acknowledged with much gratitude the care he had shown, and asked the king to grant him a district to govern. And he obtained this honor.
Herod, once in Egypt, met with Caesar with greater freedom of speech, now as a friend, and was honored most highly; for Caesar gave him the four hundred Galatians who had served as Cleopatra's bodyguard, and restored to him the territory that had been taken from him because of her. He also added to his kingdom Gadara, Hippos, and Samaria, and, on the coast, Gaza, Anthedon, Jaffa, and Strato's Tower.
Having achieved even this, he grew still more distinguished; he escorted Caesar as far as Antioch and then returned, and to the same degree that his outward circumstances seemed to him to be conducing to his happiness, to that same degree he suffered within his own household, and above all in his marriage, where he had earlier seemed most fortunate of all. For he had conceived a passion for Mariamme as great as any recorded in history, together with a just regard for her.
She, in most respects, was chaste and faithful to him, but she had by nature a certain harshness mixed with her womanly qualities. Since he was enslaved to his desire for her and allowed her to reign and rule over him, without reckoning this into account for the times, she often treated him insolently; and this he bore with self-control and even generosity, pretending not to notice. But openly she mocked her mother-in-law and sister-in-law for their low birth and spoke ill of them, so that there was already faction and irreconcilable hatred among the women, and at that time even greater slanders. The suspicion, nursed along, lasted the length of a year from the time Herod returned from Caesar. But what had long been brewing finally broke out from the following occasion.
The king lay down to rest at midday and, out of the affection he always felt for her, summoned Mariamme. She came in, but did not lie down with him; instead she scorned him and, as he pressed her, reviled him further, saying that he had killed her father and her brother. He bore this insult badly and was on the verge of some rash act, when Salome, the king's sister, noticing his deepening agitation, sent in the cupbearer, who had long been prepared for this, instructing him to say that Mariamme had persuaded him to prepare a love-potion for her to use on the king. If the king grew alarmed and asked what this meant, he was to say that she had a drug which she had urged him to administer, and that if he showed no interest in the love-potion, he should let the matter drop, since it posed no danger to him. Having coached him in this, she sent him in at that very moment to speak with the king.
He came in persuasively and with apparent urgency, saying that Mariamme had given him gifts and was trying to persuade him to give the king a love-potion. When Herod was disturbed by this and asked what the potion was, he said it was a drug given him by her, whose power he himself did not know, and that for this reason he thought it safer to report it, both for his own sake and the king's. Hearing such words, Herod, already ill-disposed toward her, grew still more provoked, and had the eunuch, who was most trusted by Mariamme, tortured concerning the drug, knowing that nothing, great or small, could be done without his knowledge. The man, under duress, had nothing to say of the matter for which he was tortured, but he did say that the woman's hatred toward the king had arisen because of things Soaemus had told her.
While he was still speaking this, the king cried out loudly that Soaemus, who had been most loyal to him and his kingdom in every other respect, would never have betrayed his orders unless he had also gone further, into intimacy with Mariamme. He at once ordered Soaemus seized and put to death. As for his wife, he handed the judgment over to a court, gathering his closest associates and pressing the accusation with great vehemence concerning the alleged love-potions and drugs. He was unrestrained in his speech and more prone to anger than to fair judgment, and in the end, seeing him in this state, those present condemned her to death.
Once the verdict was passed, some such thought also arose in him, and in some of those present, that she should not be put to death so precipitately, but rather confined in one of the kingdom's fortresses. But Salome's faction pressed hard to have the woman put out of the way, and persuaded the king, warning him to guard against the disturbances of the populace should she happen to remain alive. And so Mariamme was led away to her death.
Alexandra, observing the moment, and realizing that she had little hope of escaping a similar fate at Herod's hands, changed her attitude in a manner utterly contrary to her earlier boldness, and quite unbecoming. Wishing to make clear her ignorance of the charges her daughter faced, she rushed forward and, reviling her own daughter in front of everyone, cried out that she had been wicked and ungrateful to her husband and deserved to suffer such things for having dared to do them; for she had not repaid as she ought the benefactor of them all.
While she was play-acting in this shameless way, even daring to lay hold of her daughter's hair, there was, as one would expect, much condemnation from the onlookers of her unseemly pretense; but it showed itself even more clearly in the woman about to die herself. For Mariamme neither answered a word from the start nor, disturbed by her mother's ill grace, so much as glanced at her, but by her bearing made plain that she was troubled far more by her mother's shamelessly displayed misconduct than by her own peril. She herself went to her death with unshaken composure and unchanged color, revealing her nobility to those watching even in her final moments.
And so she died, a woman outstanding both in self-mastery and in greatness of spirit; but she lacked fair-mindedness, and there was more of a contentious streak in her nature. In beauty of body and in the dignity of her bearing in company she surpassed the women of her time by far, and this gave her the greater occasion for failing to live so as to please the king or for her own pleasure; for, being courted because of his love, and expecting nothing untoward from him, she indulged in an unmeasured freedom of speech. She was also vexed on account of her own family, and thought it right to tell Herod everything she had suffered, and in the end she succeeded in making his mother and sister her enemies, and even the king himself, the one man on whom alone she had relied not to suffer anything unpleasant.
Once she was put to death, the king's desire for her only blazed up the more, he being disposed as we described earlier; for the love he had for her was not the ordinary sort born of familiarity, but had begun from the first as something like frenzy, and had not been overcome by the license of their life together into growing any less. Then indeed it seemed, as if in some vengeance for Mariamme's destruction, to fasten upon him all the more; he often called out for her, and often gave way to unseemly lamentation, and devised everything he could to distract himself, arranging drinking parties and gatherings, but none of it was enough.
He therefore neglected the administration of the kingdom's affairs, and was so overcome by his passion that he actually ordered his servants to summon Mariamme, as though she were still alive and able to answer. While he was in this state a plague broke out, which destroyed most of the common people and the most honored of his friends, and gave everyone occasion to suspect that this had come about through divine wrath for the lawless act committed against Mariamme. This too weighed further upon the king, and in the end, giving himself over to the wilderness, and under pretext of hunting parties wandering there in his distress, he did not last many days before falling into a most severe illness: an inflammation, together with
a pain at the back of the head, and a derangement of the mind. None of the treatments applied did any good, but rather, working against him, brought him near despair. All the physicians who attended him, since none of the remedies they administered had any effect on the disease, and since the king could do nothing but follow whatever his illness compelled, allowed him whatever he demanded, entrusting to fortune the slim hope of recovery that lay in his choice of regimen. And so he was nursed in this fashion in Samaria, which had been renamed Sebaste.
Meanwhile Alexandra, residing in Jerusalem and learning of his condition, was eager to gain control of the fortresses around the city. There were two of them, one belonging to the city itself, the other to the Temple, and whoever held these had the whole nation in their power; for the sacrifices could not be performed without them, and no Jew could be brought to give up performing these more readily than to give up life itself, or the worship they were accustomed to render to God. Alexandra therefore made her approach to those in command of these garrisons,
arguing that it was proper for them to hand over control to her and to Herod's children, so that no one else might seize power before someone else forestalled it, in the event of his death; for should he recover, no one would guard the interests of his family more securely than his own closest kin. They did not take her words kindly; being loyal men, and having been so throughout the earlier period, they remained all the more so at that time, both out of hatred for Alexandra and because they considered it not even lawful to give up on Herod while he still lived.
For they had long been his friends, one of them being even the king's own cousin, Achiabus. They therefore sent at once and reported Alexandra's design to him. He, without any delay, ordered her put to death; but he himself, having barely and with great suffering survived his illness, was harsh in spirit and body alike, worn down as he was, prone to displeasure, and ready on every pretext to inflict punishment on those who fell into his hands.
He put to death even his closest friends, Costobarus and Lysimachus, and the man called Antipater of Gadara, and also Dositheus, for the following reason. Costobarus was by birth an Idumaean, of the first rank among his people, whose ancestors had served as priests of Koze, a god the Idumaeans worship.
When Hyrcanus had converted their political constitution to Jewish customs and laws, Herod, upon taking over the kingdom, appointed Costobarus governor of Idumaea and Gaza, and gave him his sister Salome in marriage, having put to death Joseph, who had previously married her, as we have related. Costobarus, having gained this good fortune gladly and beyond his expectation, was carried away by his success and gradually overstepped his bounds, thinking it neither honorable for himself to obey Herod's commands as his ruler, nor right that the Idumaeans, who had adopted Jewish customs, should remain subject to the Jews.
He therefore sent word to Cleopatra of Idumaea, claiming that he had always been descended from her ancestors, and that it was therefore just for him to ask Antony for the territory; for he himself was ready to transfer his loyalty to her. He did this not out of any greater regard for Cleopatra's rule, but because, if Herod were stripped of the greater part of his kingdom, he thought it would then be easy for him to rule over the Idumaean nation on his own account, and to achieve even greater things; for his ambitions ranged far, having no small resources of birth and of wealth, which he had amassed through continual dishonest gain, and he contemplated nothing modest. Cleopatra, however, having asked Antony for this territory, failed to obtain it. Word of these dealings reached Herod,
and though he was ready to put Costobarus to death, still, at the entreaty of his sister and his mother, he let him go and thought him worthy of pardon, though he did not thereafter regard him as free of suspicion for what he had attempted at that time. Some time later it happened that Salome quarreled with Costobarus, and she at once sent him a bill of divorce, dissolving the marriage, though this was not in accordance with Jewish law;
Among us it is permitted for a man to do this, but a woman may not, even once separated from her husband, marry another on her own authority unless her former husband consents. Salome, however, chose not the law of her own people but the law that came from power: she renounced the marriage on her own initiative and told her brother Herod that she was leaving her husband out of goodwill toward him, since she had learned that Costobarus, together with Antipater, Lysimachus, and Dositheus, was aiming at revolution.
As proof of her word she offered the sons of Sabba, who, she said, had been kept alive by him for the past twelve years already. This was in fact true, and it struck the king with great astonishment, coming as it did against all expectation; he was all the more disturbed by the strangeness of the report. The case of the sons of Sabba was one he had earlier been eager to pursue, treating them as enemies by disposition, but by then, through the long passage of time, it had faded even from memory.
The hostility and hatred toward them had arisen in the following way. While Antigonus held the kingship, Herod was besieging the city of Jerusalem with his forces, and under the pressure of the hardships that beset those under siege, more and more of the besieged were calling for Herod and inclining their hopes toward him. But the sons of Sabba, men of standing and influence with the populace, remained loyal to Antigonus throughout, continually slandering Herod and urging that the kingship be kept, in accordance with descent, for the ruling family. This was the policy they pursued, believing at the same time that it served their own advantage. When the city was captured and Herod had gained control of affairs, Costobarus, who had been appointed to block the exits and guard the city so that none of the citizens who owed debts, or who worked against the king's interests, might slip away, and who knew that the sons of Sabba were held in high regard and honor by the whole populace, judged that their preservation would count for much toward him in the event of a change of fortune. He therefore hid them away and concealed them on his own estates.
For the time being he satisfied Herod, since a suspicion of the truth had gotten about, by swearing an oath that he knew nothing of their whereabouts, and was thereby cleared of suspicion. But afterward, when the king issued proclamations and offered rewards for information and devised every means of search, Costobarus still did not come to confess, but having once denied it, he was convinced that being caught with the men discovered would cost him no less than it already had, and so, out of both goodwill and now necessity, he persisted in keeping them hidden. When word of this was brought to the king through his sister, he sent men to the places where they were reported to be staying and put both them and their accomplices to death, so that nothing was left of Hyrcanus's kindred, and the kingship became wholly his own, with no man of standing left to stand in the way of his lawless acts.
For this reason he departed still further from the customs of his ancestors, and through foreign practices he undermined the ancient order of things, which had until then remained untouched — and from this we have suffered no small harm even down to our own time, through the neglect of all that had formerly led the people toward piety. First of all he established a contest of athletic games held every five years in honor of Caesar, and he built a theater in Jerusalem, and after that a very great amphitheater on the plain, both magnificent in their expense but foreign to Jewish custom, since the use and display of such spectacles is not part of our tradition.
He nevertheless made the celebration of this five-yearly festival most splendid, announcing it to the surrounding nations and summoning participants from every people. Athletes and the rest of the competitors were called from every land, drawn by hope of the prizes offered and by the glory of victory, and the foremost men in every discipline gathered there; for he offered the greatest of prizes not only to those who trained in gymnastic contests, but also to those engaged in music and to the so-called performers on the stage, and great pains were taken that all the most distinguished men should come to compete. He also offered no small rewards for four-horse chariots, two-horse chariots, and single riders, and he imitated everything that anywhere was pursued with lavish expense or solemn splendor, out of rivalry to make the display renowned for himself. The theater itself was ringed about with inscriptions concerning Caesar, and with trophies of the nations he had won in war, all of them made of refined gold and silver for him. And as for the equipment used, there was nothing so costly, whether of clothing or of jeweled ornament, that was not put on display together with the contests to be seen.
Provision was also made for wild beasts — a great many lions were gathered for him, along with other animals of exceptional strength or of a rarer kind — and combats were arranged between the beasts themselves and against condemned men thrown to fight them. To foreigners this was at once astonishing for its expense and a source of thrilling entertainment in the dangers of the spectacle, but to the people of the land it was a plain overthrow of the customs they held in honor. It appeared, from the outset, an act of impiety to throw men to wild beasts for the pleasure of an audience of men, and no less impious to exchange their ancestral customs for foreign practices. But what grieved them more than anything were the trophies: believing that these were images encased in armor — since it was not their ancestral custom to venerate such things — they were greatly displeased.
Nor did their agitation escape Herod's notice. He thought it untimely to use force, and so he tried, in private conversation, to soothe some of them and free them from their superstitious fear. He did not, however, persuade them; instead, out of resentment at what they thought he was doing wrong, they cried out with one voice that even if everything else might be tolerable, they could not endure images of men set up in the city — meaning the trophies — for that, they said, was not their ancestral custom. Herod, seeing them so disturbed and unlikely to be easily won over unless given some reassurance, summoned the most eminent among them, brought them into the theater, and, pointing to the trophies, asked what exactly they supposed these things to be. When they cried out, "Images of men," he ordered the outer trappings stripped away and showed them the bare wood beneath. As soon as they were stripped of their coverings, the objects became a source of laughter, and this did much to dissolve the derision the people had already directed, even before this, at the manufacture of such statues.
Having in this way outmaneuvered the crowd and dissolved the impulse of anger they had felt, most of them changed their minds and were no longer indignant; but some persisted in their resentment of these practices so foreign to custom, and, holding that the overthrow of ancestral traditions was the beginning of great evils, they judged it a righteous risk to run rather than seem to look on passively while Herod, altering their way of life by force, introduced customs foreign to it — a man who was king in name but who, in fact, showed himself an enemy of the whole nation. As a result, ten citizens bound themselves by oath to undertake every risk, hiding daggers under their cloaks; among their number, sworn along with them, was a blind man, who had joined out of indignation at what he had heard done and at his own loss of sight — not that he was capable of any active part in carrying out the attempt, but he placed himself in readiness to suffer whatever befell the others, so that his presence might make the impulse of the conspirators no less determined on his account. Once resolved on this, they went by a signal into the theater, hoping that Herod himself would not escape them if they fell on him unseen, and believing that even if they failed to reach him, they would kill many of those around him — and that this alone would be enough, even should they themselves die, to bring home to the king and to that whole people the outrages they thought he was committing.
They stood ready, then, in such eagerness beforehand; but one of the men Herod had appointed to look into and report such matters had discovered the whole plot, and denounced it to the king just as he was about to enter the theater. Herod, thinking the report not implausible — bearing in mind the hatred he knew many bore him, as well as the disturbances that kept arising over each new measure — withdrew to the palace and summoned by name the men under suspicion. When his attendants fell upon them, they knew at once they could not escape, being caught in the act; but they adorned the necessary end of their fate by yielding nothing of their resolve. Without shame and without denying the deed, they displayed the daggers already seized from them, and declared that the conspiracy had been formed honorably and with piety — not for the sake of any gain or any private grievance, but above all for the sake of the common customs, which it was right for all either to preserve or to die for beforehand.
Having thus spoken out boldly in defense of their undertaking, they were led away by the king's men who surrounded them, and after enduring every torment, they perished. Not long afterward, some men, out of hatred, seized the informer who had exposed them and not only killed him but cut him limb from limb and threw him to the dogs. Though many of the citizens witnessed what was done, no one denounced them, until Herod, making the investigation harsher and more relentless, had certain women put to torture, and they confessed what they had seen done. The men responsible for the act were punished, their entire households included, as Herod pursued their recklessness; but the persistence of this hostility, and the unshakable loyalty to the laws that lay behind it, made Herod uneasy unless he could secure his rule with complete safety. He therefore resolved to surround the populace from every side, so that no uprising, should any occur, could go undetected.
To this end the city itself was already fortified for him by the citadel in which he resided, and the Temple by the strength of the fortress called Antonia, built by him nearby; as a third stronghold against the whole people, he conceived of Samaria, which he named Sebaste, believing that it would strengthen his hold over the country no less, since it lay a single day's journey from Jerusalem and would be useful and serviceable both to those in the city and to those in the countryside. For the whole nation he also built a fortress at the place once called Strato's Tower, renamed Caesarea by him. And in the great plain he set apart land for his elite cavalry and founded there a settlement called Gaba, and in Perea one called Esebonitis. In these and other particular measures he was constantly devising something further for his security, dividing the whole nation under garrisons so that it might least of all fall into disorder through its own freedom of action — disorders which even the smallest disturbance, once begun, regularly gave rise to — and so that, should anyone stir up trouble, it would not escape notice, since men were always stationed nearby who could both perceive it and prevent it.
At that time, having set his mind on fortifying Samaria, he made a practice of settling there many of those who had fought alongside him in his wars, as well as many of the neighboring peoples, both out of ambition to raise up something new — since the place had not previously been counted among the notable cities — and, still more, because his ambition here served his own security. He changed its name, calling it Sebaste, and he distributed the best of the surrounding land among the settlers, so that they might live in prosperity from the very outset; and he surrounded the city with a strong wall, using the steepness of the site to increase its defensive strength, and giving it a size not like its former one but such that it fell short of none of the most celebrated cities — for its circuit measured twenty stadia. Within it, at its center, he laid out a sacred precinct of three and a half stadia, adorned in every way, and in it he raised a temple that in size and beauty rivaled the most celebrated of temples; and in its several parts he adorned the city throughout, seeing to what was necessary for security by making it, through the strength of its enclosing walls, a fortress serving a greater purpose, while attending also to its outward beauty, since it suited his love of splendor and his wish to leave behind, for later times, monuments of his generosity.
In this year, the thirteenth of Herod's reign, the greatest calamities befell the land, whether because God was angered or because the evil came about in the natural course of recurring cycles. First there were unbroken droughts, so that the earth, being barren, produced nothing of what it should have; and then, as the people's way of life was disrupted by the shortage of grain, bodily illnesses set in and a plague-like affliction took hold, the two evils continually feeding one another. For the lack of medical care and of food made the pestilential disease, once it had begun to rage, all the worse, and the destruction wrought among those perishing in this way stripped even the survivors of their courage, since they were unable to provide for their own wants through any care of their own. And with the year's crops destroyed, and whatever had earlier been stored away now used up, nothing was left to give ground for good hope, since the evil, as far as one could judge, was only intensifying, and not merely for that one year — so that they were left with nothing in reserve, and even the seed grain that had survived was lost, the earth failing to yield even a second time. Necessity forced many innovations to meet these needs.
The king himself found his own resources no less strained, since he had been deprived of the revenues he drew from the land and had spent his money lavishly on the cities he was improving. There seemed nothing that could offer any relief, given how far the calamity had already taken hold, together with the hatred his subjects bore him — for ill fortune is always quick to find fault with those in power. In such circumstances he considered how to meet the crisis. It was difficult, since even those nearby who had grain had none to sell, having suffered no less themselves, and money was lacking as well, even if it had been possible to acquire a little at the cost of much. Yet, judging it right in every way not to neglect the relief effort, he broke up the ornamentation kept in his own palace, made of silver and gold, sparing neither the fine workmanship of its craftsmanship nor whatever else was costly by art. He sent the proceeds to Egypt, since Petronius now held that province from Caesar. Petronius, with no small number of people having taken refuge with him for the same needs, being besides a personal friend of Herod's and wishing to see those under him preserved, gave Herod's men first right to export grain, and assisted him in every way with the purchase and shipment, so that this relief effort proved to be either the greater part, or the whole, of what was accomplished. For Herod, once these supplies arrived, added to them his own personal attention, and thereby not only won over the minds of those who had before been ill-disposed toward him, but made the greatest display of his goodwill and care for his people. First of all,
He assigned to as many as could manage it themselves the task of preparing their own food, and made a most exact distribution of the grain. Since many were unable, through old age or some other infirmity, to prepare their food for themselves, he took care of them too, setting up bakers and supplying them with bread ready made. He also took care that they should not pass the winter in danger, now that a shortage of clothing had struck as well, since the flocks had perished and been entirely used up, so that there was no wool to be had nor any other material for covering. When he had procured this for them too, he turned to bestowing benefits on the neighboring cities, distributing seed to the people of Syria. This service proved no less useful to him than the grain, since his generosity was so well aimed at producing abundance that everyone had enough food. In sum, when the harvest showed itself over the land, he sent out to the country not less than fifty thousand people whom he himself had fed and kept alive, and in this way, having restored his kingdom, afflicted as it was, with the utmost zeal and diligence, he relieved no less the surrounding peoples who were suffering the same hardships. For there was no one who came to him in need who went away without securing help suited to his situation. Indeed peoples and cities, and such private individuals as found themselves in want because they had many dependents, took refuge with him and obtained what they asked, so that, by calculation, the total quantity of grain given to those outside his realm came to ten thousand cors—a cor holding ten Attic medimni—while that given within the kingdom itself came to about eighty thousand. This care of his, and the timeliness of his generosity, had such an effect, both among the Jews themselves and in reports spread among others, that the old hatred stirred up by his tampering with some of their customs was banished from his kingdom and from the whole nation, and in its place appeared, as a kind of exchange, the outstanding generosity he had shown in relieving the direst distress. He gained fame abroad as well, and it seems that the hardships that befell him proved, beyond expectation, of benefit to him: having ravaged his kingdom, they did him no small service in the matter of his reputation, for by showing, against expectation, a magnanimous spirit in the midst of scarcity, he won over the multitude, so that they came to judge, as though from the beginning, not by the record of his past deeds but by the care he had displayed in a time of need.
Around that time he also sent Caesar an auxiliary force of five hundred picked men from his bodyguard, whom Aelius Gallus led to the Red Sea, and they proved useful to him in many things. Again, then, as his affairs prospered toward increase, he built a palace in the upper city, raising enormous halls and adorning them at very great expense with gold, stone, and paneling, so that each of them could hold great numbers of men reclining at table, and they were named according to their size—one was called Caesar's, the other Agrippa's.
He also acquired a wife, moved by erotic desire, taking no account at all of what was fitting for a life lived for his own pleasure. The beginning of his marriages came about as follows. There was a certain Simon, a Jerusalemite, son of one Boethus of Alexandria, a priest of some standing among the notable men, who had a daughter reputed the most beautiful of the time. When talk of her arose among the people of Jerusalem, Herod at first was stirred merely by hearsay, but when he saw her and was struck by the girl's beauty, he disapproved altogether of resorting to the exercise of sheer power—suspecting, rightly, that this would be denounced as violence and tyranny—and thought it better to take the girl in marriage. Since Simon was of too modest a rank to become kin to him, yet too considerable to be despised, he pursued his desire by the more decent course, raising them both and making them more honored: at once, then, he removed Jesus son of Phiabi from the high priesthood and appointed Simon in his place of honor, and so contracted the alliance with him. When the marriage had been completed,
he also built a fortress on the site where he had defeated the Jews when Antigonus held power after Herod had been driven from his rule. This fortress is about sixty stadia from Jerusalem; it is naturally strong and most suitable for construction, being a hill of fair height, artificially raised so as to be shaped like a breast, ringed about with round towers, and having a steep ascent built up with two hundred polished steps. Within it are luxurious royal apartments, built for security as much as for splendor; around the base of the hill are buildings well worth seeing, in particular for the conveyance of water—for the place itself had none—achieved only after long labor and great expense. The level ground round about is built up as a city no smaller than others, with the hill serving as its acropolis over the rest of the settlement.
With everything having turned out as he had hoped, he had no fear whatsoever of disturbances within his own kingdom, having secured the obedience of his subjects on both counts—through fear, since he was implacable in inflicting punishment, and through care, since he was found magnanimous in reversals of fortune. He surrounded himself with external security as well, treating it, so to speak, as a fortification for his subjects: he dealt skillfully and kindly with cities and cultivated the favor of rulers by the opportunities he gave each of them for benefaction, making his gifts the greater, and having a nature magnanimous in a way well suited to kingship, so that everything of his kept increasing in every respect as his fortunes always advanced further. But because of his ambition in this regard, and the attentions he paid to Caesar and the most powerful of the Romans, he was compelled to depart from his own customs and to corrupt many of his people's laws, out of ambition founding cities and raising temples—not within the land of the Jews, for they would not have tolerated such things, since it is forbidden among us to honor images and figures shaped after the Greek fashion—but he built up the outlying country and the surrounding regions in this way, excusing himself to the Jews on the ground that he did nothing of his own will but by command and order, while to Caesar and the Romans he represented it as gratifying them to a degree that fell not short even of the honor due his own people's customs; in reality, however, he aimed at the whole of it, or rather was ambitious to leave behind greater monuments of his rule for posterity. Hence he also busied himself with the repair of cities and made very great expenditures for this purpose.
Noticing also a place by the sea most suitable for receiving a city, formerly called Strato's Tower, he set about it on a magnificent plan, raising every building not carelessly but out of white stone, and adorning it with the most costly palaces and civic residences; but the greatest and most laborious achievement was a harbor safe from storms, of a size to match the Piraeus, containing berths within it and secondary anchorages, and remarkable for its construction, since the site itself offered nothing suited to so great an undertaking, but it was completed by imported materials and vast expenditure. The city lies in Phoenicia, along the coastal route to Egypt, between Joppa and Dora, small towns on the shore that are hard to put in at because of the exposure to the southwest wind, which continually drags the sand from the sea onto the shore and does not allow landing, so that merchants are generally forced to ride at anchor offshore. Correcting this awkward feature of the place, he marked out the circuit of the harbor to the extent needed for great fleets to ride at anchor by the shore, and let down enormous stones into the depth to twenty fathoms. Most of these were fifty feet in length, not less than eighteen in width, and nine in depth—some larger, some smaller. The foundation, so far as it went, was laid out to two hundred feet against the sea. Half of this was set forward to break the waves, so that the surge, broken there, would be repelled—hence it was called the breakwater—while the rest carried a stone wall broken by towers, the largest of which is named Drusion, a very fine structure indeed, taking its name from Drusus, Caesar's stepson, who died young. Continuous vaulted chambers had been built to receive sailors, and before them a broad landing quay ran round in a circle, crowning the whole harbor, a most pleasant place to walk for those who wished it. The entrance and the mouth of the harbor were made to face north, the clearest quarter of the winds. At the base of the whole enclosure, on the left as one sails in, stands a tower firmly founded to hold out for a long time, and on the right two great stones, larger than the tower on the other side, standing upright and joined together. Round about the harbor in a circle are continuous dwellings built of the smoothest stone, and in the middle a certain rise, on which stands a temple of Caesar, visible far out to those sailing in, containing a statue of Roma and one of Caesar; and the city itself is called Caesarea, having obtained the finest material and construction. The parts beneath the city—sewers and passages—involve no less labor than the buildings above; some of these run at regular intervals to the harbor and the sea, while one runs crosswise and girds them all, so that rainwater and the refuse of the inhabitants are easily carried off together, and the sea, when it presses in from outside, flows through and washes out the whole city. He also built in it a theater, and behind the southern part of the harbor an amphitheater capable of holding a great crowd of people, positioned conveniently to look out over the sea. The city was thus completed in twelve years, the king never flagging in the labor nor falling short in the expense.
While engaged in such matters, and with Sebaste now already a city, he decided to send his sons Alexander and Aristobulus to Rome, to meet with Caesar. When they arrived there, their lodging was the house of Pollio, a man among those most devoted to friendship with Herod, but they were also permitted to lodge among Caesar's own household; for Caesar received the boys with every kindness, and granted Herod the right to settle the kingdom on whichever of his sons he wished, and further gave him the territory of Trachonitis, Batanea, and Auranitis—granting it for the following reason. A certain Zenodorus had leased the estate of Lysanias. Since the revenues did not suffice for him, he drew a larger income by keeping the brigands active in Trachonitis; for men living there by lawlessness plundered the territory of the Damascenes, and Zenodorus neither restrained them but shared in the profits himself. The neighboring peoples, suffering badly, cried out against Varro, then governing the province, and asked that they be allowed to write to Caesar about Zenodorus's wrongdoing. When this was reported to him, Caesar wrote back ordering the brigands destroyed, and assigned the territory to Herod, so that through his care the region around Trachonitis would no longer prove troublesome to its neighbors—for it was not easy to restrain men who had made brigandage a habit and had no other means of living; they had neither cities nor landed property, but hideouts underground and caves, and shared their existence with their flocks. They had also devised reservoirs of water and stores of food able to hold out for a very long time hidden from view. Their entrances were narrow, admitting only one person at a time, but the interior was worked out to an unbelievable size for spaciousness; the ground above their dwellings was not high, but level as it were with the plain. The rock throughout was hard and difficult to traverse, unless one used a path under guidance, for even the paths do not run straight but wind in many coils. Once these men were prevented from doing harm to their neighbors, brigandage turned against one another, so that no form of lawlessness was left untried among them. Having received this favor from Caesar, Herod entered the region and, with knowledge of the paths to guide him, put a stop to the wrongdoers and provided the surrounding peoples with untroubled peace.
Zenodorus, aggrieved first at the loss of his province, and still more out of envy that Herod had come into possession of the rule, went up to Rome to accuse him. But he returned having accomplished nothing. Agrippa was sent as Caesar's deputy over the provinces beyond the Ionian Sea, and Herod, meeting him wintering near Mytilene—for he was on the closest and most familiar terms of friendship with him—returned again to Judea. Some Gadarenes came before Agrippa to accuse Herod, and he, without even giving them a hearing, sent them back to the king in chains. The Arabs too, who had long been ill-disposed toward Herod's rule, were now stirred up and attempted to raise trouble against him, on this occasion with a cause that seemed more plausible: Zenodorus, already despairing of his own position, had hastened to sell a part of his province, Auranitis, to them for fifty talents. Since this was included in Caesar's grant, they disputed it as unjustly taken from them, at times resorting to raids and attempts at force, at other times going to plead their case; they also won over to their side those soldiers who were poor and ill-disposed, men always full of expectation and inclined toward revolution, the very thing in which those who fare badly in life most delight. Herod, though he knew these things had long been in preparation, nevertheless, out of calculation rather than hostility, sought to calm the disturbances, thinking it wrong to give them any occasion. Now when the seventeenth year of his reign had already come, Caesar arrived in Syria, and at that time most of the inhabitants of Gadara cried out against Herod, saying he was harsh in his exactions and tyrannical. They ventured this chiefly because Zenodorus was pressing the matter and slandering him, having sworn oaths that he would not give up until he had by every means both stripped Herod of his kingdom and added it to Caesar's administration. Persuaded by him, the Gadarenes made no small outcry, emboldened by the fact that even those handed over by Agrippa had not been punished, Herod having let them go and having done no wrong—for if anyone else seemed implacable toward his own household, he was magnanimous in pardoning wrongs committed by others. So when they accused him of outrages, plunder, and the destruction of temples, Herod, undisturbed, was ready to make his defense, and Caesar received him kindly, in no way altered in his goodwill by the disturbance of the crowd.
On the first day the arguments about these matters were presented, but on the following days the hearing did not proceed further. For the people of Gadara, seeing which way Caesar and the council were leaning, and expecting-as was likely-that they would be handed over to the king, and fearing torture, some cut their own throats that night, some threw themselves from heights, and others flung themselves into the river and perished by their own will.
This was taken as an admission of their rashness and wrongdoing, and Caesar, without any further delay, cleared Herod of the charges. And on top of what had already happened there came no small stroke of good fortune: Zenodorus, his spleen having ruptured and much blood draining away through his illness, died at Antioch in Syria. Caesar then gave Herod no small part of Zenodorus's former territory, the land lying between Trachonitis and Galilee-Ulatha, Panias, and the surrounding country. He attached it to the administration of Syria, instructing the governors to act in all matters in consultation with Herod. Altogether Herod's good fortune reached such a height that, of the two men who then governed the vast Roman world, Caesar and, after him, Agrippa, Caesar valued no one above Herod except Agrippa, and Agrippa placed Herod first in his friendship after Caesar himself.
Enjoying such standing, Herod asked Caesar to grant a tetrarchy to his brother Pheroras, assigning it out of his own kingdom an income of a hundred talents, so that if anything happened to him, Pheroras's position would be secure and not fall under the control of Herod's own sons by his wife. When he had escorted Caesar to the coast on his departure, Herod on his return built for him a magnificent temple of white stone in the district of Zenodorus, near the place called Panium. There is a very beautiful cave in a mountain there, beneath which the ground falls away into a deep chasm, choked with still water of unfathomable depth, and above it rises an enormous mountain; beneath the cave the springs of the Jordan river break forth.
Herod further adorned this already famous spot with the temple, which he dedicated to Caesar. At that time he also remitted a third of the taxes to the people of his kingdom, ostensibly so they might recover from a bad harvest, but in fact chiefly to win back their goodwill, since they had grown hostile to him. For in carrying out such measures as his-since their religious observance was being disrupted and their customs overturned-they had taken it hard, and there was talk everywhere among the people, who were constantly stirred up and agitated.
Herod, for his part, applied great vigilance against any such unrest, depriving people of opportunities for it and requiring that they be constantly occupied with labor; no assembly of the townspeople was permitted, nor any association for walking together or shared meals-everything was kept under watch. Those who were caught faced harsh punishments, and many, both openly and secretly, were taken away to the fortress of Hyrcania and there put to death. Both in the city and on the roads there were men keeping watch on those who gathered together. It is said that Herod himself did not neglect this business, but often disguised himself as an ordinary man and mixed among the crowds at night, testing what opinion they held of his rule.
As for those who were altogether defiant and refused to accommodate themselves to his ways, he hunted them down by every means; but the rest of the populace he required to bind themselves by oath of loyalty, compelling them to swear that they would maintain their goodwill toward his rule. Most people yielded to what he demanded, out of servility or fear, but those who showed independence of spirit and resented being forced into it he removed from his path by every means. He also tried to persuade the followers of Pollio the Pharisee and Samaias, and most of those who associated with them, to take the oath; but they neither agreed to it, nor were they punished as the other refusers were, since out of respect for Pollio they were spared. The Essenes, as we call them, were also excused from this obligation-a group that follows a way of life like that established among the Greeks by Pythagoras.
I discuss these matters more fully elsewhere. But it is worth explaining why Herod honored the Essenes and held them in higher regard than their mortal station would suggest, for the account is not unsuitable to the character of this history and will also illustrate what opinion was held of them. There was a certain Essene named Manahem, renowned for the excellence of his character and way of life, and possessing foreknowledge of the future granted by God.
This man, seeing Herod while he was still a boy attending his lessons, hailed him as king of the Jews. Herod, thinking the man either did not know him or was mocking him, reminded him that he was merely a private citizen. Manahem, smiling gently and striking him on the buttocks with his hand, said, 'Nevertheless you will be king,'
'and you will bring your rule to a happy conclusion, for you have been found worthy by God. And remember the blows of Manahem, so that this too may serve you as a token of the reversals of fortune. For the best course of reasoning would be this: if you were to love justice and piety toward God and fairness toward your citizens; but I know well that you will not be such a man, knowing the whole of it.',
'For in good fortune you will surpass nearly everyone and win eternal renown, but you will forget piety and justice. These things will not escape God's notice, and at the close of your life his wrath will be remembered against you in requital for them.' At the time Herod paid hardly any attention to these words, having no hope of such things; but as he gradually rose, even to kingship, and prospered',
in the greatness of his rule, he sent for Manahem and asked him how long he would reign. Manahem did not tell him the whole of it; but when Herod pressed him with his silence, asking only whether he would have ten years of kingship, he added twenty, and then thirty, without ever fixing an outer limit to the term. Herod, satisfied even with this, dismissed Manahem
with a warm handshake, and from then on continued to honor all the Essenes. Even though these matters may seem strange, I have thought it worthwhile to relate them to my readers and to make plain something about our own people, since many among them are held worthy of such gifts because of their virtue and their knowledge of divine things. It was then, in the eighteenth year of Herod's reign, after the events already related, that he undertook a work of no ordinary kind:
to rebuild the temple of God at his own expense, making its precinct larger and raising it to a more fitting height, believing that this, more than anything he had done, would prove-as indeed it did-the most conspicuous of all his achievements and would suffice to secure him everlasting remembrance. Knowing that the people were not eager for this and that it would not be easy given the scale of the undertaking, he thought it best to prepare them first with a speech before attempting the whole project, and so he called them together and spoke as follows.
'Of the other things I have accomplished during my reign, fellow countrymen, I think it superfluous to speak, although they were carried out in such a way as to bring less adornment to me than security to you. For neither in the most difficult circumstances did I neglect what served your needs, nor in my building projects did I pursue my own advantage more than',
the freedom from harm of you all-so that, I believe, with God's favor I have brought the Jewish nation to a greater degree of prosperity than it ever had before. As for the individual works carried out throughout the country, and the cities we have built there and in the territories newly acquired, adding to the glory of our people with the finest embellishment, it seems needless to me to speak of them to those who already know. But the undertaking which I now propose to attempt,
I will now declare to be the most pious and the finest achievement of our times: for this temple was built to the Most High God by our fathers after the return from Babylon, but it falls short by sixty cubits of the height that it ought to have-by so much did that first temple, which Solomon built, exceed it. And let no one condemn our fathers for neglecting their piety, for it was not by any fault of theirs
that the temple came to be smaller than that one; rather, it was Cyrus and Darius the son of Hystaspes who set the measurements for the building, and our fathers, being subject to them and their descendants, and afterward to the Macedonians, had no opportunity to restore the original structure to its full former size. But now, since I rule by the will of God, and there is a long span of peace, and
abundance of wealth and greatness of revenue, and-what matters most-friendship and goodwill from the Romans, who rule virtually the whole world, I will try to remedy what was neglected through the constraint and subjection of earlier times, and to render to God the complete piety owed in return for the kingship I have obtained.' Thus Herod spoke, and his words, coming as they did unexpectedly, struck most of the people with astonishment.
The incredible scale of the hope did not stir them to enthusiasm; rather they were anxious that he might tear down the whole structure and then be unable to bring the undertaking to completion-the risk seemed to them too great, and the scale of the enterprise too hard to carry out. Seeing them in this state of mind, the king reassured them, declaring that he would not tear down the temple until everything needed for its completion
had been prepared. And having said this in advance, he did not break his word: he made ready a thousand wagons to carry the stones, selected ten thousand of the most skilled workmen, and bought sacerdotal robes for a thousand priests, training some of them as masons and others as carpenters, and only then, when everything had been zealously prepared for him, did he set to work on the construction. Having removed the old foundations and laid new ones in their place, he raised up a temple
a hundred cubits in length and twenty cubits in extra height, which sank over time as the foundations settled; and this we had determined to raise again in the days of Nero. The temple was built of white and massive stones, each about twenty-five cubits in length, eight in height, and about twelve in width.
The whole of it, like the royal portico as well, was lowest at either end and highest in the middle, so that it was visible from many stades away to those living in the countryside, and especially to those who lived opposite it or were approaching it. The doors at the entrance, together with their lintels, were of the same height as the temple itself and were adorned with elaborate hangings, on which flowers
were worked in purple, and pillars woven into the design. Above them, beneath the cornices, stretched a golden vine with clusters of grapes hanging down-a marvel both of its size and of its craftsmanship to all who saw it, given the costliness of the material used in its making. He also surrounded the whole temple with immense colonnades, proportioned to match it, and surpassing in expense all that had gone before, so that no one
seems to have adorned the temple more magnificently. Both the temple and its colonnades stood within the wall, and the wall itself was a work of the greatest magnitude ever recorded among men. There was a rocky hill rising gently on the eastern side of the city up to its highest point. This hill our first king Solomon, with great forethought and immense labor, walled in around the summit, building the wall from below
starting at its base, which a deep ravine surrounds, with towering stones bound together with lead, always taking in more of the interior space as the wall advanced deeper into the ravine, so that the size and height of the structure, built up as a square, became immeasurable-so much so that the sizes of the stones could be seen on the outer face, while on the inside they were secured with iron to hold
the joints immovable for all time. When the construction had thus reached the summit of the hill, he leveled off its top and filled in the hollows around the wall, making the whole surface even and smooth. This entire enclosure had a circuit of four stades, each side measuring a stade in length. Within this, and
close by the summit itself, another wall of stone ran around above, having on its eastern ridge, level with the outer wall, a double colonnade facing the doors of the temple, which stood in the middle. This colonnade many earlier kings had built. Around the whole sanctuary hung barbarian spoils taken in war, all of which King Herod dedicated, adding to them what he had also taken from the Arabians.
On the north side stood a well-fortified, four-cornered citadel of exceptional strength. This the kings and high priests of the Hasmonean line, before Herod, had built and called Baris, since the priestly vestments were kept there, to be worn by the high priest only when he had to perform sacrifice. King Herod kept the vestments there in the same place, and after his
death they remained under Roman control until the time of Tiberius Caesar. Under Tiberius, Vitellius, governor of Syria, visited Jerusalem, and when the people received him most splendidly, wishing to repay their kindness, he wrote to Tiberius Caesar-since they had asked to have the sacred vestments placed under their own authority-and Tiberius granted it; and control of the vestments remained with the
Jews until the death of King Agrippa. After him, Cassius Longinus, then governor of Syria, and Cuspius Fadus, procurator of Judea, ordered the Jews to deposit the vestments in the Antonia, since the Romans, they said, ought to have control of them, as they had before. The Jews therefore sent envoys to Claudius Caesar to plead the matter. When they had gone up to Rome, the
younger king Agrippa, who happened to be in Rome, asked the emperor for the authority over the vestments and received it, the emperor instructing Vitellius, the governor of Syria, accordingly. Previously the vestments had been kept under the seal of the high priest and the treasurers, and on the day before a festival the treasurers would go up to the Roman garrison commander, examine their own seal, and take the vestments; then again once the festival had passed,
they would bring them back to the same place and, after showing the commander the seal was intact, deposit them there once more. This was the situation, made clear by the misfortune of the events that followed. At that time, then, Herod king of the Jews made this citadel too more secure, for the safety and guarding of the temple, and named it Antonia, in honor of his friend Antony, ruler of the Romans. On the
western side of the enclosure there stood four gates: one leading to the royal palace, crossing the intervening ravine by a passage; two leading to the suburb; and the last leading to the rest of the city, reached by many steps down into the ravine and then up again from there to the ascent on the other side, for the city lay directly opposite the temple
On the western side of the enclosure stood four gates. One led to the palace, crossing the intervening ravine; two led to the suburb; and the last led to the rest of the city, by many steps down into the ravine and then up again on the other side to the ascent — for the city lay opposite the temple, shaped like a theater, hemmed in on its whole southern flank by a deep ravine.
The fourth face of the enclosure, the one facing south, likewise had gates in its middle, and above them ran the royal portico, a triple colonnade stretching the full length from the eastern ravine to the western. It was impossible to extend it any farther; and it was the most remarkable work under the sun.
For since the retaining wall of the ravine was enormous and unbearable to look down from, if one leaned over from above into the depth, the height of the portico built upon it rose to an equally immense scale, so that if someone standing at the top of its roof combined both depths in a single glance, dizziness would overcome him, his sight unable to reach the measureless bottom.
Columns stood in rows opposite one another, four rows deep — the fourth row was bonded into a wall built of stone — and each column was thick enough that three men, arms outstretched, could just encircle it, and twenty-seven feet tall, set on a double base. The columns numbered one hundred and sixty-two in all, their capitals worked in the Corinthian style, carved with a workmanship that struck onlookers with amazement at the grandeur of the whole.
With four rows of columns, three aisles were formed running the length between the colonnades. Of these, two were parallel and built in the same fashion, each thirty feet wide, a stadium long, and more than fifty feet high; the middle aisle was one and a half times as wide and twice as high, rising far above the two on either side. The ceilings were adorned with wood carved in manifold patterns of figures, and the middle aisle's height was raised still further by a parapet wall built above the architraves, set with engaged columns, the whole of polished stone — a sight incredible to those who had not seen it, and one that struck all who beheld it with wonder. Such, then, was the first enclosure.
Not far within it, and reached by a few steps, was a second court, surrounded by a stone balustrade with an inscription forbidding any foreigner to enter, on pain of death.
This inner enclosure had, on its southern and northern sides, gateways in three rows set apart from one another, and on the side facing the sunrise a single great gate, through which we who were ritually pure passed together with our wives. Farther within, that same area was forbidden to women. Farther in still was a third court, which only the priests were permitted to enter.
Within this stood the temple itself, and before it the altar on which we used to offer whole burnt sacrifices to God. Into none of these three courts did King Herod ever pass, for he was barred from doing so, not being a priest. But he did busy himself with the work on the porticoes and the outer enclosures, and these he built in eight years.
When the temple itself had been built by the priests in a year and five months, the whole people was filled with joy, and, marveling at the speed of the work, they first gave thanks to God, and then celebrated, with equal enthusiasm for the king, the rebuilding, praising it with acclamations. The king sacrificed three hundred oxen to God, and the rest of the people offered as many as each could afford — a number impossible to state, for it truly defies telling.
As it happened, the appointed date for finishing the work on the temple coincided with the day of the king's accession, which by custom they used to celebrate, so that the two feasts falling together made the occasion the most splendid of all.
A secret tunnel was also built for the king, running from the Antonia to the inner sanctuary, to the eastern gate, above which he also built himself a tower, so that he might go up into it through the underground passage, guarding against any uprising of the people directed at the kings.
It is said that at that time, while the temple was under construction, no rain fell during the day, but showers came only at night, so as not to hinder the work; and this account has been handed down to us by our fathers, nor is it hard to believe, if one considers the other manifestations of God as well. In this manner, then, the work on the temple was completed.

======== Antiquities — Book 16 ========

CONTENTS. How Alexander and Aristobulus returned from Rome to their father. How Salome and Pheroras, the king's brother and sister, made use of slanders against them. How Herod, having given wives to Alexander and his circle, sailed to Agrippa at Mytilene, and from there persuaded him to come to Judea. Agrippa's departure for Ionia, and how Herod sailed a second time to meet Agrippa at the Bosporus. The appeal of the Jews of Ionia to Agrippa, in Herod's presence, concerning their complaints against the Greeks. How Agrippa confirmed their laws for them, and Herod returned to Judea. How Herod addressed the people of Jerusalem and remitted a quarter of the past year's taxes for them. How discord arose in Herod's household, since he favored Antipater, his eldest son, while those around Alexander bore the insult badly. How, while Antipater was staying in Rome, Herod brought Alexander and his circle before Caesar and accused them. Alexander's defense before Caesar, and his reconciliation with his father. How Herod held games every five years in honor of the founding of Caesarea. The embassy of the Jews from Cyrene and Asia to Caesar concerning the wrongs they charged against the Greeks. Copies of the letters that Caesar and Agrippa wrote on their behalf to the cities. How Herod, being short of funds, went down into David's tomb, and, after being terrified by an apparition, set up a monument at the tomb. How Archelaus, king of Cappadocia, reconciled Alexander with his father, though Herod had earlier had him bound, and how Archelaus went up to Cappadocia and Herod to Rome. The revolt of those living in Trachonitis, and the reconquest of the region by his generals. How Herod demanded the surrender of the rebels who had fled into Arabia, and, failing to obtain them, marched against them with Saturninus's permission. How Syllaeus the Arab accused Herod before Caesar over his incursion, and how, through Nicolaus, he was cleared of the charges when Caesar had been angry. The slanders of Eurycles against Herod's sons, and how their father had them imprisoned and wrote to Caesar about them. How, when Caesar granted him authority at Berytus before the council, he accused his sons, and how, once put to death, they were buried at Alexandreion. This book covers a period of twelve years.
In administering affairs generally, the king was eager to check the various wrongs being committed in the city and the countryside, and so he laid down a law unlike any earlier one, one which he himself enforced: burglars were to be sold out of the kingdom. This was harsh, not merely as a punishment for the offenders, but it also amounted to an overturning of ancestral custom. For to be enslaved to foreigners who did not share the same way of life, and to be compelled to do whatever they ordered, was, for our people, a sin against religion, not simply a punishment for the one caught -- such a penalty having been guarded against in the earlier law. The laws instead required the thief to pay back fourfold, and, if he had nothing, to be sold indeed, but not to foreigners, nor into permanent slavery: he had to be released after six years. But fixed as it now was, the punishment seemed harsh and lawless, a mark of arrogance, since Herod had set the penalty not as a king but as a tyrant, with contempt for the common interests of his subjects. These acts, being of a piece with the rest of his character, formed part of the slanders and the ill will felt toward him.
At this time he also made a voyage to Italy, setting out to meet Caesar and to see his sons, who were living in Rome. Caesar received him warmly in every way, and, since the boys had now completed their studies, handed them over for him to take home. When they arrived from Italy, the crowds were eager to see the young men, who had become conspicuous to everyone, both adorned by the greatness of the fortune surrounding them and not falling short of royal dignity in their bearing. They at once became objects of envy to Salome, the king's sister, and to those who had prevailed against Mariamme through slander; for these people supposed that once the young men came to power they would pay the penalty for the wrongs done to their mother. So they carried this same fear over into slander against the brothers, spreading the story that the young men took no pleasure in being with their father because of their mother's death, to the point that it did not even seem right to them to come into the presence of the murderer of the woman who bore them. By shifting in this way from truth to a plausible pretext for their charge, they were able to do harm and strip away the goodwill Herod felt toward his sons; for they did not say these things to him directly, but scattered such talk among the rest of the populace. Once this was carried back to Herod, a hatred was quietly built up that not even nature itself would overcome as time passed. At that time, however, the king, though given over more than ever to every kind of suspicion and slander, still, out of a father's natural affection, granted the young men what honor was due and joined them in marriage, now that they were of age: to Aristobulus he gave Berenice, the daughter of Salome, and to Alexander, Glaphyra, the daughter of Archelaus, king of Cappadocia.
Having settled these matters, when he learned that Marcus Agrippa had sailed back from Italy to Asia, Herod hurried to him and pressed him to come into his own kingdom and receive what was owed him from a man who was both a stranger and a friend. Agrippa yielded to his earnest insistence and came to Judea, and Herod left nothing undone to please him: he welcomed him in the newly founded cities, and besides showing him the buildings, he provided him and his friends with every enjoyment of a lavish way of life, both at Sebaste and at Caesarea by the harbor he had built, and in the fortresses he had constructed at great expense -- Alexandreion, Herodeion, and Hyrcania. He also brought him to the city of Jerusalem, where the whole population came out to meet him in festive dress and welcomed the man with acclamations. Agrippa offered a hecatomb to God and feasted the people on a scale matching the grandest occasions. He himself, though he would gladly have stayed even more days for his own pleasure, was pressed for time; for with winter coming on, he did not think it safe to make the return voyage to Ionia, which he was obliged to do.
So Agrippa sailed away, after Herod had honored both him and the most distinguished of his companions with many gifts. The king spent the winter at home, and in spring hurried to meet Agrippa again, knowing that he was leading the way for a campaign to the Bosporus. Sailing by way of Rhodes and Cos, he put in there, expecting to catch up with Agrippa near Lesbos. But there a north wind caught him and kept the ships from putting out. He stayed on several days at Chios, welcoming many who came to him and helping them with royal gifts; and seeing that the city's colonnade had fallen down -- one that had been demolished in the Mithridatic War and, unlike other structures, could not easily be restored because of its size and beauty -- he gave money enough not merely to cover but to exceed what was needed to complete the work, instructing the people not to let it lie neglected but to raise it quickly and restore to the city its own ornament.
Once the wind had died down, he sailed on to Mytilene and from there was carried to Byzantium; and hearing that Agrippa had already sailed past the Cyanean rocks, he pressed on as fast as he could. Catching up with him near Sinope in Pontus, he came into view unexpectedly, sailing up with his ships, and his arrival was warmly welcomed, with many expressions of affection, since Agrippa now felt he had received the surest proof of Herod's goodwill toward him: that the king had made so long a voyage and had not failed him in his need, valuing it above even leaving behind the government and administration of his own affairs. In short, throughout the campaign Herod was everything to him -- a partner in matters of business, an adviser in particular affairs, a pleasant companion even in times of relaxation, and the only one who shared with him both burdensome things, out of goodwill, and pleasant things, out of the honor due him.
When they had finished the business in Pontus for which Agrippa had been sent, they decided not to make the return journey by sea, but instead crossed through Paphlagonia and Cappadocia, and from there traveled through Greater Phrygia to Ephesus, then sailed again from Ephesus to Samos. Many benefits were conferred by the king in each city according to the needs of those who approached him; for he himself did not hold back whatever could be provided through money, meeting the expenses from his own funds, and in matters that some sought from Agrippa he acted as intermediary, arranging that none of the petitioners went away disappointed. Since Agrippa too was generous and large-minded in granting whatever was asked of him without burdening anyone else, the king's influence did the most to spur him toward acts of kindness, for Agrippa was never slow to act. He reconciled Agrippa with the people of Ilium, settled for the Chians their debts to Caesar's agents and freed them from the taxes, and for the others he intervened as each case required.
While they were then in Ionia, a great number of Jews living in the cities came forward, seizing the opportunity and speaking freely, and told of the wrongs done to them: that they were not permitted to follow their own laws, and were forced to appear in court, harassed by local magistrates on holy days, and were being deprived of the funds dedicated for Jerusalem, being compelled to take part in military service and public duties and to spend on these the sacred money -- from all of which they had always been exempt, since the Romans had allowed them to live by their own laws. As they cried out in this way, the king arranged for Agrippa to hear their case argued, and assigned Nicolaus, one of his friends, to speak the just case on their behalf. Agrippa then made the leading Romans and the kings and princes present with him into a council, and Nicolaus stood up and spoke on behalf of the Jews as follows:
"Great Agrippa, everyone who has suffered wrong must of necessity take refuge with those who have the power to remove such wrongs; but those who come to you now do so with confidence besides. For having received from you before the very things they had often prayed for, they now ask only that the favors granted through you not be taken away by the very men who gave them, especially since they received these favors from those who alone had the power to grant them, and are being deprived of them by no one of higher standing, but by men whom they know to be subjects on an equal footing with themselves, just as you are. Whether great things were granted to them or small, it is a credit to those who received them that they proved themselves worthy of so much; but it is shameful for those who gave the favors not to make good on them as well."
"Those, however, who stand in their way and harass the Jews clearly wrong both parties: the recipients, if they do not consider them worthy men to whom the rulers themselves bore witness by granting such things; and the givers, if they think it right that their own favors should prove unreliable. If one were to ask these people which of two things they would rather be deprived of -- their life, or their ancestral customs, the processions, the sacrifices, the festivals they hold in honor of the gods they recognize -- I know well that they would choose to suffer anything rather than abolish any part of their ancestral ways."
"For it is on this very account that most men choose war, guarding against transgressing them, and we measure the prosperity that the whole human race now enjoys through you by this: that it is possible for each people, in its own land, to honor its own ways, and so to grow and to live. This, then, they would not choose to suffer themselves, and yet they force it upon others, as if they were not committing an equal impiety, whether they neglect the pious duties owed to their own gods, or unlawfully destroy the customs proper to others."
"Let us examine this further point: is there any people, or city, or common nation of men, for whom the protection of your rule and the power of Rome has not been the greatest of blessings? Would anyone wish the favors that come from it to be void? No one, not even a madman -- for there is no one who does not share in them, both privately and in common. Indeed, those who take away certain things that you have granted leave nothing secure even for those very things which they hold on your account. Yet it is not even possible to measure the benefits these people owe you; for if they were to reckon up both their kingdom of old and their present government, with all the many things that have contributed to their prosperity, it is enough, above all, that they no longer appear as slaves but as free men."
"As for what belongs to us, even when we conduct our own affairs splendidly, it gives no cause for envy; for it is through you that we prosper along with everyone else, and we have asked to share in only this one thing: to preserve our ancestral piety without hindrance -- which, considered in itself, would seem to be a matter of no envy, and one that lies with those who permit it to grant. For the divine, if it delights in being honored, delights also in those who allow it to be honored."
"Nothing in our customs is inhuman; all of them are pious and consecrated by the justice we habitually observe. Nor do we conceal the precepts we follow in life as reminders of piety and of proper human conduct; we set aside the seventh day of the week for the study of our customs and law, considering the practice of these, like anything else, a discipline through which we will avoid wrongdoing. These customs are good, if one examines them on their own merits, and they are ancient for us, even if some do not think so, so that the honor owed to their antiquity is hard to instill in those who have not received and preserved them faithfully."
"Of these things they now strip us through harassment: destroying, under false pretenses, the funds we contribute to God, and openly committing sacrilege; imposing taxes and dragging us before courts and to other business even on our festivals -- not out of any need arising from actual dealings, but out of spite for the religion they know we hold, bearing toward us a hatred that is neither just nor within their own right to indulge. For your rule, having become one over all peoples, renders goodwill effective and ill will ineffective for those who choose the latter instead of the former."
"This, then, is what we ask, great Agrippa: that we not suffer harm, nor be harassed, nor be prevented from following our own customs, nor be deprived of our possessions, nor be forced by these men into what we do not force upon them ourselves; for these things are not only just, but were granted by you yourselves before. We could still..."
we could read out many decrees of the senate and the bronze tablets set up on the Capitol concerning these matters — decrees plainly granted only after testing our loyalty to you, and binding even had you bestowed on us nothing else at all. For, to put it simply, you have preserved for all mankind, not for us alone, what already existed, and by adding more than anyone hoped for you do good through your rule; anyone who tried to catalogue the good fortune each people enjoys through you would make the account endless. But to show that we ourselves justly deserve all of this, it is enough — passing over what has already been said — to point to the man who now rules us and sits here beside you. What goodwill toward your house has he ever left undone? What loyalty has he ever fallen short of? What honor has he failed to conceive? What need of yours has he not put first? Why then should our gratitude not be counted among the many benefits you have received? It would perhaps also be good not to leave unmentioned the valor of his father Antipater, who came to Caesar's aid with two thousand infantry when Caesar had invaded Egypt, and proved second to none, either in the land battles or when ships were needed. What need is there to say how great a weight they threw onto the scale at that critical moment, and how many gifts, and of what kind, each of them individually received from Caesar for it — enough to recall the letters Caesar then wrote to the senate, and how Antipater publicly received honors and citizenship? These proofs will suffice to show that we possess these favors deservedly, and to ask that you confirm them — you, from whom, even had they not been granted before, one could hope for them, given the king's disposition toward you and yours toward him. We are told by the Jews there that you entered the country graciously, that you offered God whole burnt sacrifices, honoring him with complete vows, that you feasted the people, and that you accepted the gifts of hospitality they offered. All this, for a nation and a city, must be reckoned tokens of welcome and pledges of friendship toward a man in charge of so many affairs — a friendship you showed the Jewish nation, procured for it by Herod's own hospitality. In reminding you of these things, and of the king himself who is present and sits here beside you, we ask nothing extravagant — only that you not stand by and let others take away what you yourselves have granted.
When Nicolaus had finished speaking in this way, the Greeks offered no rebuttal at all; they were not arguing a case as though in a court, but simply pressing by force to keep on doing as they pleased. They had no defense to offer for what they were doing — only the excuse that, since they inhabited the country, the Jews were now wronging them in everything. The Jews for their part showed themselves to be natives of the land, doing no harm even as they honored their own customs while living there. Agrippa, seeing that the Greeks were resorting to force, replied as follows: because of Herod's goodwill and friendship toward him, he was ready to grant the Jews absolutely anything; but what they were asking for also seemed just in its own right. So that even if they had asked for still more, he would not have hesitated to grant whatever did not burden Roman rule. But since what they had already been granted must not be nullified, he confirmed that they should continue, unmolested, in their own customs. With these words he dissolved the assembly. Herod, standing by, embraced him and acknowledged his gratitude for his disposition toward him. Agrippa, showing the same warmth in return, embraced him just as fully, clasping and kissing him. Then he withdrew for the time. The king decided to sail home from Samos, and having taken leave of Agrippa he put out to sea, landing at Caesarea not many days later, having found favorable winds. From there he went up to Jerusalem and gathered the whole people in assembly — a great crowd had come in also from the countryside. Coming forward, he gave an account of his entire journey abroad, and told them how, because of him, the Jews throughout Asia would from now on live unmolested. And, exulting over his good fortune generally and over how he had administered the kingdom, claiming that he had left out nothing that served their interests, he remitted to them a quarter of the previous year's taxes. The people, won over both by his words and by his generosity, went away with the greatest joy, calling down many blessings on the king.
Meanwhile the strife within the household kept advancing and taking a harsher turn. Salome had, as it were by inheritance, taken over the hatred against the young men, and everything that had won her success against their mother was now turning into recklessness and boldness, so that she would leave none of Mariamme's children alive who might avenge, through her death, the woman put to death because of her. The young men, for their part, harbored some boldness and ill will toward their father as well, both from remembering how their mother had suffered undeservedly, and from their own desire to rule. So once again the same evil as before repeated itself: abuse from the young men against Salome and Pheroras, and malicious scheming from these two against the youths, with calculated plotting behind it. The hatred on both sides was equal, but the manner of hating was not the same: the young men were quick to abuse and reproach openly, thinking in their inexperience that giving free rein to anger was noble; the others did not act the same way, but employed their slanders in a calculating and malicious fashion, constantly egging the youths on and then counting their boldness as proof that they would turn to violence against their father. For their refusal to feel shame at their mother's alleged offenses, and their conviction that she had not suffered justly, was, they claimed, uncontrollable in one who thought he knew the guilty party and would take revenge even with his own hand. In the end the whole city was filled with talk of this kind, and, as in a contest, the young men's inexperience won sympathy, but Salome's careful diligence prevailed — she drew the material for proving her charges true from the young men's own conduct. For being so aggrieved at their mother's death, and since Salome kept speaking ill of both her and them, they were determined to show, as was true, that their mother's ruin was pitiable, and that they themselves were pitiable, forced as they were to live with her murderers and to share meals with them.
These things went further still, since the strife had free rein during the king's absence abroad. When Herod returned and addressed the people, as we have already related, reports at once reached him from Pheroras and Salome that he was in great danger from the young men, who were openly threatening that they would not rest until they had avenged their mother's murder. They added further that the young men were pinning their hopes on Archelaus, king of Cappadocia, expecting through him to gain access to Caesar and to bring accusations against their father. On hearing this, Herod was troubled at once, and all the more shaken because others too were reporting the same thing; he was thrown back into his misfortune, reckoning first that he had gotten no good from either his dearest ones or the wife he had loved, on account of the turmoil that kept arising in his household, and, taking what had now befallen him to be even heavier and greater than those earlier troubles, he was thrown into confusion of soul. For in truth, divine fortune kept adding to him, beyond all hope, the greatest external successes, while at home the greatest and most unexpected misfortunes kept befalling him — each running to a degree no one would have imagined, so that it made a genuine contest which was the greater excess: whether it would be worth exchanging so much external good fortune for his domestic troubles, or escaping so great a weight of misfortune among his own by never having possessed the admired splendor of his kingdom at all.
Troubled and disposed in this way, in order to bring down the young men Herod brought forward another son of his, born to him while he was still a private citizen, and made a show of honoring him — his name was Antipater — not yet as he later did, wholly won over by him and referring everything to him, but thinking rather to strip Mariamme's sons of their arrogance, managing the move chiefly as a lesson to them. For their self-will, he reasoned, would not persist in them if they were persuaded that succession to the kingdom was not owed to them alone as a matter of necessity. He therefore brought in Antipater as a kind of reserve, thinking he was planning wisely, and that once the young men had been checked he would be free, in due time, to make the better choice. But it did not turn out as he had intended. It seemed to his sons that he had treated them with no small degree of spite, and Antipater, being clever by nature, once he had laid claim to a freedom of speech he had never before had reason to hope for, adopted a single strategy of harm: since his brothers would not yield the first place, he clung close to his father — already estranged by the slanders and easy to manage toward whatever he was bent on — so that things constantly grew far worse for those under accusation. The reports did not come from him alone — he was careful not to seem to be the source of such disclosures himself — but he made use of accomplices who were beyond suspicion and who would be believed to be acting out of goodwill toward the king. And by now a good number of people had begun currying favor with him for what they hoped to gain from it, winning Herod over by seeming to speak out of loyal concern. As these many faces worked together faithfully in concert, still more material kept coming from the young men themselves: often there were tears provoked by the insults done to them, invocations of their mother, and they made a habit of openly charging their father before their friends with injustice — all of which Antipater's circle, watching for their moment, maliciously seized on and reported back to Herod in exaggerated form, producing no small degree of strife within the household. The king, distressed by the slanders and wanting to humble Mariamme's sons, kept giving Antipater ever greater marks of honor, and in the end, completely won over, he brought in Antipater's mother as well, and, writing repeatedly to Caesar on his behalf, commended him all the more earnestly in private.
Then, when Agrippa was going up to Rome after his ten-year administration of the provinces of Asia, Herod sailed from Judea to meet him, and brought only Antipater with him, handing him over to be taken up to Rome laden with many gifts, to become a friend to Caesar — so that everything already seemed to rest on him, and the young men appeared to have been pushed aside entirely from any share in power.
As for honor and appearing to hold first place, things went well for Antipater during his time abroad: since Herod had written letters to all his friends, he was a marked man in Rome. But he was troubled at not being present and not having ready opportunity to keep slandering his brothers, and he feared all the more a change of heart in his father, in case he should on his own decide to think more kindly of Mariamme's sons. Turning this over in his mind, he did not abandon his course, but even from a distance, whenever he hoped to distress his father and provoke him against his brothers, he wrote constantly — ostensibly out of great concern for him, but in truth trading on the hope his natural malice held out, a hope substantial in its own right — until he had brought Herod to such a pitch of anger and ill repute that, already hostile toward the young men yet hesitant to plunge into so grave an affair, lest he err either through negligence or through rashness, Herod judged it better to sail to Rome and there accuse his sons before Caesar, rather than allow himself any act so suspect on account of its enormous impiety. So he went up to Rome, and pressed on as far as the city of Aquileia to meet Caesar. There, gaining audience and asking leave to speak concerning the great misfortunes he believed had befallen him, he brought his sons forward and accused them of madness and of an actual plot, claiming that, holding him in enmity, they had set every effort on doing away with their own father and seizing the kingdom by the cruelest means.
He himself, he said, even in dying, should have the right — not merely of necessity but by judgment, granted him by Caesar — to hand power over to whichever son had remained more loyal to him. But for them, it was not chiefly a matter of the throne; even were they to be deprived of that too, life itself mattered less to them, if only they could manage to kill their father — so savage and polluted a hatred had eaten into their souls. This misfortune he himself had borne for a long time, and now he was forced to lay it out before Caesar and to defile his ears with such a tale. And yet what harsh thing had they suffered at his hands? On what ground did they complain that he was oppressive? How could it be right and just that he not be master of a rule he himself had won through many labors and dangers — free to hold it and to give it to whoever deserved it? For this too, along with everything else, he had set up as a prize for piety, offered to whichever son should show such devoted care toward the one who would one day become king, since so great a reward was there to gain. That it was not even pious of them to meddle in this matter was perfectly plain: whoever is forever brooding on the kingdom necessarily reckons in, along with it, the death of the one who begot him, since there is no other way to receive power. As for himself, up to now he had failed his sons in nothing owed to those raised as royalty and as a king's children — not in adornment, not in attendants, not in luxury — but had even provided them the most distinguished marriages: one to his own sister's daughter, and Alexander to the daughter of King Archelaus. And the greatest thing of all: even with such grievances against them, he had not used the power he held to deal with them himself, but had brought them before Caesar, the common benefactor of all, and, setting aside every power that either a wronged father or a plotted-against king might wield, had presented them for judgment on equal terms. Yet it would be necessary that he not go entirely unavenged, nor live out his life in the greatest fear — nor indeed would it profit them, given what they had contemplated, to go on seeing the sun, should they now escape, having in effect both committed and about to suffer the gravest of human deeds.
In this passionate manner Herod laid these charges against his own sons before Caesar. Even while he was still speaking, the young men were already in tears and confusion; and all the more once Herod ended his speech — for while they held in their own conscience the confident knowledge that they stood clear of any such impiety, they knew that a charge brought by a father is hard to answer, hard as indeed it was, and that speaking with the frankness the moment called for would not look becoming, if it meant...
...always and urgently to refute it as a mistake. So they were at a loss for words, and there were tears, and finally a wail more moving than words, since they were afraid that they would seem to be at a loss out of a guilty conscience, yet found no easy defense, hampered as they were by their youth and by the turmoil they had suffered. Caesar, watching them as they stood, did not read their state as the senselessness of a genuinely troubled conscience, but as hesitation born of inexperience and of natural restraint; and those present were moved to pity for them individually, and they stirred their father too, who was seized by real feeling. When they saw a measure of goodwill both in him and in Caesar, and saw that everyone else present was weeping with them or at least sharing their grief, one of the two, Alexander, addressed his father directly and set about dissolving the charges.
"Father," he said, "your goodwill toward us is plain even in this very trial. If you had truly intended anything harsh against us, you would not have brought us before the man who saves everyone. Having full authority as king, and as father, to punish wrongdoers yourself, to bring the matter to Rome and make this man a witness to it was the act of one who meant to save us, not destroy us. No one who intends to kill a man leads him into temples and shrines. Our own case is worse still: we could not bear to go on living if we were believed to have wronged such a father in such a way. And it may be worse to live under suspicion of wrongdoing, though innocent, than to die for wrongs we did not commit. If frank speech can find room for the truth, it will be a blessing both to persuade you and to escape this danger; but if the slander prevails regardless, this sunlight is superfluous to us — why should we go on looking at it under such suspicion?
"To say that young men desire kingship is a charge conveniently aimed at the young, and adding the memory of our unhappy mother is enough, on top of her first misfortune, to manufacture our present one. But consider whether these are not common charges, equally available against anyone: nothing prevents it being said of any reigning king's sons, if they are young and their mother has died, that all of them are suspected of plotting against their father. Yet mere suspicion is not sufficient ground for so grave a charge of impiety. Let someone say whether such a thing has actually been attempted by us — a charge that even things not otherwise believable tend to gain credit from, once acted upon. Can anyone point to the preparation of poison, a conspiracy of age-mates, the corruption of household slaves, or letters written against you?
"And yet each of these things is sometimes fabricated by slander even when it never happened; for a household divided against itself is a hard thing in a kingdom, and the very throne, which you call a prize of piety, often becomes for the most depraved of men an occasion of hope for which they hold back at nothing in their malice. No one, then, will charge us with any actual wrongdoing; but how could anyone dissolve mere slanders, if he refuses to listen? We did speak with some frankness — not against you, for that would have been unjust, but against those who did not keep silent about whatever was said. One of us wept for our mother — not because she is dead, but because even dead she was spoken of badly by men unworthy to do so. Do we desire the throne that we know our father holds? For what purpose, wanting what? If we already have the honors of kings, as indeed we do, why should we chase after empty ambitions? And if we do not, do we not still hope for them?
"Or did we expect, by murdering you, to gain control of the kingdom — we, for whom, after such a deed, neither land would be passable nor sea navigable? Would the piety and religion of your subjects, of this whole nation, have tolerated men who killed their father holding power, and entering the most holy temple you yourself built? But suppose we had despised everything else — could anyone, having committed murder, remain unpunished while Caesar lives? You did not beget sons so impious, nor so senseless — perhaps more unfortunate than was good for you, but not that. If you have no charges and find no plots, what is sufficient, in your eyes, to give credence to such monstrous impiety? Our mother is dead; but surely what concerned her was fit only to admonish us, not to provoke us to such a thing.
"We could say a great deal more in our defense, but there is no arguing a case for things that never happened. And so, with Caesar, master of all, mediating this moment, we propose this agreement: if you receive from the truth itself an assurance free of suspicion regarding your disposition toward us, father, we will live — though not even so very happily, for a false charge is itself a terrible thing among great evils. But if any dread still remains, you may continue in your own piety, and we will answer for ourselves. Life is not so precious to us that we would wish to keep it at the cost of wronging the one who gave it to us."
While Alexander was speaking in this way, Caesar, who had not believed the charge in its full weight even before, was moved still further, and kept looking steadily at Herod, seeing that he too was somewhat overcome; and anguish had settled on those present, and the report, spreading through the court, turned opinion against the king. For the sheer implausibility of the slander, together with the pitiable spectacle of young men in the flower of youth and beauty, drew sympathy toward them; and still more so once Alexander had met the charge so skillfully and with such good sense in his speech. Even they no longer wore the same expression — still weeping, still bowed toward the ground in dejection, but a better hope was now showing through. The king, seeing that he was thought to have made a reasonable accusation from what had persuaded him, yet had nothing to prove it, felt the need of some kind of defense himself.
Caesar, after pausing a little, said that even if the young men appeared far removed from the charge against them, they had still erred in this very thing — in not presenting themselves to their father in such a way that no talk of this sort could even have arisen concerning them. He urged Herod to cast aside all suspicion and be reconciled with his sons; for it was not right, he said, even to believe such things against his own offspring. A change of heart, he said, could not only heal what had happened but could strengthen their mutual goodwill, since each side, in making amends for the rashness of their suspicion, would resolve to treat the other with still greater regard. With such counsel he gave the young men a nod. And when they wished to fall at their father's feet in supplication, he took hold of them beforehand, and embraced them, weeping, one after the other in turn, so that not one of those present, free man or slave, remained untouched. Then, having given thanks to Caesar, they went off together, and with them Antipater, pretending to rejoice at the reconciliation.
In the days that followed, Herod presented Caesar with three hundred talents, since he was providing games and distributions for the Roman people, and Caesar in turn gave him half the revenue of the copper mines of Cyprus and oversight of the other half, and honored him in other ways as well with gifts of hospitality and lodging, and granted him authority concerning the kingdom to appoint whichever of his sons he chose as successor, or even to divide the honor among them all, as he came to each in turn. When Herod was now ready to act on this at once, Caesar said he would not permit it while he lived — Herod must retain control both of the kingdom and of his sons. On these terms he set out again for Judea.
During his absence a considerable part of his realm around Trachonitis had revolted, but the generals left in charge subdued them and forced them back into obedience. As Herod sailed with his sons and came to Elaeousa in Cilicia — now renamed Sebaste — he met Archelaus, king of Cappadocia, who received him warmly, delighted at the reconciliation of the sons and that Alexander, who had married his daughter, had been cleared of the charge; and they exchanged gifts of the kind fitting for kings. From there Herod went on to Judea, and coming into the temple he addressed the people about what had happened during his journey abroad, recounting Caesar's warmth toward him and whatever else, in detail, he judged useful both for himself and for the others to know. Finally he closed his speech with an admonition concerning his sons, urging both the court and the rest of the people toward harmony, and declaring that his sons would be kings after him —
first Antipater, and then Alexander and Aristobulus, the sons of Mariamme. For the present, he asked that all look to him alone, and regard him as king and master of everyone, since he was neither hindered by old age — being at the time of life most experienced for rule — nor lacking in the other capacities that make it possible both to hold a kingdom and to govern one's children; and he said that if the officers and the army looked to him alone, their life would be untroubled, and every foundation of happiness would come to them from one another. Having said this, he dismissed the assembly, having spoken to the satisfaction of most, but not of all in the same way; for by then many had already been unsettled by the rivalry and by the hopes he had given his sons, and were reaching after change.
About this time Caesarea Sebaste was completed, the whole structure having reached its finish in the tenth year, though the original schedule had run out, so that it fell in the twenty-eighth year of his reign, in the hundred and ninety-second Olympiad. There were at once, for its dedication, greater festivals and the most lavish preparations, for he had announced a contest in music and athletic games, and had prepared a great number of gladiators and wild beasts, and horse-races, and the most costly of the entertainments practiced both at Rome and among certain other peoples. He dedicated this contest too to Caesar, having arranged to hold it every five years; and Caesar sent him, from his own resources, all the equipment needed for such things, adorning Herod's generosity with his own. Caesar's wife Julia, too, on her own account, sent many of the costliest things from Rome, so that the whole display fell short in nothing, being valued together at five hundred talents.
When a great crowd had gathered in the city to see the spectacle, along with embassies which the various peoples sent because of the benefits they had received, he received them all with lodging, banquets, and continuous festivities, the celebration offering, in the daytime, the diversions of the spectacles, and at night the merriment and the lavish expense devoted to it, so that his magnanimity became famous; for in everything he undertook he was eager to surpass the display of whatever had been done before, and it is said that Caesar himself and Agrippa often remarked that the extent of Herod's realm fell short of the greatness of spirit within him, and that he deserved to hold the kingdom of all Syria and Egypt as well.
After this festival and these celebrations he raised another city in the plain called Capharsaba, choosing a well-watered spot and excellent land for planting, with a river flowing around the city itself and a very fine grove, remarkable for the size of its trees, surrounding it. This he named Antipatris, after his father Antipater. He also built, above Jericho, a place named for his mother, one outstanding for its security and most pleasant for lodging, and called it Cypros. For his brother Phasael, out of the affection he had felt for him, he dedicated the finest memorials: he raised a tower in the city itself, no smaller than the one at Pharos, which he called Phasael, serving both as part of the city's defenses and as a memorial to the deceased through its name. He also founded, in his honor, a city of the same name in the plain of Jericho, on the road going north, through which he made the surrounding country, which had been desolate, more productive by the care of its settlers; this too he called Phasaelis.
As for his other benefactions, it would be impossible to say how many he bestowed on cities both in Syria and throughout Greece and wherever else he happened to travel; for he seems to have granted generously many public services, the construction of public works, and money to those in need, for the upkeep of earlier works that had fallen into neglect. But the greatest and most notable of his achievements were these: for the Rhodians he raised the temple of Pythian Apollo at his own expense and gave them many talents of silver for shipbuilding. For the people of Nicopolis, founded near Actium by Caesar, he helped construct most of their public buildings. For the people of Antioch in Syria, who inhabit the greatest city there, one cut lengthwise by a broad street, he paved the open roadway on either side with colonnades and polished stone, greatly benefiting both its adornment and the convenience of its inhabitants. And the games at Olympia, which had grown far less honorable than their name through lack of funds, he made more valuable, establishing revenues for them and enhancing the festival with sacrifices and other adornment; and because of this generosity he was inscribed by the Eleans as perpetual president of the games.
To most other people it comes naturally to wonder at the contradiction in his nature; for when we look to the acts of generosity and the benefactions he showed toward all mankind, there is no way one could deny, even among those honored less by him, that his nature was most beneficent. But when one looks instead to the punishments and the wrongs he inflicted on his subjects and on his closest kin, and takes note of the harshness and the implacability of his character, he will be judged to seem savage and a stranger to all moderation. For this reason some think that a different and conflicting disposition arose in him.
I myself, however, do not hold it so, but suppose one and the same cause behind both: being a lover of honor, and powerfully overcome by that passion, he was driven toward magnanimity whenever there was any hope, whether of future remembrance or of present praise; but since he spent beyond his means on this account, he was forced to be harsh toward his subjects, for the vast sums spent on those he lavished them upon made him, out of what he took in return, a source of hardship. And being aware of the wrongs he did his subjects for this reason, and that he was hated for it, he did not think it easy to correct these faults — nor indeed would that have served his revenues — but instead made their very ill-will an occasion for further gain, out of a spirit of rivalry. As for those closest to him, if anyone failed in word to show due submissive respect, or seemed to stir against his rule in any way, he could not master himself, and pursued kin and friends alike, punishing them as though they were enemies, out of his wish to be honored by himself alone, treating such faults as an assault on that honor. And my proof of this passion, that it was very great in him, lies also in what happened concerning the honors paid to Caesar and Agrippa and his other friends; for the same regard he showed toward...
He asked to be courted by the very people he considered his betters, and thought he was offering them the finest thing he had to give when, by his generosity, he revealed his own desire to receive the same treatment in return. The Jewish nation, however, is by law estranged from all such practices, and has grown accustomed to prize justice over glory. For that reason nothing pleased Herod less than the fact that it was not possible to flatter the king's love of honor with statues, temples, or similar devices. This, I think, was the cause of Herod's offenses against his own household and counselors, and of his benefactions toward outsiders who had no claim on him.
The cities of Asia and of Libya near Cyrene were mistreating the Jews who lived among them. Earlier kings had granted them equality before the law, but now the Greeks were harassing them so badly that they were even seizing sacred funds and doing them harm in particular matters. Suffering these wrongs and finding no end to the Greeks' inhumanity, the Jews sent envoys to Caesar about this as well, and he granted them the same equal taxation, writing to the governors of the provinces. We have appended copies of these letters as evidence of the disposition that our rulers have shown toward us from of old.
"Caesar Augustus, high priest, holding tribunician power, declares: Since the Jewish nation has been found grateful toward the Roman people, not only at the present time but also in the past, and especially in the time of my father, the emperor Caesar, and their high priest Hyrcanus, it has seemed good to me and to my council, under oath, with the consent of the Roman people, that the Jews should live by their own institutions according to their ancestral law, just as they did under Hyrcanus, high priest of the Most High God; that their temples be inviolable and that funds be sent up to Jerusalem and handed over to the receivers at Jerusalem; and that they not be required to give sureties on the Sabbath or on the preparation day before it, from the ninth hour onward. If anyone is caught stealing their sacred books or their sacred funds, whether from the synagogue or from the meeting-hall, he shall be treated as a temple-robber, and his property shall be confiscated to the Roman treasury. As for the decree presented to me by them concerning the piety I show to all people, and concerning Gaius Marcius Censorinus, I order that this edict too be set up in the most conspicuous place assigned to me by the league of Asia at Ancyra. If anyone transgresses any of the above, he shall pay no small penalty. This has been inscribed on a stele in the temple of Caesar."
"Caesar to Norbanus Flaccus, greetings. Whatever Jews there are who, by ancient custom, are accustomed to bring sacred funds and send them up, let them do so without hindrance to Jerusalem." So much for Caesar's letter.
Agrippa too wrote on behalf of the Jews in the following manner: "Agrippa to the magistrates, council, and people of Ephesus, greetings. I wish the Jews in Asia to have the oversight and safeguarding, according to their ancestral custom, of the sacred funds brought to the temple in Jerusalem. As for those who steal sacred writings belonging to the Jews and take refuge in places of asylum, I wish them dragged out and handed over to the Jews, by the same right by which temple-robbers are dragged out. I have also written to Silanus the governor, that no one compel a Jew to give sureties on the Sabbath."
"Marcus Agrippa to the magistrates, council, and people of Cyrene, greetings. The Jews in Cyrene, on whose behalf Augustus has already written to Flavius, the present governor of Libya, and to the other officials of the province, that the sacred funds be sent up to Jerusalem without hindrance, as is their ancestral custom, have now approached me, saying that certain informers are harassing them and preventing them under the pretext of taxes not actually owed. I order that they be restored without being troubled in any way, and that if any of the cities have taken sacred funds from them, those responsible in each case make restitution to the Jews there."
"Gaius Norbanus Flaccus, proconsul, to the magistrates of Sardis, greetings. Caesar has written to me ordering that the Jews not be hindered from gathering money according to their ancestral custom and sending it up to Jerusalem, whatever the amount may be. I have therefore written to you so that you may know that this is what Caesar and I wish to be done." No less did Julius Antonius, the proconsul, write as follows to the magistrates, council, and people of Ephesus: "The Jews living in Asia, when I was administering justice at Ephesus on the Ides of February, showed me that Caesar Augustus and Agrippa had granted them the right to live by their own laws and customs, and to make, without hindrance, the offerings of first-fruits which each of them, out of personal devotion and piety toward the divine, brings together with the rest to send up. They asked that I too should confirm my own decision in accordance with the grants made by Augustus and Agrippa. I therefore wish you to know that, in keeping with the wishes of Augustus and Agrippa, I permit them to use and observe their ancestral customs without hindrance."
I have set these documents down of necessity, since the records of our affairs are bound to reach the Greeks for the most part, to show them that we have always obtained every honor and have never been hindered by our rulers from following our ancestral customs, but rather have been assisted in matters of worship and in the honors paid to God. I make frequent mention of these things, distinguishing the various peoples and removing the causes of the hatred that has taken root, unreasonably, between us and them on both sides. In matters of custom no nation always keeps to the same practices, and even from city to city there is often great divergence; but the pursuit of justice, common to all people alike, is most advantageous to Greeks and barbarians alike, and it is to this above all that our laws pay heed, and if we abide by them purely, they render us well-disposed and friendly toward everyone. For this reason we ought to demand the same of others, and it should not be thought that what differs in practice is therefore alien, but rather that what tends toward moral goodness is what matters; for this is common to all and alone sufficient to preserve human life.
I now return to the continuous thread of the history. Herod, spending lavishly both on projects abroad and within his kingdom, had earlier heard that Hyrcanus, the king before him, on opening the tomb of David, had taken from it three thousand talents of silver, and that far more still remained, enough to supply every expense. He had long had the undertaking in mind, and at that time, opening the tomb by night, he went in, taking care to remain as invisible as possible to the city, and bringing with him only his most trusted friends. He found no hoard of money as Hyrcanus had, but he did find a great quantity of gold ornaments and precious objects, all of which he removed.
He was eager, however, to press his search further inward, even to the very chambers where the bodies of David and Solomon lay, and two of his guards died there, struck down, it was said, by a burst of flame as they went in. Herod himself came out terrified, and as an offering to appease his fear he had a monument of white stone built at the entrance, at great expense. Nicolaus, the historian of his time, mentions this construction, though not that Herod actually went down into the tomb, since he knew the deed was not a creditable one. Indeed, this is the manner in which Nicolaus treats the rest of his history as well: since he lived in the kingdom and was on close terms with Herod, and served him, he wrote as an aide, touching only on what brought Herod glory,
and working hard to justify, or else conceal entirely, many things that were plainly unjust — he who even falsified the truth about Mariamme's death and that of her sons, so brutally carried out by the king, wanting to give it a respectable appearance, slandering her as licentious and the young men as conspirators. Throughout his history he consistently praised beyond measure the king's just deeds, while zealously defending his lawless ones. One might well forgive him for this, as I have said, for he was composing not a history for others but a service for his king. We, however, being of a family closely related to the Hasmonean kings, and for that reason holding the priesthood with honor, consider it unseemly to lie about them, and so we set forth these matters
purely and justly, even though we hold many of that family's descendants, some of them still reigning, in respect, yet we have honored the truth above them — a truth which, whenever it was justly told, has brought upon its tellers the anger of those very people. As for Herod, because of the undertaking he carried out at the tomb, his fortunes seemed to grow worse within his household, whether the divine anger, provoked by what he had already done wrong before, now grew to bring about irreparable disasters, or whether fortune simply chose that moment to strike, so that the timing lent no small credibility to the belief that his calamities came upon him because of his impiety.
For there was, in effect, civil strife within the palace, and mutual hatreds surpassing one another in slander. Antipater was always maneuvering against his brothers, skilled at surrounding them with accusations from outside while he himself often took the place of the one defending them, so that whatever appeared to be his goodwill toward them would seem trustworthy for the schemes he had in mind. In this fashion, by various means, he had thoroughly circumvented his father, persuading him that he alone did everything for his safety. He had also won over Ptolemy, who managed the kingdom's affairs, to Antipater's side, and took counsel with Antipater's mother about urgent matters.
In short, these two controlled everything — free to do whatever they wished and to turn the king against those outside the family whenever it seemed to their advantage. The sons of Mariamme, meanwhile, were always more resentful, unable to bear, given their noble birth, being pushed aside and made to hold a lesser rank. As for the women: Glaphyra, daughter of Archelaus and wife of Alexander, hated Salome both because of her disposition toward her husband and because she seemed to look down on Salome's daughter — for she was married to Aristobulus, and Glaphyra resented her equal standing. Once this second quarrel had broken out, not even Pheroras, the king's brother, was free of turmoil,
for he had his own private grounds for suspicion and hatred. He had fallen in love with a slave woman of his, and was so utterly overcome and possessed by his passion for her that he scorned even the king's own daughter, to whom he was betrothed, keeping his mind fixed on the slave instead. Herod was angered at this slight, both because of the many benefits he had conferred on his brother and because he had made him a partner in the kingdom's power — seeing no comparable return, he felt himself disgraced even in the eyes of the world. So, when Pheroras was refused the girl in due course, Herod gave her to the son of Phasael instead. After some time had passed, thinking that his brother's passion had by now surely subsided, Herod reproached him over the earlier match and asked him to take his second daughter, Cypros, in marriage.
Ptolemy advised Pheroras, who had by now stopped feeling shame before his brother, to abandon his passion, saying it was disgraceful for a man overcome by a slave woman to deprive himself of the king's goodwill and, on top of that, to become for Herod a source of turmoil and hatred. Seeing that this advice would serve him well, since he had already once been under suspicion and had been forgiven, Pheroras sent the woman away — though he had a child by her already — and promised the king he would take his second daughter, setting the wedding for the thirtieth day, and swearing along with this that he would have nothing more to do with the woman he had dismissed. But when the thirty days had passed, he was so much the slave of his passion that he did none of what he had promised, and returned again to his first attachment.
This now openly grieved Herod and roused him to anger. Certain remarks kept slipping out from him, and many made use of the king's anger as an occasion to slander Pheroras further. There was scarcely a day or an hour in which Herod could remain at peace; something new was constantly arising out of the rivalries his kinsmen and closest relations kept stirring up against one another. Salome, harsh and ill-disposed toward Mariamme's sons, would not even allow her own daughter, married to Aristobulus, one of the young men, to show him the affection due a husband; she persuaded her to report whatever he said in private and to inform her even of their disagreements, of which there were many, thereby feeding a great many suspicions. Through this she learned everything about them, while at the same time making her daughter ill-disposed toward the young man.
To please her mother, the daughter often reported that the brothers, in private, kept the memory of Mariamme alive, hated their father, and constantly threatened that, should they ever come to power, they would appoint the sons Herod had by his other wives as village clerks, since their current studious devotion to learning suited them for nothing better; and as for the wives, if they ever saw them wearing their mother's ornaments, they would strip them of their present finery and confine them dressed in rags, not even allowed to see the sun. All this was at once reported to the king through Salome, and he listened to it with pain; he tried to set matters right, but he was worn down by the suspicions, and, growing ever worse, came to believe everyone against everyone. Even so, on that occasion, after rebuking the young men, once they had defended themselves he was somewhat relieved for the time being, but far worse news fell upon him not long after.
For Pheroras went to Alexander, who, as we have said, was married to Glaphyra, daughter of Archelaus, and told him that he had heard from Salome that Herod was overcome with passion for Glaphyra and that his desire for her was beyond consolation. On hearing this, Alexander, being young and prone to jealousy, blazed up, and took
Unable to bear it, he was thrown into confusion by the falsehood of the slander. Often he lamented the wickedness of his own household, seeing what he had been to them and what he was getting in return from them. He sent for Pheroras, and after reproaching him he said: "Vilest of all men, have you come to such unmeasured and excessive ingratitude that you could think such things about me, let alone say them?
Don't I see your purpose in bringing such talk to my son, making it into a plot and a poison meant to destroy me? For who, unless he had enjoyed the favor of some good spirit, as this boy has, would have refrained from punishing his father over such a suspicion? Do you think you were casting a word into his soul, or a sword into the hand raised against the man who begot him? And what do you mean by hating him and his brother, yet feigning goodwill toward them only so as to speak this slander against me, and to say things that it took your own impiety both to conceive and to spread? Go to ruin, you who have proved yourself so vile toward a benefactor and a brother. May this be the conscience you live with for the rest of your life, while I go on winning out over my own kin, neither taking the revenge they deserve nor doing them more good than they are entitled to receive." Such were the king's words.
Pheroras, caught in the act of his own villainy, said that Salome had persuaded him to say these things, and that the words were hers. She, as soon as she heard this — for she happened to be present — cried out convincingly that nothing of the sort had come from her, and that everyone was eager to bring her into the king's hatred, and to hold it against her in every way, because of the goodwill she bore Herod, always foreseeing dangers on his behalf ahead of everyone else, and that at this very moment she was being plotted against all the more; for it was she alone who had persuaded her brother to cast out the wife he had and marry the king's daughter, and it was only natural that he should hate her for it. As she said this, over and over again clutching at her hair and beating her breast, her outward appearance carried some plausibility toward her denial, but the malice of her character betrayed the pretense running through it all. Pheroras was caught in the middle with nothing decent to say in his own defense — he had admitted to speaking the words, but was not believed when he claimed only to have heard them from another. The confusion, and the exchange of accusations back and forth, grew still greater. In the end the king, now hating both his brother and his sister, sent them away, praised his son for his self-restraint and for bringing the matter to him, and, since it was now late in the day, turned to the care of his body.
Once this quarrel had broken out, Salome came off badly from it, since it seemed that the slander had originated with her; and the king's wives were displeased with her, knowing her nature to be most difficult, and how she became by turns an enemy and a friend as the moment suited her. So they were always saying something to Herod against her, and one incident that occurred gave them still greater license to speak freely on the subject.
The king of Arabia, Obodas, was an unambitious man, sluggish by nature, and it was Syllaeus who managed most of his affairs for him, a clever man, still young in years and handsome. Coming to Herod on some business, he saw Salome at dinner and set his mind on her; and knowing that she happened to be a widow, he spoke with her. Salome, who was faring worse than before at her brother's hands and did not look on the young man without feeling, was eager for the marriage, and at the successive dinners they attended there appeared between them rather more warmth, and less restraint, than was proper given how matters stood between the two of them.
The women reported this to the king, mocking the impropriety of it, and Herod made inquiries of Pheroras as well, and asked him to watch, during dinner, how the two of them behaved toward each other. Pheroras reported back that by nods and glances both of them made their inclination unmistakable. After this the Arab, growing suspicious, went away; but after an interval of two or three months he came again for this very purpose, and put a proposal to Herod, asking that Salome be given him in marriage; for the alliance, he said, would not be without advantage, joined as it would be to the rule of the Arabs, which even now was in fact largely in his hands, and would belong to him still more fully in time.
When Herod put the proposal to his sister and asked whether she was ready for the marriage, she accepted at once; but when they required Syllaeus to be circumcised according to Jewish custom before the marriage could take place — since otherwise it was impossible — he would not submit to it, and saying that he would even be stoned by the Arabs if he did such a thing, he departed. So Pheroras, and still more the king's wives, now accused Salome of licentiousness, saying that she had had relations with the Arab.
As for the girl whom the king had betrothed to his brother — whom Pheroras, as I said before, had not taken, being ruled by his wife — Salome had asked for her on behalf of her own son by Costobarus, and was inclined to marry her to him; but she was talked out of it by Pheroras, who said the young man would not be well disposed toward her because of his father's death, and that it was fairer that his own son, who was heir to the tetrarchy, should have her. In this way he begged forgiveness, and even without gaining it acted as if he had; so the betrothal was transferred, and she was married to Pheroras's young son, the king providing a hundred talents as her dowry.
The troubles in the household did not let up but kept growing worse, and something of the following kind occurred, arising from a cause not at all respectable, yet advancing far because of the ill will it stirred. The king had eunuchs whom he prized greatly for their beauty. Of these, one was entrusted with pouring his wine, another with serving his dinner, and another with putting the king to bed — men trusted with the greatest responsibilities of the court. Someone reported to the king that these men had been corrupted by his son Alexander for a great sum of money. When Herod questioned them about their dealings and intimacy with Alexander, they admitted to it, but said they knew of nothing else troubling toward his father. Under torture, though, as the pressure grew more severe and his agents kept intensifying it to gratify Antipater, they began to say that Alexander bore hostility toward his father and an inborn hatred for him.
He had, they said, advised them that Herod should be given up as a lost cause — a man who had already had more than his share and who used the darkening of his hair to disguise his age, hiding the proof of how old he was. If they would only pay attention to him, once he had won the kingdom — which, whatever his father wished, could belong to no one else — he would soon hold the first place in it; for not only by right of birth, but already by his own preparations, he was ready to seize power: many of the officers, and many of his friends, stood ready, being men not unwilling to do or suffer anything whatsoever.
On hearing this report Herod was overcome entirely by both resentment and fear — taking the words spoken as insolence hard to bear, and those hinting at a plot as no less dangerous — so that he grew all the more inflamed from both directions, and, being a harsh man, was afraid that something truly stronger than he could guard against by the time it came might really be organized against him. From this point on he no longer made his investigation openly, but sent out spies among those under suspicion. Suspicion and hatred toward everyone took hold of him, and, seizing on suspicion as a means of safety, he went on applying it freely even against those who did not deserve it. There was no end to it: the men reckoned to have influence seemed to him all the more to be feared the more powerful they appeared, while for those with whom he had no close relation, it seemed enough merely to name them, and at once they seemed to him to be losing part of his security. In the end, those around him, having nothing secure to hope for in the way of safety, turned against one another, thinking that if one man forestalled another by informing against him first, this would work toward his own safety; yet they only made themselves objects of envy whenever they did obtain what they sought, and brought upon themselves, in addition, the just deserts of the wrongs they had done to others. Indeed some were already pursuing private quarrels of their own in just this fashion, and, being caught out, found themselves suffering the same fate, treating the occasion as an instrument and a snare against their enemies, while being caught in the very trap by which they had schemed against others. For repentance came quickly to the king because he was putting men to death without their guilt being made plain, and the difficulty of it was resolved not by his ceasing to act in the same way, but by his taking equal vengeance on those who had brought the accusations. Such was the disturbance surrounding the court.
To many of his friends he now gave notice that they should no longer present themselves to him or come into the palace. He issued this order against those toward whom the freedom he had once granted had been either lesser or greater; for Andromachus and Gemellus, men who had long been his friends, who had done great service to his house both on embassies and in counsel on matters of state, and who had helped raise his sons, and who — need one even ask — had held the very first place in that freedom of access, he now dismissed: the one because his son Demetrius was intimate with Alexander, and Gemellus because he knew him to be well disposed toward Alexander, since he had shared in his upbringing and education and had accompanied him on his stay in Rome. He dismissed these men too, though he would gladly have treated them still worse, restrained only by the fact that he could not, without disgracing men of no small standing, extend such freedom of access as far as this — thereby stripping away both their honor and their power to restrain him from wrongdoing.
Antipater was responsible for all of this: once he had discerned the sickness afflicting his father's willingness to listen freely to others, he had for a long time been pressing close upon him in council, and seemed to be accomplishing all the more of what he intended, one by one, whenever those able to stand against him were removed. So now, once Andromachus and his circle had been driven from any voice or freedom of speech, the king first put to torture as many as he supposed loyal to Alexander, to learn whether they knew of any daring plot against him; but they died having nothing to say. This became for him a further cause of contentiousness — that nothing such as he supposed should turn up on investigation — and Antipater, clever man that he was, sought to discredit as guilty, precisely through their innocence, a man whose self-restraint and loyalty was proved by the very truth, while working to inflame matters further, seeking out from ever more people whatever lay hidden in the scheme.
Then someone among the many being tortured said that he knew the young man had often said, whenever he was praised for being tall of stature, a fine marksman with the bow, and superior to everyone in the other marks of excellence, that these were for him misfortunes rather than blessings given by nature; for his father, he said, was grieved and jealous over them, so that whenever he was out walking with him he would draw himself in and stoop, so as not to appear taller, but when shooting at the hunts, with his father present, he would deliberately miss the mark, for he knew his father's jealous pride whenever these things won him honor. As the man was tortured and, with the easing of pain, gained some relief in his body, he added further that Alexander, with his brother Aristobulus as his accomplice, planned to ambush his father during a hunt and then flee to Rome, and that once this was accomplished he intended to ask for the kingdom for himself.
Letters from the young man to his brother were also found, in which he complained that his father was acting unjustly, granting to Antipater land yielding an income of two hundred talents. On these grounds Herod at once thought he had some solid proof, as he supposed, against the suspicion he held of his sons, and he had Alexander seized and put in chains. Even so he did not relent from his harshness, though he did not entirely believe even what he had heard; for on reflection nothing worthy of a plot appeared to him in these matters, only complaints and youthful ambitions, and it seemed implausible that a man who had openly killed his father would then rush off to Rome. He wanted to get some greater proof of his son's wrongdoing, and, being contentious by nature, he was unwilling to appear to have condemned him to chains rashly. So, torturing those of Alexander's friends who held office, he put not a few of them to death without their saying anything of what he supposed.
With so much readiness for such measures, and fear and confusion prevailing around the palace, one of the younger men, as if under the pressure of necessity, said that Alexander was sending word to his friends in Rome, asking to be summoned there by Caesar as soon as possible; for he had, he said, a plot to reveal against Mithridates, the king of the Parthians, whom his father had chosen as a friend against the Romans, and that he also had poison prepared for him at Ascalon.
Herod believed these things, and found some comfort for his own rashness amid his troubles, being flattered by worse men than himself. The poison, though eagerly sought at once, was not found. But Alexander, out of sheer contentiousness, wishing to make the extremity of these evils still worse, did not turn to denial, but instead met his father's rashness with a still greater fault of his own — perhaps also wishing by this means to shame his father's readiness to believe slanders, and not least in case he had actually resolved, should he be believed, to destroy both him and the whole kingdom. He wrote letters in four books and sent them, saying there was no need to torture anyone further or to go on with the investigation; for the plot was real, and its participants were Pheroras and his most trusted friends, and Salome too, who had come to him by night and lain with him against his will; and that all of them had come together to this end, that once they had gotten him out of the way as quickly as possible, they might be free from the constant expectation of it. Among those thus accused were also Ptolemy and Sapinnius, the most trusted men of the king.
And what need is there to say more? As if some madness had fallen upon them, men once dearest to one another became like wild beasts against each other, none of them allowing room for defense or examination until the truth could be established, but destruction without judgment continually falling on everyone alike — some to chains, others to death, others lamenting that these fates awaited them — while stillness and gloom stripped the palace of its former splendor. Herod's whole life became harsh, his entire existence in turmoil, and his refusal to trust anyone was itself a great punishment inflicted by his own expectation; often, indeed, he imagined his son rising up against him, or standing over him sword in hand, as if in a waking vision. So it was that his soul, working at this night and day, took on an affliction of madness, and no less of derangement. Such was the state of affairs concerning him.
The king of the Cappadocians, when he learned what had happened to Herod, was troubled on account of his daughter and the young man and shared in his friend's distress over so great a disturbance; he came at once, not treating the matter as a minor affair. Finding things as they were, he judged it entirely unsuitable to the moment to rebuke Herod or to say that anything rash had been done, since a man already embittered would only contend the more, and one who hurried to defend himself would be filled with still greater anger. So Archelaus took a different course: he set about correcting the damage that had been done. Feigning anger at the young man, he called him blameless for having done nothing rash, declared that he would break off the marriage with Alexander, and said he would not even spare his own daughter if she had known of any wrongdoing and failed to disclose it.
Since this was not at all what Herod had expected, and Archelaus showed the greater anger on Herod's own behalf, the king's harshness gave way; feeling that he had gained a case for having acted justly, he gradually shifted back into a father's natural feeling. He was pitiable in both moods: when someone cleared the young man of the slanders he was stirred again to anger, but when Archelaus joined in accusing him he turned to tears and unfeigned grief. He began to beg Archelaus neither to dissolve the marriage nor to hold on to his anger over the wrongs the young man had done.
Archelaus, taking this up more gently, shifted the blame onto Alexander's friends, saying that it was they who had corrupted him, since he was young and had no sense of malice; and in this way he made Herod's brother Pheroras still more suspect. For Herod was harsh toward Pheroras too, and Pheroras, seeing no one else able to reconcile him, and finding no other recourse, turned to Archelaus, dressed in mourning black and bearing every mark of impending ruin. Archelaus did not dismiss his plea, but said he could not quickly change the king's mind while he was so disposed; it would be better for Pheroras himself to go and beg, admitting that he was the cause of everything, for in this way he would relieve the excess of Herod's anger, and Archelaus would be present to assist him. When Pheroras was persuaded, both matters were settled together: the slanders against the young man were unexpectedly lifted, and, having reconciled Pheroras, Archelaus set off for Cappadocia, having become, in that crisis, more welcome to Herod than any other man could have been. For this Herod honored him with the most costly gifts and treated him magnificently in every other respect, holding him among his very dearest friends. He also arranged to travel to Rome with him, since Caesar had written concerning these matters, and the two journeyed together as far as Antioch. There Herod also reconciled the governor of Syria, Titius, who was at odds with Archelaus, and then returned to Judea.
While he was in Rome, and after his return from there, war broke out against the Arabs for the following reason. The inhabitants of Trachonitis, once Caesar had taken the region from Zenodorus and given it to Herod, no longer had license to plunder, but were compelled to farm and live peaceably. This was not to their liking, nor did the land reward the labor of those who worked it. Still, at first, since the king would not permit it, they held back from wronging their neighbors, and Herod gained much good repute for his diligence in this. But when he sailed to Rome — the time when he also brought his accusation against his son Alexander and had gone to present his son Antipater to Caesar — the men occupying Trachonitis spread word that he was dead, threw off his rule, and returned to their old habit of wronging the people around them. On that occasion the king's generals subdued them while he was absent, but about forty of the ringleading bandits, fearing what had befallen those who had been caught, abandoned the country and set out for Arabia, where Syllaeus took them in after his failed marriage to Salome; he gave them a fortified place to settle in, and from there, overrunning not only Judea but the whole of Coele-Syria, they plundered it, while Syllaeus supplied them with bases and immunity for their crimes.
When Herod returned from Rome he found that much of his own people's property had been damaged, and he was unable to get the bandits into his power because of the protection the Arabs afforded them; but, deeply angered over the wrongs done to him, he went through Trachonitis and put their families to the sword. This only drove the bandits to greater fury over what they had suffered, and since they had a kind of law entitling them to pursue the killers of their kin by every means without penalty, they carried on ravaging the whole of Herod's realm. Herod, for his part, took the matter up with Caesar's governors, Saturninus and Volumnius, demanding that the bandits be handed over for punishment. Emboldened all the more by this, they grew still more numerous and threw everything into turmoil, aiming to bring down Herod's kingdom — sacking places and villages and slaughtering every man they seized, so that the lawlessness came to resemble open war; for they now numbered about a thousand.
Distressed by this, Herod demanded the bandits back, and also demanded repayment of sixty talents he had lent to Obodas through Syllaeus, since the term of the loan had passed. But Syllaeus, having pushed Obodas aside and taken charge of everything himself, denied that the bandits were in Arabia at all and kept putting off the question of the money, which was discussed before Saturninus and Volumnius, the governors of Syria. In the end it was agreed through them that within thirty days Herod would recover the money, and each side would hand over any of the other's people found within its own kingdom; among Herod's people not a single Arab was found at all, whether as a wrongdoer or in any other capacity, while the Arabs were shown to be sheltering the bandits among themselves. When the deadline passed and Syllaeus had fulfilled none of what was just, he went up to Rome. Herod then seized, as security, the money and the bandits held among the Arabs, and since Saturninus and Volumnius permitted him to proceed against those acting in bad faith, he led out an army into Arabia, covering seven stages in three days, and on reaching the fortress that held the bandits, took it by storm and captured them all, razing the place called Raepta; nothing else was harmed. When the Arabs came out to relieve it under the command of Naceb, a battle followed in which few of Herod's men fell, but Naceb, the Arab general, and about twenty-five of his men fell, and the rest turned to flight. Having punished them, Herod settled three thousand Idumaeans in Trachonitis to keep watch over the bandits there, and sent word of all this to the governors, then in Phoenicia, showing that he had done nothing more than what was needed to proceed against the Arabs' bad faith. On close inquiry they found that none of it was false.
But messengers hurried ahead to Rome on Syllaeus's behalf and reported what had happened, magnifying each event beyond its true measure, as one would expect. Syllaeus had already made himself known to Caesar, and was at that time attending the court; as soon as he heard the news he changed at once into black clothing, came before Caesar, and told him that Arabia had been ravaged by war and the whole kingdom laid waste, since Herod had attacked it with an army. Weeping, he said that two thousand five hundred of the leading Arabs had perished, that their general Naceb, his own kinsman and relative, had been killed, that the wealth at Raepta had been plundered, and that Obodas had been held in contempt for his weakness, unable to withstand the war because neither he nor the Arab forces had been present.
As Syllaeus spoke in this way, adding spitefully that he himself would never have left the country had he not trusted that Caesar cared for peace among all peoples, and that even his own presence there could not have made the war profitable for Herod, Caesar, provoked by what he heard, questioned Herod's representatives who were present, and his own men who had come from Syria, on this one point alone: whether Herod had led out the army. When they were forced to admit this much, but Caesar would not listen to why or how it had been done, his anger grew still greater, and he wrote to Herod harshly on other matters as well, but the chief point of the letter was this: that having once treated him as a friend, he would now treat him as a subject. Syllaeus, too, wrote to the Arabs about these events. Emboldened, they neither surrendered the bandits who had escaped nor settled the debts, and they kept, without payment, the pasturelands they had leased from Herod, since the king of the Jews had been humbled by Caesar's anger. Those holding Trachonitis also took advantage of the moment, rising up against the Idumaean garrison and joining the Arabs in banditry, plundering their territory — harsher in their wrongdoing not merely for gain but out of spite as well.
Herod bore all of this, since the freedom he had enjoyed through Caesar's favor had now changed, and the greater part of his confidence had been stripped away; for Caesar would not even receive the embassy Herod sent to defend himself, but sent the delegation home having achieved nothing. There was, in consequence, despondency and fear, and Syllaeus, trusted and present in Rome, caused no small distress, laying hold now of still greater matters. For Obodas had died, and Aeneas, who took the new name Aretas, succeeded to the rule of the Arabs. Syllaeus attempted, through slander, to push him aside and seize the throne for himself, giving large sums to those at court and promising much to Caesar besides. But Caesar was angry that Aretas had taken the kingship without first writing to him. Aretas, in turn, sent Caesar a letter and gifts, including a golden crown worth many talents; his letter accused Syllaeus of being a wicked slave who had destroyed Obodas with poison and seized control while he still lived, of committing adultery with Arab wives, and of borrowing money in order to make the kingdom his own. Caesar paid no more attention to this than before, and sent him away without accepting any of the gifts.
Meanwhile affairs in Judea and Arabia went from bad to worse, some falling into disorder, and, as things were being destroyed, no one stood firmly in charge: one king had not yet secured his rule and so could not restrain wrongdoers, while Herod, for defending himself, was forced — since Caesar's anger against him had flared so quickly — to endure every outrage committed against him. Seeing no end to the troubles surrounding him, Herod decided to send to Rome once more, to see whether he could find some more moderate resolution, working through his friends and appealing to Caesar himself. It was Nicolaus of Damascus who went there.
Meanwhile his household, and the affairs of his sons, had also been thrown into confusion and had grown far worse around this same time. Even in the past nothing had been free of anxiety, given how the greatest and most difficult of human sufferings so often threatens royal houses through the turns of fortune; but the trouble now advanced and grew even greater, for the following reason. Eurycles of Lacedaemon, a man of some standing among his own people but base at heart, and skilled at both indulging in luxury and flattery and concealing that he did so, came to visit Herod. He gave him gifts and, receiving still more in return, used his opportunities for private meetings to make himself one of the king's closest friends. His lodging was in Antipater's household, but his access and familiarity lay with Alexander, for he claimed to be devoted to Archelaus the Cappadocian. For this reason he also pretended to honor Glaphyra, and went about secretly courting everyone, always attentive to whatever was said or done, so as to trade on the resulting rumors. In the end he turned out, for each person as the occasion required, to seem a friend to that one while appearing to the others to be siding only with whoever suited his own advantage.
This man drew out Alexander — still young, and persuaded that he could speak freely of his grievances to no one but him — who unburdened himself, showing how his father had grown estranged from him, and recounting the treatment of his mother and the doings of Antipater, who, having pushed them aside from honor, now held all power. He said that none of this was bearable, now that his father had been so thoroughly turned against him that he could not even endure being present with him at banquets or gatherings. Such were his words, understandably, given what he suffered. But Eurycles carried these speeches back to Antipater, telling him that Alexander said such things not out of hostility to him but because he felt outdone by him, given how greatly Antipater was honored, and he urged Antipater to be on his guard against Alexander, insisting that Alexander spoke none of this idly, but that his very words carried real intent. Antipater, believing Eurycles well disposed toward him because of this, rewarded him with great gifts at every turn, and at last persuaded him to carry the report on to Herod.
Eurycles, in recounting what he claimed to have heard of Alexander's ill will, proved far from unconvincing; rather, by constantly working on the king with his words and provoking him, he brought Herod to a point where the hatred became fixed beyond recall. He showed this at once: he gave Eurycles fifty talents as a gift on the spot. Eurycles, having taken the money, went up to Archelaus, king of the Cappadocians, and there praised Alexander, saying he had done Archelaus great service in bringing about the reconciliation with his father. Having drawn money from him as well, he departed before his double-dealing could be discovered. Eurycles did not stop his wickedness even once back in Lacedaemon, and for his many crimes was in the end stripped of his own homeland.
The king of the Jews no longer behaved toward Alexander and Aristobulus as he once had, merely listening to the slanders brought against them; having now become hostile to them within his own household, he himself worked things out whether or not anyone spoke against them, watching everything, making inquiries, and giving free rein to anyone who wished to say something damaging about them — even allowing Evaratus of Cos to disclose what he claimed to know about Alexander. And this, above everything, Herod took with the greatest pleasure. A still greater plot then arose against the young men, since the slander against them was constantly being made to grow larger, and it seemed, as one might say, that a prize was set before everyone: to say something damaging about them was thought to serve the king's own safety. Herod had two bodyguards, honored for their strength and stature, Jucundus and Tyrannus. These men, having become resentful of...
The king now had them pushed away from Alexander's circle, though they still rode with him and were honored at the gymnasium, and had received a sum of gold and other gifts. The king immediately grew suspicious of these two as well and had them tortured. After holding out for a long time, they eventually said that Alexander had been urging them to kill Herod, since he would get his chance while out hunting: it would be easy to say the king had been thrown from his horse and impaled on his own spears, since something of the sort had in fact happened to him once before. They also produced the gold, which had been buried in a stable, and denounced the chief huntsman, who they said had given them royal spears and, on Alexander's orders, weapons to Alexander's attendants as well.
After these two, the commander of the fortress of Alexandreion was arrested and tortured, since he too was accused of having agreed to receive the young men into the garrison and to supply them with the funds stored there for the king's use in that fortress. He himself admitted nothing, but his son came forward and said that this had indeed happened, and produced a letter that appeared to be in Alexander's hand: "When, with God's help, we have accomplished all that we have proposed, we will come to you; only try, as you promised, to receive us into the fortress." On being shown this note, Herod no longer had any doubt about his sons' plot against him. Alexander, however, said that Diophantus the secretary had copied his handwriting, and that the note had been forged through Antipater's doing; for Diophantus was indeed known to be skilled at such things, and was later put to death after being convicted of other forgeries.
The king brought those who had been tortured before the crowd at Jericho to denounce the young men, and the mob stoned them to death with their own hands. When the crowd surged forward to kill Alexander and his brother in the same way, the king held them back, through the intervention of Ptolemy and Pheroras, and had them instead placed under guard and watch. No one was allowed to approach them, but everything they did and said was closely monitored, and they suffered all the disgrace and fear of condemned men.
One of them, Aristobulus, overcome with bitterness, urged his own aunt and mother-in-law to grieve with him over his misfortunes and to hate the man who had persuaded her to act as she had. "Is there not also a danger to you," he said, "now that you have been slandered to Syllaeus in hope of marriage, in reporting everything that happens here?" She quickly carried these words to her brother. He could no longer restrain himself and ordered the two young men bound, and, once they had been separated from each other, ordered them to write down and hand over an account of every wrong they had done against their father. When this was required of them, they wrote that they had never conceived or plotted any scheme against the man who begot them, but that they had planned to flee, and this only out of necessity, because their life had become suspect and difficult to bear.
At this time an envoy named Melas, a man of standing among Archelaus's people, arrived from Cappadocia on behalf of Archelaus. Wishing to demonstrate Archelaus's ill will toward him, Herod summoned Alexander from his bonds and again questioned him about the escape plan -- where and how they had intended to withdraw. Alexander said that he had planned to go to Archelaus, and from there, once Archelaus agreed, to be sent on to Rome; he had entertained nothing else improper or troublesome against his father, nor was anything that his enemies had maliciously fabricated true. He said he wished still to live, if only to have Tyrannus and his companions examined more thoroughly, but that they had already been put to death sooner, because Antipater kept installing his own friends among the people. As he was speaking, Herod ordered that Melas and Alexander be brought to Glaphyra, Archelaus's daughter, and that she be asked whether she knew nothing of what was being plotted against Herod.
When they arrived, Glaphyra, seeing Alexander in chains, struck her head at once and, overcome, cried out loudly in shared grief. There were tears from the young man too, and the sight was painful for those present, so much so that for a good while they could neither say nor do what they had come for. At last Ptolemy, to whom the task of conducting Alexander had been assigned, ordered him to state whether his wife knew anything of what had been done. "What would she not have known," he replied, "since she is loved by me more than my own life and shares in our children?" At this she cried out that she knew of nothing improper, but that if lying about herself would help save him, she would confess to everything. Alexander said, "There is nothing impious in it, nor anything of what those who least ought to suspect us have imagined -- I myself never conceived it, and you know nothing of it -- except that we had decided to withdraw to Archelaus and from there to Rome." When she admitted to this much, Herod, concluding that Archelaus's ill will toward him had been proven, gave letters to Olympus and Volumnius, instructing them, on their voyage, to put in at Eleusa in Cilicia and deliver them to Archelaus, reproaching him for having taken part in the young men's plot, and then to sail on from there to Rome.
If they should find that Nicolaus had accomplished anything, so that Caesar was no longer displeased with him, they were to deliver the letters and the evidence he had drawn up against the young men. Archelaus, for his part, defended himself by admitting that he had received the young men, but said it was for their own good and their father's, so that nothing harsher might be added, in anger, to the suspicions over which they were already at odds; he had not, however, agreed to send them to Caesar, nor anything else out of ill will toward Herod.
When they were brought to Rome, they found an opportunity to deliver the letters, only to discover that Caesar had already been reconciled with Herod; for the matter of Nicolaus's embassy had turned out as follows. When he arrived in Rome and came before the court, he asked to be heard not only on the matter for which he had come but also to bring charges against Syllaeus, and it was clear even before the hearing that the two men were at odds. The Arabs, suspecting this of him, went to Nicolaus and reported all of Syllaeus's wrongdoings, offering clear proof that the whole of Obodas's estate had been squandered -- for they even had some of Syllaeus's own letters, which they had taken at the time of the revolt and used to convict him through this evidence.
Nicolaus, seeing that this good fortune had come his way, used it to further his purpose, pressing for a reconciliation between Herod and Caesar; for he knew well that if he wished to defend what Herod had done, he would not be granted freedom of speech, but that if he chose instead to accuse Syllaeus, an opportunity would arise to speak in Herod's favor. So, once the two were set against each other and a day appointed, Nicolaus, with Aretas's envoys present, brought a whole series of charges against Syllaeus: that he was responsible for the death of the king and of many Arabs; that he had borrowed money for no honest purpose; and he exposed adulteries not only with women in Arabia but also with women in Rome. He added, most seriously of all, that Syllaeus had deceived Caesar by telling him nothing that was true about what Herod had done.
When he came to this point, Caesar cut him off, insisting that he speak only to this: whether Herod had not led an army into Arabia, killed two thousand five hundred of its people, taken prisoners, and plundered the country. To this Nicolaus replied that he would show, above all, that none of this -- or at most very little of it -- had happened as Caesar had heard, and that it would have been just to bear it harshly even if it had. When, to everyone's surprise, Caesar consented to hear him out, Nicolaus spoke of the loan of five hundred talents and the contract, in which it was also written that once the deadline had passed it was permitted to seize pledges from the whole country; the campaign, he said, was no campaign at all, but a just demand for one's own money -- and not even that demand made hastily, or beyond what the contracts allowed. Herod had gone repeatedly to Saturninus and Volumnius, the governors of Syria, and finally, at Berytus, in their presence, Syllaeus had sworn by Caesar's own fortune that within thirty days he would hand over the money and the fugitives from Herod's kingdom.
When Syllaeus did none of this, Herod had gone again to the governors, and only when they permitted him to seize the pledges did he go forth, with difficulty, together with his own men. "This, then, was the 'war,'" Nicolaus said, "as these men have made a tragedy of it, and this was the nature of the campaign. And how could it be called a war, when your own governors had permitted it, the agreement had authorized it, and your own name, Caesar, along with those of the other gods, had been impiously violated? As for the prisoners," he went on, "that must be spoken of next. Bandits from among those inhabiting the Trachonitis, forty of them at first and then more, fleeing Herod's punishments, made Arabia their base. Syllaeus took them in, supporting them beyond all men, gave them land to live off, and took for himself the profits of their banditry. He had also sworn, under the same oaths, to hand them over by the same deadline as the loan. He cannot at present show any other people of Arabia removed from their land besides these -- nor even all of these, but only those who failed to escape notice. Thus, Caesar, you can see for yourself how the greatest and most invidious accusation, that of taking captives, turns out to be nothing but a fabrication and a lie devised to provoke your anger.
"For I say that when the Arabs' forces attacked us, and one and then a second of Herod's men fell, and Herod's men, defending themselves only with difficulty, killed Nakebos their commander and about twenty-five men in all -- Syllaeus, reckoning each one of these as a hundred, reported two thousand five hundred dead." This moved Caesar all the more, and turning to Syllaeus in a rage he demanded to know how many Arabs had actually died. When Syllaeus, at a loss, said he had been misinformed, the loan agreements were read out, along with the governors' letters and those of the cities that laid the blame on the bandits, and in the end Caesar's judgment came to this: he condemned Syllaeus to death, and, reconciled with Herod, expressed regret for the harsher letter he had written him out of the bitterness caused by slander, and said something to the effect that Syllaeus had forced him, through his false report, to be unjust toward a friend. In the end Syllaeus was sent back to answer the charges and repay his debts to his creditors before being punished.
Caesar was not well disposed toward Aretas, because he had taken the throne on his own authority rather than through Caesar's grant. He had in fact decided to give Arabia to Herod, but the letters sent by Herod prevented it. For when Olympus and Volumnius, learning that Caesar was well disposed, thought it best at once to hand over, on Herod's instructions, the documents concerning his sons and the evidence against them, Caesar, on reading them, judged it would not be right to add another kingdom to an old man already in such trouble over his children; but he received Aretas's envoys and, reproaching him only for his rashness in not waiting to receive the kingdom from Caesar himself, accepted his gifts and confirmed him in his rule. To Herod, now reconciled, he wrote that he was grieved over the matter of his sons, and that if they had attempted anything truly impious, he should proceed against them as against those who had raised their hands against their own father -- for that authority was granted to him; but if they had merely planned to flee, he should admonish them and take no irrevocable action.
He advised him to convene a council at Berytus, where Romans resided, and, taking with him the governors and Archelaus, king of Cappadocia, and any others he judged distinguished for friendship and standing, to determine with their counsel what ought to be done. Such was Caesar's letter. When it was brought to him, Herod was overjoyed, both at the reconciliation and at being granted full authority over his sons. And somehow, while his earlier misfortune, hard as it was, had not made him bold or rash toward destroying his children, now, seizing on this turn for the better and this new freedom of action, he grew vain in the exercise of his power. He accordingly sent out summons to all whom he thought fit to call to the council, apart from Archelaus; him he did not think fit to have present, out of enmity, or because he thought he would stand in the way of his purpose.
When the governors and the others he had summoned from the cities had gathered at Berytus, he kept his sons -- for he did not see fit to bring them before the council -- in a village of the Sidonians called Platana, near the city, so that he could produce them if they were called for. He himself entered alone, and, before an assembly of a hundred and fifty seated men, brought an accusation that was not one of grief, as might be expected from a man suffering such misfortune, but one very far removed from how a father should speak against his sons. It was violent, and in laying out his case he was in turmoil, giving the greatest signs of rage and savagery, not allowing the judges to examine the evidence for themselves, but instead presenting, on the sons' behalf, a defense unworthy of a father speaking against his sons, and reading out what they themselves had written, in which no plot or thought of impiety had been recorded -- only that they had planned to flee, along with certain reproaches against him arising from their ill will. As he read these out, he grew still louder, and turned what remained into an admission of the plot itself, swearing that he would rather be deprived of life than hear such words.
Finally he said that he held this authority both by nature and by Caesar's grant, and added that ancestral law also commanded that if parents, having accused someone, laid their hands upon his head, those standing by were required to stone him and put him to death in this way. This he said he was ready to do himself, in his own country and by his own royal authority; yet he had chosen to wait for their judgment -- though he had not come as though seeking judges for offenses that were plain, for which he had nearly suffered at his sons' hands, but rather men who, having the opportunity to share his anger, would judge that no one, however distant, ought to overlook so grave a plot.
When the king had said this, and the young men had not even been brought forward to answer the charge, those seated in the council, agreeing among themselves that gentleness and reconciliation would only make matters worse, confirmed his authority to act. And first Saturninus, a man of consular rank and among those of the highest standing, delivered his opinion, though in a most unpleasant position: he said he condemned Herod's sons, but did not think it right to have them killed, since he too had sons, and the calamity would be all the greater for him, even if--
Everything had gone badly for him because of them. After Saturninus, his sons declared the same opinion — three legates who had accompanied him — and Volumnius said outright that men who had committed such impiety against their father should be punished with death. Most of those who spoke after them said the same, so that it no longer seemed to be anything other than that the young men had already been condemned to death. From there Herod went straight to Tyre, bringing them with him, and when Nicolaus sailed to him from Rome, he questioned him, after first describing what had happened at Berytus, about what opinion his friends in Rome held concerning his sons. Nicolaus said that what they had planned against Herod did indeed seem impious, but that he ought to confine and keep them under guard; and if he later decided to punish them, he should make sure it did not appear that he had acted more out of anger than judgment, while if he decided instead to release them, he should make sure the misfortune would not be beyond correction. This, he said, was also the opinion of most of Herod's friends in Rome. Herod fell silent and sank into deep thought, and then ordered Nicolaus to sail with him.
When he arrived at Caesarea, there was at once talk everywhere among all the people about the sons, and the kingdom was in suspense, waiting to see where their case would finally turn. A terrible fear had come over everyone, that after long factional strife things would arrive at their final outcome, and while they were distressed at what was happening, no one could safely say anything rash, nor listen safely to anyone else who did; but shut in as they were, they bore the excess of their grief painfully yet in silence. One of them, however, a soldier of long standing named Tiro, whose son was of an age to be a friend of Alexander, could not, out of his outspoken nature, keep hidden what the others kept quietly concealed; instead he was driven to cry out often among the crowds, saying openly that truth had perished, that justice had been removed from among men, and that lies and malice now prevailed, casting so thick a cloud over affairs that even the greatest of human sufferings could no longer be seen by those responsible for them. Being the sort of man he was, he seemed to speak with reckless disregard for danger, yet the reasonableness of what he said stirred everyone, since he took his stand on the occasion not without courage. For this reason people gladly heard, spoken by him, everything each of them would have wished to say himself, and while they foresaw their own safety in keeping silent, they nevertheless welcomed his outspokenness, for the disaster they expected compelled everyone, through him, to speak on Alexander's behalf.
He himself, pressing forward to the king with complete freedom of speech, insisted on speaking with him alone, and when this was granted but he could not bring himself to speak, he said: "O king, to endure in silence such suffering, though this bold outspokenness is dangerous, I have judged more useful and necessary for you than my own safety, if you should gain something profitable from it. Where have your good sense and your judgment gone, fallen out of your soul? Where is that extraordinary intelligence of yours, by which you accomplished many great things? What is this desolation of friends and kinsmen? I do not even judge those who are present to be kinsmen or friends, since they look on while such a horror is done to a kingdom once counted blessed. Will you not consider what is actually being done? You will kill two young men, born of a queen, men of the highest excellence in every virtue, and leave yourself in old age with a single son who has managed badly the hope placed in him, and with kinsmen on whom you yourself have already so often pronounced sentence of death. Do you not realize that even the silence of the crowds nevertheless sees this madness and hates the deed, and that the whole army, and its leading officers, feel pity for the unfortunate and hatred for those who are doing this?" The king listened to this at first not altogether unreasonably, but — why should I even say it — he was deeply stirred when Tiro touched openly on his suffering and on his mistrust of his own household. Then, little by little, the man went further, using an unmeasured and soldierly frankness, for his lack of restraint carried him beyond what the occasion allowed, and Herod was filled with confusion, and, feeling reproached rather than hearing words meant for his benefit — especially once he learned of the soldiers' disposition and the officers' resentment — ordered that all those named be arrested and that Tiro be bound and held under guard.
When this had happened, a certain Trypho, a barber of the king's, seized the occasion as well, coming forward and saying that Tiro had often tried to persuade him, whenever he was shaving the king's throat with the razor, to cut it — for he would then be among the first around Alexander and would receive great gifts. Having said this, Herod ordered him arrested, and after this there was torture of Tiro, of his son, and of the barber. While Tiro held out under it, his son, seeing his father now in a wretched state and with no hope of safety — foreseeing from the severity being inflicted on the sufferer what awaited himself as well — said he would reveal the truth to the king, if he would spare both himself and his father further torture and abuse by his telling it. When the king had given his word on this, he said there was a plot for Tiro to attack the king with his own hand, since it was easy for him to approach him alone, and that in doing so and suffering whatever was likely to follow, he would not act ignobly, but would be doing Alexander a favor. Having said this, he freed his father from the compulsion, though it is unclear whether he was forced to speak the truth, or whether he had thought of this as a way of ending the suffering for himself and for the one who had begotten him.
Herod, if he had earlier had any hesitation about the killing of his children, any room or place left for it in his soul, now had none at all; having removed everything that might have afforded him a change of mind toward better reasoning, he hastened at last to bring his resolve to its conclusion. Bringing before an assembly three hundred of the officers who had been implicated, along with Tiro, his son, and the barber who had informed against him, he brought accusations against all of them. The crowd, pelting them at once with whatever came to hand, killed them. Alexander and Aristobulus were taken to Sebaste on their father's order and strangled there, and their bodies were carried by night to Alexandreion, where their maternal grandfather and most of their ancestors lay buried.
Now perhaps it does not seem unreasonable to some that a hatred nurtured over a long time should grow in this way and, advancing further, overcome nature itself. But a question might reasonably arise as to whether such a cause should be traced back to the young men, on the ground that they provoked their father to anger and, over time, brought him to an incurable harshness toward themselves, or rather to Herod himself, since he was a man untouched by restraint and extraordinary in his desire for power and for the rest of his reputation, so much so that no one supposes he left anything undone by which he might make whatever he wanted unassailable — or else one might say that fortune had a power greater than any sound reasoning, whence we are also persuaded that human affairs are consecrated beforehand by her to the necessity that they come about absolutely, and we call this fate, as though nothing existed that did not come about through her. This argument, however, as reaching too far toward that conclusion, will suffice for us to raise only in passing, granting something to ourselves as well and not leaving the differences among ways of life unaccountable — matters that have already been philosophized about before us, and by the law as well.
Of the other two causes, one might reproach the sons with an accusation arising from youthful self-will and royal pride, in that they tolerated slanders against their father and were not kindly examiners of the way he conducted his life, being prone to suspect the worst and unrestrained in speaking of it, and thus easily caught, on both counts, by those who watched them and reported for favor. The father, however, does not seem worthy of any mitigation for his impiety toward them, since, without having received clear proof of a plot or being able to demonstrate any preparation for an attempt, he dared to kill his own offspring — men outstanding in body and longed for by all who were not even his own, and no way inferior in their pursuits, whether it were a matter of hunting, or training for war, or speaking on behalf of those who had fallen into misfortune. For they took part in all of these, and Alexander, the elder, even more so. It would have sufficed, even if he had condemned them, to keep them alive nonetheless, in bonds or in exile from the kingdom, with great safety for himself, surrounded as he was by the power of Rome, through which he could suffer nothing even from open assault and force. But to kill them quickly, for the pleasure of the passion overpowering him, is proof of unmeasured impiety, and he erred greatly in this, being already advanced in age. Yet the delay and the passing of time would not bring him any pardon either; for to rush, stirred and shaken, into some monstrous act, though a harsh thing, is at least something that always happens; but to pause and deliberate at length, often setting out and often hesitating, and in the end to undertake and carry it through, is the mark of a bloodthirsty soul, hard to turn back from the worse course. He showed this also in what followed, not sparing even the rest of those who seemed dearest to him, in whose case justice made less claim to pity for those who perished, but the cruelty was just the same, in that he spared none of them either. We will go on to narrate these things in the account that follows.

======== Antiquities — Book 17 ========

How Antipater was hated by the whole nation because of the killing of his brothers, and how because of this he courted favor with the people at Rome with large sums of money, and with Saturninus, who had been entrusted with Syria, and the officials with him. How King Herod, seeing that the region of Trachonitis could not be kept stable because of the raids of the Arabs, summoned Zamaris, a Jew who had withdrawn from Babylon and was living at Antioch, and settled him there, using him as a bulwark against the Arabs. How, when Herod treated the children of his sons Alexander and Aristobulus as his own and betrothed to them the daughters of Pheroras, Antipater persuaded his father to transfer the betrothal to his own children instead. And how Antipater courted Pheroras's circle, wishing now to plot against his father through them. How the king's sister Salome learned of this secretly and reported it to her brother. How Herod ordered Antipater not to visit Pheroras, nor to tell him anything secret; and Antipater did nothing openly, but did it in secret, and even this did not escape Herod. How Antipater wrote to his friends at Rome, urging them to write to his father to persuade him to send Antipater to Caesar with a great deal of money, and Herod, persuaded, sent his son off. How Antipater persuaded Pheroras to kill his father Herod with poison, himself giving the poison to Pheroras. And how King Herod ordered his brother Pheroras to cast out his wife or withdraw from the kingdom; Pheroras heard this gladly, withdrew to his own tetrarchy, and died there not long after. The accusation brought against Pheroras's wife by Pheroras's brothers, that he had been killed by poison. And how Herod, on investigating, found that the poison had been prepared against him by his own son Antipater, and, having applied torture, learned of Antipater's plots. Antipater's voyage back from Rome to his father. And how, accused by Nicolaus of Damascus and condemned to death by his father and by Quintilius Varus, then governor of Syria, he was kept in chains until Caesar should render his decision. An embassy sent by Herod to Caesar concerning Antipater. And how Caesar, on hearing the charges, condemned him to death. Concerning Herod's illness and the uprising of the Jews because of it, and the punishment of the rebels. How, when Antipater supposed Herod had died, he spoke with his bodyguard about securing his own release, and how this led to Antipater's execution. Herod's death and his will, addressed to Caesar, and the division of the kingdom among his three sons. And how Caesar made Archelaus king of Judea. Herod's letter to the army, with a gift to each soldier and an exhortation to keep faith with his son Archelaus. Herod's burial at the fortress of Herodium. And how the people rose up against his son Archelaus at the festival. How Archelaus killed three thousand of them, and himself sailed to Caesar in Rome together with his brother Herod, entrusting his kingdom meanwhile to his brother Philip. How Sabinus, Caesar's procurator in Syria, went up to Jerusalem and forcibly demanded Herod's money and fortresses from Archelaus's stewards. How Archelaus's stewards persuaded the people to take up arms and besiege Sabinus and his troops in the Antonia. And how Varus, on hearing of this, marched up to Jerusalem with a large force, rescued Sabinus from the siege, punished those responsible for the revolt, and, having set affairs in Judea in good order, wrote to Caesar reporting what had been done. How Caesar confirmed Herod's will, preserving the succession for his sons. And how Archelaus was accused by his own relatives before Caesar, and, having prevailed, received the kingdom; but after ruling badly for ten years he was accused again and exiled to Vienne, and Caesar converted his kingdom into a Roman province. This book covers a period of fourteen years.
For Antipater, who had raised his hand against his brothers with the utmost impiety and had wrapped his father in the curse that followed from it, the hope of the life still to come did not turn out as he wished. Once freed from the fear that had hung over his position — since his brothers no longer shared any claim to it — he found securing the kingdom for himself more laborious and more hopeless than before, so great was the hatred that had grown up against him in the nation. And while this alone was hard enough, he was troubled still more by the army, whose sentiments toward him were hostile — the very men on whom kings depend entirely for their own safety whenever the nation is inclined toward revolution. So great a danger had the destruction of his brothers stored up for him.
Nevertheless he still shared in the rule with his father in no other way than as if he were king himself, and was trusted by him all the more, since he had thought it good to win proofs of his goodwill precisely from destroying his brothers, as though he had denounced them for the sake of Herod's safety and security, not out of hatred toward them and, before them, toward his father — such, in fact, were the curses he was heaping upon Herod all the while. All this, then, served as devices clearing Antipater's path to power, since it stripped him of accusers for what he intended to do, and stripped Herod of anyone to whom he might turn for help, now that Antipater had openly become his enemy. So it was out of hatred for his father that he had carried out the plot against his brothers, but what weighed on him more was that, having put his hand to the plot, he could not let it go: if Herod died, the throne would pass to him securely; but if Herod lived on still longer, and dangers arose in turn from the plot becoming known — a plot of which Antipater himself was the author — he would be forced to turn his father into his enemy.
Through his lavish gift-giving he won over those close to his father, astonishing men's hatred of him with great sums of money, and above all he made the friends at Rome well disposed toward him by sending them costly gifts, most of all Saturninus, the governor of Syria. He also hoped to win over Saturninus's brother through the size of the presents he gave him, and likewise the king's sister, who was married to the foremost man in Herod's circle, using the same method with her. Feigning friendship toward those he dealt with, he was extremely skilled at winning trust, and, having conceived hatred against certain people, was most shrewd at concealing it. Yet he did not deceive his aunt, who had long since taken his measure and was no longer the kind of person who could be misled, and who had already set herself, with every preparation, against his malice. And yet her daughter was married to his uncle on his mother's side, through Antipater's own scheming and contrivance, having taken a girl earlier married to Aristobulus; and her other daughter was the wife of the son of her husband Calleas. But this marriage connection proved no shield against his wickedness being recognized, just as the earlier kinship had not kept him from being hated.
Herod, meanwhile, forced Salome — who, out of erotic desire, was eager to marry Syllaeus the Arab — to live with Alexas instead, with Julia cooperating in this and persuading Salome not to refuse the marriage, lest hostility arise between them, since Herod had openly sworn he would bear Salome no goodwill unless she accepted marriage to Alexas. And Salome yielded, both because Julia was Caesar's wife and because her advice was altogether to Salome's advantage. At this same time Herod also sent Archelaus's daughter back to her father the king, since she had been married to Alexander; he returned her dowry from his own funds, so that no dispute at all should remain between them.
He himself raised the children of his sons with great care; for Alexander had two sons by Glaphyra, and Aristobulus had, by Berenice the daughter of Salome, three sons and two daughters. Once, with his friends present, he set the little children before him and, lamenting the fate of their fathers, prayed that nothing of the kind should ever befall these children, but that, once grown to manhood in virtue, they might repay him — through the very misfortune that justice had brought on their fathers — for the upbringing he was giving them. He had betrothed them for marriage, once they should reach the proper age: the elder of Alexander's sons to Pheroras's daughter, and Aristobulus's son to Antipater's daughter; he named one of Aristobulus's daughters for Antipater's son, and the other for his own son Herod, whom the king had by the daughter of the high priest — for it is our ancestral custom for a man to be married to several wives at once. The king arranged these betrothals of the children out of pity for the orphans, so as to win their goodwill, and to conciliate Antipater through the alliance. But Antipater did not relent from his settled purpose against his brothers, extending it now to their children as well, once they were born; his father's evident devotion to them provoked him, since he expected they would grow greater than their fathers' brothers had been, especially once they came of age — Archelaus being ready to claim the king's granddaughters for his own family, and Pheroras for the one who would marry his daughter, he too being a tetrarch. He was stirred as well by the whole populace, who treated the orphans with pity but directed all their hatred at him, since he had not shed his reputation for wickedness toward their fathers. He therefore schemed to undo what had been settled with his father, counting it a fearful thing that these children should come into contact with so great a power through such an alliance. And Herod kept changing his mind, yielding to Antipater's entreaties, so that in the end he himself married Aristobulus's daughter, and Pheroras's son married Antipater's daughter. Thus the marriage agreements were altered in this way, against the king's own original wish.
At this time nine wives lived with King Herod: Antipater's mother; and the high priest's daughter, by whom he had a son of the same name as himself; he also had one niece married to him, a brother's daughter, together with a cousin — to these no child was born. Among his wives there was also one of Samaritan birth, whose children were Antipas and Archelaus, and a daughter, Olympias, whom Joseph, the king's nephew, later married; Archelaus and Antipas were being raised at Rome under a private tutor. Cleopatra of Jerusalem was also married to him, and by her he had two sons, Herod and Philip, the latter also being raised at Rome. Pallas too, among his wives, had borne him a son, Phasael; and besides these there were Phaedra and Elpis, from whom came two daughters, Roxane and Salome. His elder daughters, born of the same mother as Alexander, whose marriage Pheroras had overlooked, were married — one to Antipater, son of the king's sister, and the other to Phasael, son of Herod's brother. Such was Herod's family.
At that time, wishing to secure himself against the Trachonites, Herod decided to found in their midst a village no smaller than a city, settled with Jews, both to make his own territory harder to penetrate and to be able to strike quickly against the enemy from closer range. Learning that a Jewish man from Babylonia, together with five hundred mounted archers and about a hundred kinsmen, had crossed the Euphrates and happened to be living at Antioch-by-Daphne in Syria — Saturninus, then governor there, having given him a place called Ulatha to settle in — Herod sent for this man together with the crowd that followed him, promising to give him land in the district called Batanea, which bordered on Trachonitis. He wished to make this man's settlement a bulwark, and so promised the land tax-free, freeing the settlers from all the taxes normally levied on those who occupied the land, offering it to him without any burden. Persuaded by these terms, the Babylonian came, and, having taken possession of the land, built forts and a village, naming it Bathyra. This man became a bulwark both for the local inhabitants against the Trachonites, and for the Jews who came from Babylon to Jerusalem to sacrifice, protecting them from being harmed by Trachonite brigands; and many came to him from every direction, people among whom the ancestral customs of the Jews are observed. The region grew very populous, thanks to the freedom from taxation that remained in force for them as long as Herod lived. Philip, his son, on taking over the rule, imposed few and light burdens on them; Agrippa the Great, however, and his son of the same name, wore them down considerably, though the people never wished to disturb their freedom. The Romans, on receiving the rule from them, likewise preserved their claim to freedom, but pressed them hard with the imposition of taxes. These matters I will describe in greater detail as the narrative proceeds.
Zamaris the Babylonian, who had attached himself to Herod in order to acquire this territory, died after a life of virtue, leaving behind good sons: Jacimus, who, having distinguished himself for courage, organized the Babylonian cavalry under his own command, and a squadron of these men served as bodyguard to these kings. Jacimus, dying in old age, left behind his son Philip, a man capable in action and, in every other respect, remarkable for his virtue beyond anyone else. For this reason a loyal friendship and a firm goodwill grew up between him and King Agrippa, and he continued to train whatever army the king maintained and to lead it out wherever it needed to march.
While Herod was occupied with the matters I have described, all affairs turned upon Antipater, and he was never without the power to carry out whatever he judged beneficial to himself, since his father had granted him this authority in the hope of his goodwill and loyalty; and Antipater, growing bolder, ventured to acquire still further power over these matters, because he could work his mischief without his father's knowledge and yet be thought altogether trustworthy in whatever he said. He was feared by everyone, not so much for the strength of his authority as for the forethought behind his malice. Pheroras above all courted him, and was courted by him in turn in a dreadful fashion, since Antipater had thoroughly surrounded him and won over the women of his household to his side; for Pheroras was enslaved to his wife, to her mother, and to her sister, even though he hated these women for the insolence they showed toward his own unmarried daughters. Even so he put up with them, and nothing was done apart from these women, who kept him surrounded on every side and, being of one mind with each other, cooperated in everything without exception — so that Antipater had won them over completely, both through himself and through his mother, for these four women all said the very same thing. And as for Pheroras's dealings with Antipater, in matters of no great consequence...
Their attitudes toward each other kept shifting. What pulled against them both was the king's sister, who watched everything from a greater distance and knew that their goodwill toward each other was being carried on to Herod's harm, and who had no scruple about reporting it. Once Pheroras and Antipater realized that this mutual affection had made them objects of the king's hatred, they contrived to keep their meetings with one another from being visible, while making their mutual hostility and abuse conspicuous whenever the occasion called for pretense—above all when Herod was present, or when people were on hand who would report to him—while in secret they made their friendship all the more secure. And so they carried on. None of this escaped Salome, neither at the start, when they first set their minds on such a course, nor afterward, when they had not given it up; she tracked everything and, magnifying it further to her brother, reported their secret meetings
and drinking parties and council sessions arranged out of sight, which, had they not been plotted for his destruction, need not have been hidden even if they had come to light. But as things stood, men who were openly at odds and spoke everything to each other's harm, yet reserved their true goodwill for the many in secret, and whenever they found themselves alone together acted as friends without having ceased to be so, were in effect confessing that they were waging war against the very people toward whom, by concealment, they were showing themselves eager in mutual affection. Salome tracked all this and, getting precise information, reported it to her brother, who already understood much of it on his own, though her accusations were not without effect in making him more confident of his suspicions.
There was, moreover, a certain group among the Jews who prided themselves on exact observance of their ancestral customs and the laws in which the Deity delights, and by whom the women of the court had been won over—these are called Pharisees. Toward a king with the greatest power to act, they were forward and quick, openly bent on making war and doing harm. Indeed, when the whole Jewish people confirmed by oath that they would be loyal to Caesar and to the king's government, these men, more than six thousand in number, refused to swear; and when the king fined them for it, Pheroras's wife paid the fine on their behalf.
In return for her kindness—since they were credited with foreknowledge through divine visitation—they predicted that God had decreed the end of Herod's rule for him and for his line, and that the kingdom would pass to her and to Pheroras and to whatever children they might have. Salome was not unaware of this, and she reported it all to the king. He put to death the most culpable of the Pharisees, and also Bagoas the eunuch, and a certain Carus, who at that time surpassed others in the excellence of his good looks and was Herod's favorite. He killed as well everyone in his household who had aligned themselves with what the Pharisee had said. Bagoas had been puffed up by them with the promise that he would be called father and benefactor of the one who would be set up in fulfillment of the king's foretold successor—for everything would be in that man's power, since he would grant Bagoas both the capacity for marriage and the begetting of legitimate children.
Herod, having punished the Pharisees convicted on these charges, then convened a council of his friends and brought an accusation against Pheroras's wife, laying the outrage against the maidens at the door of the woman's boldness, and making that itself a further charge against her—that in stirring up strife between him and his brother she had, by every means in her power, whether by word or by deed, waged on nature's behalf the war between them, and that the payment of the fine he had imposed on the Pharisees had been diverted through her own funds, and that there was nothing now done that was not done with her involvement. "For all this, Pheroras," he said, "it would have been proper—and there was no need even for me to suggest it to you—for you to send this woman away of your own accord, as one who would be to you the cause of war against me. And now, if indeed you still lay claim to kinship with me, renounce this wife; for only so will you remain both my brother and one who has not given up loving me."
Pheroras, though overborne by the force of these words, said that neither the claims of kinship with his brother nor his affection for his wife could move him to do anything unjust, and that he would choose rather to die than to endure, while living, being robbed of a wife who was dear to him. Herod restrained his anger against Pheroras over this, though he had exacted a punishment far from pleasant; but he forbade Antipater to associate with Pheroras's wife or with her mother, and ordered the women to be kept from any meeting together. They agreed to this in words, but continued to meet whenever occasion allowed, and Pheroras and Antipater kept up their carousing together.
A rumor also went about that Pheroras's wife was on intimate terms with Antipater as well, with Antipater's mother helping to arrange their meetings. Suspicious of his father and afraid that his hatred toward him might go still further, Antipater wrote to his friends in Rome, urging them to write to Herod telling him to send Antipater to Caesar as quickly as possible. When this was done, Herod sent Antipater off, having him carry the most valuable gifts along with a will in which he declared Antipater king after himself—or, should Herod die first, the son born to him by the high priest's daughter.
Syllaeus the Arab set out for Rome along with Antipater, having accomplished none of what Caesar had ordered, and Antipater accused him before Caesar of the same matters Nicolaus had earlier charged. Syllaeus was also accused by Aretas, on the ground that he had put to death, against Aretas's wishes, a number of the notable men of Petra, above all Soaemus, a man most deserving of honor for his excellence in every respect, and that he had also killed Fabatus, a slave of Caesar's. The charge against Syllaeus arose in this way: Corinthus was a bodyguard of King Herod's, one of those most trusted by him. Syllaeus persuaded this man, for a great sum of money, to kill Herod, and Corinthus agreed. Fabatus, learning of what Syllaeus had said to him,
reported it to the king. Herod had Corinthus arrested and tortured, and everything became known to him. He also arrested two other Arabs implicated by Corinthus's testimony, one a tribal chief and the other a friend of Syllaeus. These two, when the king had them tortured, admitted that they had come to keep Corinthus from losing his nerve, and, if it should be needed, to lend a hand in the murder themselves. Saturninus, once everything had been reported to him by Herod, sent them off to Rome.
Herod ordered Pheroras, who still clung firmly to his affection for his wife, to withdraw to his own territory. He set off gladly for his tetrarchy, swearing many oaths that he would not come back until he learned that Herod was dead—so much so that even when the king fell ill and asked him to come, on the pledge that certain instructions would be given him if Herod should be about to die, he did not comply, out of regard for his oath. Herod, however, did not repay him in kind for the attitude Pheroras had shown on that occasion; instead, when Pheroras himself later fell ill, he went to him, and when no summons had come from Pheroras, and Pheroras had died, Herod had the body prepared and brought to Jerusalem, insisted on burial there, and proclaimed great mourning for him. This, though Antipater was by now sailing for Rome, became the beginning of the disasters that led to fratricide, as God took vengeance on him. I will relate the whole account concerning him, since it will serve as an example to mankind of what happens to one who means to conduct his life with virtue in everything.
When Pheroras died, two of his freedmen, men who had been in his confidence, came to Herod and asked that he not leave his brother's death unavenged, but investigate this senseless and unfortunate change. The king, moved by their words—for they seemed credible—was told that Pheroras had dined at his former wife's house shortly before his illness, and that poison had been brought and mixed into a dish he was not accustomed to eat, and that after eating it he had died from it; that the poison had been procured by a woman from Arabia, ostensibly for use as a love-charm—for that indeed was its name—but in truth meant for Pheroras's death.
The women of Arabia are the most skilled in poisons of all women; and the woman to whom this task had been assigned was, as it happened, on close and acknowledged terms of friendship with Syllaeus's mistress. Hoping to persuade her to sell the poison, the mother and sister of Pheroras's wife had gone to that region, and were bringing her back with them, arriving one day before the dinner. Roused by this account, the king had the women's slaves put to torture, and some free women as well, and since the matter remained unclear because no one would speak, one of the women, at the very end of her endurance under the torments, said nothing else but that she called on God to visit such torments on Antipater's mother, the cause of the evils weighing on everyone.
This brought Herod to attention, and under torture of the women everything came to light—the carousing and the secret meetings, and indeed the disclosure to Pheroras's wives of words spoken to the son alone; and there was the matter of a gift of a hundred talents that the father had ordered kept hidden, which Antipater was to tell Pheroras about; and hatred toward the father, and complaints made to the mother, saying that his father had been drawn out to live an extremely long time, and that old age was pressing on Antipater himself no less, so that even should the kingdom come to him, it would no longer bring him the same joy;
and that many were being kept in reserve for the throne—both brothers and the sons of brothers—who gave no assurance of security for his hope; and indeed that even now, if anything should happen to him, his father was ordering that the rule be given to a brother rather than to his own son. He accused the king of great cruelty, and of the murder of his sons, and said that out of fear that he too might soon be touched by it, the one at Rome had devised a scheme, and Pheroras one in his own tetrarchy. These matters were consistent with what his sister had said, and did much to remove any remaining suspicion that they were untrue.
The king, now convinced of Antipater's wickedness, stripped Doris, Antipater's mother, of all her personal ornaments, worth many talents, and then sent her away, and made a treaty of friendship with Pheroras's wives. What most incited the king to anger against his son was a Samaritan man named Antipater, steward to the king's son Antipater, who under torture, besides other things about him, disclosed that Antipater had prepared a deadly poison and had ordered it given to Pheroras during his own absence abroad, so that he might be as far removed as possible from any suspicion in such matters, with instructions to give it to his father. He said that Antiphilus, one of Antipater's friends, had brought the poison from Egypt, and that it had been sent to Pheroras by way of Theudion, the mother of Antipater's cousin, the king's brother's son, and that in this way the poison had come
to Pheroras's wife, given to her by her husband to keep. When the king examined her, she admitted this, and running as if to fetch it, threw herself down from the roof, but did not die, since she fell on her feet. Once he had revived her, promising her immunity and the same for her household if she did not turn to concealing the truth—but that he would grind her down with the worst afflictions if she persisted in defiance—she agreed and swore that she would indeed tell the whole story of how it had happened, saying, as most people also affirmed, that it was all true.
"The poison," she said, "was brought from Egypt by Antiphilus; his brother, who is a physician, supplied it, and when Theudion brought it to us I kept it myself, having received it from Pheroras, prepared by Antipater for use against you. When Pheroras fell ill and you came to attend him, seeing your goodwill toward him, he was broken in his resolve, and calling me to him he said, 'Wife, Antipater has worked his way around me, using my own father and my own brother, and has devised a deadly plan and procured a poison to be used through my agency against him. Now, since my brother has shown, in his conduct toward me lately, that he holds back nothing of his former kindness, and since I have hope that I shall not be long for this life, I would not want to pay for it by a scheme of fratricide against my own forefathers.' He told me to burn the poison before his own eyes, and I did so at once, delaying nothing, in obedience to my husband's instructions.
I burned most of the poison, but kept back a little, so that if Pheroras died and the king should treat me badly, I might use it to escape my troubles." Having said this, she produced the poison and the box in the middle of the assembly. Antiphilus's brother and his mother, under compulsion and the severity of torture, said the same things and recognized the box. The high priest's daughter, the king's wife, was also accused, as one who had known all this and had been eager to conceal it. For this reason Herod cast her out and struck her son from the will as far as concerned his becoming king, and took the high priesthood away from his father-in-law Simon son of Boethus, appointing in his place Matthias son of Theophilus, a native of Jerusalem.
Meanwhile Bathyllus, a freedman of Antipater's, arrived from Rome and, when tortured, was found to be carrying poison meant to be given to his own mother and to Pheroras, so that, if the first attempt did not touch the king, they might use this one to finish him off. Letters also arrived from Herod's friends in Rome, composed at Antipater's suggestion and dictation, accusing Archelaus and Philip, as though they were slandering their father over the killing of Aristobulus and Alexander, and were themselves winning sympathy by it—for they were already being summoned by their father, not on other charges but on the same ones that had destroyed the earlier brothers, since their recall was being arranged. The friends carried this out for Antipater in return for large sums. Antipater himself also wrote to his father about them, in the gravest terms of accusation, while claiming to be entirely clearing the young men, and casting the blame on their youth.
He himself was meanwhile pressing his case against Syllaeus, and had been paying court to the leading men, having bought for himself a splendid array of ornaments worth two hundred talents. One might well wonder that, with so much stirred up against him in Judea, nothing became clear to him for seven months beforehand; the reason was the strict watch kept on the roads, and the hatred people bore toward Antipater—for there was no one willing, at his own risk, to become a supplier of security to the man. When Antipater wrote to Herod that, having accomplished everything as he should, he would soon return, Herod, concealing his anger, wrote back urging him not to delay his journey, lest something happen to him during his absence, and at the same time accusing his mother of having done him some small
He kept promising to lay to rest his complaints against his mother once his father arrived, and in every way he displayed affection toward him, afraid that if Antipater grew suspicious of anything he would delay his journey home and, settling in at Rome, would use his resources to lie in wait for the kingdom, or even work some scheme against it there. It was in Cilicia that Antipater came upon these letters, along with others reporting the death of Pheroras — the earlier ones had reached him at Tarentum. He took the news badly, not out of any love for Pheroras, but because his father's murder had not been carried out as Pheroras had promised, and Pheroras had died without accomplishing it.
When he reached Celenderis in Cilicia he began to hesitate about the voyage home, deeply pained at his mother's expulsion, and his friends were divided: some urged him to hold back and watch how things developed, others urged him not to delay the voyage home, since his arrival would dissolve every charge against him, just as now it was nothing else but his absence that had given his accusers their strength. Persuaded by these, he sailed and put in at the harbor called Sebastos, which Herod had built at great expense and named Sebastus in honor of Caesar. By now Antipater's ruin was plain for all to see: no one came near him, no one greeted him, as they had when he set out amid prayers and favorable omens — instead the bitterest curses went unchecked, since people supposed he owed a penalty for his brothers.
At this time Quintilius Varus happened to be in Jerusalem, sent out as Saturninus's successor in the governorship of Syria, and he had come in person to advise Herod on the troubles now pressing him, at Herod's own request. While they sat in council, Antipater arrived, no one having told him anything. He entered the palace still wearing his purple robes; the men at the doors received him but kept his friends out. He was already visibly disturbed, sensing where he had come, since when he approached to greet his father, his father thrust him away, charging him with the murder of his brothers and with plotting his own death, and declaring that Varus would hear and judge the whole matter the next day.
Overwhelmed by the sheer weight of this disaster, both hearing of it and finding it already upon him, he went off; his mother and his wife met him — she was by now the daughter of Antigonus, who had reigned over the Jews before Herod — and from them, learning everything, he set about preparing for the contest to come.
The next day Varus and the king sat together in council, and the friends of both were called in, along with the king's relatives and his sister Salome, and also anyone who was going to give evidence, together with those who had already been put to torture — including the slaves of Antipater's mother, who had been seized shortly before his arrival while carrying a letter whose substance was: do not come back, since everything has come to my father's knowledge, and your only refuge left is Caesar — and along with that refuge, escaping falling into your father's hands.
When Antipater threw himself at his father's knees and begged that judgment not be settled beforehand, but that he be given a hearing and be allowed to remain unharmed at his father's side while it took place, Herod ordered him led out into the middle of the assembly, and himself lamented over his sons — the fate that fell to him before he could recover from his earlier hostility toward Antipater — describing the upbringing and education he had given them, and the abundant wealth he had placed at their disposal at every turn, as they might wish; and yet none of this had stood in the way of his own perishing at their plotting, in their eagerness to seize the kingdom by wicked means sooner than the law of nature would bring it to them by his own prayer and by justice.
He said he marveled at Antipater — on what hope had he been emboldened, that he pressed on to such deeds without turning back? For he, Herod, had by writing declared him successor to the throne; and while he still lived, Antipater fell short of him in nothing — neither in the visible marks of rank nor in the exercise of power — receiving fifty talents a year in revenue, and having been given, as a gift for his journey to Rome, the sum of three hundred talents. He charged him further, concerning his brothers: if they had truly been wicked, Antipater had become their imitator in his accusation of them; but if the charges he brought against them had been empty, then he was bringing this same kind of ruin down upon his own kinsman. For he had learned everything, with no exception, only through Antipater's own information, and had acted against them entirely on Antipater's judgment — and now Antipater sought to absolve them of every wrong and make himself the heir of a father's murder in their stead. Saying this, Herod broke down in tears and could no longer speak.
Nicolaus of Damascus, who was a friend of the king and shared in all his affairs, and who was familiar with the manner in which everything had been carried out, spoke next at the king's request, laying out the rest — all that concerned the proofs and the cross-examinations. When Antipater turned to make his defense to his father, going through all the instances of his goodwill toward him, and bringing forward the honors that had been his, which, he argued, could never have come to him had he not shown himself worthy of them by his virtue — for whatever needed to be foreseen, he had thought through prudently in advance, and whatever required action, he had carried out entirely by his own labor — it was not likely, he said, that his father, having chosen him out from all other plots against himself, would then set him up as a plotter, blotting out the very virtue for which he had been commended, in favor of a wickedness that was supposed to accompany it.
And yet, he said, though he had already been named successor and was to share in the honors that presently stood to him, nothing had been forbidden him; it was not likely that a man who possessed the half of everything safely and with honor would reach for the whole through blame and danger, especially one who had witnessed the punishment of his brothers, and who, though he could have kept silent and remained unnoticed, had instead become their informer and accuser — only later to become their punisher once they were shown openly to be wicked toward their father. These, he said, were the proofs of his own conduct here in Judea, offered as examples of one who had acted with unmixed loyalty toward his father; and as for what had happened in Rome, Caesar himself was witness that it was not possible to deceive him, any more than it was possible to deceive God — and proof of this lay in the letters Caesar himself had sent.
It was not right, Antipater argued, that the slanders of those bent on stirring up trouble should carry more weight simply because most of them had been put together during his absence, once his enemies had gained the leisure that his presence would never have allowed them. He also discredited the use of torture as a source of falsehood, since compulsion by its nature teaches those under it to say mostly what will please their examiners — and he offered himself up for torture. At this the council's mood shifted, for they deeply pitied Antipater as he wept and disfigured his own face with grief, so that even his enemies were moved to pity, and it became plain that Herod himself was wavering in his judgment, though he did not want this to show.
Nicolaus then rose and took up again, at greater length, the very points with which the king had begun, driving them home even more forcefully, and laying out all that the tortures and the testimonies together had gathered as proof of the charge. Above all he dwelt at length on the king's own virtue, which, however he had applied it to the upbringing and education of his sons, had nowhere found any benefit from it, stumbling instead from one son to another. Yet he said he did not so much wonder at the recklessness of the earlier sons — young men, after all, corrupted by the wickedness of their advisers, eager to lay hold of power before nature's own claims permitted it — but that one ought rightly to be struck with horror at the madness of Antipater, who had not been softened even by the many benefits he had received from his father, his reasoning as unyielding as the most venomous of serpents — creatures in which some softness at least sometimes arises against wronging their benefactors — nor had even the fate of his brothers stood in his way, to keep him from imitating their cruelty. "And yet, Antipater," he said, "of your brothers' crimes, whatever they dared, you yourself were both informer and investigator of the proofs and punisher of what was uncovered. We do not fault you for the anger you showed then, which was not lacking; what has struck us with horror is that you were eager to imitate their very depravity — finding that these things too were done by you, not for your father's safety, but for your brothers' destruction, so that by your hatred of their wickedness you might be believed devoted to your father, and so gain a freer hand to work evil against him yourself — which indeed you demonstrated by your deeds. For at the very moment you were destroying your brothers for the wrongs you had exposed in them, you did not hand over those who had acted with them, making it plain to all that you had made a pact with your brothers against your father and then turned to accusing them, wishing to keep for yourself alone the profit of the plot to kill your father, and to reap the enjoyment of two contests at once, in a manner worthy of your own character: open in the case against your brothers, in which you even gloried as though in the greatest of achievements — and it would have been fitting to think so, had you not in fact been the worse offender — but hidden in the plot you formed against your father together with them, whom you did not hate as men who had plotted against your father — for you would never have gone so far as a like act with them — but rather because you thought them more rightful heirs to your rule than yourself; and hidden too in your intent to slaughter your father alongside your brothers, so that you might sooner escape exposure for having falsely accused them, and might exact from your unfortunate father the very penalty that you yourself deserved to pay, devising a parricide unlike any other, one such as human life has not recorded until now. For you were plotting not merely as a son against a father, but against one who loved you and had done you good, having been made partner in the kingdom in deed and declared successor in the open, allowed already to enjoy the pleasure of power beforehand without hindrance, and secured besides in your hope for the future by your father's own resolve and by his written word. But it was not, after all, by Herod's virtue that your affairs were governed — it was by your own judgment and your own wickedness, wishing to take away even the share belonging to a father who obeyed you in everything, and seeking in deed to destroy the very man you pretended in word to be saving — and not content with making yourself alone wicked, you filled your mother too with your schemes, stirring up faction against the goodwill your brothers deserved, and daring to call your father a wild beast, having fashioned in yourself a mind more savage than any serpent, with which you incited their poison against your nearest kin and against the very benefactors who had done so much for you, arming yourself against the old man with alliances of guards and the arts of men and women alike — as though your own intention were not sufficient to make plain the hatred lurking within you. And now you have come, after the torture of free household servants turned slaves for your sake, to contest the very disclosures of your fellow conspirators, straining against the truth, having all but plotted to remove your father from the ranks of humankind, and now defying even the law written against you, the virtue of Varus, and the very nature of justice — so confident are you in your shamelessness that you even ask to be put to torture yourself, and call the tortures of those examined before you false, so that those who would save your father might be barred from having spoken the truth, while your own tortures might seem trustworthy? Will you not, Varus, rescue the king from the malice of his own kin? Will you not see this wicked beast, who feigned love for his father to destroy his brothers, and who, once he was alone and about to seize the kingdom swiftly, would have shown himself the deadliest of all men to his father as well? He knows that parricide is a crime common to nature and to human life alike, and that whoever fails to punish it wrongs nature no less than the one who plotted it."
Nicolaus went on to add the matter of Antipater's mother — all the things she had said to certain people out of womanish idle talk, the divinations and sacrifices performed against the king, and all the debauchery that had gone on between Antipater and Pheroras's wives, amid wine and erotic mischief, together with the examinations under torture and whatever bore on the testimonies. Much of this, of every kind, had been prepared beforehand, and some of it had been discovered only shortly before it was reported and confirmed; for people, even if they had something to say out of fear of Antipater, kept silent so long as he might, by escaping, take revenge on them — but now, seeing him exposed to the accusations of those who had begun them, and seeing the great good fortune that had once attended him openly handed over to his enemies, who glutted themselves insatiably on their hatred of him, they came forward eagerly — not out of hostility toward the man bringing the charges, but overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the wickedness he had devised and the enmity he bore toward his father and brothers, having filled the household with faction and mutual destruction, treating neither hatred with justice nor friendship with true goodwill, but only as either might serve his own advantage at the time.
All of this had long been foreseen by most of those best able to judge matters by virtue, precisely because they were free of anger in casting their judgment on events; men who had been kept from voicing their complaints before, now that the opportunity had come, brought out into the open everything they knew. The proofs of his wickedness were of every kind, and none of them could be charged with falsehood, since the greater number of those speaking did so neither out of goodwill toward Herod nor out of fear of danger silencing what they had to say, but because they genuinely believed the state of affairs to be wicked, and Antipater deserving of every punishment — not for Herod's safety, but for his own depravity. Much, too, was said by many who had not even been instructed to speak, so that Antipater, for all his consummate skill at lying and his shamelessness, could not muster strength enough even to raise his voice in reply. When Nicolaus had finished both his speech and his cross-examinations, Varus ordered Antipater to proceed to his defense against the charges, if he had any means of showing himself not liable to what was brought against him — for he himself, Varus said, wished, as Herod did, to find him guilty of nothing.
But Antipater lay face down, turned toward God, laying before all present his plea that whatever might bear witness that he had done no wrong should come forward, or else that he might be shown by clear proofs not to have plotted against his father. All men who fall short in virtue are accustomed, whenever they set their hand to some wrongdoing, to shut out the divine presence that attends everyone and to proceed on their own judgment alone; but whenever, once exposed, they stand in danger of paying the penalty, they turn everything aside by appealing to God as their witness. This is exactly what had happened to Antipater: having carried out everything as though God were absent from it all, and now with the case closing in on him from every side, with no other grounds of defense left by which he might clear himself of the charges, he once again presumed upon the virtue of God, invoking his testimony as to his own power, until he had brought before the assembly all that he had not failed to dare against his father. Varus, when he had questioned Antipater repeatedly and found nothing more than his appeal to God,
Varus, seeing that the business would go on forever, ordered the poison brought into the assembly so he could see how much potency it still had. It was brought in, and one of the men condemned to death drank it at Varus's command and died on the spot. Varus then rose and left the council, and the next day set out for Antioch, where in fact he spent most of his time, since Antioch was the seat of Roman government for Syria.
Herod for the moment simply had his son bound. What Varus had said to him in their private conversation, and what he had said as he left, remained unknown to most people. It was generally guessed that Herod was acting on Varus's advice in everything he did concerning Antipater. He kept his son in chains and sent letters about him to Rome, to Caesar, along with men to instruct Caesar by word of mouth in Antipater's wickedness, and Coponius carried Caesar's own opinion of the matter.
About the same time a letter written by Antiphilus to Antipater was intercepted. Antiphilus himself was staying in Egypt. When the king had it opened, it read: "I have sent you the letter from Acme, risking my own life to do it; for you know that I am now in danger from two households, if I should be found out. I wish you good fortune in the matter." That was the substance of the letter.
The king also wanted the other letter, but it was not to be found, and Antiphilus's slave, who had carried the one that had been read, denied having received any other. While the king was at a loss, one of Herod's friends noticed that the inner tunic of the slave had been sewn up — for he was wearing two — and guessed that the letter was hidden inside the fold. This proved to be so. They took the letter, and in it was written the following:
"Acme to Antipater. I have written to your father the sort of letter you wanted, and I made a copy in the form of a letter as though from Salome to my mistress, which I know she will punish Salome for when she reads it, as a plot against her." The letter purporting to be from Salome to her mistress had in fact been dictated by Antipater under Salome's name, saying whatever suited his purpose, though composed in Acme's own words. What was written was this: "Acme to King Herod. Making it my business that nothing done against you should escape your notice, I found a letter from Salome to my mistress written against you, and I have copied it out at risk to myself but for your benefit, and I send it to you.
Salome wrote it because she wants to marry Syllaeus. Tear up this letter, then, so that I too do not come to risk my life over it." And to Antipater himself she had written, explaining that, acting on his instructions, she had both written to Herod as though Salome were plotting entirely against him, and had sent him a copy of the letter supposedly addressed by Salome to her mistress.
Now Acme was Jewish by birth and a slave of Julia, Caesar's wife, and she did this out of friendship for Antipater, having been bought by him with a large sum of money to help him work mischief against his father and his aunt. Herod, appalled at the magnitude of Antipater's wickedness, was moved at once to have him killed outright, as a man who had stirred up such great troubles,
and who had plotted not only against him but against his own sister, and had corrupted the household of Caesar. Salome too, beating her breast, urged him on and demanded that Antipater be put to death, if any charge weighty enough for such a course could be made good. Herod sent for his son and questioned him, telling him to say whatever he had to say in his own defense without holding anything back; and when Antipater remained speechless,
Herod asked him — since he had by now been exposed as wicked in every particular — at least not to delay in naming those who had shared in his crimes. Antipater laid the whole blame on Antiphilus and put forward no one else. Herod, in deep distress, resolved to send his son to Rome to Caesar to answer for his schemes, but then, fearing that with the help of friends he might find some way to escape the danger, he kept him instead a prisoner as before,
and sent envoys and letters accusing his son, listing everything Acme had done to help him, along with copies of the letters. The envoys hurried to Rome, having been thoroughly instructed in what they should say when questioned and carrying the documents with them. Meanwhile the king fell ill and drew up a will,
leaving the kingdom to his youngest son, out of the hatred he now bore toward Archelaus and Philip because of Antipater's slanders; and he left Caesar a thousand talents, and Caesar's wife Julia, his children, and his freedmen five hundred. He also distributed money, revenues, and estates among his sons and their sons, and enriched his sister Salome greatly,
since she had remained loyal to him throughout and had never ventured to do him wrong. Despairing now of recovery — for he was about seventy years old — he grew savage, giving free rein to unrestrained anger and bitterness in everything, the cause being his sense that he was held in contempt and that the nation took pleasure in his misfortunes; and all the more because some of the more popular sort of men had actually risen up against him,
for a reason of the following kind. There were two men, Judas son of Sariphaeus and Matthias son of Margalothus, the most learned of the Jews and unrivaled interpreters of the ancestral laws, men beloved by the people for the instruction they gave to the young; for every day crowds who cultivated a reputation for virtue spent their time with them. When they learned that the king's illness was incurable, they roused the younger men,
urging that whatever works had been set up by the king contrary to the ancestral law should be pulled down, and that this would be a feat of piety on the law's behalf; for indeed it was because of his daring against what the law prescribed for such construction that everything else had befallen him — the departures from what was customary for a man in his position, and above all his illness. For Herod had built certain things contrary to the law, which Judas and his companions kept denouncing.
The king had set up above the great gate of the temple a dedication, a very costly one — a great golden eagle. But the law forbids setting up images or making dedications of any living creature for those who choose to live by it. So the sophists urged that the eagle be pulled down, saying that even if there were danger in it for those who undertook the deed,
the virtue thereby added — for those who would die in the safeguarding and defense of the ancestral law — would prove far more profitable than the pleasure of living, since they would win an undying reputation, praised now and remembered forever by those to come, and would leave life memorable. Even those who lived free of danger, they said, could not escape misfortune in the end,
so that it was well for men who reached after virtue to accept their appointed death with praise and honor and so depart from life; for it brought great relief that death should come while engaged in noble deeds, whose reward the danger itself would be, and at the same time they would leave their sons and whatever kinsmen, men and women, survived them, a benefit in the good repute that would come from it.
With such arguments they roused the young men. Word reached them that the king had died, and this too spurred on the sophists' plan. So at midday they went up and pulled down the eagle and hacked it to pieces with axes, while a great many people were about in the temple. The king's captain, when the attempt was reported to him,
suspecting a larger design than what was actually being carried out, went up with a large force, as many as could withstand the crowd of those attempting to tear down the dedication, and fell upon them unprepared — for, as a mob is apt to do, they had ventured the deed on rash confidence rather than sound foresight, in disorder and without any plan for their own safety.
No fewer than forty of the young men, who stood their ground boldly as he attacked while the rest of the crowd fled, were taken, along with the instigators of the deed, Judas and Matthias, who thought it beneath them to retreat before his onset; and he brought them up before the king.
When they arrived before him, the king asked whether they had dared to pull down his dedication. "Yes," they said, "and what we resolved and did was done with a virtue most fitting for men; for we have come to the defense of God's honor, and we have obeyed what the law demands. It is no wonder,
then, if we judged that the laws which Moses left behind, written at God's dictation and teaching, deserved to be observed above your decrees. We will bear death, and whatever punishment you impose, gladly, since we are to suffer it not for unjust deeds but out of love for what is pious." All of them spoke in this way, with no less boldness in their words
than they had shown daring in doing the deed. The king had them bound and sent for the leading men of the Jews to come to Jericho, and when they had arrived he convened an assembly in the theater there, lying on a couch because he was too weak to stand. He recounted at length all that he had done for them,
and how the temple had been built at great expense to him — something the Hasmoneans, in the hundred and twenty-five years of their reign, had not been able to accomplish in honor of God — and how he had adorned it besides with dedications worth speaking of. Because of this, he said, he had hoped that even after his death he would leave behind a memory and good repute. Yet already, he cried out, they had not even refrained from insulting him while he still lived,
but in broad daylight and before the eyes of the multitude had laid hands, in outrage, on what he had dedicated, and had made its destruction itself an act of insult — in word aimed at him, but in truth, if one examined what had actually happened, an act of sacrilege. The men, fearing that in his savage anger he would exact vengeance on them as well, said that the deed had not been done with their consent,
and that in their judgment it did not deserve to go unpunished. Herod dealt more gently with the rest, but removed Matthias the high priest from his office, holding him responsible for that portion of the affair, and appointed Joazar, his own wife's brother, high priest in his place. During the term of this Matthias's priesthood it happened that another man served as high priest for a single day — the day the Jews observe as a fast.
The reason was this: Matthias, while serving as priest, on the night leading into the day on which the fast was to begin, dreamed that he had had intercourse with a woman, and because of this, being unable to perform the sacred rites, Joseph son of Ellemus, his kinsman, served as priest in his place. Herod had by then removed both this Matthias from the high priesthood and the other Matthias, who had stirred up the revolt, and had certain of his companions burned alive. And on that same night the moon was eclipsed.
Herod's illness now grew ever more bitter, as God exacted from him the penalty for his lawless deeds; for the fever that consumed him was mild, and gave no outward sign of the burning it was inflicting within. There was, besides, a terrible craving to take some food, which could not be denied him, and ulceration of the bowels, especially severe pains in the colon,
a moist, transparent swelling about his feet, a similar inflammation of the abdomen, and indeed decay of his genitals producing worms, together with a straining difficulty in breathing that was itself most distressing, both for the offensiveness of the odor and for the labored quickness of the breath; convulsions seized every part of his body, adding a strength beyond what could be borne. It was said, then, by
those who make it their business to foretell such things by their skill, that God was exacting this penalty from the king for his great impiety. Yet, suffering more than anyone could be expected to endure, he still clung to hope of recovery; he kept sending for physicians and did not refuse to try whatever remedies they suggested, and he crossed the Jordan and gave himself over to the hot springs at Callirrhoe, waters which,
besides their other virtues, are also fit to drink; this water flows out into the lake called the Asphalt Lake. There the physicians thought to warm him, and he was let down into a tub full of oil, which gave them the impression that he was fading away. When his servants cried out in lamentation, he recovered himself, and having no hope left of surviving, he ordered fifty drachmas to be distributed to each of the soldiers, and gave lavish gifts
to their officers as well and to his own friends. He then came back to Jericho, where a black bile now seized him and inflamed him with rage against everyone, so that in the end he devised the following scheme: by his own order he summoned Jewish men of standing from the whole nation, wherever any were of note; and a great many came, since the whole nation had in effect been summoned and all had heard the proclamation, for
death was appointed for those who disregarded the letters, the king being now enraged indiscriculously against innocent and guilty alike. Having shut them all up in the hippodrome, he sent for his sister Salome and her husband Alexas and told them he would soon die, given how far his sufferings had already advanced; "and this," he said, "is bearable, and welcome to everyone —
but what troubles me most is that there will be no mourning fit for it, no grief such as should attend a king's death. For I know well enough the mind of the Jews: my death will be a thing prayed for and altogether welcome to them, since even while I live they have been eager for rebellion and for insulting what I have set up. It falls to you, then, to grant me some relief from so bitter a grief,
if you are willing to act as I resolve: let my funeral be a great one, such as no other king's has ever been, and let there be mourning through the whole nation, grief poured out from the heart, in place of the joy and laughter they feel at my death. When, then, you see that I have breathed my last, surround the hippodrome with the soldiers before my death has been made known to the crowd,
and do not announce it to the people before this is done: give orders that the men shut up here be shot down with javelins, and that all of them, killed in this way, ensure that I do not go, on two counts, without something to gladden me — by the fulfillment of the commands I give you as I am dying, and by being honored with a mourning worth remembering." And he, weeping, entreated them, calling on the loyalty of kinship and the faith owed to God, and charged them
insisting that he not be dishonored, and the guards promised they would not fail him. One can see the man's cast of mind and what pleased him from the start: that it was love of life, not affection for his kin, that had driven his actions toward them, since not even in his final letters is anything humane expressed. Even as he was leaving life he took care that the whole nation should be plunged into mourning and desolation for their dearest, ordering one man to be seized from every house—men who had done him no wrong and against whom no other charge had been laid—simply because it is the custom of people, when a pretense of virtue serves them, to lay aside their hatreds toward those who have justly become their enemies at such a time.
While he was dictating these instructions to his kinsmen, letters arrived from the envoys who had been sent to Rome, to Caesar. When they were read out, the substance was this: Acme had been put to death by Caesar's anger for her complicity with Antipater, and as for Antipater himself, Caesar left it to Herod's own judgment, as father and king, whether he wished to drive him into exile or to have him killed. Hearing this, Herod for a moment rallied, cheered by the news and elated at the death of Acme and at the power now granted him over his son's punishment; but then, his pains having grown very great, he fainted from the exhaustion of having gone without food. He asked for an apple and a small knife, for it was his habit, as before, to peel it himself and eat it cut into small pieces. Taking it and looking about him, he resolved to stab himself, and he would have done it had not his cousin Achiab rushed forward and caught his hand. At this a great cry went up, and at once there was wailing throughout the palace and a great uproar, as though the king had died.
Antipater, believing that his father had truly reached his end, took heart at the report and behaved as one already about to be freed from his chains and to receive the kingdom into his hands without a struggle; he entered into conversation with his jailer about his release, promising him great rewards both now and later, since the contest, as he saw it, was now at hand. But the jailer not only refused to do what Antipater asked, but reported his intentions to the king, adding embellishments of his own. Herod, who even before had not been won over by affection for his son, on hearing what the jailer told him cried out, raising his head though he lay at the point of death, and propping himself on his elbow he ordered one of his guards to be sent at once, without delay, to kill Antipater and bury him without honor at Hyrcania.
He then rewrote his will once more, his mind having undergone a change: he made Antipas, to whom he had before left the kingdom, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea instead; he granted the kingdom to Archelaus; Gaulanitis, Trachonitis, Batanaea, and Panias he made into a tetrarchy for Philip, his son and Archelaus's full brother; and Jamnia, Azotus, and Phasaelis he assigned to his sister Salome, together with five hundred thousand silver drachmas. He made provision also for the rest of his kinsmen, establishing each of them in comfort with gifts of money and grants of revenue. To Caesar he left ten million silver drachmas, besides vessels of gold and silver and clothing of very great value, and to Julia, Caesar's wife, and to certain others, five million.
Having done this, he died on the fifth day after he had put his son Antipater to death, having reigned thirty-four years from the time he killed Antigonus, and thirty-seven from the time the Romans had declared him king—a man harsh to all alike, less a slave to anger than a master of justice, and favored by fortune, if ever a man was, beyond all others. For from a private citizen he rose to be king, and though hemmed in by countless dangers he escaped them all and attained an extraordinarily long life. As for his domestic affairs concerning his sons, whatever came of his own judgment he managed with great shrewdness, since he never failed to prevail over those he judged his enemies—though to my mind he was in this respect a most unfortunate man.
Before the king's death became known, Salome and Alexas sent away those who had been shut up in the hippodrome, each to his own affairs, telling them that the king ordered them to go off to their farms and manage their own property; and by this they did the nation the greatest service. When the king's death was at last made public, Salome and Alexas gathered the soldiers into the amphitheater at Jericho, and first read out a letter written to the soldiers thanking them for their loyalty and goodwill toward him, and urging them to show the same steadfast support to his son Archelaus, whom he had appointed king. Next Ptolemy, who had been entrusted with the king's signet, read out the will, which was not to take legal effect until Caesar had examined it. At once there was a shout acclaiming Archelaus king, and the soldiers, company by company, together with their officers, promised him their loyalty and zeal, and called on God to be his helper.
After this they prepared the king's burial, Archelaus being anxious that his father's funeral procession should be of the utmost splendor, and he brought forth every ornament to accompany the corpse. The body was carried upon a golden bier studded with precious stones of many colors; the coverlet was of purple, and the corpse itself was clothed in purple robes and adorned with a diadem, over which lay a golden crown, and a scepter rested by the right hand. Around the bier walked his sons and the multitude of his kinsmen, and after them the soldiers, arranged by their national units or designations: first the guards, then the Thracian contingent, then all the Germans, and after them the Gauls, all in full battle array. Behind these followed the whole army, marching out as if to war, led by their captains and company commanders. Following them came five hundred of the household servants carrying spices. They went to Herodium, a distance of eight stadia, for it was there, by his own command, that he was buried.
Such was the manner of Herod's death. Archelaus, for seven days, continued to observe mourning for his father, that being the number the custom of the country prescribes. Then, having given the people a feast and ended the mourning, he went up to the Temple. There were shouts of acclaim and praise wherever he passed, each group vying with the others to make its acclamations seem the grandest. Mounting a high platform that had been built for him and taking his seat on a golden throne, he greeted the crowds in turn, receiving their goodwill with evident delight, and thanked them, saying that he bore them no grudge for whatever wrongs his father had done them, and that he would strive to repay their zeal without stinting. For the present, however, he said he would refrain from taking the title of king, for he would be honored with that dignity only once Caesar had confirmed the will his father had drawn up; that was also why, when the army at Jericho had been eager to set the diadem on his head, he had declined to accept that coveted honor, since the one properly empowered to bestow it had not yet made himself known. If matters turned out in his favor, he said, he would not fall short in virtue in repaying their goodwill, for in everything he would strive to show himself better toward them in every way than his father had been.
The crowd, as a crowd is wont to do, supposing that the first days revealed the true intentions of those entering upon such offices, the more mildly and courteously Archelaus spoke to them, the more extravagant their praises became, and they proceeded to make requests for favors: some cried out for relief from the annual taxes they paid, others for the release of the prisoners who had been bound by Herod, of whom there were many, and some who had been so for a long time. Still others demanded the abolition of the duties levied harshly on sales and purchases. Archelaus in no way opposed them, being eager, in his zeal, to please the crowds in everything, since he reckoned that winning the people's goodwill would greatly help him secure his rule. After this he sacrificed to God and turned to feasting with his friends.
Meanwhile some of the Jews, moved by a desire for revolution, gathered to mourn Matthias and those put to death with him by Herod—men who had at once been deprived, out of fear of Herod, of the honor of being mourned, these being the men condemned for pulling down the golden eagle. Raising a great outcry and lamentation, and thinking to gain some relief for the dead, they hurled reproaches at the king. When they had assembled together, they demanded that Archelaus punish those whom Herod had honored, and above all and most conspicuously that he depose the man Herod had made high priest and choose in his place a man more lawfully qualified and pure to hold the high priesthood. Archelaus, though deeply displeased by this, restrained his anger toward them because of the journey to Rome he had before him, which he needed to undertake quickly to look after the matters awaiting Caesar's decision.
He sent his general to try persuasion, urging them to abandon such folly and consider that the deaths of their friends had come about under the law, that their demands were rapidly heading toward outrage, and that the present circumstances were not suited to such matters—rather this was a time for harmony, until, once he had settled his rule with Caesar's approval, he should return to them; for then he would deliberate jointly with them about whatever they thought right, but for now they should hold back, lest they appear to be fomenting sedition. Having said this and instructed the general accordingly, Archelaus sent him out to them. But they, shouting, would not let him speak, and put both him and any others who might, for the sake of restraint and to turn them from such aims, dare to speak in danger of being killed, since they were resolved to yield to their own desire rather than to the authority of those set over them, thinking it monstrous that while Herod lived they had been deprived of their dearest ones, and now that he was dead they were denied vengeance for what had been done to them—their tempers inflamed, and holding whatever was likely to bring them satisfaction to be both lawful and just, while being too ignorant to foresee the danger it entailed, and if anyone warned them of it, the immediate pleasure of avenging themselves on those they took to be their worst enemies overrode all caution.
Many were sent by Archelaus to reason with them, both men presently in office under him and others who, though seeming to come on their own judgment, in fact came at his direction, in order to bring them to a gentler mood, but they would not tolerate hearing a word from anyone. There was an uprising, fueled by anger, and it was clear they intended to swell the sedition still further as the crowd streamed in to join them.
Now at this time the festival was at hand at which it is customary for the Jews to set out unleavened bread; they call the festival Passover, since it is a memorial of their departure from Egypt, and they sacrifice it eagerly, with a greater number of victims than at any other festival, as their custom requires. Countless throngs come down from the countryside, and by now from beyond the borders as well, to worship God, and the agitators, mourning for Judas and Matthias, their expounders of the law, gathered in the Temple, being well supplied with food for the rebels, since it was not thought shameful for them to beg it. Archelaus, fearing that some terrible outcome might grow out of their desperation, sent a cohort of soldiers under a tribune to check their impulse before the whole crowd was carried further into their madness, and to bring before him any who stood out conspicuously above the rest in their zeal for rebellion. At this the agitators among the expounders and the crowd were roused to still greater fury, shouting and calling to one another, and rushed upon the soldiers, surrounding them and stoning most of them to death; only a few, along with the tribune, escaped, wounded.
Once they had done this, they turned again to their sacrifice, as though their hands were clean. Archelaus, thinking it impossible to preserve order in any way without crushing this impulse of the crowd, sent out his whole army, ordering part of it to prevent those camped nearby from going to the aid of the men at the Temple, and part to receive those driven out by the infantry, once they were confident of having reached safety. The cavalry killed as many as three thousand men; the rest made their way off to the nearby hills. Archelaus proclaimed that all should return to their homes, and they departed, abandoning the festival, in fear of a still greater disaster, bold as they were only through lack of discipline.
Archelaus then went down to the coast together with his mother, taking with him Nicolaus, Ptolemy, and Ptolla among his friends, and leaving Philip his brother in charge of managing everything in the household and the government. Salome, Herod's sister, also went out with him, bringing her own children, and many of his kinsmen went too, ostensibly to support Archelaus in securing the kingdom, but in reality to work against him, and above all to bring accusations against him for what had happened at the Temple. Sabinus, Caesar's procurator of affairs in Syria, who had set out for Judea to safeguard Herod's property, met Archelaus at Caesarea. But Varus, arriving on the scene, restrained him from his intended course, for he had come at Archelaus's summons, through Ptolemy. To oblige Varus, Sabinus neither took possession of the strongholds in Judea nor sealed up the treasuries, but allowed Archelaus to keep them until Caesar should decide something concerning them, and he remained at Caesarea, having given this undertaking.
But once Archelaus had sailed for Rome and Varus had gone on to Antioch, Sabinus made his way to Jerusalem and took possession of the palace. Summoning the garrison commanders and all who were in charge of affairs, he made it clear that he intended to demand an account from them and to install the strongholds as he saw fit. The guards, however, did not treat Archelaus's instructions lightly, but held firm, preserving everything as they had been ordered, their pretense to Caesar being that they were merely guarding it all. At this same time Antipas, another son of Herod, was also sailing for Rome to press his own claim
Antipas too, Herod's son, was sailing to Rome at this same time, roused by Salome's promises to contend for the throne, and reckoning it far more just that he, not Archelaus, should take over the government, since by the earlier will he had been declared king, and that will, he held, was more secure than the one substituted for it. He brought with him his mother, and Ptolemy, Nicolaus's brother, who had been Herod's most honored friend and remained devoted to him. But the man who most spurred him on to contest the kingdom was Irenaeus the orator, a man trusted with the kingdom's cause because of his reputed cleverness. For this reason he would not yield to those who urged him to give way to Archelaus, as the elder brother and the one named king in the later will by their father.
When he reached Rome, all his kinsmen went over to his side—not out of goodwill toward him, but out of hatred for Archelaus. What they wanted above all was freedom, to be placed under a Roman governor; but failing that, they judged Antipas the lesser evil compared with Archelaus, and so they worked with Antipas for the kingship. Sabinus meanwhile sent letters to Caesar accusing Archelaus. And when Archelaus in turn had sent letters to Caesar setting out his claims, together with his father's will and the accounts of Herod's money brought by Ptolemy along with the royal seal, Caesar waited to see what would come of it. Once he had read these documents, as well as the letters of Varus and Sabinus concerning the sums of money and the annual revenue, and all that Antipas had written seeking to secure the kingdom for himself, he called his friends together to deliberate, among them Gaius, the son of Agrippa and of his own daughter Julia, whom he had adopted and now seated first, and he bade those who wished to speak on the matters at hand do so.
Antipater, Salome's son, spoke first—a most formidable speaker and the bitterest opponent of Archelaus. He said that Archelaus's talk of kingship was mere pretense, since in fact he had already exercised its power before Caesar had granted him anything, charging him with the outrages committed against those who died at the festival. Even if those men had been guilty of some wrong, the punishment belonged properly to those with authority to use it against outsiders, not to a private man—for if a king had done it, he would still be doing wrong by using Caesar's own prerogative of judgment before it had been granted him; and if a mere commoner had done it, the offense was far worse, since it was not fitting for one merely laying claim to a kingdom to have been allowed such license, seeing that he was thereby stripping Caesar of the very authority over such matters.
He attacked him too over the removal of certain officers in the army, over his taking a seat on the royal throne, over settling lawsuits as though he were already king, over granting the petitions of public suitors, and over managing everything—none of which, he said, could possibly be imagined as done by a man merely appointed by Caesar to his position. He also credited him with releasing the prisoners from the hippodrome, and with much else, some of it true and some merely plausible, since it is natural for such things to be believed of young men who seize power out of ambition to rule, and of the neglect of mourning for a father, and revels held the very night of his death—circumstances which, he said, gave the populace their first occasion to riot, since it was outrageous that a father who had done him such benefits and thought him worthy of so much should be repaid for his corpse in such a fashion: pretending to weep by day like an actor on a stage, while by night he indulged in all the pleasure that power could give.
And Archelaus, he said, would show himself the same before Caesar in seeking to be granted the kingdom as he had shown himself toward his father—dancing and singing as if an enemy had fallen, not a kinsman who had raised him to such benefits. Worst of all, he declared, was that Archelaus now came before Caesar to seek confirmation of a kingship all of whose privileges he had already arranged for himself beforehand, treating as already secured what ought only to be exercised once the emperor himself had firmly granted it. Above all he made much of the slaughter at the temple and its impiety—how, with the festival under way and while the sacrificial victims were being slain in the customary manner, some strangers and some natives alike were cut down, and the temple filled with corpses, not by some foreign hand, but by the very man who, even while pursuing the kingship under lawful pretexts, sought thereby to satisfy that injustice hated by all men which is the nature of tyranny.
For this reason, he said, not even in a dream should the succession to the kingdom by right of his father come to him: for he knew the man's character, and indeed a more formidable enemy than himself had been set against him by the terms of the will—Antipater—for he had been summoned by his father to the kingship not while his father was diseased in mind as well as body, but while he still used sound judgment, and while bodily strength still governed his affairs. And if the father had earlier disposed of things toward him just as he had now, it would show plainly what kind of king he would prove: one who, while Caesar alone held the right to bestow the kingdom and had been robbed of the power to grant it, was nevertheless, while still a private citizen, cutting down his fellow citizens in the temple without restraint. Having said such things, and having supported his charges with the testimony of many of the kinsmen, Antipater ceased speaking.
Then Nicolaus rose on behalf of Archelaus, and said that what had happened in the temple should be attributed to the intent of those who suffered rather than to any authority exercised by Archelaus; for men in command in such matters are guilty of wrongdoing not only when they themselves commit outrage, but also when they compel those inclined to act reasonably to resort to self-defense. And that the men in question had acted as if in open war, ostensibly against Archelaus but in reality, it was plain, against Caesar himself; for those who came as restrainers of the outrage, or who were sent by Archelaus and were attacked and killed while giving no thought to God or to the law of the festival—of these men Antipater was not ashamed to make himself the avenger, out of service to his own hatred for Archelaus rather than from any natural love of justice. It was those who came forward, and not those minded to do injustice, who were the rulers; it was the ones who used force, and forced those unwilling to defend themselves to take up arms, who were truly at fault.
He laid the rest of the blame likewise on all those in council with the accusers; for nothing had been done that was not accompanied by their own approval, and thus the charge of wrongdoing applied to them—not that these acts were by nature evil in themselves, but that they seemed likely to damage Archelaus. So great, he said, was their eagerness to insult a man who was their kinsman, the son of a benefactor father, and one who had always dealt with them familiarly and as a fellow citizen. As for the will, it had been written by a king in full possession of his senses, and it took precedence over the earlier one, since the judgment on what was written in it had been left to Caesar, master of all things. And Caesar would in no way imitate their insolence—men who, having in every way enjoyed the benefits of Herod's power while he lived, now rushed with insulting intent against his memory, though not even they themselves had behaved so toward their kinsman. Surely Caesar, he said, would not overturn a will made in good faith toward a man who had done everything for him and was his friend and ally, nor imitate their wickedness—Caesar, whose virtue and good faith toward the whole world stood beyond all doubt—nor condemn as madness and derangement of judgment the act of a king who had left the succession to a worthy son and had thrown himself upon Caesar's own good faith; nor had Herod ever erred in his judgment of a successor, since he had always acted with sound judgment and left everything to Caesar's own decision. With these words Nicolaus concluded his speech.
Then Caesar raised up Archelaus, who had fallen at his knees, kindly, saying that he was most worthy of the kingdom, and he made it clear by many signs that his own inclination was to do nothing other than what the will prescribed and what would be advantageous to Archelaus. Nothing, however, was yet confirmed, as if Caesar wished to keep Archelaus, even with so favorable a precedent to rely on, still without full assurance. And once the men had been dismissed, he considered by himself whether the kingdom should be confirmed to Archelaus, or whether it should instead be divided among all of Herod's family, especially since all of them stood in need of much support.
But before any decision on these matters had been reached, Malthace, Archelaus's mother, died of illness, and letters arrived from Varus, governor of Syria, reporting the revolt of the Jews; for after Archelaus's departure the whole nation had fallen into turmoil. Varus himself, once he arrived, inflicted punishment on those responsible for the disturbance and checked much of the unrest, then withdrew to Antioch, leaving one legion of his army at Jerusalem to hold the Jews' revolutionary spirit in check. This, however, accomplished nothing toward putting an end to their rebelliousness. For once Varus had departed and Sabinus, Caesar's procurator, remained behind, he pressed hard upon the rebels, trusting in the troops left to him and confident that he would prevail through their numbers. He armed many of the men and used them as his bodyguard, driving the Jews on and provoking them to revolt; for he was determined to seize the fortresses by force and eagerly pursued a search for the royal treasures, driven by greed for profit and lust for gain.
When Pentecost arrived—a festival of ours so named by ancestral custom—the people gathered not only in observance of the rite but also in anger at the outrage and drunken insolence of Sabinus; tens of thousands assembled, a great many of them Galileans and Idumeans, and there was a multitude from Jericho and from those who dwell across the Jordan, and the Jews of the region itself gathered in numbers to join with all the rest, and were even more eager than the others to take vengeance on Sabinus. Dividing into three companies, they encamped in as many places: some occupied the hippodrome; of the remaining two groups, some turned toward the northern side of the temple facing south, while others held the eastern quarter; the third group held the western side, where the palace also stood. All of this was directed toward besieging the Romans, who found themselves shut in on every side.
Sabinus, fearing both their numbers and the temper of men who thought little of dying rather than yield, since they judged victory itself to be the very measure of courage, at once sent letters to Varus, urging him, as was his custom, to come to his aid with all speed, since the greatest danger surrounded the army left behind, for he expected it would not be long before they were cut down and taken. He himself, meanwhile, seized the highest of the towers of the fortress, called Phasael in honor of Herod's brother Phasael, who had been so named after his own death at the hands of the Parthians, and from there he urged the Romans to go out against the Jews, though he himself did not dare to go down even among his own friends, judging it right that others should die before him for the sake of his own greed.
When the Romans dared to sally out, a fierce battle broke out, and the Romans got the better of it in many engagements; yet the courage of the Jews did not fail at the sight of the danger, even though many of them had fallen. Circling around, they went up to the porticoes that ran along the outer wall of the temple enclosure, and since the fighting there was hard to press home, they hurled stones, some flung by hand, others slung, being practiced athletes in this kind of fighting. All the archers too, drawn up in formation, did great harm to the Romans, since they held the higher ground and were thus hard to attack, being beyond the reach of those who tried to cast javelins at them, while they themselves could more easily overcome their enemies. The battle continued in this fashion for a long time. Then the Romans, exasperated by what was being done to them, set fire to the porticoes,
catching unawares those of the Jews who had climbed up onto them. The fire, fed by many hands and joined by those skilled in kindling flame, quickly caught the roofing. Since the woodwork was coated with pitch and wax, and further overlaid with gold, the flame ran through it at once, and those great and most remarkable works were destroyed. A sudden and unexpected death overtook the men above the porticoes: some were carried down together with the collapsing roof, while others were struck down all around by the enemy as they stood; many, in their desperation for safety and terror at the calamity surrounding them, threw themselves into the fire, while others used their own swords to make an end of themselves. Those who tried to escape downward by the way they had climbed up were all killed by the Romans as they emerged,
naked as they were and broken in spirit, since desperation, lacking arms, could offer no help. Of those who had gone up onto the roof, not a single one survived. The Romans, forcing their way through wherever the fire allowed, seized control of the treasury, where the sacred funds were kept. Much of it was stolen away by the soldiers, but Sabinus openly kept back for himself four hundred talents.
The Jews were grieved by the loss of their friends who had fallen in this battle, and grieved too at the plundering of the votive offerings; yet the most warlike and closely bound portion of them, gathering around the palace, threatened to set fire to it and kill everyone inside unless they departed at once, promising safety to those who obeyed, and to Sabinus along with them. And most of the royal troops deserted to their side; but Rufus and Gratus, who commanded three thousand of the most warlike men in Herod's army, men vigorous in body, went over to the Romans. There was also a body of cavalry under Rufus's command, which likewise became an addition to the Roman force. The Jews, for their part, did not neglect the siege, but undermined the walls and called upon those who had changed sides not to obstruct their recovery, in due time, of the ancestral freedom that was theirs by right.
Sabinus, then, was glad enough to depart with his soldiers, yet he could not trust the offer, both because of what had already happened and because the very reasonableness of the enemy's terms made him suspect some trap intended to turn him from the course he had settled on; and at the same time, expecting Varus to arrive, he held out under the siege. Meanwhile countless other disturbances took hold of Judea, as many men in many places, driven by hopes of private gain and by hatred of the Jews, rushed into war: two thousand of those who had once served under Herod and had already been disbanded banded together within Judea itself and made war on the royalists, opposed by Achiabus, Herod's cousin, who had been pushed back from the plains into the highlands through his familiarity with
military experience gave the men, while the ruggedness of the terrain let him save whatever could be saved. Judas was the son of Ezekias, the arch-bandit who had once grown very powerful before Herod captured him only after great effort. This Judas now gathered a band of desperate men around Sepphoris in Galilee, made a raid on the royal palace, seized whatever weapons were stored there, armed his followers with them, and carried off
whatever money he found there. He became a terror to everyone, seizing and dragging off those he came across, driven by ambition for greater power and by envy of royal honor, not through any proven excellence, but expecting to win that prize through the sheer scope of his outrages.
There was also Simon, a slave of King Herod, but otherwise a handsome man who stood out for the size and strength of his body, and who had been given great trust. Puffed up by the confusion of the times, he had the audacity to put on a diadem, and when a crowd rallied to him he too was proclaimed king by their madness, thinking himself worthy above anyone else. He set fire to the palace at Jericho and plundered whatever was stored inside it, and he burned many other royal residences throughout the country, destroying them, while he allowed his followers to carry off whatever was left as booty.
He would have done something still greater had swift retaliation not followed: Gratus, commander of the royal soldiers who had joined the Romans, met Simon with the force he had, and after a long and fierce battle most of the Peraeans, being undisciplined and fighting with boldness rather than skill, were destroyed; and as Simon himself was trying to save himself through a ravine, Gratus overtook him and cut off his head. The palace at Ammathus on the Jordan was likewise burned by another band of men like Simon.
So great was the folly that took hold of the nation, because it had no king of its own blood to restrain the masses through virtue, while the foreigners who came in to set the people right became instead the very kindling of sedition, through their own arrogance and greed.
Then there was also Athrongaeus, a man distinguished neither by the fame of his ancestors nor by any abundance of wealth or virtue, but a shepherd, unknown to all in every respect, except that he was conspicuous for the size of his body and the strength of his hands. He had the audacity to set his mind on kingship, thinking that in gaining it he would enjoy it more than the cost of dying for it, counting the loss of his life for such a prize as no great matter. He had four brothers, likewise big men and themselves trusted for their bodily prowess, who were thought to be pillars supporting his hold on the kingdom, and each commanded a company of his own, for a great crowd gathered to them. They acted as generals
and served under him whenever they went into battle at his direction, while he, wearing the diadem, held councils on what was to be done and kept everything referred to his own judgment. This man's power lasted a long time: he was called king and was never deprived of doing whatever he wished, and he and his brothers were devoted to killing on a great scale, waging war on Romans and royal troops alike out of hatred for both, this on account of the arrogance they had suffered under Herod's rule, that on account of what they now thought the Romans were doing wrong to them at present. As time went on they grew ever more savage in the same way, and no one could escape falling into their hands, some through hope of gain, others through sheer habit of killing. They once attacked
a Roman company near Emmaus that was bringing grain and weapons to the army. Surrounding them, they shot down with javelins Arius the centurion, who commanded the whole party, and forty of the best foot soldiers with him. The rest, terrified by their fate, found protection when Gratus arrived with the royal troops around him, and escaped, leaving their dead behind.
Carrying on warfare of this kind for a long time, they caused the Romans no small trouble and did great harm to the nation. In time each of them was overcome, one falling to Gratus, another to Ptolemy; and when the eldest was taken, the last brother, grieved by his fate and seeing that safety was becoming ever harder to find because he was now alone and worn down by great hardship, stripped of his forces, surrendered himself to Archelaus on a pledge of good faith and by the trust of God. But this happened later. Judea was full of bands of robbers, and whoever the king in power happened to find joining any such rising, he pursued to destruction of the common good, causing the Romans little trouble in a few small matters, but bringing about a very great deal of bloodshed among their own people. As soon as Varus
first learned of what Sabinus had done, from a letter Sabinus had written to him, he grew alarmed for the legion and took the two remaining legions, for there were only three in all in Syria, along with four squadrons of cavalry and whatever auxiliary troops the kings and tetrarchs of the time supplied, and hurried to help those then under siege in Judea. Orders were given for all who had been sent ahead to hurry to Ptolemais. The people of Berytus, as he passed through their city, also gave him fifteen hundred auxiliaries, and Aretas of Petra, seeking the friendship of the Romans out of hatred for Herod, sent no small force of infantry and cavalry as well. Once his whole force was gathered at Ptolemais, he handed part of it over to his son and to one of his friends and sent them to make war on the Galileans, who lived
near Ptolemais. This force attacked, routed those who took a stand against it in battle, took Sepphoris, enslaved its inhabitants, and burned the city. Varus himself advanced with the whole army toward Samaria, but spared the city itself because it had taken no part in the disturbances, and camped instead at a village belonging to Ptolemy called Arous. The Arabs, out of hatred for Herod, burned this village, showing hostility even to those who were his friends. From there they advanced and the Arabs plundered and burned another village, Sampho, which was very strongly fortified, and nothing escaped them on their march, everything was filled with fire and slaughter. Emmaus, too, was burned at the order of Varus in retaliation for those who had been killed there, after its inhabitants had fled ahead of him.
From there he advanced and now drew near to Jerusalem, and the Jews who had been besieging the legion camped there could not bear the sight of the approaching army and fled, abandoning the siege half-finished. The Jews within Jerusalem, when Varus sharply charged them, cleared themselves of the accusations, saying that the crowd had gathered only for the festival, and that the war had not been of their own choosing at all but that they had been drawn into it and had been besieged themselves along with the Romans through the boldness of the newcomers, and had shown more eagerness to help the siege against them than to besiege anyone. Josephus, a cousin of King Herod, together with Gratus and Rufus, came out ahead to meet Varus, bringing the soldiers under their command, along with the Romans who had been under siege. Sabinus did not come into Varus's presence at all, but slipped out of the city and made for the coast.
Varus then sent part of his army through the country in search of those responsible for the revolt. When they were identified, he punished the most guilty, but let some go free; those crucified for this cause came to two thousand. After this he sent his own army back home, seeing that it was of no use for anything in the present business, much of it had grown undisciplined and had disregarded Varus's own orders in its pursuit of the gains that came from wrongdoing. He himself, learning that ten thousand Jews had banded together, hurried to capture them. But they did not come to blows at all; instead they surrendered themselves at the advice of Achiab. Varus, granting the crowd a pardon, sent to Caesar those who had been their leaders in the revolt. Caesar
let most of them go free, but punished only those who, though relatives of Herod, had campaigned with the rebels, since they had shown no regard for what was right in taking up arms against their own kin. Having settled these matters and left the legion that had been there before to garrison Jerusalem, Varus hurried back to Antioch. For Archelaus, meanwhile, new troubles were beginning to grow at Rome, for the following reasons. A delegation of Jews arrived at
Rome, since Varus had permitted their nation to send envoys to request self-rule. Those sent as envoys by decision of the nation were fifty in number, and they were supported by more than eight thousand of the Jews then living at Rome. Caesar gathered a council of his own friends and of the leading Romans in the temple of Apollo, which he had built at great expense, and the envoys arrived together with the crowd of Jews resident there, while Archelaus came with his friends. Whichever of the king's relatives there were held back from siding with Archelaus out of hatred for him, yet they thought it a dreadful thing to vote with the envoys against him, believing it would bring shame on themselves in Caesar's eyes to show themselves so eager to act in this way against one of their own family. Philip too was now present,
having come from Syria at Varus's urging, chiefly so as to plead his brother's case, for Varus was very well disposed toward him, and since a change was coming over the kingdom, Varus suspected that it would be divided up, on account of the many who were eager for self-rule, and he did not want to be too late to secure some share of it for Philip himself as well. When the floor was given to the Jewish envoys, who had hoped to speak in favor of abolishing the kingdom altogether, they turned instead to accusing Herod of his lawless acts, declaring that though he had borne the name of king,
he had in fact taken on himself the full measure of ruthlessness found in every tyranny, combining it all for the destruction of the Jews, and that it was simply his nature never to stop devising fresh evils. Indeed, of the many who had perished in utter ruin, no one before could recall the like; and far more wretched than those who had died were those still living, since they suffered not only in what grieved the eye and the mind, but also in their very property. He had adorned the neighboring cities, inhabited by foreigners, at the expense of destroying and laying waste the cities of his own realm, and he had reduced a nation that had received only modest prosperity to the depths of poverty. Whenever he put the nobility to death on groundless charges, he confiscated their estates, and those to whom he granted the wretchedness of mere survival he condemned to be stripped of their property. And apart from the taxes imposed each year on everyone, there were separate exactions paid to him, his household, his friends, and those of his slaves who went out to collect the taxes, because it was impossible to secure anything without paying, however unjustly demanded, in silver.
As for the violation of virgins and the shaming of wives, done in drunken outrage and simple human depravity, they would stay silent, since it gave those who suffered it as much relief to keep it unknown as it would have to have it never happen at all. Such was the outrage Herod visited upon them, of a kind no wild beast would inflict were it granted power over men. Indeed, though the nation had passed through many upheavals and changes, none could recall a disaster of this kind ever having befallen it before, so that Herod himself stood as the very model of the ill-treatment he inflicted on the nation. It would only be natural, then, that Archelaus should gladly be hailed as king in the expectation that whoever succeeded to the throne would prove more moderate than Herod, and that he would join his subjects in mourning his father, so as to win at least a measure of moderation, and would grow close to them in every other way as well.
But since Archelaus feared he would not be believed the true son of Herod, he had, without any delay, straightaway shown the nation his true character, and this before he had even fully secured his rule, since that lay with Caesar to grant and was not yet in his power, by making a slaughter of three thousand of his fellow citizens in the temple itself, as an example of the virtue he would show his future subjects in moderation and good government, an offering made both to his countrymen and to God from the very first act he displayed in office. How could such men not now be entitled to a just hatred against him, in addition to his other cruelty, and to bring the charge of resistance and opposition to his rule as a further complaint? The sum of their request was to be freed from kingship and from rule of that kind altogether, and instead, becoming an addition to the province of Syria, to be placed under the governors sent out there; for in that way it would become clear whether they truly were rebellious and much given to revolution, or not, once they came under more moderate men set to govern them.
When the Jews had spoken to this effect, Nicolaus cleared the kings of the charges, defending Herod on the ground that during his lifetime he had gone unaccused, for surely those who had grounds for complaint against a living man, who was able to punish them for moderate offenses, ought not to bring their accusation together only against a dead man. As for what had been done by Archelaus, he laid the blame on the outrage of the Jews themselves, who, in reaching for things contrary to the laws and beginning the slaughter, brought the charge against those who had merely defended themselves against their violence once they acted. He accused them further of a love of revolution and sedition, born of an undisciplined refusal to submit to justice and the laws, out of a desire to have everything their own way in all things. This, then, was what Nicolaus said.
Caesar, having heard them, dissolved the council, but a few days later he did not declare Archelaus king; instead he made him ethnarch of half the territory that had paid tribute to Herod, promising to honor him with the rank of king if he conducted himself in a manner worthy of it. The other half he divided in two and gave over to two of Herod's other sons, Philip and Antipas, the same Antipas who had disputed with his brother Archelaus over the whole realm. To Antipas were made subject Peraea and Galilee, with a tribute of two hundred talents a year. Batanea, together with Trachonitis and Auranitis, along with part of the house of Zenodorus, as it was called, paid Philip a hundred talents. What was subject to Archelaus
included Idumea, Judea, and the Samaritan territory, though the last had a quarter of its tribute remitted, Caesar having voted them this relief because they had not joined the rest of the people in revolt. The cities subject to Archelaus were Strato's Tower and Sebaste along with Joppa and Jerusalem; for Gaza, Gadara, and Hippos, being Greek cities, Caesar detached from his jurisdiction
He added this to the province of Syria. The revenue in money that came to Archelaus each year from the territory he had received amounted to six hundred talents. Such were the shares that fell to the sons of Herod from their father's estate. As for Salome, besides what her brother assigned her in his will—Jamnia, Azotus, and Phasaelis, and five hundred thousand drachmas of coined silver—Caesar granted her also the royal residence at Ascalon. This too brought in a revenue of sixty talents a year, and its estate lay within the territory of Archelaus. The rest of the king's relatives received whatever the will had specified for them. To Herod's two unmarried daughters, apart from what their father had left them, Caesar gave a dowry of two hundred and fifty thousand drachmas of coined silver each, and married them to the sons of Pheroras. He also granted to the king's children whatever Herod had left to him personally, some fifteen hundred talents, keeping back only a few pieces of furniture, valued not for their worth but because they reminded him of the king who had given them.
While these matters were being settled by Caesar, a young man, Jewish by birth but raised in the city of Sidon in the household of a Roman freedman, made his way into Herod's family circle by trading on a resemblance of build to Alexander, Herod's murdered son, which struck all who saw him. This encouraged him to make a bid for the throne. Taking as his accomplice a countryman of his who was experienced in the affairs of the court, naturally villainous and capable of stirring up great trouble, and who now became his tutor in this kind of wickedness, he gave himself out to be Alexander, Herod's son, smuggled away by the men sent to kill him—for, he said, they had killed others in his place to deceive onlookers, and had spared both him and his brother Aristobulus. Buoyed up by this story, he did not stop deceiving those he met, but crossing to Crete he won over to belief in him every Jew he came in contact with there, and having got money from their generosity he sailed on to Melos. There he received far more money still, on the strength of his royal kinship and in the hope of recovering his ancestral throne and rewarding his benefactors. He hurried on to Rome escorted by his private hosts, and putting in at Puteoli he had no less success in winning over the Jews there by the same deception. They came flocking to him as to a king, both the rest and all who had had ties of hospitality and friendship with Herod. The reason lay in people's readiness to believe gladly what they were told, reinforced by the convincing likeness of his features; for even those who had been closely acquainted with Alexander were largely persuaded that he was no other than Alexander himself, and they swore to their neighbors that it was so, so that when word of him spread through Rome, the whole Jewish community there went out to meet him, hailing this unhoped-for deliverance as an act of God and rejoicing on account of his descent through his mother, whenever he passed down the street carried in a litter. Everything about him had a royal air, kept up at the expense of his private hosts; great crowds gathered around him with cries of acclamation such as naturally attend men so unexpectedly restored—there was nothing that was not done for him.
When the report about him reached Caesar, he was inclined to disbelieve it, since he did not think Herod could easily have been deceived in matters that concerned him so greatly; still, giving some room to hope, he sent Celadus, one of his own freedmen who had been acquainted with the young princes, with orders to bring Alexander before him. Celadus brought the man, who proved no better able to withstand the judgment of a discerning eye than he had been to withstand that of the crowd. Caesar indeed was not deceived; the man did resemble Alexander, but not so closely as to fool those capable of sober judgment. His hands were worn from manual labor, and instead of the softness that came from Alexander's pampered, well-born constitution, his body, shaped by the opposite way of life, had turned out coarser. Observing this collusion between teacher and pupil in their lying story, and the boldness with which they had put it together, Caesar questioned him about Aristobulus—what had become of him, since he had supposedly been smuggled away with him, and why he had not come forward too, to claim the rank that men of such birth were entitled to. The man replied that Aristobulus had been left behind on Cyprus for fear of the dangers of the sea, so that if some disaster befell the one of them, the line of Mariamme might not be wiped out entirely but Aristobulus might survive to deal with those who had plotted against them. While he was still insisting on this, with the deviser of the whole scheme backing him up, Caesar took the young man aside privately and said, "A reward awaits you if you will not try to deceive me as well, on condition that your life is spared: tell me truly who you really are, and who put you up to daring such a scheme; for the plot you have undertaken shows more cunning than your years would suggest." And so, since there was no other course open to him, he told Caesar the whole plot, how it had been arranged and by whom. Caesar did not punish the false Alexander—for he had not lied once he confessed the truth to him—but, seeing that he was strong enough to work with his hands, assigned him to row among the oarsmen; the man who had put him up to it he had put to death. As for the people of Melos, their loss of everything they had spent on the false Alexander was penalty enough. Such was the inglorious end of this bold conspiracy concerning the false Alexander.
Archelaus, once he had taken over the ethnarchy and arrived in Judea, removed Joazar son of Boethus from the high priesthood, holding against him his support of the rebels, and put in his place Joazar's brother Eleazar. He also rebuilt the palace at Jericho magnificently, and diverted half the water that irrigated the village of Neara to supply the plain he had planted with palm trees, and founded a village there which he named Archelais after himself. In violation of ancestral custom he married Glaphyra, daughter of King Archelaus and formerly the wife of his own brother Alexander, by whom she had had children—though it was forbidden among the Jews for a man to marry his brother's widow. Nor did Eleazar remain long in the priesthood, for while he was still alive he was replaced by Jesus son of Sie.
In the tenth year of Archelaus's rule, the leading men among the Jews and Samaritans, no longer able to bear his cruelty and tyranny, brought accusations against him before Caesar, especially since they had learned that he had disregarded the instructions given him, to treat his subjects with moderation. When Caesar heard this, he angrily summoned Archelaus's agent in Rome—his name too was Archelaus—and considered it beneath him to write to Archelaus himself, but told the agent, "Sail at once, without any delay, and bring him back to us." The man made a swift crossing, and on reaching Judea found Archelaus feasting with his friends; he informed him of Caesar's decision and urged him to set out at once. Caesar, when Archelaus arrived, gave a hearing to his accusers and then to his own defense, and sent him into exile, assigning him Vienne, a city in Gaul, as his place of residence, while confiscating his property.
Before he was summoned to Rome, Archelaus had described to his friends a dream he had had. He seemed to see ten ears of wheat, full-grown and heavy with grain, being devoured by oxen. On waking, since the vision seemed to portend something momentous, he sent for the interpreters of dreams who made such matters their study. While they gave conflicting explanations, one to another, for no single account satisfied them all, a man of the Essene sect named Simon, after asking leave to speak freely, said that the vision foretold a change of fortune for Archelaus, and not for the better: oxen, he explained, signified hardship, since the animal labors at its work, and further signified change, because ground plowed by their toil cannot remain in the same state; while the ten ears of grain marked out a like number of years, since one ear comes to harvest in the course of a single year, and Archelaus's time in power was drawing to its end. So he interpreted the dream. On the fifth day after this vision first came to him, the man Archelaus who had been summoned—the other one—arrived in Judea to bring him back.
Something similar befell his wife Glaphyra as well, daughter of King Archelaus, to whom, as I said earlier, Alexander son of Herod and brother of Archelaus had been married when she was a virgin. When it happened that Alexander was put to death by his father, she was married to Juba, king of the Libyans, and after the Libyan's death, while she was living as a widow in Cappadocia with her father, Archelaus took her as his wife, divorcing his own wife Mariamme to do so—so great was his passion for Glaphyra. While living with Archelaus, she had the following dream: she seemed to see Alexander appear before her, and rejoiced at the sight and embraced him eagerly, but he reproached her, saying, "Glaphyra, you prove true the saying that women cannot be trusted—you who pledged yourself to me and shared my home as a virgin, and yet, though we had children together, have consigned my love to oblivion out of desire for a second marriage. And not content with that outrage, you have dared to take a third husband into your bed as well, coming shamelessly and improperly into my house, and contracting a marriage with Archelaus, a man who is your own brother-in-law and my brother. But I will not forget my affection for you; instead I will free you from every reproach, restoring you to what you were as I had made you." Having told this to the women who were her companions, she died within a few days.
I have thought it worth recounting these matters, not regarding them as foreign to the present history, both because it concerns the royal family and, further, because it affords an example bearing on the immortality of souls and on how divine providence embraces human affairs. Whoever finds such things hard to believe is free to keep his own opinion, without hindering another who is led by them toward virtue.
When the territory of Archelaus had been added as a dependency to that of Syria, Caesar sent Quirinius, a man of consular rank, to assess property values in Syria and to sell off the estate of Archelaus.

======== Antiquities — Book 18 ========

How Quirinius was sent by Caesar as assessor of Syria and Judea, and to dispose of Archelaus's estate. How Coponius, of the equestrian order, was sent as prefect of Judea. How Judas the Galilean persuaded the people not to register their property, until Joazar the high priest persuaded them instead to submit to the Romans. What sects there were among the Jewish philosophers, and how many, and what their laws were. How Herod and Philip the tetrarchs founded cities in honor of Caesar. How the Samaritans defiled the people for seven days by scattering the bones of the dead in the Temple. How Salome, the sister of Herod, on her death left her estate to Julia, the wife of Caesar. How Pontius Pilate wished to bring the busts of Caesar secretly into Jerusalem, and the people rioted and would not accept it. What happened to the Jews in Rome at this time because of the Samaritans. The accusation brought against Pilate by the Samaritans before Vitellius, and how Vitellius forced him to go up to Rome to answer for his conduct. The war of Herod the tetrarch against Aretas, king of the Arabs, and his defeat. How Tiberius Caesar wrote to Vitellius to persuade Artabanus the Parthian to send him hostages, and to make war on Aretas. The death of Philip, and how his tetrarchy became a province. The voyage of Agrippa to Rome, and how, accused by his own freedman, he was put in chains. How he was released by Gaius after the death of Tiberius, and became king of Philip's tetrarchy. How Herod, having gone up to Rome, was exiled, and how Gaius gave his tetrarchy to Agrippa. The strife between the Jews and Greeks in Alexandria, and the embassy sent by each side to Gaius. The accusation of the Jews by Apion and his fellow envoys, on the ground that they had no statue of Caesar. The disaster that befell the Jews in Babylon because of the brothers Asinaeus and Anilaeus. This book covers a period of thirty-two years.
Quirinius, a man of senatorial rank who had held the other offices of state and passed through all of them on his way to the consulship, a man great in other respects too in his standing, arrived in Syria with a small retinue, sent out by Caesar to be judge of the nation and to assess its properties. Coponius, of the equestrian order, was sent with him to hold full authority over the Jews. Quirinius also came into Judea, now added to Syria as an appendage, to assess their properties and dispose of Archelaus's money.
The Jews, though at first indignant at the very idea of the census, gave way and did not resist any further, persuaded by the high priest Joazar, son of Boethus. Submitting to Joazar's arguments, they assessed their properties without further hesitation. But Judas, a Gaulanite from a city called Gamala, taking with him Saddok, a Pharisee, pressed hard for revolt, saying that the assessment meant nothing less than outright slavery, and calling on the nation to defend its freedom. If they succeeded, he said, they would win prosperity for the possession they had gained; and if they failed of that good, they would still win honor and glory for their high resolve—and God himself would join eagerly in bringing their plans to success, if only they, setting their hearts on great things, did not shrink from the labor it required. And since the people received their words with such pleasure, the enterprise made great headway; there is no evil that did not spring from these two men and fill the nation to overflowing, beyond all telling: wars brought on by their teaching, which knew no cessation of violence; the loss of friends who might have lightened the burden; the raids of great bands of brigands; the murder of leading men, under the pretense of the public good but in reality from hope of private gain; the factions that grew out of this and political bloodshed—some of it inflicted by men slaughtering their own kinsmen in a madness that would not let them fall short of their rivals, some by the hand of the enemy; famine reduced at last to the extremity of shamelessness; the storming and razing of cities—until this same faction spread even to burning the very Temple of God with the fire of our enemies. So true is it that the innovation and alteration of ancestral ways carries great weight toward the ruin of those who combine to bring it about, since Judas and Saddok, by raising up among us a fourth philosophy never known before, and finding no shortage of enthusiasts for it, filled the state at once with turmoil and planted the roots of the troubles that followed, all through a philosophy till then unfamiliar to us. About this I wish to say a little, especially since the passion of the younger generation for it coincided with the ruin of our affairs.
The Jews had, from the most ancient of their traditions, three philosophies: that of the Essenes, that of the Sadducees, and a third followed by those called Pharisees. I have already spoken of these in the second book of the Jewish War, but I will nonetheless recall them briefly again now.
The Pharisees make their way of life simple, conceding nothing to soft living, and they follow the guidance of whatever their reasoned tradition has judged and handed down as good, holding that the observance of its precepts is a thing worth fighting for. They yield honor to their elders, and those who are puffed up with boldness do not presume to contradict what their elders have proposed. Holding that all things are brought about by fate, they nonetheless do not strip from human beings the will to act on their own impulse, since it has pleased God that there should be a mingling, and that the will of man, with its virtue or its vice, should join in the deliberation of fate's council. They believe that souls have an immortal power, and that beneath the earth there are rewards and punishments for those whose practice of virtue or vice has occurred in life—perpetual imprisonment for the latter, but for the former an easy path back to life. Because of these beliefs they are extremely persuasive with the common people, and whatever is done in the way of divine worship, prayers, and the performance of sacrifices, is carried out under their direction. To such a degree have the cities borne witness to their virtue, by their pursuit of what is best in all things, both in their manner of life and in their speech.
The Sadducees, on the other hand, hold that the soul perishes along with the body, and they own no observance at all beyond the laws; indeed they count it a virtue to dispute with the teachers of the school of wisdom that they follow. This doctrine has reached only a few men, though these are the foremost in rank; and practically nothing is ever accomplished by them, for whenever they come to office, they submit, unwillingly and under compulsion, to what the Pharisee says, since otherwise the populace would not tolerate them.
Among the Essenes the tradition is to leave everything in God's hands, but they too hold the soul immortal, counting the attainment of what is just a thing worth contending for. They send offerings to the Temple, but perform their sacrifices according to a purity distinct from that of others, by which they are kept apart from the common precinct, and so offer their sacrifices among themselves. Otherwise they are men of the best character, wholly devoted to farming. What deserves admiration in them above all others who lay claim to virtue is a practice found among no Greeks or barbarians, indeed not even briefly—one that has been with them from ancient times without interruption: their property is held in common, and the rich man enjoys no more of his own wealth than the man who possesses nothing at all. Those who follow this way of life number more than four thousand. They take no wives and have no desire to own slaves, believing the latter leads to injustice and the former opens the way to strife; instead, living by themselves, they render service to one another. They elect collectors of their revenues, good men chosen from among whatever the land produces, and priests to prepare bread and other food. They live in no way differently from most others, except that they most closely resemble the customs of the Dacians.
Of the fourth of the philosophies, Judas the Galilean set himself up as leader. In everything else it agrees with the opinion of the Pharisees, but they have an unconquerable passion for freedom, since they hold that God alone is their leader and master. They think little of enduring the strangest forms of death, or the punishment of kinsmen and friends, for the sake of never calling any man master. Since most people have seen for themselves how unshakable they are in holding to this position, I have let the matter drop without going further into it; for I have no fear that anything said about them might be met with disbelief—rather my fear is that my account might fall short of the contempt with which they actually receive suffering and pain. It was from this madness that the nation began to sicken, when Gessius Florus, who was then governor, drove them by his abuse of power to desperation and revolt from Rome. So much for the philosophical schools among the Jews.
Quirinius, having now sold off Archelaus's property, and the assessments—which took place in the thirty-seventh year after Caesar's defeat of Antony at Actium—now complete, deposed Joazar the high priest, who had lost the confidence of the populace, and appointed Ananus, son of Seth, high priest in his place. Herod and Philip, each having received his own tetrarchy, settled into their rule. Herod fortified Sepphoris, to be the ornament of all Galilee, and named it Autocratoris; and Bethramphtha, likewise a city, he surrounded with a wall and named Julias, after the emperor's wife. Philip built up Panias, by the springs of the Jordan, and named it Caesarea; and the village of Bethsaida, on the Lake of Gennesaret, he raised to the rank of a city, both by the size of its population and by other means, and named it Julias, after the emperor's daughter.
While Coponius, whom I said had been sent out along with Quirinius, was governing Judea, the following took place. During the feast of unleavened bread, which we call Passover, it was the custom for the priests to open the gates of the Temple from the middle of the night. So on that occasion, as soon as the gates were first opened, some Samaritans, who had come secretly into Jerusalem, began scattering human bones about the porticoes and throughout the whole Temple, an act unheard of before then. Because of this the priests kept the Temple under still stricter guard than before. Not long after, Coponius returned to Rome, and Marcus Ambivulus arrived to succeed him in office.
Under his term Salome, the sister of King Herod, died, leaving to Julia the town of Jamnia and its whole toparchy, together with Phasaelis and Archelais in the plain, where the plantations of palm trees are most abundant and their fruit is excellent. Annius Rufus succeeded him in turn, and it was under his term that Caesar died, having been the second man to rule Rome as emperor, for fifty-seven years, six months, and more than two days, of which time Antony shared rule with him for fourteen years; he lived to the age of seventy-seven. Tiberius Nero, the son of Caesar's wife Julia, succeeded him in the principate, being now the third emperor, and it was he who sent Valerius Gratus to the Jews as prefect, in succession to Annius Rufus.
Gratus, having removed Ananus from the priesthood, declared Ismael, son of Phabi, high priest; and not long after, removing him too, he appointed Eleazar, son of the high priest Ananus, high priest. A year having passed, he removed this man as well, and handed the high priesthood over to Simon, son of Camithus. This man too held the office no more than a year before Gratus removed him, and Joseph, also called Caiaphas, succeeded him. Having done all this, Gratus returned to Rome, after spending eleven years in Judea; Pontius Pilate came to succeed him.
Herod the tetrarch, who had by now advanced far in Tiberius's friendship, built a city named Tiberias after him, settling it with the best people of Galilee, on the Lake of Gennesaret. There are hot springs not far off, in a village called Ammathus. Settlers of mixed origin flocked there, no small number of them Galileans; and there were those brought from the territory under his rule by compulsion and force to inhabit the place, and some, too, of the ruling class. He took in as fellow settlers even destitute men gathered from every quarter, some of them not even certainly free, and in many ways he freed and benefited them, imposing on them the obligation not to abandon the city; for their houses he built at his own expense, and he made them a grant of land, knowing that the settlement was contrary to the law and to Jewish tradition, since many tombs had to be removed to make room for the founding of Tiberias—and our law declares that those who dwell on such a site are unclean for seven days.
About this same time Phraates, king of the Parthians, died, the victim of a plot laid against him by his son Phraatakes, for the following reason. Phraates, having had legitimate children, had also an Italian slave girl, named Thermusa, sent to him among other gifts by Caesar; he made use of her at first as a concubine, but, struck by her great beauty as time went on, and once she had borne him a son, Phraatakes, he made her his lawful wife and held her in honor. Having, in everything she might say, gained the king's confidence, and eager that the rule of the Parthians should pass to her own son, she saw that this could not come about unless the legitimate sons of Phraates were somehow removed. She therefore persuaded him to send his legitimate sons to Rome as hostages. And since it was not easy for anyone to oppose Thermusa's commands to Phraates, these sons were duly sent off to Rome. Phraatakes, now being raised alone to share in the government, thought it a hard thing, and at the same time a long wait, for his father to hand over the rule to him in due course; and so he plotted against his father, with the collusion of his mother, with whom, rumor had it, he was also intimate. Hated on both these accounts—his subjects reckoning his mother's incestuous love no less monstrous a pollution than the murder of his father—he was driven out by a rebellion before he could grow great in power, and fell from his position, and so died. The noblest of the Parthians, taking counsel together—since it was impossible for a people to be governed without a king, and yet it was not lawful for anyone but one of the royal line of the Arsacids to rule, and it was intolerable for the royal dignity to go on being insulted in this way, as had already happened many times even down to now, from
By an Italian concubine's marriage and their offspring they called him Orodes, sending envoys to fetch him -- a man otherwise resented by the populace and open to blame for the extremity of his cruelty, for he was thoroughly perverse and quick to violent anger, but he was one of the royal line. Him they conspired together and killed: some say at a truce and at table, since it was the custom for all to carry daggers; but as the more common account has it, they lured him out to a hunt.
They then sent envoys to Rome asking for a king from among the hostages there, and Vonones was dispatched, chosen ahead of his brothers; for it seemed that fortune was inclining toward him, since two of the greatest realms under the sun, his own and a foreign one, were being offered to him. But barbarians are quick to overturn what they have set up, being by nature prone to instability, and disposed to resent any indignity -- for they thought it beneath them to do the bidding of a king reared as another people's slave, calling his time as a hostage "slavery" instead and holding the very title in contempt. It could not be, they said, that the man who would rule Parthia should have been handed over by right of war -- and, worse still by far, by the insolence of peace.
At once they summoned Artabanus, king of Media and himself of the Arsacid line. Artabanus was persuaded and advanced with an army. Vonones went out to meet him, and at first, with the mass of the Parthians rallying to his side, he drew up his forces and won, and Artabanus fled to the borders of Media. But not long after, gathering his strength again, Artabanus engaged Vonones and won, and Vonones rode off to Seleucia with the few men around him. Artabanus, having wrought great slaughter in the rout to strike terror into the barbarians, withdrew to Ctesiphon with his forces and was now king of the Parthians.
Vonones fled into Armenia, and at first he set his hopes on that country and sent envoys to the Romans. But when Tiberius rejected him, both for his want of manly resolve and because of the threats of the Parthian king -- who was renewing his embassies with threats of war, there being no other way to secure a second kingdom, since the powerful men around Niphates in Armenia were now going over to Artabanus -- Vonones gave himself up to Silanus, the governor of Syria. Silanus, out of respect for his rank, kept him under guard in Syria, while Artabanus gave Armenia to Orodes, one of his own sons.
About this time Antiochus, king of Commagene, also died, and his people split into two factions over the notable men of the country, embassies coming from each side: the powerful wished to change the form of government into a province, while the common people wished to be ruled as a kingdom, according to their ancestral custom. The Senate voted to send Germanicus to set affairs in the east in order, fortune arranging for him the opportunity of his death; for once he had come to the east and set everything right, he was killed by poison at the hand of Piso, as has been related elsewhere.
Pilate, the governor of Judea, brought an army from Caesarea and stationed it in winter quarters at Jerusalem, with the intention of abolishing the laws of the Jews: he introduced into the city the busts of Caesar that were mounted on the military standards, though our law forbids the making of images. For this reason the earlier governors had always entered the city with standards that carried no such ornament. Pilate was the first to set up the images, bringing them into Jerusalem, and this he did without the people's knowledge, because it was done by night.
When they learned of it, they came in crowds to Caesarea and pleaded with him for many days to have the images removed. He would not yield, since to do so seemed to him an affront to Caesar; but as they would not give up their entreaty, on the sixth day he secretly stationed his soldiers under arms around the stadium where he held audience, and came out himself to his tribunal. The stadium had been arranged so as to conceal the waiting troops.
When the Jews again pressed their petition, at a given signal he had the soldiers surround them and threatened to inflict death upon them at once if they did not stop their clamor and go home. But they threw themselves face down on the ground, bared their throats, and declared they would gladly accept death rather than dare to transgress the wisdom of their laws. Pilate, astonished at the firmness of their devotion to the laws, at once had the images carried back from Jerusalem to Caesarea.
Pilate also brought a supply of water into Jerusalem, at the expense of the sacred funds, by drawing off the source of the stream from a distance of some two hundred stadia. The people were displeased at what was being done regarding the water, and many tens of thousands of them gathered and cried out against him, demanding that he stop the work he was so intent upon. Some also used abuse and heaped insults on the man, as a crowd is apt to do. He, however, had dressed a large number of soldiers in the Jews' own clothing, arming them with clubs concealed beneath their garments, and sent them out to surround the people; he then ordered the crowd itself to disperse. When they turned to hurling abuse, he gave his soldiers the signal that had been agreed upon beforehand.
They set upon them with blows far heavier than Pilate had ordered, striking without distinction those who were rioting and those who were not; and the people, bringing nothing to defend themselves, were caught unarmed by men who had come prepared, so that many of them died on the spot from this, and others withdrew wounded. And so the uprising came to an end.
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man; for he was a doer of astonishing deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure, and he won over many Jews and many of the Greeks as well. He was the Christ. And when, on the indictment of the leading men among us, Pilate had condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him from the first did not cease to do so; for he appeared to them on the third day, alive again, the divine prophets having foretold this and countless other marvels about him. And to this day the tribe of the Christians, so named after him, has not disappeared.
About the same time another terrible thing threw the Jews into an uproar, and events took place concerning the temple of Isis at Rome that were not free from disgraceful conduct. Having first made mention of the crime committed regarding the rites of Isis, I will then turn my account to what happened among the Jews.
Paulina was a woman of Rome, of ancestry no less distinguished for its rank than for the discipline of virtue she practiced beyond others of her time; her name stood high, she had great wealth, and she was, moreover, beautiful in form and at that age of life in which women take the greatest pride, while her whole manner of living was devoted to modesty. She was married to Saturninus, a man in every way to be compared with her for his own standing.
Decius Mundus, a man of great rank among the knights of that day, fell in love with her, and since her greater worth made her not to be won by gifts -- for even when he had sent presents amounting to a great sum, he saw them disregarded, and this only inflamed him the more -- he went so far as to promise two hundred thousand Attic drachmas for a single night with her. And when even this failed to bend her,
unable to bear the misfortune of his passion, he judged it best to end his life by starving himself, to put a stop to the evil that had seized him, and he had resolved on death of this kind and was proceeding to carry it out. Now Mundus had a freedwoman of his father's, named Ide, versed in every kind of wickedness, who was deeply distressed at the young man's decision to die -- for it was no secret that he would perish --
and she went to him and roused him with her words, holding out the promise of certain hopes, namely that meetings with Paulina could be arranged for him. He received her plea with delight, and she told him that she would need only fifty thousand for the winning over of the woman. Having thus revived the young man's spirits and taken the money he asked for, she did not proceed by the same means as those who had served him before,
since she saw that the woman could not be won by money at all; but knowing that she was deeply devoted to the worship of Isis, she devised the following scheme. She went to certain of the priests and, with great assurances -- and above all with a gift of money, two and a half myriads at once, and as much again should the affair succeed -- she revealed to them the young man's passion, urging them by every means
to see that the woman was won for the one who would have her. They, led on by the prospect of the gold, promised their help. And the eldest of them, having pressed his way in to see Paulina once he had gained admittance, asked to speak with her alone. When this was granted, he told her he had come sent by Anubis, who, overcome by love of her, bade her come to him. This message was welcome to her, and she
boasted to her friends of being thus honored by the claim of Anubis, and told her husband that a dinner and a night with Anubis had been announced to her; he consented, knowing well his wife's virtue. So she went to the temple, and after dining, when it was time for sleep, the doors were shut by the priest, the lamps within the shrine were put out, and
Mundus, who had hidden himself there beforehand, did not fail to have intercourse with her, and served her the whole night through, she supposing him to be the god. And when he had departed, before the priests who knew of the plot had begun to stir, Paulina went early to her husband and told him of the epiphany of Anubis, and boasted of it in glowing words to her friends. They,
looking at the nature of the thing, disbelieved it in part, while in part they were struck with wonder, not knowing how they could judge it incredible, when they considered her modesty and her rank. On the third day after the deed Mundus met her and said, "Paulina, you have saved me two hundred thousand drachmas, though you might have added that sum to your own house, and yet you did not fail to render the service
for which I first solicited you. As for the insult you sought to inflict on Mundus, I care nothing for names, but only for the pleasure got from the affair -- I gave myself the name of Anubis." With these words he departed, and she, coming only then to understand the enormity of what had been done to her, tore her garment and, telling her husband the full extent of the whole plot, begged him not
to overlook it, but to see that she got redress. He reported the affair to the emperor. Tiberius, once he had made careful inquiry, examined the priests under torture, crucified them along with Ide, who had caused the ruin and had contrived the whole scheme to the woman's dishonor, tore down the temple, and ordered the statue of Isis thrown into the Tiber river. Mundus he punished only
with exile, judging that his offense, having been committed out of passion, was reason enough not to punish him more severely. Such were the outrages committed against the priests in connection with the temple of Isis. I return now to the account of what befell the Jews at Rome at this same time, as my narrative had already indicated it would. There was a Jewish man, a fugitive from his own country on a charge
of transgressing certain laws and from fear of the punishment due for them, thoroughly wicked in every way. At that time, living in Rome, he professed to expound the wisdom of the laws of Moses, and having gained three men wholly like himself in every respect, when Fulvia, a woman of high rank who had come over to the Jewish observances, began to frequent them, they persuaded her to send purple and gold to the
temple in Jerusalem; and having received these, they used them for their own expenses, which had been the very purpose for which the request was made in the first place. Tiberius -- for Saturninus, a friend of his and Fulvia's husband, informed him of it at his wife's urging -- ordered the whole Jewish population expelled from Rome. The consuls conscripted four thousand of them into the army and sent them to Sardinia,
the island, while they punished many more who refused military service out of regard for their ancestral laws. So it was that because of the wickedness of four men the Jews were driven out of the city. Nor was the nation of the Samaritans free of disturbance: a man stirred them up who made light of falsehood and, to please the crowd, contrived every kind of scheme, calling on them to gather with him on Mount Gerizim,
which they hold to be the most sacred of mountains, and he assured those who came that he would show them the sacred vessels buried there, which Moses had deposited in that very place. They believed the story plausible and came armed, and encamping in a certain village called Tirathana, they took in those who kept joining them, intending to make the ascent of the mountain with a great multitude. But Pilate got ahead of their ascent by occupying the position beforehand
with a column of cavalry and infantry, who engaged those who had already assembled in the village; in the battle that followed some they killed, others they put to flight, and many they took captive alive, of whom Pilate put to death the ringleaders and the most influential among those who had fled. When the disturbance had been put down, the council of the Samaritans went to Vitellius, a man of consular rank who held the governorship of Syria, and
accused Pilate of the slaughter of those who had died; for they said they had come to Tirathana not to revolt from Rome but to escape the outrage of Pilate. Vitellius sent Marcellus, one of his friends, to take charge of affairs for the Jews, and ordered Pilate to go to Rome to answer to the emperor for the charges the Samaritans were bringing. So Pilate, after spending ten years in Judea, hastened to Rome,
obeying the orders of Vitellius, which he could not refuse. But before he could reach Rome, Tiberius had already passed away. Vitellius, coming to Judea, went up to Jerusalem; and since it was their ancestral feast, called Passover, Vitellius was received with great magnificence. He remitted the taxes on the produce that was bought and sold, for all the inhabitants of the region, and he also granted that the vestments of the
high priest, together with all his adornment, which was kept in the temple, should remain in the charge of the priests, just as had been their right before. At that time it was kept in the Antonia, as the fortress there is called, its deposit there having come about for the following reason: one of the priests, Hyrcanus -- there having been many who bore that name, this being the first -- once he
had built a residence close to the temple, spent most of his time there and kept the vestments with him, for he was its guardian, since he alone had been granted the right to wear it; there he kept it stored away, and whenever he went down into the city he would resume his ordinary dress. And his sons practiced the same custom, as did their children after them. But when Herod became king, he took over that residence
This vestment, finding it conveniently placed, Herod had rebuilt at great expense and named Antonia, in honor of his friendship with Antony, and he kept the robe stored there just as he had received it, confident that the people would attempt no revolution against him because of it. Archelaus, the king who succeeded him, his son, did the same, and after him the Romans, once they had taken over the government, kept the high priest's robe stored in a stone chamber, sealed by the priests and the treasurers, while the captain of the guard lit a lamp there every day. Seven days before a festival it was handed over to them by the captain of the guard, and after the high priest had used it in the purification rite, on the day following the festival he put it away again in the chamber where it had lain before. This was done at each of the three festivals every year, and also at the fast.
Vitellius, however, out of regard for our ancestral custom, made the robe available, instructing the captain of the guard not to concern himself with where it lay or when it might be needed. Having done this as a benefit to the nation, he also removed the high priest Joseph, called Caiaphas, from the priesthood and appointed Jonathan, son of Ananus the high priest, in his place. He then set out again for Antioch.
Tiberius also sent a letter to Vitellius ordering him to make friendship with Artabanus, king of the Parthians, for Artabanus, being hostile and having seized Armenia, alarmed him, and he feared he might do further harm. Tiberius said he could trust in the friendship only if hostages were given him, above all the son of Artabanus. Writing this to Vitellius, Tiberius also persuaded, with large gifts of money, the king of the Iberians and the king of the Albanians not to hesitate to make war on Artabanus.
They themselves held back, but the Alani, granting the Iberians and Albanians passage through their territory and opening the Caspian Gates, brought them in against Artabanus. Armenia was seized from him again, and as the land of the Parthians was filled with wars, the foremost of the men there were killed, and everything was thrown into ruin for them, and the king's own son fell in these battles along with many tens of thousands of the army.
Vitellius, by a lavish distribution of money to the king's relatives and friends, was on the point of having Artabanus himself killed through those who had taken the bribes. But Artabanus, perceiving the plot, and recognizing that it could not be escaped since it had been formed by many, including the foremost men, and that it would not be dropped until it was carried through, and believing that even those who still seemed to stand by him faithfully were either already corrupted and only feigning goodwill through deceit, or would go over to the rebels once tested, saved himself by fleeing to one of the upper satrapies. After this he gathered a large army of the Dahae and the Sacae, made war on those who opposed him, and recovered his kingdom.
When Tiberius heard this, he desired that friendship be made with Artabanus after all, and since Artabanus too, when invited, gladly accepted the proposal concerning it, Artabanus and Vitellius came to the Euphrates. A bridge was thrown across the river, and each met the other at its very center, each with his own guard. When words of agreement had passed between them, Herod the tetrarch entertained them, having had a costly pavilion set up in the middle of the crossing.
Artabanus then sent Tiberius his son Darius as a hostage, along with many gifts, among them a man seven cubits tall, a Jew by birth named Eleazar, who because of his size was called the Giant. After this Vitellius went off to Antioch and Artabanus to Babylonia.
Herod, wishing to be the first to bring word to Caesar of the receiving of the hostages, sent off couriers, having written everything precisely in a letter, leaving nothing out for the consul to report. But when letters arrived from Vitellius as well, and Caesar signified to him that word of the matter had already reached him earlier, since Herod had sent notice of it first, Vitellius was greatly disturbed, and, supposing he had suffered a greater slight than had actually been done to him, concealed his anger against Herod, keeping it hidden, until he took his revenge after Gaius had succeeded to the rule of the Romans.
At that time Philip, Herod's brother, died, in the twentieth year of Tiberius's reign, having himself governed Trachonitis, Gaulanitis, and the nation of the Batanaeans in addition for thirty-seven years, and having shown himself moderate and unconcerned with trouble in his rule. He spent his whole life in the territory subject to him, and when he made his rounds he was accompanied by only a few chosen men, and had his throne, on which he used to sit in judgment, carried with him on the roads, so that whenever someone met him in need of assistance, there was no delay: the throne was set up on the spot, wherever it happened to be, and sitting there he heard the case at once, imposed penalties on the guilty, and released those unjustly caught up in accusations. He died at Julias, and after his body was brought to the tomb which he himself had built earlier, a costly funeral was held. Since he left no children, Tiberius took over his rule and made it an addition to the province of Syria, though he ordered that the taxes collected in what had been his tetrarchy be kept apart and deposited there.
At this time a quarrel broke out between Aretas, king of Petra, and Herod, for the following reason. Herod the tetrarch had married the daughter of Aretas and had lived with her for a long time already. Setting out for Rome, he lodged with Herod, his brother by a different mother, for this Herod was the son of the daughter of Simon the high priest. There he fell in love with Herodias, the wife of this brother.
She was the daughter of Aristobulus, who was also their brother, and sister of Agrippa the Great, and Herod ventured to speak with her of marriage. She accepted, and an agreement was made that she would move in with him once he returned from Rome; part of the agreement was that he would put away the daughter of Aretas. Having made these arrangements, he sailed for Rome. But when he was returning, having accomplished in Rome the business for which he had gone, his wife, having learned of the agreement with Herodias, before it became known to him that she knew everything, asked to be sent to Machaerus, which lies on the border between the territory of Aretas and that of Herod, without revealing her intention. Herod sent her off, not suspecting that the woman had perceived anything.
She, however, had already sent word ahead to Machaerus, which was subject to her father, and with everything prepared for the journey by the governor, she arrived and at once set out for Arabia, passing from one governor's escort to the next in succession, and came to her father as quickly as possible and told him of Herod's intention. He took this as the beginning of hostility, which was joined also by a dispute over borders in the territory of Gamala.
Each side gathered forces for war and appointed generals to command in their place, and when the battle took place, Herod's entire army was destroyed, betrayed by men who were deserters from Philip's tetrarchy and had campaigned alongside Herod. Herod wrote of this to Tiberius, who, angered at Aretas's aggression, wrote to Vitellius to make war on him, and either bring him back alive in chains, or, if he were killed, send his head to him. This is what Tiberius directed the governor of Syria to do.
Some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod's army came from God, and quite justly, in punishment for what he had done to John, called the Baptist. For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man, one who urged the Jews to practice virtue, to act with justice toward one another and with piety toward God, and so to come together in baptism. For only in this way, he taught, would the baptism itself appear acceptable to God, not as employed to beg pardon for certain sins, but as a purification of the body, seeing that the soul too had already been thoroughly cleansed beforehand by righteousness.
When others too began to gather around him, since they were extremely stirred by the hearing of his words, Herod grew afraid that persuasion of this degree over men might lead to some uprising, since they seemed likely to do everything on his advice, and thought it far better to act first and put him to death, before any change came about through him, than to fall into difficulties and then have to regret it once the revolt had actually happened. So John, a prisoner sent to Machaerus, the fortress mentioned above, on suspicion born of Herod, was put to death there. The Jews believed that the destruction of the army came about as vengeance on Herod's behalf, God wishing to do him harm.
Vitellius, having prepared for the war against Aretas with two legions of heavy infantry along with their light troops and cavalry drawn as allies from the kingdoms subject to Rome, hastened toward Petra and reached Ptolemais. As he was setting out to lead the army through Judea, the leading men met him and asked that he not take that route through their country, for it was not their ancestral custom to permit standards to be carried through it, since many images were mounted on them. Persuaded, he changed the plan he had previously formed on this point, and ordering the army to march through the great plain, he himself went up to Jerusalem with Herod the tetrarch and his friends to sacrifice to God, since a festival of the ancestral kind for the Jews was then in progress.
There he was met and received magnificently by the multitude of the Jews, and spent three days in the city; during this time he removed Jonathan from the high priesthood and handed it over to his brother Theophilus. On the fourth day, letters arrived informing him of the death of Tiberius, and he made the people swear allegiance to Gaius. He also recalled the army to its several winter quarters, no longer being able to press the war in the same way, since affairs had now passed into the hands of Gaius.
It was also said that Aretas, on receiving report of Vitellius's soldiers, consulted the omens and declared that it was not possible for the army to make its way against Petra, for one of the leaders would die, either the one who had ordered the war, or the one who had set out to carry out his intention, or the one against whom the expedition had been prepared. And so Vitellius withdrew to Antioch.
Agrippa, the son of Aristobulus, went up to Rome a year before Tiberius's death, to transact some business with the emperor, once he had come into possession of some means. I wish, then, to speak at greater length about Herod and his family, both because the account belongs to this history, and because it affords a demonstration of the divine, showing that neither numbers nor any other strength that men achieve avails anything apart from piety toward the divine -- seeing that within a hundred years of his death, but for a few, and there were many of them, Herod's descendants perished. This might also contribute something to the correction of the human race, to learn of their misfortune, and at the same time it allows the story of Agrippa to be told, a man most deserving of wonder, who from being an utterly private citizen, and beyond all expectation of those who knew him, rose to such a degree of power. I have spoken of these matters before, but I will now set them out again in precise detail.
Herod the Great had two daughters by Mariamme, the daughter of Hyrcanus: Salampsio, the one, who was married to Phasael her own cousin, son of Herod's brother Phasael, her father having given her to him; and Cypros, likewise married to her cousin Antipater, son of Herod's sister Salome. To Phasael, Salampsio bore five children: Antipater, Alexander, Herod, and daughters Alexandra and Cypros, whom Agrippa, son of Aristobulus, married. Alexandra was married to Timius of Cyprus, a man of distinction, and died childless in his house. To Cypros, by Agrippa, were born two sons and three daughters, Berenice, Mariamme, and Drusilla, the sons being named Agrippa and Drusus, of whom Drusus died before reaching manhood. Their father Agrippa was raised together with his other brothers, Herod and Aristobulus, and Berenice, and these were the children of Herod, son of the Great. Berenice was the daughter of Costobarus and Salome, Herod's sister. Aristobulus, when he died at his father's hand, left these as infants, along with his brother Alexander, as we have said before. Having grown to manhood, this Herod, brother of Agrippa, married Mariamme, daughter of Olympias, daughter of King Herod, and of Joseph, son of Joseph, this Joseph being brother of King Herod; and he had by her a son, Aristobulus. The third brother of Agrippa, Aristobulus, married Jotape, daughter of Sampsigeramus, king of Emesa, and a daughter was born to them who was deaf; her name too was Jotape. These, then, were the children of the male line.
Herodias, their sister, was married to Herod, a son of Herod the Great by Mariamme, daughter of Simon the high priest, and they had a daughter, Salome; after her birth, Herodias, resolving upon a confusion of ancestral custom, left her husband while he was still alive and married Herod, his brother by the same father, who held the tetrarchy of Galilee. Her daughter Salome was married to Philip, son of Herod the tetrarch of Trachonitis, and when he died childless, Aristobulus, son of Herod, Agrippa's brother, married her. Three sons were born to them: Herod, Agrippa, and Aristobulus. This, then, is the line of Phasael and Salampsio.
To Cypros, by Antipater, a daughter was born, Cypros, whom Alexas, son of Elcias the son of Alexas, married, and her daughter too was named Cypros. Herod and Alexander, whom I said were Antipater's brothers, died childless. To Alexander, Herod the king's son, who was put to death by his father, sons were born, Alexander and Tigranes, by the daughter of Archelaus, king of Cappadocia. Tigranes, who became king of Armenia, died childless after being accused before the Romans. Alexander, his namesake and Tigranes' brother, had a son who became king of Armenia under Nero, and he too had a son, Alexander. This Alexander married Jotape, daughter of Antiochus, king of Commagene, and Vespasian set him up as king over a part of Cilicia. The line of Alexander, as soon as it was born, abandoned the observances proper to the Jews and went over to Greek custom, while it fell to the remaining daughters of King Herod to die childless. Of the descendants of Herod whom I have listed, those who remained were still living when
...at the time when Agrippa the Great took over the kingdom. Now that I have set out the family in advance, I will go on to relate all the turns of fortune that came Agrippa's way, and how, after escaping them, he rose to the very height of both rank and power. A little before King Herod's death, Agrippa was living in Rome. He had grown up alongside Drusus, the son of the emperor Tiberius, and through their close familiarity and long companionship he had also won the friendship of Antonia, the wife of Drusus the elder, since Berenice, Agrippa's mother, was held in honor by her and had asked her to advance her son.
Agrippa was naturally inclined to grandeur and lavish in his giving. While his mother was alive he did not reveal what his heart wanted, since he thought it right to escape her anger at such things; but once Berenice died, he gave free rein to his own temperament. He spent his money partly on the extravagance of his daily living and partly on gifts given without measure, and the greatest part of it went to Caesar's freedmen, in hope of what their influence might do for him, so that in a short time he was reduced to poverty. This was what kept him from living any longer in Rome. Tiberius, moreover, since his son had died, had forbidden his son's friends to come into his sight, because seeing them stirred up his grief by reminding him of the boy.
For these reasons, then, Agrippa set sail for Judea, in low spirits and humbled, having lost his fortune and having no way to pay off his debts to his many creditors, who allowed him no relief whatsoever. So, at a loss what to do and ashamed before them, he withdrew to a certain tower at Malatha in Idumea, where he was of a mind to end his own life. His wife Cypros perceived his intention and did everything she could to turn him from such plans. She also sent letters to his sister Herodias, who was living with Herod the tetrarch, explaining the straits Agrippa had fallen into and the necessity that had driven him to such a plan, and asking her, as a kinswoman, to look on and help, showing in every way how she might relieve her husband, especially since their circumstances had once been so similar.
Herod and Herodias sent for him, appointed Tiberias as his residence, granted him a sum of money for his upkeep, and honored him with the market-inspectorship of Tiberias. Herod, however, did not long abide by these arrangements, insufficient as they already were. At a drinking party in Tyre, words were exchanged between them under the influence of wine, and Agrippa, unable to bear it after Herod had reproached him with his poverty and with having to be given the necessities of life, went to Flaccus, the man of consular rank, who had earlier been a particular friend of his in Rome and who was at that time governing Syria.
Flaccus received him, and Agrippa was staying with him there, along with Aristobulus, who, although Agrippa's brother, was at odds with him. Their mutual enmity did no harm to either, so that the ordinary marks of the consular's friendship were shown to both alike. Aristobulus, however, did not relax his hostility toward Agrippa in the least, and eventually brought him into conflict with Flaccus as well, taking as his occasion for this ill will the following affair.
The people of Damascus were at odds with those of Sidon over a boundary dispute, and when Flaccus was about to hear the case, they learned that Agrippa carried great weight with him and asked that some part of their cause be entrusted to him, promising him a very large sum of money for it. He, for his part, set about doing everything he could to help the Damascenes. But Aristobulus, since the agreement about the money had not escaped his notice, denounced him to Flaccus.
When the matter was investigated and found to be true, Flaccus drove Agrippa from his friendship. Reduced to the utmost want, Agrippa came to Ptolemais, and since he had no means of living anywhere else, he resolved to sail for Italy. But being shut out by lack of funds, he asked Marsyas, his own freedman, to raise money for such purposes for him by borrowing from someone.
Marsyas accordingly asked Peter, a freedman of Berenice, Agrippa's mother, who by the terms of her will was under obligation to Antonia, to advance the sum himself on a note of hand and his own credit. Peter, since he had a claim against Agrippa for money owed him, forced Marsyas to draw up a bond for twenty thousand Attic drachmas, taking two thousand five hundred less than that amount. Marsyas agreed to this, since there was no other way to manage it.
Once this sum had been secured, Agrippa went to Anthedon, took ship, and was on the point of putting to sea. But Herennius Capito, the procurator of Jamnia, learning of it, sent soldiers to collect from him three hundred thousand drachmas of silver owed to Caesar's treasury from his time in Rome, and pressed him to stay. Agrippa at the time pretended he would comply with the order,
but when night came he cut his moorings and made for Alexandria, sailing on. There he asked Alexander the alabarch to lend him two hundred thousand drachmas. Alexander said he would not give it to him, but he did not refuse Cypros, being struck by her devotion to her husband and by all her other virtues besides. She gave her pledge, and Alexander, having given them five talents at Alexandria,
promised to provide the rest once they reached Puteoli, being wary of how ready Agrippa was to spend. So Cypros, having set her husband on his way to Italy, herself returned with the children to Judea. Agrippa, putting in at Puteoli, wrote a letter to Tiberius Caesar, who was residing at Capri, announcing his arrival and asking to pay his respects and see him,
and requesting permission to cross over to Capri. Tiberius, without any hesitation, wrote back to him in the most gracious terms, and when Agrippa duly arrived at Capri, showing nothing lacking in the warmth of his letter, he welcomed him and entertained him. But the next day a letter reached Caesar from Herennius Capito,
stating that Agrippa, having taken a loan of three hundred thousand drachmas and let the agreed time for repayment lapse, had fled the province the moment repayment was demanded, thereby putting himself beyond his power to collect it. Reading this letter, Caesar was greatly displeased and ordered that Agrippa be barred from his presence until he had paid the debt.
Agrippa, not in the least daunted by Caesar's anger, appealed to Antonia, mother of Germanicus and of Claudius, who later became Caesar, asking her to lend him the three hundred thousand drachmas, so that he might not forfeit his friendship with Tiberius. She, remembering his mother Berenice — for the two women had been very close to each other — and because of the intimacy that had grown up between Agrippa and Claudius's circle, gave him
the money, and once he had paid off the debt, his friendship with Tiberius stood unimpeded. Tiberius Caesar afterward assigned him to his grandson, instructing him to accompany the boy on all his outings. Agrippa, received into Antonia's friendship, then turned his attentions to Gaius, who was her grandson and, out of regard for his father, held in the highest honor. There was
also another man, a Samaritan by birth, a freedman of Caesar's. From him Agrippa raised a loan of a million drachmas, with which he repaid the debt owed to Antonia, and with the rest, spent in courting Gaius, he rose all the higher in his esteem. As Agrippa's friendship with Gaius grew to great importance, the two of them, talking together one day, fell into conversation about Tiberius, and Agrippa,
turning the talk into a wish, since they were alone together, said he prayed that Tiberius, the old man, might soon step down from power and hand it over to Gaius, who was in every way more worthy of it, for then Tiberius's own grandson would be no obstacle to them, since he would die at Gaius's hand. Eutychus, a freedman of Agrippa's and his charioteer, overheard these words and at the time kept silent about them. But afterward, accused by Agrippa of stealing some garments of his — and indeed he had truly stolen them — he fled, was caught, and was brought before Piso, who was the
prefect of the city. When Piso asked the reason for his flight, he said he had secret words to speak to Caesar, bearing on Caesar's own safety; so Piso had him bound and sent to Capri. There Tiberius, true to his own character, kept him in chains, being as much given to delay as any king or tyrant who ever lived. He never gave prompt audience to embassies,
nor was any successor appointed for governors or procurators he had sent out, unless they happened to die first; hence he was equally indifferent about hearing the cases of prisoners. So when his friends asked him the reason for this way of dragging things out, he said that he put off embassies so that, once they had been given prompt dismissal, other envoys freshly appointed would come in their place, and he would be burdened with receiving and escorting them over and over again;
and that he left governorships to those who had once been appointed to them, out of consideration for their subjects — for it is the nature of every position of authority to be inclined toward greed, and those that are not held permanently, but only briefly and uncertainly, until the moment they are taken away, only spur those who hold them on to plunder all the more. If, then, they remained in office longer, they would in time have their fill of plundering, since the sheer volume of what they had already gained would make them use their position more sluggishly thereafter;
whereas if a successor came quickly, those subject to greedy governors would never gain any relief, since the time allowed would not be enough for those already sated to relax their eagerness to take, precisely because they were removed before they had had their fill in due time. And he told them this story to illustrate the point: a wounded man lay
with flies swarming in great numbers around his wounds. Someone who happened by, pitying his misfortune and supposing that he lacked the strength to help himself, came up and set about driving the flies away. When the wounded man asked him to stop doing this, the man was puzzled and asked him why he showed no concern to escape the evil that beset him. "You would do me a greater wrong," he said, "by driving them off.
These flies here, now that they are already gorged with my blood, no longer press me so hard, but in a way even ease off. But if fresh ones came together, driven by unspent hunger, and found me already worn down, they would finish me off entirely." For this reason, he said, he himself, mindful that his subjects had already been ruined by so much plundering, thought it prudent not to keep sending out new governors one after another, who would harry them in the manner of these flies,
since men naturally bent on gain, once they took office, would have as their ally the expectation that their pleasure in it would soon be taken away. Tiberius's own conduct will bear out what I say about his character in such matters: for in the twenty-two years he was emperor, he sent out only two men in all to govern the Jewish nation and administer its affairs, Gratus and Pilate, who succeeded him in the office. And he was not
only such toward the Jews, but different toward the rest of his subjects as well. Even in the case of prisoners, he made plain how far his reluctance to give them a hearing went, in that for men condemned to death, execution would have brought relief from the evils pressing upon them, since it is not for any virtue of theirs that such a fate comes upon them by chance, while for those left to be worn down, the lingering weight upon them only made their misfortune the greater. It was for these reasons, then, that Eutychus too
failed to obtain a hearing and remained bound in chains. But as time passed, Tiberius came from Capri to Tusculum, about a hundred stadia from Rome, and Agrippa asked Antonia to arrange a hearing for Eutychus on the charges he was bringing against him. Antonia was held in the highest honor by Tiberius, both for the dignity of her kinship — for she
was the wife of his brother Drusus — and for her virtue and self-restraint; for though still young when widowed, she remained so, and refused to marry another, even though Augustus himself had urged her to marry someone, and she kept her life free of scandal. She had also, in her own right, been of the greatest service to Tiberius personally: for when a great conspiracy was formed against him by Sejanus, a man who was both his friend and at that time held the greatest power, because he
commanded the armies, and most of the senate as well as many of the freedmen had gone over to him, and the soldiery had been corrupted, and the conspiracy was making great headway and might well have succeeded, had not Antonia met Sejanus's villainy with a boldness wiser than his cunning. For when she learned what had been contrived against Tiberius, she wrote to him
setting out everything in detail, and giving the letter to Pallas, the most trustworthy of her slaves, sent it off to Tiberius at Capri. He, on learning of it, put Sejanus and his fellow conspirators to death, and held Antonia, whom even before he had regarded highly, in still greater honor thereafter, and trusted her in all things. It was at the urging of this same Antonia that Tiberius, though reluctant,
agreed to examine Eutychus. "If Eutychus has spoken falsely," said Tiberius, "about what Agrippa is said to have said, he will receive from me punishment enough, which I myself have already imposed on him. But if, under torture, what he has said proves true, let Agrippa take care that in his eagerness to punish his freedman he does not call down the trial on his own head instead." When Antonia reported this to him, Agrippa pressed all the more insistently for the matter to be examined,
and Antonia, since Agrippa would not let up in his entreaties on this score, seized an occasion of the following kind. Tiberius was being carried along on a litter, with Gaius, her grandson, and Agrippa walking alongside; they had just come from lunch. Walking beside the litter, she urged that Eutychus be summoned and examined. Tiberius said, "Antonia, let the gods be my witness that it is not
of my own will, but drawn out by the necessity of your entreaty, that I do what I am about to do." So saying, he ordered Macro, who was Sejanus's successor, to bring Eutychus. He came without any delay. Tiberius asked him what he had to say against a man who had given him his freedom. Eutychus said, "Master, Gaius here and Agrippa with him were riding along in a carriage,
and I was sitting at their feet, and as much talk went round, Agrippa said to Gaius: 'If only the day would come when this old man stepped aside and appointed you ruler of the world; for then Tiberius, his grandson, would be no obstacle to us at all, since he would die at your hands, and the world would be blessed, and I along with
Tiberius took what had been said as trustworthy, and it also recalled to him an old grudge against Agrippa: when he had ordered Agrippa to pay court to Tiberius his grandson, the son of Drusus, Agrippa had treated him with contempt, ignoring the summons and going over entirely to Gaius's side. "This man," he said, "Macro, put him in chains." Macro did not clearly understand whom he had been ordered to bind, and besides, he did not expect any such order to concern Agrippa, so he held back to make sure he had understood correctly. But when Caesar, having made a circuit of the hippodrome, found Agrippa standing there, he said, "Macro, it is indeed this man I said should be bound." When Macro asked again which man, he said, "Agrippa, of course."
Agrippa turned to entreaty, invoking the memory of the boy with whom he had been raised and of Tiberius's own upbringing, but it did him no good at all — they led him off in his purple robes, a prisoner. The heat was fierce, and since he had not drunk much wine with his meal, thirst burned in him; his anguish was made worse by the indignity of it all. Seeing one of Gaius's slaves, a boy named Thaumastus, carrying water in a vessel, he asked to drink.
When the boy readily held it out and Agrippa had drunk, he said, "Boy, if this service of yours turns out well for you, once I am free of these chains I will lose no time in securing your freedom from Gaius, since he showed no less regard for me now, a prisoner, than when I held my former rank."
And he did not fail to make good on this word — indeed he repaid it more than in kind. For later, when he had become king, he had Thaumastus freed — Gaius Caesar by then having granted this — and set him over his estate; and when he died, in that same office of honor, an old man, he left him behind still in service to his son Agrippa and his daughter Berenice on the same terms. But that all belongs to a later time. Agrippa, then, stood there in chains before the palace, leaning against a tree out of despondency, along with many others who were likewise bound.
A bird settled on the tree against which Agrippa was leaning — the Romans call this bird an owl — and one of the prisoners, a German, saw it and asked the soldier who the man in the purple robe was. On learning that his name was Agrippa, that he was a Jew by birth, and one of the most eminent men of that nation, he asked the soldier chained beside him if he might come near and speak with him, saying he wished to ask him something concerning his ancestral customs. Given leave, he came close and, through an interpreter, said:
"Young man, the suddenness of this change that has come upon you, bringing with it so great and abrupt a reversal of fortune, no doubt shakes you, and you distrust any words that promise deliverance from the trouble now upon you, thinking them to deny the workings of divine providence. But know this: by the gods of my own fathers and the gods native to this place, who have set this iron upon us, I swear I will tell you everything, giving no license to an idle, glib tongue, nor seeking merely to cheer you with empty words. For predictions of this kind, when the event that should confirm them is delayed, only add a harsher grief than if one had never heard them at all. Still, I judge it right, even at risk to myself, to disclose to you the gods' foretelling. There is no way that you will not be released from these bonds very soon, and advanced to the very height of rank and power; you will become the envy of all who now pity your misfortune, and you will make a happy end for the children you will leave behind you in life. But remember, when you next see this bird, that your death will follow five days after. This will come to pass exactly as this bird, sent forth by God, signifies. I did not think it right to withhold from you the understanding that has come to me by foreknowledge of these things, so that, knowing that good is to come, you might set the grief of your present state at a lighter weight. And remember, once the good fortune has come into your hands, the misfortune we now share together as well, so that you may free me from it."
So much did the German foretell, and he earned from Agrippa such laughter at the time as, by later events, proved him worthy of wonder instead. Antonia, distressed at Agrippa's misfortune, saw that speaking to Tiberius about him would be a difficult matter and in any case likely to come to nothing; but she did secure from Macro that a moderate number of soldiers be assigned to watch over him with care, and a centurion to be set over them and to share his confinement, that he be allowed a daily bath, and visits from his freedmen and friends, and every other comfort that could be given his body.
So his friend Silas and his freedmen Marsyas and Stoichus came in to him, bringing food he enjoyed and attending to him with every care, and bringing garments too, under pretense of selling them, which at nightfall, with the soldiers' connivance — Macro having arranged it beforehand — they spread beneath him. This went on for six months. Such was Agrippa's situation. Meanwhile Tiberius, having returned to Capri, fell ill — at first only moderately.
But as the sickness grew worse, and he had little hope for himself, he summoned Euodus, who was most honored among his freedmen, and ordered him to bring the children to him, for he wished to speak with them before he died. He had no legitimate children left of his own — Drusus, his only son, had died — but Drusus had left a son, Tiberius, called Gemellus, and there was also Gaius, son of Germanicus, his brother's son, already a young man who had completed his education to the fullest, and who was honored by the goodwill of the people on account of the virtue of his father Germanicus. For Germanicus had risen to the very greatest honor among the common people, through the steadiness of his character and his graciousness in dealing with others, being unassuming and winning esteem by his wish to be equal to all.
Because of this, not only did the people and the senate hold him in the highest regard, but so did every one of the subject nations — some who had dealt with him directly, won over by the charm of meeting him, others who had heard of it from report and took it up in turn. When he died, mourning was proclaimed for him among all, not out of any pretended grief in deference to the government, but from genuine sorrow, since each felt his death as a loss peculiarly their own — so unassumingly had he dealt with people. From this a great advantage was left to his son as well among everyone, and especially the army was devoted to him, counting it a point of honor that the succession should fall to him, and being ready to die for it if need be.
Tiberius gave Euodus instructions that on the following day, at dawn, he should bring the children in to him; and he prayed to his ancestral gods to show him some clear sign as to who should succeed to the rule. He was eager to leave it to his grandson, but he trusted more to what God would reveal on the matter than to his own judgment or wish. The omen he set for himself was this: that the rule should go to whichever of the two came to him first the next morning. Having resolved this, he sent to the tutor of his grandson, telling him to bring the boy to him at the first hour, believing that God would take care of the matter of succession himself; but God voted against his choice.
Having settled on this plan, as soon as day came he ordered Euodus to call in whichever of the boys was present first. Going out, Euodus found Gaius before the chamber — Tiberius the grandson was not there, his nurse having kept him occupied, and Euodus knew nothing of what his master intended — and said, "Your father calls you," and brought him in. When Tiberius saw Gaius, he came for the first time to a full realization of the divine power at work, and that the succession had been entirely taken out of his hands, that whatever he might decree would need confirming by another authority not granted to him from that quarter.
He lamented at length, that the power to ratify his own deliberations had been taken from him, and that Tiberius his grandson would lose both the rule of Rome and his own safety, since he would have to live alongside one who could not bear the presence of a rival close to him in rank, and who, moved by fear and hatred toward one standing so near the throne, would use every means against him — partly as against a claimant to power, partly to forestall any counterplot — and would not let go until he had secured both his own safety and full possession of affairs. Tiberius was also greatly devoted to astrology, and, from its having proved true for him more than for others given to it, he had come to stake his whole life upon it. So once, seeing Galba approaching, he said to those closest to him that a man was coming who would one day contend for the rule of Rome. Regarding all such predictions as reliable, he above all men in power relied on them once their truth was borne out by events. And now he was in great distress at what had happened, grieving bitterly as though his grandson were already dead, and reproaching himself for his own foresight in reading the omens —
for he might have died free of grief, in ignorance of what was to come, but instead had to go on living with the foreknowledge of the coming misfortune of those dearest to him. Yet, troubled as he was by this unwelcome turn of the succession toward one he had not wished, unwillingly and reluctantly he nonetheless said to Gaius:
"My boy, though Tiberius is nearer kin to me than you are, by my own judgment, and by the concurring will of the gods in the matter, I hand over to you the rule of Rome. I ask that in exercising it you forget neither my goodwill toward you, in setting you up to so great a height of honor, nor your kinship with Tiberius, but understand that it is through the gods, and after them through me, that I have made you the giver of such great goods, and that you repay my eagerness on your behalf, and at the same time have regard for Tiberius because of your kinship — knowing besides that Tiberius, if he survives, would be a bulwark to you both for your rule and for your own safety, but would become, if put out of the way, the beginning of misfortune. For isolation is dangerous for those set at the height of such great affairs, and the gods do not leave unpunished whatever is done against justice, in violation of the law that calls for acting otherwise."
So Tiberius spoke, but he did not persuade Gaius, even though Gaius made promises; rather, once established in power, Gaius did away with Tiberius through the very arts of divination that had raised him up, and not long after, having himself become the object of a conspiracy, he too died. Tiberius, having declared Gaius his successor in the rule, lived only a few more days and died, having held the empire himself for twenty-two years, five months, and three days. Gaius was the fourth emperor.
When word of Tiberius's death reached the Romans, they rejoiced at the good news, but they did not dare to believe it — not from any unwillingness, for they would have paid a great sum of money for the report to be confirmed true — but from fear that, if the report proved false, having risen up too soon to show their joy, they would then be destroyed once informed against. For this one man had done more terrible things to the Roman nobility than any other, being quick to anger against everyone and, once set on a course of action, impossible to appease, even taking up a cause for hatred without any reason at all, and being naturally savage in whatever he judged, imposing death as the penalty even for the lightest offenses. And so, though the pleasure of hearing such news drew them to enjoy it as much as they wished, they were held back by the dread of the harm that would follow should their hopes prove false.
But Marsyas, Agrippa's freedman, on learning of Tiberius's death, rushed off at a run to bring Agrippa the good news, and finding him coming out on his way to the bath, he leaned toward him and said in the Hebrew tongue, "The lion is dead."
Agrippa, grasping the sense of the words and overcome with joy at them, said, "May every kind of thanks be yours, for all things and for this good news besides, if only what is said is true." The centurion set to guard Agrippa, seeing the haste with which Marsyas had come and the joy that had come over Agrippa at his words, suspected that some new report had arrived, and asked them about the matter at hand. At first they turned the question aside, but when he pressed, Agrippa disclosed it — he was by now a friend — hiding nothing. The centurion, since the news brought good to Agrippa, shared in his pleasure at it, and set out a dinner for him.
While they were feasting and the drinking was going on, someone came in saying that Tiberius was alive and would return to the city within a few days. The centurion, terribly alarmed at this report, since he had done things that carried a death penalty — dining in comfort and joy with a prisoner over a report of the emperor's death — thrust Agrippa off his couch and said, "Do you suppose you can hide from me that you have deceived me with a false report of the emperor's death, at the cost of your own head, when this comes to light?" So saying, he ordered Agrippa bound — having earlier released him — and set a stricter guard over him than before. That night Agrippa remained in such distress.
The next day, however, the report grew stronger throughout the city, confirming Tiberius's death, and people now dared openly to speak of it freely, and some even offered sacrifices. Letters also arrived from Gaius — one to the senate, announcing Tiberius's death and his own succession to the rule, the other to Piso, the prefect of the city, saying the same, and ordering that Agrippa be moved out of the camp to the house where he had lived before he was bound.
From then on he conducted his affairs there with confidence; there was still guard and watch kept over him, but with relief now as to his manner of living. When Gaius arrived at Rome bringing Tiberius's body, he gave it a costly funeral according to ancestral custom, and that same day Agrippa —
Antonia was eager to free him but was blocked — not out of any hatred for the prisoner, but from concern for Gaius's dignity: it would look bad if a man Tiberius himself had imprisoned were released the moment word of his death arrived, as though out of sheer pleasure at the news. Still, not many days passed before Gaius sent for Agrippa, brought him into the palace, had him shaved and dressed in fresh clothes, and then set a diadem on his head, making him king over the tetrarchy of Philip and granting him the tetrarchy of Lysanias besides, and exchanging his iron chain for a gold one of equal weight. He also sent Marullus out as commander of cavalry over Judea.
In the second year of Gaius Caesar's reign, Agrippa asked leave to sail out, settle his kingdom in order, and then return once he had arranged everything else as it should be. The emperor granted it, and Agrippa arrived beyond anyone's hope, appearing to all as a king, and displaying to onlookers, who could reckon his former poverty against his present prosperity, how great a power fortune holds over men. Some counted him blessed for a fate that had not betrayed his hopes; others could not believe what had happened. But Herodias, Agrippa's sister, who lived with Herod — the tetrarch of Galilee and Perea — took his elevation as an injury, seeing her own husband raised to so much lesser a rank than a man who, forced to flee because he could not pay his debts, had now come home with such standing and such wealth.
So it galled her, and she bore it bitterly whenever she saw him going about among the crowds with the royal insignia now customary to him; she could not bear to hide her jealousy and misery, but goaded her husband, urging him to sail to Rome and press for equal honors — for life itself, she said, was unbearable to her if Agrippa, son of an Aristobulus condemned to death by his own father, and once reduced to such helpless poverty that his daily needs were barely met, and who had fled his creditors by sea, should now come home a king, while Herod himself, son of a king, and with his kinship to the throne calling him to claim the same, should sit content to live out his days as a private citizen.
"Even if before now, Herod, it never troubled you to hold a lesser rank than the father you were born to, seek now at least the honor that belongs to your family, and do not consent to being outdone by a man who has courted your wealth in place of honor. Do not let his poverty be shown to have made better use of our prosperity than we have, and do not think it beneath your shame to rank second to men who until yesterday and the day before lived only by our charity. Let us go to Rome, and let us spare neither effort nor expense of money and gold, since keeping watch over it serves no better purpose than being spent to secure a kingdom."
For a time he resisted, content with quiet and suspicious of the crowds of Rome, and tried to talk her out of it; but the more she saw him drawing back, the more fiercely she pressed him, insisting he do everything possible for the kingship, and in the end she did not relent until she had won him over, against his will, to share her purpose — since there was no other way to escape her decree on the matter. So, outfitting himself as lavishly as he could and sparing nothing, he set sail for Rome, taking Herodias with him. When Agrippa learned of their intent and their preparations, he too made ready, and once he heard they had put to sea, he sent his own freedman Fortunatus to Rome as well, carrying gifts to the emperor and letters against Herod, and also briefed to inform Gaius, when the moment was right, of what was needed.
Fortunatus, once he had put to sea, and having favorable sailing, so outstripped Herod's party that Fortunatus reached Gaius first, while Herod's ship was only then coming into harbor and delivering its letters. Both parties in the end put in at Dicaearchia and found Gaius at Baiae — itself a small town of Campania about five stadia from Dicaearchia, where there are royal residences built with great luxury, each emperor having vied to outdo his predecessors, and where the place provides hot baths, springing naturally from the earth, good both for the healing of those who use them and otherwise beneficial to a relaxed regimen.
Gaius, as he greeted Herod — for Herod was the first he met with — was at the same time going over Agrippa's letters, composed as an accusation against Herod. He charged him with having conspired with Sejanus against Tiberius's rule, and now with Artabanus the Parthian against the rule of Gaius, and as proof of this claim he cited the store of weapons kept in Herod's armories, sufficient to equip seventy thousand men. Gaius was shaken by these charges and asked Herod whether the report about the weapons was true. Herod, having no other answer to give — for the truth spoke against him — admitted that the weapons existed. Gaius, taking this as confirmation of the accusations of revolt, stripped him of his tetrarchy and added it to Agrippa's kingdom, and likewise gave Agrippa his money, while punishing Herod himself with permanent exile, appointing Lugdunum, a city of Gaul, as his place of residence.
When Gaius learned that Herodias was Agrippa's sister, he offered to let her keep whatever money was her own, and, thinking she should not share her husband's misfortune, told her that her brother would be her shelter. But she said, "You speak, Emperor, with the generosity and the dignity that befit you, but what stands in the way of my accepting the favor of your gift is my devotion to the man I married. Having shared his prosperity, it would not be right for me to abandon him now that fortune has turned against him." Angered at her nobility of spirit, Gaius banished her along with Herod, and gave her property to Agrippa. So it was that God punished Herodias for her jealousy of her brother, and Herod for having listened to a woman's foolish talk.
For his first year, and the one following, Gaius conducted affairs with great magnanimity, presenting himself with moderation, and won great goodwill both among the Romans themselves and among their subjects. But as time went on he abandoned human ways of thinking, and, carried away by the greatness of his power, began to deify himself and to conduct all his affairs to the dishonor of the divine.
When strife broke out in Alexandria between the Jews living there and the Greeks, three envoys were chosen from each faction and came before Gaius. One of the Alexandrian envoys was Apion, who heaped much abuse on the Jews, among other things charging that they neglected the honors due Caesar: for while everyone else subject to Roman rule had set up altars and temples to Gaius and received him in every other way as they did the gods, the Jews alone thought it disgraceful to honor him with statues or to swear by his name. After Apion had said much that was harsh, by which he hoped — and reasonably so — to inflame Gaius against them, Philo, the leader of the Jewish delegation, a man distinguished in every respect, brother of Alexander the alabarch and no stranger to philosophy, was prepared to answer the charges in their defense. But Gaius cut him off, ordering him out of the way, and it was plain he was furiously angry and meant to do them some harm.
Philo left, thoroughly humiliated, and said to the Jews around him that they should take courage, since Gaius was raging against them only in word, but in deed was already setting God in array against himself. Gaius, deeply offended at being alone slighted by the Jews, sent Petronius as governor of Syria in Vitellius's place, ordering him to march into Judea with a strong force, and, if the people received the statue willingly, to set it up in the temple of God, but if they resisted, to subdue them by war and do it regardless. Petronius, taking over Syria, hurried to carry out the emperor's instructions, gathering as large an allied force as he could and bringing two legions of the Roman army to Ptolemais, where he arrived intending to winter there before renewing operations toward spring, and he wrote to Gaius about what he had learned. Gaius commended his zeal and urged him not to relent, but to make war forcefully on any who refused compliance.
Many tens of thousands of Jews came to Petronius at Ptolemais, begging him not to force them into lawlessness and transgression of their ancestral law. "But if you are absolutely determined to bring the statue and set it up, deal with us first, and only then carry out your orders — for we cannot bear to live and see done to us things forbidden by the dignity of our lawgiver and of our ancestors, who by their virtue established these prohibitions." Petronius, angered, said: "If I were acting on my own authority as emperor and had conceived this plan myself, your argument against me would be just. But as it is, Caesar has given the order, and I am utterly bound to carry out what he has already decreed, since disobeying it would bring a far worse penalty on me."
"Since you feel this way, Petronius," the Jews replied, "and would not disregard Gaius's letters, neither would we transgress the decree of our law's God — persuaded by virtue and by the labors of our ancestors, we have remained faithful to it until now, nor would we dare fall so low as to break, for fear of death, whatever he has decreed that we should not do that would bring us any good. We will endure whatever fortune brings in defense of our ancestral customs, knowing that even in the danger we choose to face there remains hope of survival, because God will stand with us to His own honor as we accept these terrors, and because fortune, favoring both sides equally, may attend our affairs as well — whereas obeying you would bring us much reproach for cowardice, as men who pretend to break the law only for that reason, and at the same time bring down much anger of God, who would prove a better judge over you than Gaius."
Petronius, seeing from these words how unyielding their resolve was, and that he could not carry out the dedication of the statue for Gaius without a fight, and that there would be great bloodshed, took his friends and the retinue that attended him and hurried to Tiberias, wanting to learn firsthand how matters stood among the Jews. The Jews, reckoning the danger of war with Rome great, but judging far greater the danger of transgressing their law, again came out in many tens of thousands to meet Petronius when he arrived at Tiberias, and pleaded with him not to force them into such straits nor defile the city by setting up the statue. "Will you then make war on Caesar," Petronius said, "without reckoning either his strength or your own weakness?" "We will not make war at all," they replied, "but we will die first rather than transgress our laws." And falling on their faces and baring their throats, they declared themselves ready to be killed.
This went on for forty days, and in the meantime they gave no thought to farming, even though it was the season for sowing; such was their resolve, and such their desire and readiness to die rather than see the statue set up. While matters stood thus, Aristobulus, brother of King Agrippa, and Helcias the Great, and the other leading men of that household, together with the foremost citizens, went in to Petronius and urged him, since he saw the people's determination, not to provoke them further to desperation, but instead to write to Gaius describing the intransigence of the people over accepting the statue, and how they had abandoned farming and taken their stand against it — not because they wished to fight, since they knew they could not, but because they were glad to die rather than transgress their laws — so that the land would go unsown, and banditry would arise from the people's inability to pay their taxes. Perhaps Gaius, once softened, would think of nothing cruel and would not resolve on the nation's destruction; but if he persisted in his original intent to make war, then Petronius himself could take up the matter at that point. With these arguments Aristobulus and his companions pleaded with Petronius.
Petronius, moved on the one hand by the persistent urgency of Aristobulus's party, who pressed their plea for so great a cause and used every device in their entreaties, and on the other by his own observation of the Jews' unyielding conviction, and thinking it a terrible thing to bring death upon so many tens of thousands of people for the sake of Gaius's madness, and to live out the rest of his own life burdened by a guilty conscience for having brought about the killing of men on account of their reverence toward God, judged it far better to write to Gaius of their intransigence, angering him though it would, than to have acted rashly on his instructions in dispatching them at once — for perhaps he might yet persuade him; but if Gaius persisted in his original madness, then Petronius would take up the war against them; and if, in the event, some part of his anger should turn instead against himself, he judged it well, for men who lay claim to virtue, to die on behalf of so great a multitude of people. So he judged the petitioners' argument persuasive.
He summoned the Jews to Tiberias — and they came, many tens of thousands of them — and, standing before them, declared that the present expedition was not undertaken by his own judgment but by the emperor's command, and that Caesar's anger allowed no delay, but was brought at once against any business in which men showed the boldness to disobey; and that it would be fitting for a man who had attained such honor to do nothing contrary to Caesar's authorization. "Yet I do not think it right," he said, "that my own safety and honor should not be spent on behalf of your preservation, when so many of you are at stake, in service of the virtue of the law, which you regard as ancestral and worth fighting for, and of the majesty and power of God over all things, whose temple I would not dare allow to fall victim to the outrage of ruling power. I am sending word to Gaius, laying out your views, and in some measure pleading your case as well, that what you have proposed may, against expectation, prevail with him."
May God act with us — for his power over Caesar's decisions is stronger than any human contrivance or authority — securing for you the preservation of your ancestral customs and for Caesar himself the avoidance of any error in the honors he is accustomed to receive, brought on by human designs contrary to his own judgment. But if Gaius, embittered, turns the full weight of his anger against me, I will endure every danger and every hardship that falls upon my body and fortune, rather than watch so great a multitude of you perish while engaged in such honorable pursuits. Go, then, each to his own work, and labor the land. I myself will send word to Rome, and through my own efforts and those of my friends I will not cease to act on your behalf.
With these words he dismissed the assembly of the Jews, and urged the officials to see to the farming and to encourage the people with good hopes. He himself worked to keep the crowd cheerful. But God now displayed to Petronius openly his own presence and his care for the whole matter: for scarcely had Petronius finished the speech he had given to the Jews when at once, beyond all expectation, a great rain fell upon the people — this though that very day had dawned clear, with nothing in the sky foretelling rain, and the whole year had been gripped by a great drought, so that people had given up hope of any rain from above even when they saw a cloud in the sky. So it was that when so much rain arrived then, contrary to custom and contrary to what anyone else expected, the Jews came to hope that Petronius would fail in nothing he asked on their behalf, and Petronius himself was struck with still greater awe, seeing clearly that the God of the Jews was watching over them and had shown so plain a sign of his presence that not even those set on the opposite course could find any strength left for argument.
And when he wrote to Gaius, along with everything else, all that he wrote was persuasive, urging in every way that he not drive so many tens of thousands of people to desperation — for if he killed them, he would not gain their land without a war fought over their ancestral religion, and he would lose the revenue that came from them, and would burden the age to come with the monument of a curse. And besides, he declared that the divine power set over them showed itself unmixed and left no doubt as to the strength it could display. Such was Petronius's situation.
King Agrippa, meanwhile, who happened to be residing at Rome, was advancing further and further in Gaius's friendship. Once, when he gave a banquet for him and took care to outdo everyone else, both in the expense laid out for the dinner and in the preparation of everything that could give pleasure, he did it so thoroughly that not only could none of the rest believe it possible to equal him, but Gaius himself could not believe anyone would even wish to try to equal it, let alone surpass it — so far did the man exceed everyone in his preparations and in providing everything, sparing no thought even beyond what Caesar himself might have provided. Gaius, astonished at his intention and his magnificence, feeling compelled, out of regard for him, to make use of his wealth beyond what his own resources allowed, and wishing to imitate Agrippa's lavish generosity for his own pleasure,
being relaxed by wine and turned in mind toward greater cheerfulness, said at the banquet, urging him to drink: "Agrippa, even before now I was well aware of the honor you showed me and the great goodwill you displayed, even at the risk you ran under Tiberius on my account, and you fall short in nothing, but use a devotion toward me beyond your means. For this reason — for it would be shameful for me to be outdone by your zeal — I wish to make up what I have so far left undone. For all that I have granted you as gifts so far amounts to little. Whatever might add weight to your prosperity shall be provided you, with all my eagerness and power." He said this expecting that Agrippa would ask for a large tract of land yielding revenue, or perhaps the revenues of certain cities.
But Agrippa, though he had prepared in advance everything he meant to ask for, did not reveal his intention, but answered Gaius sharply on the spot: neither before, he said, watching for gain from him, had he courted his favor against Tiberius's wishes, nor now would he act, for the sake of gains pleasing to Gaius, as though seeking some private benefit. What had already been given him was great, and beyond what a man who used his hopes so boldly could expect — for even if it fell short of Gaius's own greatness, it exceeded the intention and worth of himself, the one who had received it. Gaius, astonished at his virtue, pressed him all the more to say what gift he would accept from him. Agrippa replied: "Since, my lord, you declare by your own eagerness that I am worthy of gifts, I will ask for nothing that leads to wealth, since I am already conspicuously provided for by what you have already given me. But whatever might bring you a reputation for piety, and call the divine to your aid in whatever you might wish, and bring me honor among those who hear of it, in the knowledge that I have never lacked anything I sought at your hands — I ask you this: give up your intention of ordering Petronius to set up the dedication of the statue in the temple of the Jews."
Though Agrippa judged this request a dangerous one — for if Gaius decided it was not persuasive, it would bring on nothing less than death — still, because he thought the stakes so great, he considered it worth the throw of the dice. But Gaius, both because he was bound by his devotion to Agrippa and because he thought it unseemly to be shown false before so many witnesses regarding what he had so eagerly pressed Agrippa to ask for, quickly regretted his promise, yet also, marveling at Agrippa's virtue, and thinking he could enlarge his own power in a short time either by revenue in money or by other means, while caring for the public's peace of mind by upholding the laws and the divine — he yielded, and wrote to Petronius,
praising him both for the gathering of the army and for having written to him about it. "Now, then," he wrote, "if you have already set up the statue, let it stand; but if you have not yet made the dedication, trouble yourself no further, but disband the army and go yourself to the tasks I first sent you to do. For I no longer need the setting up of the statue, since I am granting this favor to Agrippa, a man I honor more than to refuse him and what he asks of me."
So Gaius wrote this to Petronius before he received word — for he had supposed, from the gathering, that the Jews were hastening toward revolt, since their intention seemed to signal nothing else than open war against the Romans. Deeply angered, as though at men who had dared to test his rule, a man who fell short of shame yet also fell short of the best, and who, whenever he judged it right to give way to anger against anyone, pursued it more urgently than anyone else, adding no discipline to it whatever, but making pleasure the standard of his judgment of what was good, he wrote to Petronius: "Since you have valued more highly the gifts the Jews gave you than my commands, carrying out everything for their pleasure
rather than mine, and have been swept up into transgressing my orders, I command you to become your own judge and to determine for yourself what you must do, once you have incurred my anger — since you shall be made an example to all now living and to as many as shall come after, that they must never dare to nullify the commands of their emperor." This was the letter he wrote to Petronius. But Petronius did not receive it while Gaius still lived, for the voyage of those carrying it was delayed so long that letters reached Petronius before it, informing him of Gaius's death.
God, it seems, was not going to forget the dangers Petronius had taken on himself for the sake of the Jews and for the honor due to God, but having disposed of Gaius in anger for what he had dared to attempt against his own worship, chose to pay off the debt and reward Petronius together — Rome and the whole empire rejoiced, and especially those of highest rank in the Senate, because Gaius had vented unrestrained anger against them. He died not long after writing the letter that condemned Petronius to death; the cause of his death and the manner of the plot against him I will relate as my account proceeds.
For Petronius, the letter announcing Gaius's death arrived first, and not long after came the one ordering him to take his own life. He rejoiced at the coincidence of the disaster that had overtaken Gaius, and marveled at God's providence, which without any delay, but at once, had rewarded him for the honor he had shown the temple and the help he had given toward the safety of the Jews. And so Petronius, though he had not expected it, easily escaped the danger of death.
A terrible disaster also befell the Jews living in Mesopotamia, and especially those settled in Babylonia — a slaughter of them, great and unequaled by any recorded before. Concerning this I will now give a full and accurate account, along with the causes from which their suffering arose.
Neerda is a city of Babylonia, populous and possessed of good and extensive territory, and, along with other advantages, full of people. It is also not easily assailable by enemies, since the Euphrates encircles it entirely on its course, and it is further protected by fortified walls. There is also the city of Nisibis, situated on the same river's circuit,
from which the Jews, trusting in the natural strength of these places, used to deposit the half-shekel that custom required each of them to pay to God, and whatever other offerings they made, using these two cities as a kind of treasury. From there the funds were sent up to Jerusalem at the proper time, and many tens of thousands of people undertook the conveyance of the money, fearing the raids of the Parthians, since Babylonia was subject to them.
Now there were two men, Asinaeus and Anilaeus, natives of Neerda and brothers to one another. Being orphaned of their father, their mother set them to learn the weaver's trade, since it was not considered unseemly among the local people for men to work at weaving wool. The man in charge of the workshop, in which they had indeed learned their craft, once accused them of coming late and punished them with blows.
They, however, judged the punishment an outrage, and taking down whatever weapons were kept in the house, went off to a certain place called the Break of the Rivers, a place suited by nature to provide good pasture and fodder for those who might store it up for winter. There the most destitute of the young men gathered to them, and arming these men, the brothers became their commanders and were not prevented from becoming leaders in wrongdoing.
Advancing to a position beyond assault and building a stronghold, they sent to those who pastured flocks nearby, ordering them to pay a tribute of livestock sufficient to support them, offering in return friendship to those who complied and protection against enemies from any other quarter, but threatening the slaughter of their flocks to those who refused. The herdsmen, having no other choice, obeyed and sent as many sheep as were demanded,
so that a greater force gathered around the brothers, and they had full power to do whatever they decided, driving on quickly to work mischief. Everyone they encountered began to court their favor, and they became feared even by those who might try to oppose them, so that talk of them was already advancing even as far as the king of the Parthians. The satrap of Babylonia, learning of this and wishing to check them while they were still growing before some greater evil should arise from them,
gathered as large an army as he could of both Parthians and Babylonians and marched against them, wishing to strike first and destroy them before his preparations against them could be reported. He encamped around the marsh and kept quiet, and on the following day — it was the Sabbath, a day of rest from all labor for the Jews — supposing that the enemy would not dare resist him, but that he would take them bound without a fight, he advanced little by little, wanting to make his assault sudden.
Asinaeus happened to be sitting with his companions, their weapons lying beside them, when he said: "Men, a neighing of horses has reached me — not of grazing horses, but such as would come from horses with men mounted on them, since I also perceive a certain drawing back of bridles. I fear the enemy may have surrounded us without our knowing it.
Let someone go ahead as a scout to bring us a clear report of what is happening. May what I have said prove false." So he spoke, and some went off to reconnoiter what was happening, and returned as quickly as possible, reporting that he had not been a false and clear judge of what the enemy was doing, nor would the enemy allow them to commit outrage any longer — "we have been surrounded by a trick, no different from cattle: such a multitude of cavalry is bearing down on us while we lie helpless, our hands idle, because we are restrained by the command of our ancestral law to rest." But Asinaeus was not, after all, going to let the scout's opinion decide what should be done; rather, judging it more lawful, if he must incur punishment for transgressing in the necessity into which he had fallen, to receive it for having shown courage than to end helplessly and give the enemy cause for rejoicing, he himself took up his weapons and instilled courage in his companions to match his own.
They went to meet the enemy, and killing many of them — because their enemies, full of contempt, advanced as though toward an easy victory — put the rest to flight. When word of the battle reached the king of the Parthians, he was astonished at the daring of the brothers
and desired to meet them face to face and in conversation, and sent the most trusted of his bodyguards to say that King Artabanus, though wronged by their attack upon his rule, valued his own anger at them less than their courage, and had sent him to give them his right hand and his pledge, granting them safe and unmolested passage, wishing them to come to him in friendship, without deceit or trickery, and promising to give them gifts and honor which, added to the standing they now had, would in time benefit them through his own power. Asinaeus himself declined to make the journey there, but sent his brother Anilaeus with such gifts as could be gathered. Anilaeus went, and gained an audience with the king. And Artabanus...
When Artabanus saw Anilaeus arriving alone, he asked the reason why Asinaeus had also been delayed. On learning that fear had kept him waiting in the marsh, the king swore by his ancestral gods that he would do no harm to men who had come to him trusting his word, and he gave his right hand on it—among all the barbarians of that region the greatest pledge there is, one that gives those who deal with a man confidence to approach him.
No one would ever lie once his right hand had been given in this way, nor would anyone hesitate to trust it, when such a guarantee of safety is offered even by men who are under suspicion of meaning harm. Having done this, Artabanus sent Anilaeus off to persuade his brother to come back, and the king did this because he wanted to use the courage of the Jewish brothers as a check on the satrapies that were in revolt, intending to march against them himself once he judged the moment right. He was afraid that if he became tied down in a war there to subdue the rebels, Asinaeus and his men would grow to great strength in Babylonia and either combine forces against him when he was weakest to resist, or, failing in that, would not fall short of doing him serious harm in some other way. With this in mind he sent Anilaeus off,
and Anilaeus succeeded in persuading his brother, laying before him the king's goodwill and the oath that had been sworn, so that the two of them hastened to Artabanus. The king received them with pleasure when they arrived, and admired Asinaeus's boldness in action, seeing that he was altogether short in stature and gave those meeting him for the first time, at first sight, every occasion to despise him, judging him by nothing remarkable to look at. The king remarked to his friends that in this comparison the man's spirit clearly outweighed his body, and over wine he pointed Asinaeus out to Abdagases, his camp commander, telling him the man's name and the full extent of the courage he showed in war. When Abdagases urged that he be allowed to kill him and collect a reward for the wrongs he had done to the Parthian kingdom,
the king said, "I could not grant leave against a man who trusted me enough to come, who moreover sent his right hand and took pains to win my confidence by oaths sworn on the gods. If you are in truth a good man in war, without asking me to break my oath, avenge the Parthian kingdom's outraged honor yourself: attack him as he withdraws and overpower him by your own strength, without my knowledge." At dawn he summoned Asinaeus and said, "Young man, it is time for you to go to your own affairs, so that you do not provoke the anger of more of the generals here to attempt your murder without my consent. I entrust to you as a deposit the land of Babylonia, that it remain free of plunder and untouched by harm through your care.
It is fitting that I find you honorable in return, since I have offered you my trust without reservation, not over trifles but over matters bound up with your safety." Having said this and given gifts, he then sent Asinaeus off. On reaching his own territory Asinaeus built forts and strengthened whatever defenses he had made before; in a short time he had become great, unlike anyone before him who had laid hold of such power from so bold a beginning, and the Parthian generals sent down to that region courted his favor, since the honor coming to them from the Babylonians seemed slight compared with the standing he had won for himself. He was held in dignity and power, and all affairs in Mesopotamia now turned on him; their prosperity advanced for fifteen years.
But while their fortunes were at their height, the beginning of misfortunes overtook them, from the following cause. Since they turned the very courage by which they had risen to such power into outrage, falling, through desire and pleasure, into transgression of their ancestral ways, one of them—a Parthian general arrived in charge of that district—brought with him a wife who, besides everything else, surpassed all women in the praise she received, and who gained an even greater hold on him through admiration of her beauty. Anilaeus, the brother of Asinaeus, having learned of her beauty either by report or by having seen her himself, became her lover and her husband's enemy—partly because he had no other hope of gaining access to the woman except by taking control over her as one acquired for himself, and partly because he judged his desire too strong to argue against.
So the man became marked out as an enemy on her account, and was killed; a skirmish was brought on, he fell slain, and once she was taken captive she was married to her lover. Yet the woman did not come into the household of Anilaeus and Asinaeus without great misfortunes attending, and for this reason: when, after her husband's death, she was led off as a captive, she brought with her the images of the gods that had belonged to both her husband and herself—since it is the custom among all the people of that region to keep such objects of worship in the house and to carry them along when going abroad. In observing this she kept up, along with everything else, the ancestral custom concerning them, and at first practiced her worship secretly; but once she had been made a wife, she went on serving them in the manner and with the rites she had been accustomed to under her former husband.
The most honored of their companions at first said nothing at all, since he had married a foreign woman who did not follow the Hebrew practices, or anything suited to their own laws, and who was violating the strictness of the sacrifices and worship they were used to; but they thought they should watch, lest by yielding too much to bodily pleasure he destroy the foundation of his good standing and the power that had, until now, come to him from God. When they made no headway, but he even killed the most honored of them because he had spoken with too much frankness, that man, as he watched, called down a curse—in the name of the laws' goodwill and in vengeance for his own killing—that Anilaeus and Asinaeus and all their companions alike meet an end brought on by enemies:
on the one hand as leaders who had become lawbreakers, on the other because they did not come to his aid when he suffered such things for upholding the laws. The rest were troubled but bore with it, remembering that it was for no other reason than the brothers' strength that they had joined their fortunes to theirs. But when they also heard of the worship being paid to the gods honored among the Parthians, they no longer considered Anilaeus's outrage against the laws tolerable, and going to Asinaeus, now more of them cried out against Anilaeus, saying it would be well, if he had not seen before where his own advantage lay, at least now to take notice of what had happened, before the wrongdoing brought ruin on him and on everyone else besides—saying that the woman's marriage had not been made according to their laws or customs,
and that the worship she practiced was carried on to the dishonor of the God they revered. Asinaeus himself knew that his brother's wrongdoing was and would be the cause of great evils, yet he did not restrain him, being overcome by affection for his kinsman and granting him pardon on the ground that he was overcome by a desire stronger than himself. But when more and more men kept gathering to protest, and the outcry grew louder, at that point he spoke to Anilaeus about it, rebuking him for what had already happened and ordering him to put a stop to it going forward by sending the woman away to her own kin. Nothing came of these words. The woman, meanwhile, aware of the disturbance holding the people because of her, and fearing for Anilaeus, lest something happen to him out of his passion for her,
gave Asinaeus poison in his food and did away with the man, now free of anyone to judge what would be done concerning her, since she had become the beloved of Anilaeus. Anilaeus, now sole commander, led out an army against the villages of Mithridates, a leading man in Parthia and husband of King Artabanus's daughter, and carried them off as plunder, seizing much money and many slaves, many flocks, and much else of the kind that helps toward the increase of prosperity for those who hold it. Mithridates, who happened to be in the region, on hearing of the sacking of the villages took it hard, since Anilaeus had begun the wrong unprovoked and had shown contempt even for his rank; he gathered as many horsemen as he could, along with most of the men of military age he had at hand,
and set out to engage Anilaeus's forces, and having taken up quarters in a village of his own he rested there, intending to give battle the next day, since that day was the Sabbath, which the Jews spend in rest. Anilaeus, learning this from a Syrian, a foreigner from another village, who reported everything accurately, including the very place where Mithridates was going to dine, had supper at the usual hour and then rode through the night, wanting to fall upon the Parthians while they were unaware of what was afoot. Falling on them around the fourth watch, he killed those still asleep and put the rest to flight, and took Mithridates himself alive, carrying him off mounted naked on a donkey—the greatest disgrace known among the Parthians. Having brought him down to the woods under this humiliation,
and though his friends urged him to kill Mithridates, he argued them out of it, himself pressing hard the opposite course: that it was not right to kill a man of the very first rank among the Parthians, held in even greater honor through his marriage tie to the king. What had been done so far, he said, could still be tolerated; even though Mithridates had been outrageously humiliated, still, being benefited with the safety of his life, he would remember gratitude toward those who had granted him such things—whereas if he suffered anything fatal, the king would not sit still without making a great slaughter of the Jews in Babylon, whom it would be well to spare, both for the sake of kinship and because, should any mishap befall them, there would be no fallback for the brothers, given how much they relied on that community's strength at its full numbers. Having reasoned this out and put it before the assembled men, he carried the point, and Mithridates was released.
When he came home, his wife reproached him, saying that if he were the king's son-in-law he ought to look out for himself, and, avenging this insult, see to it that those who had outraged him were themselves punished—rather than settling for his life after being taken captive by Jewish men. "Now go and recover your honor," she said, "or I swear by the royal gods that I will indeed break off my marriage-partnership with you." He, unable to bear the daily sting of her reproaches, and also afraid of his wife's high spirit—that she might in fact break off the marriage—unwillingly and against his own wishes nonetheless gathered as large an army as he could and marched out, thinking his own survival unbearable too, if, being a Parthian, he were pushed aside by a Jew fighting against him. When Anilaeus
learned that Mithridates was advancing with a large force, he judged it dishonorable to stay in the marshes rather than go out to meet the enemy first, and hoping to repeat his earlier good fortune, and that courage attends those who dare and are used to being bold, he led out his forces. Many had joined his own army besides, eager to turn to plundering others' property and to overawe the enemy by sheer numbers at the sight of them. When they had advanced ninety stadia, through waterless country, and it was now midday, thirst overcame them badly on top of everything else, and Mithridates appeared and fell upon them while they were worn out by lack of water and, because of it and the heat, unable to carry their weapons. So Anilaeus's men were routed, since they met fresh troops while already exhausted,
and there was great slaughter—many tens of thousands of men fell. Anilaeus, with whatever forces held together around him, withdrew in flight to the woods, having given Mithridates great joy in his victory over them. To Anilaeus there now flocked a helpless crowd of wicked men, seeking their safety for the moment through the ease his company offered, so that the numbers coming to him matched the numbers of those who had been lost—though they were nothing like the fallen in experience for want of training. Even so, he descended upon the villages of the Babylonians, and all of that region was thrown into upheaval by Anilaeus's violence. The Babylonians and those engaged in the war sent to Neerda, to the Jews there, demanding Anilaeus be handed over, and when they refused
this demand—being in fact unable to hand him over even had they wished—they proposed peace instead; the Babylonians said that they too wanted terms of peace, and sent men along with the Babylonians to negotiate with Anilaeus. But the Babylonians, once they had gained knowledge of the ground through a reconnaissance and learned the place where Anilaeus was encamped, fell upon it secretly by night while the men were drunk and lying overcome by sleep, and killed without mercy everyone they caught there, Anilaeus himself included. The Babylonians, once rid of Anilaeus's oppressive rule—for it had served as a check on them only through their hatred of the Jews, since the two peoples had always for the most part been at odds because their laws opposed one another, and whichever side found itself with the advantage was the first to move against the other—now that Anilaeus's men had perished, turned on the Jews.
The Jews, finding the outrage from the Babylonians hard to bear, and being able neither to stand against them in battle nor to think it tolerable to go on living alongside them, went off to Seleucia, the most notable city of that region, founded by Seleucus Nicator. Many Macedonians live there, and even more Greeks, and there is no small number of Syrians as well among its citizens. To this city the Jews fled, and for five years they suffered no harm; but in the sixth year after their first calamity in Babylon, followed now by these fresh troubles and their flight to Seleucia on account of them, a still greater disaster awaited them, whose cause I will now relate. Among the Greeks of Seleucia, life with the Syrians was for the most part one of factional strife and discord, and the Greeks held the upper hand.
At that time, once the Jews had come to live among them, the two other groups fell into strife, and the Syrians proved the stronger, because the Jews had sided with them, being men fond of danger and eager for war. The Greeks, hard pressed by the faction fighting and seeing one avenue open to them for recovering their former standing, if they could manage to stop the two sides from speaking with one voice,
each of them approached the Syrians who had been friendly with them before, promising peace and friendship. The Syrians gladly accepted. Proposals passed between the two sides, and since the leading men on each side pressed for reconciliation, an agreement was reached very quickly. Having come to this accord, each side thought it right to offer the other, as a great proof of goodwill, their shared hostility toward the Jews.
Falling upon the Jews without warning, they killed more than fifty thousand men. All of them perished except for those who, through the pity of friends or neighbors, were allowed to escape. These found refuge in Ctesiphon, a Greek city lying near Seleucia, where the king winters every year and where most of his baggage is kept in storage. But it was senseless of them to have settled there, given their regard for the kingdom of the Seleucids, who had brought this disaster about.
The whole Jewish nation in that region now feared both the Babylonians and the people of Seleucia, since all the Syrians who lived as citizens in those places agreed with the people of Seleucia about making war on the Jews. So they gathered in great numbers at Nehardea and Nisibis, relying on the strength of those cities for their safety, and besides, the entire population there consisted of men fit for war. Such, then, was the state of affairs among the Jews settled in Babylonia.

======== Antiquities — Book 19 ========

How Gaius Caesar, plotted against by Cassius Chaerea, was killed, and how his uncle Claudius, compelled by the soldiers, took over the government. The conflict between the senate and people on one side and Claudius with the troops that supported him on the other. The embassy of King Agrippa to the senate, and how the soldiers, coming to terms with the senate, went over to Claudius and made him master of affairs, while the senate, left isolated, appealed to Claudius to be reconciled with it. How Claudius Caesar restored to Agrippa the whole of his ancestral kingdom and added to it the tetrarchy of Lysanias. The edicts of Claudius Caesar at Alexandria on behalf of the Jews there, and throughout his empire. The departure of King Agrippa by sea for Judea. The letter of Publius Petronius, governor of Syria, to the people of Dora on behalf of the Jews. How King Agrippa, while building the walls of Jerusalem at great expense, died before the work was finished and left it incomplete. Everything he did in the three years up to his death, and the manner in which he ended his life. This book covers a period of three years and six months.
Gaius did not confine the madness of his arrogance to the Jews of Jerusalem and those who lived nearby; he sent it out over every land and sea subject to Rome, and filled the whole of it with countless evils such as had never before been recorded. Rome felt the horror of what was happening more than anywhere else, since he held her in no greater honor than any other city, but plundered and despoiled everyone, above all the senate and those of its members distinguished by noble birth and the fame of their ancestors. Countless outrages were likewise found against the men called knights, who by rank and the power of their wealth were equal to senators, since it was from their number that men were called up into the senate; these men were stripped of honor and driven into exile, killed and robbed of their property, since for the most part the killings were carried out for the sake of seizing their wealth.
He proclaimed himself a god and no longer thought it fitting that the honors his subjects paid him should be merely human. Going to the temple of Zeus which they call the Capitol, the most honored of their temples, he dared to call Zeus his brother, and everything else he did fell no short of madness. Once, going from the city of Dicaearchia in Campania to Misenum, another town on the coast, and thinking it beneath him to cross by trireme, and holding besides that, since he was master of the sea, he was entitled to demand of it whatever could be demanded of the land, he bridged the sea for thirty stadia from headland to headland, enclosed the bay within it, and drove his chariot the whole length of the bridge — since it was fitting, being a god, that his travels take such a form.
He left no temple of the Greeks unplundered, ordering that everything of value in them — paintings, carvings, and all the remaining furnishings of statues and dedications — be brought to him; for it was not right, he said, that beautiful things should lie anywhere but in the most beautiful place, and that place, he held, was the city of Rome. With what was brought from there he adorned his house, his gardens, and all his residences throughout Italy. He even dared to order that the Olympian Zeus, honored by the Greeks and so named, the work of Phidias the Athenian, be carried off to Rome. He did not, however, go through with it, since the engineers charged with moving the statue told Memmius Regulus, who had been assigned to the task, that the work would be destroyed if it were moved. It is said that for this reason, and also because portents too great to be readily believed occurred, Memmius put off the removal; and he wrote a letter to Gaius in justification for leaving the matter unattended to, and by this was saved from the danger it brought upon him, since Gaius happened to die first.
His madness reached such a pitch that, when a daughter was born to him, he carried her up to the Capitol and laid her on the knees of the statue, declaring that the child belonged jointly to himself and to Zeus, and appointing two fathers for her, leaving open which of the two was the greater. And people put up with him doing even this. He also undertook to allow slaves to bring accusations against their masters on whatever charges they pleased; for anything that might be said became terrible, since most such matters were settled by his favor and at his prompting — so much so that a slave named Polydeuces even dared to bring an accusation against Claudius on a capital charge involving his own former master, and Gaius consented to attend the hearing, in hopes of finding an occasion to have him put out of the way. He did not, however, succeed in this.
When he had filled with false accusations and evils the whole world he governed, and had raised the tyranny of slaves over their masters to a great height, plots against him were already forming on many sides — some out of anger, meaning to avenge what they had suffered, others thinking it best to deal with the man before great evils should befall them. Since, then, his death brought great benefit both to the laws that govern all men and to the general security, and since our own nation would very nearly have perished had his end not come swiftly, I wish to go through the whole account of him with care — all the more since it carries strong proof of God's power, and offers comfort to those who live in adversity, and a lesson in restraint to those who suppose good fortune eternal and are led by it, wrongly, into further evil when excellence has played no part in it.
Three separate paths, then, were being prepared toward his death, and over each of these good men held the lead. Aemilius Regulus, a man of Corduba in Spain by birth, was gathering some men, whether through others or through himself, being eager to bring Gaius down. A second group was being organized under the leadership of Cassius Chaerea, a tribune. And Annius Minucianus formed no small part of those preparing against the tyranny. Their reason for joining together in hatred of Gaius was, in Regulus's case, a temper angry at everything and given to hating whatever was done unjustly — for he had something spirited and free in his nature, which kept him from being able to conceal his plans; indeed he shared them with many, both friends and others whom he judged capable men of action. Minucianus was moved partly by vengeance for Lepidus, who had been his closest friend and whom Gaius had put to death along with a few other citizens, and partly by fear for himself, since Gaius's anger, once let loose against everyone alike toward death, might at any time fall upon him too — this drove him to the undertaking. Chaerea bore the shame of the taunts of cowardice that Gaius kept bringing against him, and besides this reckoned that to risk his life daily under the guise of friendship and service, waiting for Gaius's death, was not altogether a free man's part. The conspirators also reasoned that the question of acting in the matter had, in effect, already been put before everyone in common, since all alike saw the outrage and longed, at the height of its fury, to escape it by bringing Gaius down; for perhaps they would succeed, and if they succeeded, it would be a fine thing to have won such great goods by laboring for the safety of the city and the empire, even though the undertaking be approached at the risk of death. But above all it was Chaerea who pressed forward, out of desire for a greater name, and also because, thanks to his rank as tribune, he could approach Gaius without arousing suspicion, which would make killing him an easy matter for him.
At this time there were horse races. The Romans are passionately devoted to this spectacle; they come together eagerly at the racecourse, and gathered there in great numbers they ask the emperors for whatever they want, and the emperors, judging such requests impossible to refuse, are never ungracious in response. So on this occasion the crowd, pleading fervently, urged Gaius to reduce some of the taxes and lighten something of the burden of the tribute. He would not consent, and when they shouted all the louder, he sent men out in different directions with orders to seize those who were shouting and lead them off and put them to death without delay. He gave the order, and those charged with it carried it out, and a great many died on that account. The people saw it happening but bore it, falling silent, seeing with their own eyes that to beg for the sake of money, in such circumstances, led straight to their own deaths.
This drove Chaerea all the more to take up the plot and put an end to Gaius, who had grown savage against mankind. Often, even at banquets, he was on the point of making the attempt, but he held himself back on reflection, having already resolved beyond doubt to kill him, but watching for the right moment, so that he might use his hands not in vain but to bring about what had been planned. He had by now been serving as a soldier for a long time, without any pleasure in Gaius's conduct. When Gaius set him to collect the taxes and whatever other payments due to Caesar's treasury had fallen behind schedule — since the sum owed had doubled — he took his time over the collection, following his own manner rather than Gaius's instructions, out of a certain forbearance, taking pity on the hardships of those being taxed; and this provoked Gaius's anger, who accused him of softness for being slow in gathering the money for him. Indeed Gaius heaped other insults on him besides, and whenever the watchword of the day fell to him to receive, he would give him womanish names, full of shame at that — and he did this without being free of such things himself, for at certain rites of mysteries which he himself instituted, he would put on women's clothing, devise for himself the wearing of braided wigs, and other things meant to give his appearance a false semblance of femininity, and yet he dared to call upon Chaerea for the shame of such things.
Whenever Chaerea received the watchword, anger came over him, and still more whenever he had to hand it on, laughed at by those who received it, so that even his fellow tribunes made a joke of him; for whenever he was about to bring the watchword from Caesar himself, they would tell one of those accustomed to carry it in advance, turning it into a game. Because of this he grew bold enough to take certain men into his confidence, since it was not against a few that Gaius vented his anger. Among these was Pompedius, a man of senatorial rank who had passed through nearly all the offices, but also an Epicurean, and for that reason devoted to a quiet life. Timidius, being his enemy, denounced him for using improper abuse against Gaius, bringing forward as witness Quintilia, a woman of the stage, celebrated among many, including Pompedius, for the brilliance of her beauty. And since the woman — for the charge was false — thought it a terrible thing to give testimony that would bring about the death of her lover, Timidius demanded that she be put to torture; and Gaius, provoked, ordered Chaerea to torture Quintilia at once, without delay, using Chaerea for bloody business and whatever required torment, in the belief that, to escape the charge of softness, he would carry it out all the more cruelly. Quintilia, being led to the torture, trod on the foot of one of her fellow conspirators, signaling him to take courage and not fear on her account, for she would endure it with fortitude. Chaerea tortured her cruelly, unwillingly, but under the necessity laid on him, and since she gave way in nothing, he brought her before Gaius in a state that gave no pleasure to those who looked on. Gaius, moved by the sight of Quintilia, so terribly disfigured by her sufferings, dropped the charge against both her and Pompedius, and honored her besides with a gift of money as some comfort for the disfigurement she had suffered, which had ruined the loveliness that had made her sufferings unbearable to behold.
This deeply troubled Chaerea, that he should be the cause, for men who deserved comfort even from Gaius, of such evils as had befallen them at his own hands; and he said to Clemens and Papinius — of whom Clemens held command over the armies, and Papinius was himself also a tribune — "Clemens, it is not for want of trying that we fail to carry out everything the emperor demands of us; for of those who conspired against his rule we have, by our own diligence and toil, killed some and tortured others to such a degree that even he pitied them — and with what virtue, then, are we led out at the head of the troops?" When Clemens fell silent, showing by his look and his blush that he bore what was ordered with shame, but judging it unsafe to draw them by word into speaking against the emperor's madness, out of concern for his own security, Chaerea, now emboldened, spoke freely of the dangers, laying out to him the terrible state that gripped the city and the government, and saying that it was Gaius who, in name, bore the responsibility for such things, but that for those who tried to examine the truth of the matter, it was I, Clemens, and Papinius here, and before us, you — we who inflict these tortures on Romans and on all mankind, serving not at Gaius's command but by our own judgment, though it lies within our power to put a stop to a man who already treats citizens and subjects alike with such outrage; we have become bodyguards and executioners in place of soldiers, and we carry these weapons not for the freedom or the rule of the Romans, but for the preservation of the man who enslaves both their bodies and their spirits, defiling ourselves daily with the blood of slaughter and the torture of our own people — until at last someone will perform the same service against us, on Gaius's behalf. For he will not treat us kindly on this account; rather he will look on us with suspicion, all the more because so many who have already perished paid this same price; for Gaius's anger will never come to rest, since its end lies not in justice but in pleasure. We ourselves will become targets in our turn, when instead it is our duty to secure for everyone freedom from conspiracy and from tyranny, and to vote ourselves release from danger.
Clemens was plainly seen to approve of Chaerea's purpose, but he urged him to keep silent, lest the talk, spreading to too many and disclosing what it would be best to keep hidden, should get abroad before the deed could be carried out, and the plotters be punished once the plan became known; for the present, he said, they should leave everything to hope and to what time would bring, since some chance aid might yet come their way — for he himself, on account of his age, had been deprived of the daring for such things, but as for those under you,
"...Chaerea, though I might perhaps suggest a safer plan once everything has been arranged and said, how could anyone contrive a more honorable one?" With that, Clemens withdrew into himself, turning over in his mind both what he had heard and what he himself had said. Chaerea, however, in his eagerness hurried off to Cornelius Sabinus, a military tribune whom he knew besides to be a man of note, a lover of freedom, and for that very reason hostile to the present state of affairs. He wanted to move quickly on what had been resolved, judging it good to bring such a man into the undertaking, and fearing too that word of it might leak out through Clemens — all the more since he reckoned delay and missed opportunities as the mark of men who let time slip away.
Since everything about the plan was welcome to Sabinus as well — a man of no less resolve than Chaerea, but one who, for lack of anyone he could safely confide in, had until then kept his own intentions to himself in silence — once he had found a man who would not only keep secret what he learned but declare his own purpose openly, he was roused all the more, and needed no urging from Chaerea to delay any longer. The two of them then turned to Minucianus, a man bound to them by his own pursuit of virtue and by his kinship of great-spiritedness, and one whom Gaius had come to suspect after the death of Lepidus — for Minucianus and Lepidus had been very close friends — as well as by the fear of the dangers that hung over himself. For Gaius was a terror to every man in office, since no one could tell against whom, or against how many, his madness would next be unleashed; and these men had made plain to one another their distress at the state of affairs, disclosing to each other directly both their thoughts and their hatred of Gaius, casting off the fear of danger — all the more since, perceiving each other's hatred of him, they had for that very reason never ceased to feel goodwill toward one another. Once they had made their approaches, since they were already in the habit, whenever they met, of holding Minucianus in honor for the pre-eminence of his standing — for he was the noblest of the citizens and the most praised on every count — Chaerea was all the more eager, whenever the subject came near, to be the first, if ever he met Minucianus, to ask what watchword he had received that day; for throughout the city there was talk of the insult done to Chaerea through the watchwords assigned to him. Delighted at the remark, Minucianus, without any hesitation, answered him, trusting him with such conversation and speaking to him directly.
"And you," he said, "are giving me a watchword of freedom. Thank you for rousing me to a boldness greater than I am used to summoning in myself; I need no further words to give me courage, if indeed this is your judgment too — we have shared the same purpose even before we came together to speak of it. I wear a single sword at my side, but it would serve for both of us. So come, let us take hold of the deed. Be our leader; command me to go wherever you wish, and I will go there, trusting in your help and your partnership in the work. Nor is there any lack of steel for men who bring their whole soul to the task — it is that very thing which makes steel itself effective. I have set out on this course not carried along by any hope of what I myself might gain from it; I have no leisure to weigh my own dangers, grieving as I am for the enslavement of a country that was once most free, for its laws stripped of their virtue, and for all mankind overtaken by ruin because of Gaius. I would deserve, with you as my judge, to be trusted in such a matter, since you think as they do and have not held yourself apart."
Minucianus, seeing the force of these words, embraced him warmly, praised his daring, and stood close beside him; and after this embrace, with prayers and mutual pledges, they parted. Some maintained, as confirming what had passed between them, that when Chaerea was entering the senate house a voice came from the crowd urging him on, bidding him carry through what had to be done and take the god as his ally; and Chaerea at first suspected that one of the conspirators had turned traitor and that he was being trapped, but in the end took it as encouragement — whether it was a warning given by one of those in the secret to spur him on, or the god who watches over human affairs lifting him up. By now the plot had spread among many, and all stood ready under arms, some of them senators, others knights, and as many of the soldiery as shared the secret; for there was no one who would not have counted Gaius's removal a piece of good fortune. Because of this all were eager, by whatever means each could manage, not to fall short willingly of a share in so virtuous an act; and, so far as each had zeal or power, all were roused, in word and in deed, toward the tyrant's killing — even Callistus, who was a freedman of Gaius and, alone among such men, had risen to the very height of power, a power amounting to nothing less than a rival tyranny, through the fear he inspired in everyone and the vastness of the wealth he had gathered.
He was in fact the most venal and the most insolent man there ever was, having used his authority far beyond all reasonable measure; and knowing well besides that Gaius's nature was incurable, and that once he had condemned a man nothing could ever call him back, and that he himself had many reasons to fear for his own safety — not least the size of his fortune — he had taken to secretly cultivating Claudius, going to sit beside him, in the hope that if the rule should pass to Claudius once Gaius was gone, he would already have laid the foundation of honor for himself through such past favors, and a claim on his goodwill. He even ventured to say that, though ordered to do away with Claudius by poison, he had found countless ways to draw out the matter for his own profit. Callistus made this claim in order to win Claudius's favor, but the truth was neither that Gaius was so set on destroying Claudius that he tolerated Callistus's excuses for long, nor that Callistus, when ordered to carry out the deed, took it as something to be wished for — for if he had played the villain with his master's letters, he would not have failed to collect his reward at once. Rather, it was by some divine power that Claudius was preserved through the worst of Gaius's madness, while Callistus merely made a show of having secured a favor that in truth he had never done him.
For Chaerea and his men, the daily delays were growing ever harder to bear, since many held back; but Chaerea himself was in no way willing to put off action, reckoning every occasion suitable for the deed. Often enough an opportunity presented itself: when Gaius went up to the Capitol, or during the sacrifices offered for his daughter, he might have been pushed headlong from the palace roof as he stood scattering gold and silver coin to the crowd below — the roof there is high and looks out over the forum — or again during the performances of the mysteries he was arranging, since on all such occasions he was off his guard, both because he took care to conduct himself becomingly in them and because he had given up expecting to be the target of any attack, trusting that even the gods' power over death would come to his aid; and if nothing held sacred stood in the way, he thought he himself would have the strength to kill Gaius even unarmed. Such was the pitch of eagerness with which Chaerea held the conspirators, fearing that the opportunities would slip away.
They, for their part, could see that he wanted only what was right and was pressing for their common good; nevertheless they asked him to wait a little longer, lest, if some mishap attended the attempt, they should throw the city into turmoil with inquiries after those who shared the secret, and Gaius, forewarned, should bar the way to courage still more firmly against anyone who tried again later. It would be better, they said, to seize the moment while the games were being celebrated on the Palatine — held in honor of the first Caesar who had taken power from the people for himself, in a small wooden structure erected before the palace, where the noble Romans watch together with their wives and children, and Caesar too. It would be an easy matter, with tens of thousands of people packed into so small a space, for the bodyguard, once he entered, to have no room to act on his behalf, even if some of them were eager to help him. Chaerea held to this plan; but when the games came and, though it had been decided to strike on the very first day, fortune proved stronger than their plan and granted one delay after another, so that all three lawful days of the festival slipped by, it was only on the last of them that the deed was at last carried out. Chaerea called the conspirators together and said:
"Long enough has the time already passed for us to be reproached for our delay over a course resolved on with such courage; and it would be a terrible thing if, once word gets out, the deed should fall through and Gaius grow still more insolent. Do we not see that we are cutting away from our own freedom as many days as we grant, as a gift, to the growth of Gaius's tyranny — when instead we ought to be free from fear from this moment on, and, by giving others the cause of their happiness, stand forever after in the great wonder and honor of those who come after us?" When the others could neither speak against him, since there was nothing honorable in doing so, nor yet openly embrace the deed, but stood struck dumb in silence, he said, "Why, gentlemen, do we go on delaying? Do you not see that today is the last day of the festival, and that Gaius is about to sail away? He has made ready to sail for Alexandria, to see Egypt for himself. It would be a fine thing for us to let slip from our own hands the shame that will fall on Roman pride, paraded through both land and sea. How could we not rightly judge ourselves shamed by what is to come, if some Egyptian were to kill him, refusing to consider his insolence tolerable for men born free? For my part I will endure your excuses no longer; I will go to meet the danger myself this very day, welcoming with pleasure whatever may come of it, and I will not put it off any further, if it can be done. For what could be more unbearable to a man of spirit than that someone else should kill Gaius while I am still alive, robbing me of the honor of this deed?"
Having said this, he set out at once to accomplish the act, and put courage into the rest; and all were seized with a passion to join the undertaking without any further delay. At dawn he was on the Palatine as usual, girt with the sword of the equestrian order — for it was the custom for military tribunes, once so girded, to ask the emperor for the day's watchword, and this happened to be the day on which it fell to Chaerea to receive it. Just then a crowd was gathering on the Palatine to secure seats for the show, amid much noise and jostling, Gaius taking delight in the people's eagerness for such spectacles; for this reason no place had been set apart, either for the senate or for the knights, but men and women sat mixed together in disorder, and free men were mingled with slaves.
When his procession had gone forth, Gaius offered sacrifice to the deified Augustus, in whose honor the games were being held, and as one of the victims fell, it happened that the toga of Asprenas, one of the senators, was drenched with its blood. This made Gaius laugh, but it proved to be an omen made plain for Asprenas, since he was killed immediately after Gaius. It is recorded that Gaius, contrary to his own nature, was remarkably affable that day, and that by his charm in conversation he astonished everyone who happened to be present. After the sacrifice he turned to the games and took his seat, with the most distinguished of his companions around him. The theater was rebuilt each year in this fashion: it had two doors, one leading to an open courtyard, the other to a colonnade, for entrances and exits, so that those shut inside would not be thrown into confusion; and within the wooden structure itself, partitions marked off a further space where the performers and all manner of entertainers could move about.
While the crowd sat together, with Chaerea and the military tribunes not far from Gaius — Caesar occupied the right wing of the theater — a certain Bathybius, a senator of praetorian rank, asked Cluvius, a man of consular rank sitting beside him, whether any rumor of a coming upheaval had reached him, taking care as he spoke not to be overheard. When Cluvius said he had heard nothing, Bathybius replied, "Well then, Cluvius, a contest of tyrannicide lies before us." And Cluvius said, "My good man, be quiet — let none of the other Achaeans hear that story."
As a great abundance of fruit was showered on the spectators, along with many birds of the kind prized for their rarity by those who caught them, Gaius watched with delight the scrambles and struggles of the crowd as they claimed the prizes for themselves. It was there, too, that two omens are said to have occurred: a mime was performed in which a captured chieftain is crucified, and then a dancer performed a piece about Cinyras, in which both he and his daughter Myrrha are killed, with a great deal of artificial blood poured out, both around the crucified man and around the figures of Cinyras. It is also agreed that this was the very day on which Pausanias, one of his own companions, killed Philip son of Amyntas, king of the Macedonians, as he was entering the theater.
As Gaius hesitated over whether to remain to the end of the show, since it was the last day, or to bathe and dine and return afterward as he had done on the previous days, Minucianus, who was sitting above Gaius and feared that the opportunity might come to nothing, rose when he saw that Chaerea had already gone out ahead of him, and hurried to go and encourage him. But Gaius caught hold of his cloak, seemingly in friendliness, and said, "Where are you off to, my good man?" Minucianus, out of what seemed respect for Caesar, sat back down, but his fear got the better of him, and after a short pause he rose again. Gaius put no obstacle in his way as he left, supposing he was going out for some necessary reason. Ambronas, too, was urging Gaius, as before, to withdraw for his bath and his meal and then come back in, since he too wanted the plan brought to its completion.
Meanwhile Chaerea's men were stationing one another wherever the moment required, each straining to hold his assigned post and not desert it. They were growing vexed at the delay and at the postponement of what lay in their hands, especially since it was already about the ninth hour of the day. As Gaius lingered, Chaerea grew eager to force his way in upon him where he sat, though he knew well this would mean a great slaughter of the senators and of as many knights as were present; yet, fearful as he was, he remained eager, judging it a good thing, in purchasing safety and freedom for everyone, to count the fate of those who would perish as a small price. And so, with everyone now turning back toward the theater...
At the signal of his entrance Gaius rose to his feet, and a commotion broke out; the conspirators, too, turned back and began pushing against the crowd, ostensibly because they were annoyed at Gaius, but in reality wanting to isolate him from anyone who might come to his defense, so that they could get at the business of killing him unopposed. Going ahead of him were Claudius, his uncle, and Marcus Vinicius, his sister's husband, and also Valerius Asiaticus, whom not even the conspirators, had they wished, had the power to bar from his path, out of respect for their rank; Gaius himself followed with Paulus Arruntius. Once he was inside the palace, he left the direct route along which the attendant slaves were stationed and the men around Claudius were walking ahead, and turned instead down a quiet passage, meaning to go to a spot near the baths and, at the same time, to look over some boys who had arrived from Asia, a procession of whom was then in progress, with hymns for the mysteries he was celebrating, and others rehearsing war-dances to be performed in the theaters. Chaerea met him there and asked for the watchword. When Gaius answered with one of the words kept on hand for mockery, Chaerea did not hesitate: he hurled abuse at Gaius, drew his sword, and struck a violent blow — but it was not a fatal one.
Some indeed say it happened by Chaerea's design, that he meant not to kill Gaius with a single stroke but to punish him more severely with a multitude of wounds. I myself do not find this account plausible, since in actions of this kind fear leaves no room for calculation; and if Chaerea really thought that way, I judge him, of all men, to have been supremely foolish — indulging his anger for the sake of pleasure rather than securing, by one swift blow, deliverance from danger for himself and his fellow conspirators. For many means of rescue might still have come to Gaius's aid had he not lost his life before they could act, and then Chaerea would have had to answer not for punishing Gaius but for the fate of himself and his friends — when in fact, had he struck well and kept silent afterward, he might have slipped past the wrath of Gaius's defenders, rather than risk, with the outcome still uncertain even in success, losing both himself and the opportunity through such reckless conduct. This I leave for anyone to judge as he pleases. Gaius, reeling from the pain of the blow — for the sword, aimed at the point between shoulder and neck, was stopped from going deeper by the collarbone — neither cried out from the shock nor called upon any of his friends, whether from disbelief or sheer bewilderment, but groaning under the pain, he threw what strength remained into flight.
Cornelius Sabinus caught him, his resolve already broken, and shoved him down; and as he sank to his knees, a crowd gathered around him and, at a single signal, cut him down with their swords, urging one another on and vying to outdo each other. Last of all came Aquila, who — this is agreed by everyone — dealt the blow that finished him for certain.
One might rightly credit the whole deed to Chaerea. For even though it was carried out with the help of many others, he was the one who first conceived it, having anticipated all the rest by far, and he was the first to declare it boldly to the others; and once they had taken up his proposal for the killing, he gathered together the scattered participants and organized the entire affair with sound judgment, proving far superior to the rest wherever a plan needed to be put forward, and he won them over with persuasive words, so that although they had hesitated, he brought them all to act. And when the moment came to use the hand, he showed himself here too the first to charge, the first to lay hold of the killing by his own courage, making the way easy for the others and Gaius already as good as dead — so that whatever the rest went on to do might justly be credited to Chaerea's resolve, his courage, and the labor of their hands. Gaius, then, having met his end in this fashion, lay there, his life drained out from the sheer number of his wounds.
As for Chaerea and his companions, once Gaius was already finished off, they saw that it was impossible to save themselves by returning the way they had come, both from dread of what had happened — for it was no small danger for men who had killed the emperor, given the people's foolish devotion to him and their affection for him, and given that the soldiers would carry out the search for his killers with more than a little bloodshed — and also because the streets along which they had done the deed were narrow, and a great crowd, together with the attendants and however many soldiers were on guard duty for the emperor that day, had blocked them off. They therefore went by other routes and arrived at the house of Germanicus, Gaius's father, whom they had just killed, a house connected to the palace, since the whole complex was one continuous building, extended by each successive ruler through his own additions — some parts even taking their name from the ruler who had begun the construction, though it was never finished in his reign. Having slipped through the crowd, they found themselves, for the moment, safe from pursuit, since the disaster was still unknown — that the man who held the empire had been killed.
The first to learn of Gaius's death were the Germans. These were bodyguards who bore the name of the nation from which they had been recruited, forming a Celtic unit of their own. It is a national trait of theirs to give themselves over to rage, a thing rare among other barbarian peoples, because they are less inclined to let reason govern their actions; they are powerful in body and, charging with their first onset against whomever they take for enemies, achieve great results. These men, on learning of Gaius's murder, were deeply grieved — not because they judged the matter by any standard of right, but by their own advantage, and above all because Gaius had been dear to them, having bought their loyalty with gifts of money. They drew their swords — their commander was Sabinus, a tribune not through the merit and nobility of his ancestors, for he had in fact been a gladiator, but one who had won, through sheer bodily strength, the standing needed to command such men — and they went through the house searching for Caesar's killers. They cut down Asprenas, who happened to run into them first — the man whose robe, as I have said earlier, had been stained by the blood of the sacrificial victims, an omen that boded nothing good for what followed. Second came Norbanus, one of the most distinguished of citizens, who counted many consuls among his ancestors, and who put up resistance; but they showed no regard at all for his rank, and being the stronger, wrested the sword from the first man who attacked him, making it plain he did not intend to die without a fight — until, surrounded at last by a mass of assailants, he fell under the weight of his wounds. Third was Anteius, one of the senators, who along with a few others had not run into the Germans by chance, as the previous men had, but out of a longing to see for himself, and take pleasure in the sight of, Gaius lying dead, so as to satisfy an old hatred: Gaius had driven Anteius's father, who bore the same name, into exile and, not content with that, had had him killed by soldiers sent after him. And so Anteius had come, for this reason, to gladden himself with the sight of the corpse; but when the household grew alarmed, he thought to hide himself, and yet did not escape the Germans, whose thoroughness in the search matched their fury in the killing, falling alike on the guilty and the innocent. Such was the death of these men.
When word of Gaius's death reached the theater, there was shock and disbelief. Some, even those who received news of his destruction with great pleasure and had long counted it a blessing were it ever to happen, were nonetheless incredulous, out of fear. Others were altogether without hope that anything of the kind had befallen Gaius, and would not credit the report as true, since they thought it impossible that a man of such power could meet such an end. These were the women, the children, whatever slaves there were, and some of the soldiers — the soldiers because they served for pay and were nothing but partners in his tyranny, using their share in his outrages to extort both honor and profit from the leading citizens; the women's quarters and the younger crowd, as a mob will, were captivated by the pleasures of public shows, gladiatorial exhibitions, and distributions of meat — things done, in name, to gratify the people, but in truth to feed, out of Gaius's own madness, his cruelty. The slaves, for their part, having gained a voice of their own and license to defy their masters, had no protection against anyone who abused them except the favor his rule afforded them; for it was easy for them, by lying accusations against their owners, to be believed, and by denouncing their property to have both freedom and wealth granted them as the price of their testimony, since an eighth share of the estate was held out to them as their prize.
As for the nobility, even where the report seemed credible to some — whether because they had known of the plot beforehand, or because they simply wished it true and so believed it readily — they gave it away to no one, concealing in silence not only their joy at the news but even their opinion of whether it was true, some fearing that, should their hopes prove false, they would be punished for having rushed to betray their feelings; others, who knew for certain because they had shared in the plot, hid it all the more from one another, each ignorant of the others' involvement, and afraid that if they spoke to the wrong man — one to whom the continuance of the tyranny was advantageous — they would, with Gaius still alive, be denounced and punished once the informer came forward. For another rumor had also spread, that he had indeed been wounded but had not died, and was alive under the care of physicians. No one trusted anyone else enough to declare his own view with confidence, for whoever showed himself a friend of Gaius became suspect of favoring the tyranny out of genuine goodwill toward it, while whoever showed hatred toward him found that the very absence of goodwill in the man he spoke to was enough to make his words be doubted. It was even said by some — and these did the most to extinguish the nobles' cheerful hope — that Gaius, careless of danger and entirely unconcerned about his wounds, had gone out, just as he was, drenched in blood, into the forum, and was there addressing the people. This, however, was mere conjecture, born of the reckless wish of those eager to spread such talk, and taken by their hearers however they pleased; still, no one abandoned his hiding place, for fear of the charge that would fall on anyone who came out too soon — since they had no confidence that judgment upon them would be made on grounds they thought fair, but rather on whatever grounds their accusers and their judges chose to imagine.
When a crowd of Germans, swords drawn, surrounded the theater, every spectator expected to be killed, and at each new entrance panic seized them, as though they were about to be cut down on the spot; they were at a loss, with neither the courage to leave nor confidence that staying inside the theater was safe. As the Germans began bursting in, a cry rang out through the theater, the crowd turning to plead with the soldiers, protesting that they had known nothing of what had been plotted by the conspirators — if indeed there had been a plot — nor of what had happened afterward. They begged, therefore, to be spared, and not made to suffer punishment for another man's daring when they themselves were not even implicated, asking that the search for the actual perpetrators be carried out first, and only then whatever was found to be true be acted upon. Such words, and more besides, they spoke amid tears and the beating of their breasts, calling on the gods and pleading whatever the danger standing so near taught them to say, as anyone fighting for his life would. At this the soldiers' anger broke, and they repented of their design against the spectators — for it seemed cruel even to men so far hardened, once they had already set up the heads of Asprenas and his companions upon the altar. At the sight of these heads the spectators were moved all the more, both out of regard for the men's rank and out of pity for their suffering, so that they themselves, having come through dangers no less severe, came close to being stirred up in turn — with an outcome that, had it run its course, no one could have foretold.
So it was that even those who hated Gaius eagerly, and with justice, were kept from the joy of having rid the country of him, since they too had stood on the edge of destruction along with him, and confidence in their own survival had not, even now, become secure. There was a certain Euarestus Arruntius, one of the public auctioneers, who through that trade had developed a powerful voice, and had acquired wealth to rival the richest of the Romans, and possessed the influence to do as he wished in the city, both then and later. This man, composing himself into as mournful a bearing as he could manage — though he hated Gaius as much as any man — judged nevertheless that self-restraint, and a plan aimed at securing his own safety, mattered more than the pleasure of the moment. Having arranged himself with all the trappings a man might assume for the loss of his dearest possessions, he came forward into the theater and announced Gaius's death, and put a stop to the people's continuing any longer in ignorance of what had happened. By this time Stilas Arruntius, too, had arrived, calling off the Germans, and the tribunes with him ordering them to lay down their weapons and making clear to them that Gaius was dead.
This, above all, was what most surely saved those gathered in the theater, and everyone who happened, in any way, to fall in with the Germans; for had hope reached them that Gaius still lay alive and breathing, there is no atrocity from which they would have held back. Such was the surplus of their devotion to him that they would have been ready, even at the cost of their own lives, to see that no plot against him went unavenged, sharing in so great a misfortune alongside him. They ceased their furious pursuit of vengeance once clear word of his death reached them, both because it would now be pointless to display such zealous devotion to a man who, being dead, could no longer reward them for it, and out of fear that if they pressed their violence further, it might draw the attention of the Senate, should power come to rest with it, or of whatever ruler succeeded him. And so the Germans, though only with difficulty, ceased at last from the frenzy that had seized them over Gaius's death. Chaerea, meanwhile, was greatly afraid on Minucianus's account, lest he be destroyed by falling in with the Germans' madness, and went around to each of the soldiers, begging them to look to Minucianus's safety, and taking great pains that he not perish. Clemens rescued Minucianus — for he had been brought before him — releasing him along with many other senators, bearing witness to the justice of the deed and to the courage of those who had conceived it and had not shrunk from carrying it out. Tyranny, he said, may for a time rise up on the pleasure taken in its own outrages, but those who wield it are not granted, in the end, a fortunate departure from life, since the hatred of virtue stands set against it, but rather a misfortune of the kind that in fact overtook Gaius, at the hands of those who rose up and organized the attack against him, he himself
Gaius had come to be such a man, and by the very outrages that made him unbearable had taught, in destroying the law's providence, that his own dearest kin should turn to war against him; so that now, though in name it is these men who have killed Gaius, in fact he lies destroyed by his own hand.
By now the theater too was rising up out of the fear that had at first gripped it so bitterly, only gradually relenting. The reason for its eagerness was this: Alcyon the physician, having been swept up as though to attend to some of the wounded, sent away those with him on the pretext that they too were going to fetch what was needed for the wounded's treatment, but in truth so that they might learn of the danger that had arisen. Meanwhile the senate met, and the people gathered, as was their custom, for assembly in the forum, to search out the murderers of Gaius — the people very eagerly, and the senate too, it seemed.
There was a certain Valerius Asiaticus, a man of consular rank. He came forward before the people, and when they were in an uproar and treated it as an outrage that the killer of the emperor was still unknown, since all of them eagerly asked him who the man responsible was, he said, "Would that it were I."
The consuls also published an edict denouncing Gaius, and ordering the people and the soldiers to return to their own business — promising the people great hope of relief, and the soldiers honors, if they remained orderly and were not led into any of their usual violence. For there was fear that, should they turn savage, the city would suffer through their plundering and through the looting of temples.
By now the whole body of senators had already assembled, and above all those who had joined in the murder of Gaius, already acting with boldness and holding themselves in great pride, as though affairs now rested entirely in their hands. While matters stood thus, Claudius was suddenly seized from his house; for the soldiers, having held a meeting among themselves, deliberated with one another about what should be done, and concluded that a democracy could never come about, given power over affairs of such magnitude, and that even if it were achieved, gaining such rule would not turn out for their own good; and that if any one man should hold command, it would go badly for them in every way unless they had made themselves partners in his power.
It seemed good to them, then, while the matter was still undecided, to choose Claudius as their leader — he was the dead man's uncle, and of all those gathered in the senate none was more distinguished, both in the excellence of his ancestors and in the learning he himself had pursued — and that once established as emperor he should be honored fittingly and rewarded with gifts. This they resolved, and carried out at once. Claudius, then, had been seized by the soldiery.
Gnaeus Sentius Saturninus, though he had learned of Claudius's seizure and that he was laying claim to power — seemingly against his will, but in truth by his own wish as well — came forward before the senate and, quite unshaken, delivered, as befits free and noble men, this exhortation:
"Even though it may seem past belief, Romans, because after so long a time it comes unhoped for, still we possess the standing of free men — uncertain how long it will last, resting as it does on the will of the gods who have granted it, but sufficient to bring us joy, and, should we be deprived of it, sufficient in itself to count as happiness. A single hour is enough for those who have a sense of virtue, if it is lived out with a mind wholly its own, in a fatherland governed by its own laws — the laws under which it once flourished.

As for me, I can forget the freedom of earlier days, since I came after it was gone; but the freedom of now I drink in without ever being satisfied, and I count blessed those who were born and raised in it, and I judge these men worthy of honor no less than the gods — men who have, late as it is, and even at this stage of our lives, given us a taste of it. May its security remain for the whole age to come; but even this single day would be enough, for our younger men, and for those of us grown old it will be reckoned a lifetime — provided the elder among us, having had our share of its blessings, may now depart this life, and the younger have, as an education in virtue, this good order established for them by the very men from whom we are descended. And now, given the present hour, nothing should matter more to us than to live with virtue, which alone secures freedom for mankind.

The events of old I know only by hearsay, but from what I have witnessed with my own eyes I have learned with how many evils tyrannies fill our commonwealths — hindering every virtue, stripping the high-minded of their freedom, and turning themselves into teachers of flattery and fear, because they leave everything not to the wisdom of the laws but to the anger of those who rule. From the time Julius Caesar set his mind on overthrowing the republic, and by force overrode the order of the laws and threw the state into confusion — making himself stronger than justice, yet weaker than whatever might bring him private pleasure — there is no evil the city has not worn through, as all those who succeeded him in power vied with one another to erase the ways of our fathers and to leave the citizens as bereft as possible of noble men. They believed it made for their own safety to keep company with counterfeit men, and not merely to diminish something of the pride of those trusted to excel in virtue, but to condemn them utterly to destruction. And though many such men displayed things unbearable, each in his own rule, Gaius alone, who died today, showed himself more terrible than all of them, unleashing an untutored rage not only against his fellow citizens but even against his own kin and friends, inflicting ever greater evils on everyone alike and exacting punishment unjustly, growing savage toward men and toward the gods in equal measure.

For under tyranny pleasure is not simply enjoyed, nor does its insolence stop at wronging property and wives; the whole gain lies in troubling the enemy's entire household. And everything free is an enemy to tyranny, so that it cannot be won over to goodwill, nor can those it has wronged ever count their sufferings as small. Knowing full well what evils they have filled others with, some tyrants show great-spirited contempt toward fortune, but, unable to hide from themselves what they have done, believe they can win freedom from suspicion in only one way — by destroying utterly those they suspect. Now that we are rid of such evils, and have made ourselves accountable to one another — which is the surest guarantee a commonwealth can have, both for present goodwill and for future security from conspiracy, and so that credit may belong properly to whoever guides the city rightly — it is right that we take thought for this, since its benefit falls to the common good; and let anyone displeased with the proposals already made state his own opinion in reply, without this bringing him any danger at all, since whoever presides will be no unanswerable master with power to harm the city and, as sole ruler, remove those who have spoken against him. Nothing new nourishes tyranny except idleness and the failure to oppose anything it wills. Overcome by the pleasantness of peace, and having learned to live after the manner of slaves, all of us who have heard of irremediable disasters and seen the evils befalling our neighbors have, out of fear of dying with honor, endured our own ends instead with the utmost shame.

First, then, we must bestow the greatest honors there are upon those who removed the tyrant, and above all upon Cassius Chaerea; for with the gods' help this one man has shown himself the provider of our freedom, both in judgment and by his own hand. It is right not to forget this, but, since he took counsel for our freedom against the tyranny and at the same time faced the danger first, to vote him honors for that freedom, and let this be declared the first act done under no compulsion. It is the noblest deed, and one fitting free men, to repay their benefactors — and such a man has this one been toward all of us, in no way like Cassius and Brutus, who killed Gaius Julius Caesar; for they rekindled for the city the beginnings of civil strife and civil wars, whereas this man, along with killing the tyrant, has also delivered the city from the horrors that would have followed from it."
Such were the words Sentius used, and the senators received them with pleasure, as did all the equestrians who were present. Then a certain Trebellius Maximus leapt up and pulled the ring off Sentius's finger — a stone engraved with an image of Gaius was set in it — because in the eagerness of his speaking, and of what he intended to do, he had, it seemed, forgotten it was there; and the engraving was broken. Night had already come on far, and Chaerea asked the consuls for the watchword, and they gave "Liberty." What was happening seemed to them a wonder, almost past belief: for it was the hundredth year since they had first been deprived of the republic that the giving of the watchword passed back to the consuls — since these men had been masters of the soldiery before the city fell under tyranny. Chaerea, having received the watchword, handed it on to the soldiers stationed with the senate. They numbered four cohorts, for whom having no king was more honorable than tyranny.
These men then withdrew with their tribunes, and by now the people too were departing, full of joy, hope, and high spirit over the man who had won leadership for them — no longer over whoever happened to preside. And Chaerea was everything to them.
Chaerea, for his part, thought it a terrible thing that Gaius's daughter and wife should still be alive, and that ruin should not fall on his whole household together with him, since whatever of them remained would be left standing for the ruin of the city and its laws; and being eager besides to bring his own purpose to completion and to fully satisfy his hatred of Gaius, he sent out Julius Lupus, one of the tribunes, to kill Gaius's wife and daughter. Since Lupus was a relative of Clemens, they assigned him this service so that, having taken part even in such acts, he might be honored by his fellow citizens for the virtue of the tyrannicide, as one who could be thought to have shared from the start in the whole plot among those who first conspired together.
But to some of the conspirators it seemed a cruel thing to use such violence against the woman, since Gaius, they thought, had done everything driven by his own nature rather than by her counsel — the very acts that had worn the city out with the evils that overtook it, and by which whatever was the flower of its citizens had perished. Others, however, laid the responsibility for such things on her own design, and blamed her for all the evils Gaius had done, saying she had given Gaius a drug that enslaved his mind and had contrived to draw him into love for her, so that, once he had been driven into madness, everything that followed was of her own making, built up against the fortunes of the Roman people and of the world subject to them. In the end it was decided that she should die — for those who tried to delay it could do nothing to help her — and Lupus was sent. He wasted no time in any hesitation of his own, so as not to fail to serve those who had sent him at the right moment, wishing to be blameless in nothing that concerned the people's benefit.
Coming to the palace, he found Caesonia, Gaius's wife, lying beside her husband's body where it had fallen to the ground, deprived in her misfortune of everything the law would grant the dead, smeared with blood from his wounds, overwhelmed with grief, her daughter flung down beside her. Amid all this, nothing was to be heard from her but reproach of Gaius, for not having found convincing what she had so often foretold to him. This remark was interpreted both ways at the time, and still today lies open to the same treatment, according to whatever inclination the minds of those who hear it choose to give it. Some said it meant that she had advised him to abandon his madness and govern the citizens with moderation and virtue rather than savagery, and that it was for following his own way instead that he perished. Others said that when word of the conspirators had reached Gaius, she had urged him to deal with all of them at once without delay, so as to stand clear of danger even if they were guilty of nothing, and that this was the very thing now being thrown back at her as a reproach — that though she had foretold it, he had proved too soft-hearted to act.
Such, then, were the things said about Caesonia, and this was what people thought of her. Now when she saw Lupus approaching, she pointed out Gaius's body to him and, with wailing and tears, begged him to come nearer. But when she saw him standing rigid in his resolve, coming no closer, like a man bent on a deed not to his own liking, she recognized what he had come to do, and bared her throat for the blow, crying out most eagerly the sort of things natural to those who have so plainly come to despair of life, urging him not to delay in bringing to completion the drama already resolved upon against them. And so, with great courage, she died at Lupus's hand, and after her the little daughter as well. Lupus hurried to report all this to Chaerea and his men.
Gaius, then, died in this way, having ruled the Romans for a fourth year lacking four months — a man who, even before he came to power, was perverse and had reached the very extreme of wickedness, a slave to pleasure and a friend to slander, cowed by whatever was truly frightening and, for that very reason, most murderous toward whatever he dared face, glutting his power in one thing alone — committing outrage against those toward whom he least should have shown it — driven by an irrational arrogance, and making his profit out of killing and lawbreaking. He was eager both to be and to seem greater than what is divine and lawful, yet was a slave to the praise of the crowd, and counted as virtue everything the law judges shameful and punishes. He forgot friendship, however great and however deeply founded, toward anyone he had once grown angry with, through the shock of punishing even the smallest offenses, and he regarded everything allied with virtue as his enemy, brooking no contradiction in whatever his desire commanded. Hence he even had relations with his own full sister, and it was from this above all that the citizens' hatred of him began to grow more intense, since a thing unheard of for so long a time invited both disbelief and enmity toward the one who had done it.
One could point to no achievement of his reign that benefited either the people around him or those who would come after, except for the project he conceived at Rhegium and Sicily for the reception of the grain ships from Egypt. This, admittedly, was a very great and useful undertaking for sailors, yet it was never brought to completion, but was left half-finished because his enthusiasm for it grew dull. The cause was his devotion to worthless things and his spending on pleasures which, taken by themselves, might have done him good but which, in fact, drained away the ambition he had once professed for higher pursuits.
In other respects he was an excellent speaker, thoroughly trained in both the Greek language and the ancestral tongue of the Romans, and he could grasp on the spot the arguments composed by others, even those built up over a long time, and reply to them extempore, so that in the greatest matters he appeared, through sheer quickness, more persuasive than anyone else, both from a natural facility for the task and because he had added to that facility the strength that comes from practiced effort. For being the son of Tiberius's nephew, whose successor he became, he was under great compulsion to devote himself to education, since Tiberius himself excelled and took the first place in it, and Gaius shared this devotion to fine learning, deferring to the letters of a kinsman and a ruler, and so he came to hold first place among the citizens of his time.
And yet the goods he had gathered from his education proved unable to withstand the ruin that overtook him through the possession of power. So hard is it to acquire the virtue of self-control for those who have at their ease the freedom to act without being called to account. He made use of friends, all of them men of worth, at the outset, driven by his education and his desire for glory to emulate his betters, until, once his excess of insolence turned their goodwill toward him into a hatred that grew up secretly within them, he was plotted against by them and died.
Claudius, as I said above, once the breach with the ways of Gaius had occurred and the household was thrown into confusion by the calamity of Caesar's death, being at a loss over how to save himself, took refuge in a certain narrow passage and hid himself there, suspecting no cause for danger except his own high birth. For as a private citizen he had lived modestly and was content with what he had, devoting himself to learning, above all Greek learning, and keeping himself in every way apart from anything associated with turmoil.
At that moment, with panic gripping the crowd and the whole palace filled with soldierly madness, cowardice, and disorder among men who, private citizens as it were, had taken up the role of bodyguards, those attached to the so-called general staff, which is the most respectable part of the army, were deliberating about what should be done, while those who happened to be present set little store by vengeance for Gaius, since his fortunes had justly come round upon him, and instead considered rather how their own affairs might turn out well, and how the Germans among the executioners, who acted out of their own savagery rather than out of concern for the common good, might be dealt with in reprisal.
Claudius was thrown into confusion by all this, fearing for his safety, especially since he had seen the heads of Asprenas and his companions being carried past. He stood in a certain recess reached by a few steps, keeping himself concealed in the darkness there. And Gratus, one of the soldiers attached to the palace, caught sight of him, and being unable, because of the darkness, to make out clearly who it was, but not disposed to doubt that the man crouching there was indeed a man, came closer, and when Claudius wished to draw back he pressed on and, seizing him, recognized him. "This is Germanicus," he said to those following him, "let us set him up as our leader, carrying him along with us."
But Claudius, seeing that they were prepared for plunder and fearing that he might die by the same violence as Gaius, begged them to spare him, reminding them of how inoffensive he had been and how he had taken no forethought for what had happened. Gratus, smiling, took hold of his right hand and said, "Stop being petty about your safety; you ought instead to be thinking grandly about the rule which the gods, having taken it from Gaius, have granted to your virtue, having taken thought for the world. Come, then, and take up the throne of your ancestors."
And they lifted him up, since he was scarcely able to walk on his own feet, from both fear and joy at what had been said. More and more of the bodyguards now gathered around Gratus, and seeing Claudius being led away, they thought he was being dragged off to punishment for the losses he had suffered — a man who had lived his whole life inoffensively and had faced no small dangers during the reign of Gaius. Some of them thought it right to hand his case over to the consuls for judgment.
As more and more of the soldiery gathered, the crowd began to scatter, and there was no way forward for Claudius because of his physical weakness, since even the men carrying his litter, when the flight broke out around the moment of his seizure, saved themselves, giving up hope for their master's safety. When they reached the open space of the Palatine — which, tradition tells us, was the first part of the city of Rome to be inhabited — and were already laying hold of the public quarter, the crowd of soldiers flocking to them grew much larger, welcoming the sight of Claudius with joy, and they were most eager to set the man up as emperor, both out of goodwill toward Germanicus, whose brother he was and who had left behind, for all who had known him, a memory greatly to his credit.
A further consideration occurred to them too: the greed of those who held power in the senate, and all the wrongs committed under the former administration. Besides, they took note of the impracticality of the whole business, and reflected that if power reverted once more to a single ruler, the dangers to them would come through the one man who had won it, whoever should be granted it, whereas if by their goodwill Claudius took it, he would remember the favor and repay them with honor sufficient for such a service.
These thoughts they turned over among themselves and privately, and told to everyone they met along the way, and those who heard readily accepted the proposal, and closing ranks and pressing in around him, they carried him on their shoulders to the camp, so that their haste might not be hindered.
Meanwhile opinion was divided among the people and among the senators. Some, who longed for their former dignity and were eager to seize the moment to escape from the slavery that the insolence of tyrants had imposed on them, hoped that the seizure of Claudius would spare them civil strife of the kind that had once occurred under Pompey, if this man were established as emperor. The people, on the other hand, out of envy toward the senate and knowing that emperors served as a check on its greed and as their own refuge, rejoiced at Claudius's seizure.
When the senate learned that Claudius had been brought to the camp by the soldiers, it sent to him men of distinction from its own number, who were to instruct him that he must not use force to hold onto power, but should yield to the senate, since he was but one man among so many, giving way and, in accordance with the law, surrendering to it the oversight of public affairs; that he should remember what the earlier tyrants had done to harm the city, and what dangers he himself had run together with the senators under Gaius, and that he should not, because he hated the oppressiveness of the tyranny practiced by others, take courage of his own accord to commit the same outrage against his country.
If he obeyed, he would be assured lasting honors, such as free citizens would vote him, and by the law's concession both ruler and ruled would gain the credit of virtuous conduct. But if he grew reckless, learning nothing from the death of Gaius, they themselves would certainly not permit it, for their forces were considerable, they had an abundance of arms, and a multitude of slaves who could be made use of. Fortune and hope, moreover, counted for much, and the gods gave their aid not to just anyone, but to those who conducted their struggles with virtue and honor — and such, they said, were those who fought for the freedom of their country.
The envoys, Veranius and Brochus, both of whom were tribunes, delivered this message, and falling at his knees they implored him earnestly not to plunge the city into war and calamity, seeing that Claudius was already surrounded by a great mass of soldiers and that the consuls counted for nothing beside him. If he desired power, let him accept it as given by the senate; for it was a happier and more prosperous thing to receive rule not through violence but through the goodwill of those who granted it.
Claudius, knowing full well with what boldness they had been sent, for the present turned toward greater moderation in line with their wishes; yet, roused both by fear on their account and by the confidence of the soldiers, and by King Agrippa's urging that he not let slip from his hands so great a power that had come to him unbidden, he acted as one would expect a man to act who had been raised to honor by Gaius himself. For he had taken charge of Gaius's corpse, laid it out on a bier, dressed it as decently as circumstances allowed, and withdrawn to the bodyguards, announcing that Gaius was alive, though suffering from his wounds, and saying that physicians would come to him. But on learning of Claudius's seizure by the soldiers, he hurried to him and, finding him in confusion and ready to yield to the senate, he roused him to lay claim instead to the rule.
Having said this to Claudius, he went over to his side; and when the senate summoned him back, he anointed his head with perfumes, as though he were just returning from some social gathering, and appeared before them, and they asked him what Claudius had done. When he told them the truth and they further inquired what view he held about the whole situation, he was ready in words to die for the senate's honor, but he bade them consider, apart from what gave them pleasure, whatever served their advantage; for those who aspired to power needed both arms and soldiers to defend them, lest, being unprepared, they should come to grief in this venture. When the senate answered that it would supply an abundance of arms and money, and that it already had part of an army assembled, the rest to be raised by freeing slaves,
"It would be possible, senators," said Agrippa, taking up the matter, "to do whatever your spirit prompts, but I must say, without hesitation, since my words are spoken for your safety: you know that the army fighting for Claudius has long practice in soldiering, whereas our forces will be a motley crowd, including those unexpectedly freed from slavery, and hard to control. We shall be fighting trained men after putting forward men who do not even know how to draw a sword. It seems to me, therefore, that we should send envoys to persuade Claudius to lay down his power, and I am ready myself to go on such an embassy."
So he spoke, and when they agreed, he was sent along with others; and privately he described to Claudius the senate's turmoil and instructed him to answer in a more commanding manner, befitting the dignity of his authority. Claudius accordingly said that he was not surprised the senate took no pleasure in being ruled, worn out as it was by the cruelty of those who had previously held power, but that they would find in him, by his own moderate conduct, a taste of better times; the name of rule alone would belong to him, while in practice it would be set forth for the common good of all. Having traveled through many and varied circumstances, he said it was well for them, in his presence, not to distrust him. And the envoys, charmed by hearing such words, were sent on their way.
Claudius then addressed the assembled army, taking oaths from them that they would surely remain faithful to him, and gave the bodyguards five thousand drachmas apiece, promising proportionate sums to their officers according to rank, and the same to the legions wherever stationed.
Meanwhile the consuls called the senate together in the temple of Jupiter the Victorious; it was still night. Of the senators, some who were hiding themselves in the city hesitated to attend the meeting, while others, who had gone out to their own estates, had already made their exit, foreseeing how the whole matter would turn out, now that hope of freedom had been abandoned, and judging it far better to live out their lives safely in idleness rather than in labor, than to gain the rank of their fathers only to remain in doubt about their own safety.
Even so, no more than a hundred assembled, and while they were deliberating about the matters at hand, a sudden shout rose up from the soldiery gathered together, bidding the senate choose an emperor as commander and not ruin the government through a multiplicity of rulers. And for their own part they declared that power should belong not to all, but to one man, and that it was for the senators to see who was worthy of so great a charge. So the senators were in great distress, chiefly through shame at their boast of freedom having come to nothing, but also through fear of Claudius.
There were, nonetheless, some who aspired to power, both by the distinction of their birth and by marriage connections. Minucianus, for instance, put forward Marcus, a man of note in his own right for his nobility, who had also married Julia, the sister of Gaius, and who was eager to lay claim to power; but the consuls held him back, contriving one pretext after another. Minucianus also restrained Valerius Asiaticus, one of the assassins of Gaius, from entertaining such designs. There would have been a slaughter no less than what had already occurred, had those who desired power been allowed free rein to set themselves against Claudius — all the more since the gladiators, of whom there was a considerable number, and those soldiers who kept night watch over the city, and as many oarsmen as were streaming into the camp, were involved, so that of those seeking power, some withdrew out of regard for the city, others out of fear for themselves.
At the very beginning of the day, Chaerea and those with him came forward and made an attempt at persuasion, addressing the soldiers. But when the crowd saw them silencing the men with gestures and refusing to allow them to say what they were capable of urging as to who should rule, they raised an uproar, since all were bent on having a monarchy, and called for the man who was to lead them, unwilling to tolerate delay. The senate, meanwhile, was at a loss both as to who should rule and in what manner it should be ruled, since the soldiers would not accept them, and the assassins of Gaius would not permit the soldiers to have their way.
In such circumstances, Chaerea, unable to contain his anger at the demand for an emperor, promised to give them a general, if someone would bring him a signal from Eutychus. This Eutychus was a charioteer of the faction called the Greens, greatly favored by Gaius, and much occupied about the stable buildings of that faction's horses.
The soldiery was worn out with these degrading duties. It was for this that Chaerea reproached them, along with much else of the sort, adding that he would fetch the head of Claudius himself: it would be monstrous if, after one madman, they handed the command to a fool. His words did not move them at all; instead they drew their swords, took up their standards, and went off to join those swearing allegiance to Claudius.
The senate was left without defenders, and the consuls were no better off than private citizens. Shock and despondency filled them, and no one knew what to do with the conspirators, since Claudius had been provoked against them. They turned to abusing one another, and regret set in. Sabinus, one of Gaius' assassins, came forward and threatened to kill himself before he would see Claudius established as ruler and slavery take hold; he rebuked Chaerea for clinging to life, if, having despised Gaius, he was now the first to judge life more valuable than a freedom that could no longer be restored to the fatherland in any case. Chaerea replied that he had no hesitation about dying, but wished first to test Claudius' intentions. So matters stood with them. Meanwhile, at the camp, crowds pressed in from every side to pay their respects.
One of the consuls, Quintus Pomponius, was under suspicion by the soldiers, since he was urging the senate on toward freedom; they drew their swords and would have acted against him had Claudius not intervened. Claudius seated the consul beside himself, rescuing him from danger, but the other senators who were with Quintus were not received with the same honor — some were even struck as they were pushed back from access to him. Aponius withdrew wounded, and all of them were in danger. King Agrippa then came forward to Claudius and asked him to deal more gently with the senators, for if any harm came to the senate, he would have no one else left to rule. Claudius yielded and summoned the senate to the Palatine, being carried there through the city escorted by the soldiery, with a great deal of rough handling of the crowd along the way.
Among the assassins of Gaius, Chaerea and Sabinus went out more openly, though they were barred from public appearances by the letters of Pollio, whom Claudius had shortly before chosen as commander of the bodyguard. When Claudius reached the Palatine, he gathered his companions and put Chaerea's case to a vote. To them the deed itself seemed splendid, but they charged the man who had done it with treachery, and thought it right to impose punishment on him as a deterrent for the future. So he was led away to execution, and with him Lupus and a good number of other Romans. It is said that Chaerea bore his misfortune with great composure, his bearing unshaken throughout, in contrast to Lupus, whom he taunted for breaking into tears.
When Lupus, laying aside his cloak, complained of the cold, Chaerea remarked that Lupus had never before shrunk from acting against the cold. As a crowd of onlookers followed to watch, when he reached the place he asked the soldier whether the killing blows had come to him with practice, or whether he now held a sword for the first time, and told him to bring the very blade with which he himself had dispatched Gaius. He died fortunate, killed with a single stroke. Lupus, however, did not manage his end so gracefully; he shrank back in distress, and it took several blows, since he offered his neck too weakly.
A few days later, when the Romans were holding their rites for the dead, the people brought their offerings to the fire and honored Chaerea's portion among them as well, praying that he be gracious and free of resentment for the ingratitude shown him. Such was the end of Chaerea's life. As for Sabinus, though Claudius released him not only from the charge but restored to him the office he had held, he considered it wrong to abandon his pledge to his fellow conspirators, and killed himself by falling on his sword until the hilt itself met the wound.
Claudius, having swiftly cleared away everything suspect in the army, published an edict confirming the kingdom Gaius had granted Agrippa, and praising the king with high commendation. He added to it the whole territory that had been ruled by Herod, Agrippa's grandfather — Judea and Samaria — restoring this as a debt owed to their kinship. He further added Abila, the territory of Lysanias, and all that lay on Mount Lebanon that had belonged to it, and a treaty was sworn between them in the middle of the forum in the city of Rome. He took from Antiochus the kingdom he held and gave him instead a portion of Cilicia along with Commagene. He also freed Alexander the alabarch, an old friend of his, and Antonia's steward, who had been bound in chains through Gaius' anger, and Alexander's son married Berenice, Agrippa's daughter.
As for that marriage, since Marcus, Alexander's son, died after having taken her as a virgin bride, Agrippa gave her to his own brother Herod, having asked Claudius that he be granted the kingdom of Chalcis. At about this same time, discord broke out between the Jews and the Greeks in the city of Alexandria. For after the death of Gaius, the Jewish nation, which under his rule had been humbled and grievously insulted by the Alexandrians, took heart again and was immediately in arms. Claudius wrote to the prefect governing Egypt to put down the uprising, and he also sent an edict, at the urging of the kings Agrippa and Herod, to both Alexandria and Syria, written in the following terms:
"Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, holder of tribunician power, declares: Having learned that the Jews in Alexandria, called Alexandrians, were settled together with the earliest inhabitants from the very first times of the city and obtained equal citizenship from the kings, as is clear from the documents in their possession and from the decrees, and that after Alexandria was brought under our rule by Augustus, their rights were preserved by the successive prefects sent out, and that no dispute over these rights had arisen — and further, that at the time when Aquila was in Alexandria, upon the death of the ethnarch of the Jews, Augustus did not prevent further ethnarchs from being appointed, wishing that each people remain subject while abiding by its own customs and not be compelled to transgress their ancestral religion — but that the Alexandrians grew emboldened against the Jews among them in the time of Gaius Caesar, on account of his great derangement and madness, because the Jewish nation refused to transgress its ancestral religion and address him as a god, and so he humbled them — I wish that none of the rights of the Jewish nation be forfeited on account of Gaius' madness, but that their former privileges be preserved for them so long as they abide by their own customs, and I charge both parties to take the greatest care that no disturbance arise after the publication of my edict."
Such, then, was the wording of the edict sent to Alexandria on behalf of the Jews. The one sent to the rest of the inhabited world read as follows: "Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, high priest, holder of tribunician power, chosen consul for the second time, declares: Since King Agrippa and King Herod, dearest to me, have asked that I grant the same rights to be preserved for the Jews throughout the whole empire under Roman rule as for those in Alexandria, I have most gladly agreed — not only as a favor to those who asked it of me, but because I judge those on whose behalf the request was made to be worthy of it, on account of their loyalty and friendship toward the Romans. I judge it especially just that no Greek city be denied these rights, since they were preserved for them even in the time of the deified Augustus. It is therefore right that the Jews throughout the whole world under our rule keep their ancestral customs without hindrance; and I now charge them in turn to make more moderate use of this kindness of mine, and not to hold in contempt the religious observances of other nations, but to keep their own laws. I wish this edict of mine to be published by the magistrates of the cities and colonies and municipalities in Italy and abroad, and by kings and rulers through their own envoys, and to be kept posted for no fewer than thirty days, in a place where it can easily be read from ground level."
By these edicts, sent to Alexandria and to the whole inhabited world, Claudius Caesar made known his mind concerning the Jews. He then at once sent Agrippa off to take possession of his kingdom, with even greater honors, writing to the governors and procurators of the provinces to treat him with affection. Agrippa, as one would expect of a man returning to a better fortune, hastened back, and coming to Jerusalem he offered thanksgiving sacrifices, omitting nothing that the law required. For this reason he also ordered a great many Nazirites to be shaved. The golden chain that Gaius had given him, equal in weight to the iron one with which his royal hands had been bound, he hung up within the sacred precincts above the treasury, as a memorial of his wretched fortune and a testimony to his change for the better — so that it might stand as proof both that great things can sometimes fall, and that God can raise up what has fallen.
For the dedication of the chain made this plain to all: that King Agrippa, from a small cause, had been stripped of his former dignity and become a prisoner, and shortly afterward, released from his fetters, had been raised to a kingship more splendid than before. From this, then, one should reflect that human greatness can slip and fall, and that what has been brought low can rise again to conspicuous heights.
Having thus fully paid his devotions to God, Agrippa removed Theophilus, son of Ananus, from the high priesthood, and bestowed that honor on Simon, son of Boethus, who bore the surname Cantheras. Simon had two brothers, and their father was Boethus, whose daughter King Herod had married, as has been shown above. So Simon held the priesthood along with his brothers and his father, just as before him the three sons of Simon, son of Onias, had held it together in the time of the Macedonian rule, as we have related in earlier books.
Having thus arranged matters concerning the high priests, the king repaid the people of Jerusalem for their goodwill toward him: he remitted the tax due on every house, thinking it fitting to return affection for the affection they had shown him. He appointed Silas commander of the whole army, a man who had shared many hardships with him. A very short time later, some young men of Dora, putting forward boldness in place of piety and naturally inclined to reckless daring, brought a statue of Caesar and set it up in the synagogue of the Jews. This greatly provoked Agrippa, for it amounted to an overthrow of his ancestral laws. Without delay he went to Publius Petronius, who was governor of Syria, and denounced the men of Dora. Petronius, no less angered at what had been done — for he too judged the transgression of the laws to be impiety — wrote in anger to the leading men of Dora who had committed the offense:
"Publius Petronius, legate of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, declares to the chief men of Dora: Since some among you have shown such reckless folly that, even though the edict of Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus permitting the Jews to observe their ancestral customs had been published, you were not persuaded to obey it, but did the very opposite, preventing the Jews from holding their assembly by moving Caesar's statue into it — thereby transgressing not only against the Jews but against the emperor himself, whose statue would better be set up in his own temple than in another's, and especially in the place of the synagogue, since nature grants each people the right to govern its own place, in accordance with Caesar's decree (for it is absurd to invoke my own decree after the emperor's own edict, which permitted the Jews to keep their own customs and, further, to share citizenship with the Greeks) — as for those who dared such things against the Augustan edict, since even those of you who seem to hold the highest standing among you were themselves indignant, saying that it was not done by their own choice but by the impulse of the crowd, I have ordered them brought before me by the centurion Proculus Vitellius to give an account of what was done; and I urge the chief magistrates, if they do not wish this wrongdoing to appear to have been done by their own choice, to point out the guilty parties to the centurion, and to allow no occasion for sedition or conflict, which I suspect is exactly what is being sought through such acts — since neither I nor King Agrippa, whom I hold in the highest honor, care about anything more than that the Jewish nation, gathering under the pretext of self-defense, should not be driven by some such occasion into open desperation. And so that it may be better known what view Augustus himself took of this whole matter, I have attached his edicts published at Alexandria, which, even though they are thought to be known to all, King Agrippa, whom I hold in the highest honor, nevertheless read publicly from the tribunal, pleading that they ought not to be deprived of Augustus' gift. For the future, then, I charge you to seek no pretext for sedition or disturbance, but to let each people practice its own rites."
Thus Petronius took care that the wrong already done should be set right, and that nothing similar should happen to them again. King Agrippa removed Simon Cantheras from the high priesthood and restored it once more to Jonathan, son of Ananus, judging him more deserving of the honor. But it did not seem to Jonathan a welcome thing to receive so great an honor, and he declined it, saying: "I rejoice, O king, in the honor you have shown me, holding dear in my soul this favor which your goodwill grants me; but God has not judged me worthy of the high priesthood at all. Having once put on the sacred vestments, I am content; for I wore them then with greater holiness than I would recover now. But if you wish someone more worthy than myself to receive this honor now, let me instruct you:
my brother is pure of all sin, both toward God and toward you, O king; I recommend him as fitting for the honor." Pleased with these words, the king admired Jonathan for his judgment, and gave the priesthood to his brother Matthias. Not long after, Marsus succeeded Petronius and took charge of Syria. And the king's Silas...
Silas, the king's prefect, had remained loyal to him through every turn of fortune, refusing no danger and often undertaking the most hazardous labors on his behalf, and he was full of a confidence that he thought entitled him to equal standing on the strength of that steadfast friendship. He would therefore never defer to the king in any way, but spoke his mind freely on every occasion, and in his displays of familiarity he became tiresome, boasting of himself without measure and repeatedly bringing up before the king the grim turns of his former fortune, calling them to mind so as to point out his own zeal at the time, and constantly recounting, at length, how much he had toiled on the king's behalf.
The excess of these reminders came to seem an insult, and so the king came to resent the man's unchecked frankness of speech, for the memories of inglorious times are not pleasant, and it is foolish to keep bringing up favors one has done in the past. In the end Silas so thoroughly provoked the king's anger that Agrippa, giving way to rage more than to reason, not only removed him from his prefecture but had him bound and sent back, to be imprisoned, in his own homeland.
In time, however, the king's anger cooled, and turning the matter over with a clearer judgment, he took into account how many labors the man had endured on his behalf. So when he was celebrating his own birthday, a day on which all his subjects held festivities in general rejoicing, he summoned Silas at once to come and share his table. But Silas -- for his temper was that of a free man -- thought he had good cause for anger, and did not conceal it, saying to those who came for him:
"For what honor is the king recalling me, an honor that will vanish again in a moment? He did not even preserve for me the rewards I first earned for my goodwill toward him -- he stripped them from me with insult. Or does he suppose I have given up my frankness of speech? With what conscience could I keep silent, when I could cry aloud instead how many dangers I freed him from, how many labors I bore to secure his safety and his honor -- labors for which my reward was chains and a dark prison cell? I will never forget these things; perhaps even my soul, once it has left the flesh, will carry with it the memory of my valor."
This is what he shouted, and what he ordered be reported to the king. The king, seeing that he was incurably disposed in this way, again left him in confinement.
He fortified the walls of Jerusalem on the side facing the new part of the city at public expense, widening them in some places and raising them higher in others, and he would have carried this work to a scale beyond any human power to overcome, had not Marsus, the governor of Syria, informed Claudius Caesar by letter of what was being done. Claudius, suspecting some plan of revolution, sent orders to Agrippa to stop the building of the walls at once, and Agrippa judged it best not to disobey.
This king was by nature inclined to generosity in his gifts, ambitious to show magnanimity toward nations, and delighted to raise himself to prominence through lavish and repeated expenditures, taking pleasure in giving and rejoicing to live amid good report -- in temperament nothing like Herod, the king before him. For Herod's character was harsh, given to severe punishment and unrestrained toward those he hated, and it is acknowledged that he was more closely attached to the Greeks than to the Jews: he adorned the cities of foreigners with gifts of money, with the construction of baths and theaters, and in some he even raised temples, in others colonnades, but he never deemed any city of the Jews worthy even of the slightest repair, nor of any gift worth mentioning.
Agrippa's temperament, by contrast, was gentle, and his generosity was shown alike to all. Toward foreigners he was kindly and displayed his liberality to them as well, but toward his own people he was proportionately more benevolent and sympathetic. He took pleasure, at any rate, in residing continually in Jerusalem, and he kept the ancestral customs in strict purity, living his whole life in a state of ritual cleanness, letting no day pass without its lawful sacrifices being offered.
Now there was a certain man in Jerusalem, a native who was reputed to be a strict observer of the law -- his name was Simon -- who gathered a crowd into an assembly at a time when the king had gone away to Caesarea, and dared to denounce him, saying that he was not pure, and that he would justly be barred from entering the temple, since that right belonged to the native-born. This speech of Simon's before the populace was reported to the king by the commander of the city's garrison, in a letter.
The king summoned Simon, and since he happened to be sitting in the theater at the time, he ordered him to be seated beside him. "Tell me, gently and calmly," he said, "what is unlawful in the things that go on here?" Simon had nothing to say and begged to be forgiven. The king was reconciled to him more readily than anyone expected, judging mildness more befitting a king than anger, and knowing that in the great, forbearance is more fitting than rage. So he even honored Simon with a gift before sending him away.
Having built many things in many places, he honored the people of Beirut in particular, for he built them a theater surpassing many others in costliness and beauty, and an amphitheater built at great expense, and besides these, baths and colonnades, sparing no expense in any of these works and doing no injury either to their beauty or their scale. He was equally lavish in the magnificence of their dedication, presenting in the theater spectacles of every kind of musical performance and every form of varied entertainment for the pleasure of the crowd, and in the amphitheater displaying his own munificence through a multitude of gladiators. There, wishing to stage a mass combat for the pleasure of the spectators, he sent in seven hundred men to fight seven hundred others, assigning to this task all the criminals he had, so that they might be punished while, at the same time, the work of war became, in peacetime, a form of entertainment. These men he destroyed to the last one.
Having completed the events described at Beirut, he moved on to Tiberias, a city of Galilee. He had by now come to be regarded with admiration by the other kings. Antiochus, king of Commagene, came to visit him, as did Sampsigeramus, king of Emesa, and Cotys, who ruled Lesser Armenia, and Polemon, who held the kingdom of Pontus, and Herod, his own brother, who ruled Chalcis. He entertained them all, in his receptions and displays of friendliness, in a manner that showed the very height of good judgment, so much so that it seemed only just that he should be honored by the presence of the king. But while these men were still lingering with him, Marsus, the governor of Syria, arrived.
The king, observing due respect toward the Romans, went out seven stadia from the city to meet him. But this, as it turned out, was to be the beginning of his falling-out with Marsus, for as he sat beside him in his carriage he had brought the other kings along with him, and Marsus, seeing their unity and mutual friendship extending even this far, suspected it and judged it not in Rome's interest for so many rulers to be of one mind together. He therefore at once sent men to each of them privately, instructing them to depart to their own territories without delay.
Agrippa took this badly, and from that time his relations with Marsus were strained. He also removed Matthias from the high priesthood and appointed in his place Elionaeus, son of Cithaerus, as high priest.
The third year of his reign over the whole of Judea had now been completed, and he came to the city of Caesarea, which had formerly been called Strato's Tower. There he presented spectacles in honor of Caesar, understanding this to be a festival held for his welfare, and a great number of the province's officials and men risen to high rank had gathered for the occasion. On the second day of the spectacles he put on a robe woven entirely of silver, of such marvelous workmanship that it was a wonder to behold, and entered the theater at the break of day.
There, as the first rays of the sun struck it, the silver, catching the light, shone out in a way that was astonishing, gleaming with a brilliance that struck those who gazed at him with something like fear and dread. At once the flatterers, though it did him no good, cried out from this side and that, calling him a god and saying, "Be gracious to us; if until now we have feared you as a man, from this time on we confess you to be greater than mortal nature."
The king did not rebuke them for this, nor did he reject their impious flattery. But shortly afterward, looking up, he saw an owl perched above his head on a rope. He recognized at once that this was a messenger of evil, just as it had once been a messenger of good things, and a sharp pain seized his heart, and at the same moment a violent, sudden agony fastened on his bowels. Turning to his friends, he cried out:
"I, whom you call a god, am now ordered to end my life -- fate at once proving false the words you just now spoke falsely of me. I who was called immortal by you am even now being led away to die. But I must accept my destiny, as God has willed it, for we have lived our life in no mean fashion, but amid a splendor that has been called blessed."
Even as he spoke these words he was overcome by the intensifying pain, and he was carried in haste to the palace, and word spread among all the people that he was on the point of death altogether. At once the multitude, together with their wives and children, sat down on sackcloth, according to ancestral custom, and prayed to God on the king's behalf, and everything was full of wailing and lamentation. The king, lying in a lofty chamber and looking down at them falling prostrate below, could not himself hold back his own tears.
After five continuous days of being racked by the pain in his belly, he ended his life, being in the fifty-fourth year of his age and the seventh of his reign. He had reigned four years under Gaius Caesar, ruling the tetrarchy of Philip for three years and, in the fourth, receiving in addition that of Herod; and he had held it for three years more under the rule of Claudius Caesar, during which he reigned over the territories already named and also received in addition Judea, Samaria, and Caesarea. The revenue he drew from these came to as much as twelve million drachmas, and yet he borrowed heavily besides, for being so generous he spent more lavishly than his income allowed, since his love of honor knew no restraint.
While the news of his death was still unknown to the populace, Herod, ruler of Chalcis, and Helcias the prefect, a friend of the king, conspiring together, sent Aristo, one of their suitable attendants, and had Silas -- for he was their enemy -- put to death, as though by order of the king. Thus did King Agrippa end his life in this manner. He left behind him a son, Agrippa, seventeen years of age, and three daughters: of these, Berenice, aged sixteen, had already been married to Herod, her father's brother, while the other two, Mariamme and Drusilla, were still unmarried, the one being ten years old and Drusilla six. Their father had betrothed them in marriage: Mariamme to Julius Archelaus, son of Chelcias, and Drusilla to Epiphanes, son of Antiochus, king of Commagene.
But when it became known that Agrippa had departed this life, the people of Caesarea and Sebaste, forgetting his benefactions, behaved like the bitterest of enemies. They hurled unseemly abuse at the departed king, and those among them who happened at the time to be under arms -- and they were many -- went home, seized the statues of the king's daughters, carried them off together to the brothels, set them up on the rooftops, and abused them there in ways too indecent to describe, so far as it was possible. They also reclined in the public squares and held communal banquets, crowned with wreaths and anointed with myrrh, pouring libations to Charon and drinking toasts to one another over the king's death. They forgot not only Agrippa, who had shown them many acts of generosity, but also his grandfather Herod, who had built their cities for them and constructed harbors and temples at magnificent expense.
Meanwhile the son of the deceased, also named Agrippa, was at this time in Rome, being raised at the court of Claudius Caesar. When Caesar learned that Agrippa had died, and that the people of Sebaste and Caesarea had committed outrages against him, he grieved for the one and was angered at the ingratitude of the other. He was on the point of at once sending the younger Agrippa to succeed to the kingdom, wishing also to make good the oaths he had sworn, but the freedmen and friends who held the greatest influence with him dissuaded him, saying it was altogether risky to entrust so great a kingdom to one so young, who had not even outgrown the years of boyhood, since he would be unable to bear the burdens of administration, and that even for a grown man a kingdom is a heavy weight to carry. Caesar judged that they spoke reasonably, and so he sent Cuspius Fadus as prefect over Judea and the whole kingdom, thereby paying honor to the deceased by not bringing in Marsus, with whom Agrippa had been at odds, to rule over his kingdom.
He had also resolved, before anything else, to instruct Fadus to rebuke the people of Caesarea and Sebaste for their outrages against the dead king and their drunken abuse of those still living, and to transfer the cavalry regiment of the Caesareans and Sebastenes, together with the five cohorts, to Pontus, so that they might serve there, and to select soldiers from the Roman legions in Syria by number to fill their place. But those so ordered did not move, for by sending envoys they mollified Claudius and obtained leave to remain in Judea -- and it was these very men who, in the times that followed, became the source of the greatest calamities for the Jews, sowing the seeds of the war that would come under Florus, from which cause Vespasian, once he had prevailed, as we shall relate shortly, removed them from the province.

======== Antiquities — Book 20 ========

How, after Agrippa's death, Claudius Caesar sent Fadus into Judea as procurator. The strife between the people of Philadelphia and the Jews living in Perea over the boundary of a village, and how, when many of the Philadelphians had been killed by them, Fadus in anger seized the three leading men of the Perean Jews and put them to death. How Tholomaeus the chief bandit, who had been raiding the Arabs, was captured and brought before Fadus and executed. How Fadus and Cassius Longinus, the governor of Syria, went up to Jerusalem and ordered the leading men of the Jews to deposit the high priest's robe and the sacred vestment in the Antonia, under Roman authority, as had been the case before. The Jews' appeal to Fadus and Longinus about this, asking them to allow an embassy to be sent to Claudius Caesar concerning it. How Fadus, having taken hostages, granted this. How Claudius Caesar, at the request of the younger Agrippa, granted the Jews their requests and wrote to Fadus about them. How Helena, queen of the Adiabenians, and her sons Monobazus and Izates, and their whole family, came to embrace the customs of the Jews. How, when Herod, king of Chalcis, died, the younger Agrippa received the kingdom, given to him by Claudius Caesar. How Tiberius Alexander, arriving in Judea as procurator, punished the sons of Judas the Galilean for deceiving the populace. Concerning the famine that occurred in the country. The arrival of Cumanus in Judea as procurator, sent by Caesar. How under him many of the Jews perished at the Temple. The conflict of the Jews with the Samaritans, and how many of the Samaritans were destroyed. How Ummidius Quadratus, governor of Syria, hearing of this and going up to Judea, ordered the leading men of the Jews and Samaritans to go up to Rome, and likewise Cumanus the procurator and Celer the tribune, to give account to Claudius Caesar of what had happened, while he himself punished some of the Jews. How Claudius, hearing them, acquitted the Jews of the charge at the request of King Agrippa, banished Cumanus, and punished Celer the tribune and the leading men of the Samaritans. How Felix, sent as procurator and finding the country ravaged by bandits, took care to bring peace to the land by destroying them, and sent the chief of the bandits, named Eleazar, bound to Rome. How, when a certain Egyptian charlatan appeared and many Jews were led astray by him, Felix went out against them and killed many. How Felix the procurator put an end to the strife between the leading Jews and the Syrians in Caesarea. How, when Claudius died, Nero succeeded to the rule. How, when Porcius Festus was sent to Judea as procurator, the country came to be afflicted by the sicarii. Concerning the portico of the inner Temple and how the Jews raised it higher. How Festus, angered at this, sent the leading Jews to Rome to Nero to make their case about what had been done. How, when Festus died in Judea, Albinus came as his successor. How under him the sicarii ceased to ravage the country. How Florus, coming as Albinus's successor, inflicted such evils on the Jews that he drove them to take up arms. Concerning Josephus, his family, and his standing. This book covers a period of twenty-six years.
When King Agrippa died, as we reported in the previous book, Claudius Caesar sent Cassius Longinus as successor to Marsus, granting this as a favor to the memory of the king, since Marsus, while Agrippa was still alive, had been asked many times by him in letters no longer to preside over affairs in Syria.
When Fadus arrived in Judea as procurator, he found the Jews living in Perea at war with the people of Philadelphia over the boundary of a village said to be full of hostile men. The Pereans, without consulting their own leading men, had taken up arms and killed many of the Philadelphians. Learning of this, Fadus was greatly angered that they had not left the judgment to him, if indeed they believed themselves wronged by the Philadelphians, but had instead resorted to arms. So he took the three leading men, who were also responsible for the uprising, ordered them bound, then put one of them to death — his name was Annibas — and sentenced the other two, Amaramus and Eleazar, to exile. Tholomaeus the chief bandit, too, was captured not long after and brought before him, a man who had inflicted the greatest harm on Idumea and the Arabs; and from that point all Judea was cleared of banditry through the foresight and care of Fadus.
He then summoned the chief priests and the leading men of Jerusalem and urged them to deposit the high priest's robe and the sacred vestment — which only the high priest is accustomed to wear — in the Antonia, a fortress, to be kept under Roman authority, as had indeed been the case before. They did not dare object, but nevertheless appealed to Fadus and to Longinus, who had also come to Jerusalem bringing a large force, for fear that the multitude of the Jews might be driven to revolt by Fadus's orders. They asked first to be allowed to send envoys to Caesar requesting that the sacred vestment be kept under their own authority, and then to wait until they learned what answer Claudius would give. Fadus and Longinus said they would allow the envoys to be sent if they received the sons of the leading men as hostages. The Jews readily agreed and handed over the hostages, and the envoys were sent off. When they arrived in Rome, the younger Agrippa, son of the king who had died, learning why they had come — he happened to be at the court of Claudius Caesar at the time, as we said before — urged Caesar to grant the Jews what they requested concerning the sacred vestment, and to write to Fadus about it. Claudius summoned the envoys and said he granted this, and told them to be grateful to Agrippa, since it was he who had asked it of him; and along with his answer he gave them the following letter.
Claudius Caesar Germanicus, holder of tribunician power for the fifth time, consul designate for the fourth time, acclaimed imperator for the tenth time, father of the country, to the magistrates, council, and people of Jerusalem, and to the whole nation of the Jews, greetings. Since my Agrippa, whom I have raised and who is with me, a most devout man, brought your envoys to me to give thanks for the care I have taken for your nation, and they earnestly and eagerly asked that the sacred robe and the crown be kept under your own authority, I grant this, just as the most excellent and most honored Vitellius did before me. I agreed to this decision first because of my own devotion and my wish that every people worship according to its ancestral customs, and also because I know that King Herod and the younger Aristobulus — whose devotion to me and zeal on your behalf I recognize, men to whom I owe the greatest debts of friendship, being most excellent and honored by me as well — were the ones who asked this of me. I have written about these matters also to Cuspius Fadus, my procurator. The bearers of this letter are Cornelius son of Ceron, Tryphon son of Theudion, Dorotheus son of Nathanael, and John son of John. Written four days before the Kalends, in the consulship of Rufus and Pompeius Silvanus.
Herod too, the brother of the Agrippa who had died, who at that time had been entrusted with the rule of Chalcis, asked Claudius Caesar for authority over the Temple, the sacred funds, and the appointment of the high priests, and obtained all of it. From that time this authority remained with all his descendants until the end of the war. And so Herod removed from the high priesthood the man called Cantheras, giving the succession to that honor instead to Joseph son of Camei.
At this time Helena, queen of the Adiabenians, and her son Izates, changed their way of life to the customs of the Jews, for the following reason. Monobazus, king of the Adiabenians, who also bore the name Bazaeus, fell in love with his sister Helena, took her in marriage, and made her pregnant. Once, as he lay beside his wife with his hand resting on her belly while she slept, he seemed to hear a voice commanding him to take his hand from her womb and not press upon the child within it, which, by God's providence, would attain rule and a happy end. Startled by the voice, he woke at once and told his wife what had happened, and named the son Izates. He also had an older son, Monobazus, by Helena, and other children by other wives; but he plainly showed all his affection toward Izates, as though he were an only child. From this, envy toward the boy grew among his half-brothers, and from that envy grew hatred, since all of them were grieved that their father favored Izates above them.
Although the father clearly perceived this, he forgave the others, since they suffered it not out of wickedness but because each wished to receive his father's favor for himself. But being greatly afraid for the young man, lest he suffer some harm at his brothers' hands out of their hatred, he sent him, with many gifts, to Abennerigus, king of Spasinou Charax, entrusting to him the young man's safety. Abennerigus received the young man gladly, treated him with great favor, gave him his daughter Samacho in marriage, and granted him a territory from which he would draw great revenues. Monobazus, now old and seeing that little time remained to him, wished to see his son face to face before he died. So he summoned him, greeted him most affectionately, and gave him the territory called Carrhae. This land is excellent for bearing quantities of amomum; and in it are also the remains of the ark in which, it is said, Noah was saved from the flood, and to this day these remains are shown to those who wish to see them. Izates remained in this territory until his father's death.
On the day Monobazus departed from life, Queen Helena summoned all the magnates, the satraps of the kingdom, and those entrusted with the forces. When they had assembled, she said: "That my husband wished Izates to succeed him in the kingdom, and judged him worthy of it, I do not think has escaped you either; yet I still await your judgment as well, for happy is not the man who receives rule from one person alone, but from many, and willing ones." She said this to test what those summoned were thinking. On hearing it, they first bowed before the queen, as is their custom, and then said they confirmed the king's decision and would gladly obey Izates, who had rightly been preferred by his father over his brothers in accordance with everyone's prayers. They also said they wished first to kill his brothers and kinsmen, so that Izates might hold the rule securely, for once these were destroyed, all the fear arising from their hatred and envy would be removed. To this Helena replied that she acknowledged their goodwill toward her and toward Izates, but urged them nevertheless to hold off their plan to destroy the brothers until Izates arrived and gave his own approval. Since they could not persuade her to allow the killing, they urged instead that the brothers be kept bound and under guard until his arrival, for the sake of their own safety, and they advised her meanwhile to appoint as regent of the kingdom someone she trusted greatly. Helena agreed, and appointed her eldest son Monobazus king, placing the diadem on him and giving him their father's signet ring and the ring called among them the samphera, urging him to administer the kingdom until his brother's arrival. This Monobazus, hearing quickly of his father's death, came at once and succeeded his brother, who stepped aside from the rule in his favor.
Now during the time Izates was staying at Spasinou Charax, a certain Jewish merchant named Ananias, visiting the king's wives, taught them to worship God according to the ancestral custom of the Jews; and through them he came to be known to Izates as well, and likewise persuaded him. When Izates was summoned back by his father to Adiabene, Ananias went along with him, yielding to his earnest request; and it happened that Helena too had been instructed by another Jew and had likewise adopted their laws. When Izates took over the kingdom and arrived in Adiabene, and saw his brothers and other kinsmen in bonds, he was distressed at what had happened. Considering it impious either to kill them or to keep them bound, but believing it dangerous to keep men who bore grudges at his side unbound, he sent those meant to serve as hostages, along with their children, to Rome to Claudius Caesar, and sent the others to Artabanus the Parthian on similar pretexts.
Learning that his mother took great delight in the customs of the Jews, he hastened to adopt them himself as well, believing that he could not be firmly a Jew unless he were circumcised, and he was ready to act on this. But his mother, learning of it, tried to prevent him, telling him it would bring danger upon him, for he was king, and would arouse great hostility among his subjects once they learned he desired foreign and alien customs, and that they would not tolerate a Jew ruling over them. She said this and used every means to prevent him. He reported her words to Ananias. Ananias agreed with the mother and threatened that, if the king did not obey him, he would leave and depart, for he said he feared that, if the matter became known to all, he might risk punishment as the one responsible, having taught the king improper practices; but he said the king could worship God even without circumcision, if indeed he had firmly resolved to emulate the ancestral customs of the Jews, for this was more essential than being circumcised, and God would forgive him for not performing the act out of necessity and fear of his subjects. At the time the king was persuaded by these words. But afterward — for he had not entirely abandoned his desire — another Jew, from Galilee, named Eleazar, reputed to be extremely strict about the
Since Eleazar was thought to be an exact observer of the ancestral customs, he urged Izates to do the deed. For when he came in to greet him and found him reading the law of Moses,
he said, "You fail to realize, O king, that you are doing the gravest wrong to the laws, and through them to God himself. You must not merely read them — you must first of all do what they command. How long will you remain uncircumcised? But if you have not yet read the law concerning this, read it now, so that you may know what impiety is."
On hearing this, the king did not put off the act any longer. He withdrew to another room, called in the physician, and had the prescribed thing done. Then he sent for his mother and his tutor Ananias and told them he had done it.
Astonishment seized them at once, and no small fear — that if the act became known, the king might risk losing his throne, since his subjects would not tolerate being ruled by a man who had become a zealot for foreign customs, and that they themselves might risk being blamed for it.
But it was God who kept their fears from coming to pass. For when Izates himself, and later his sons, fell into many dangers, God preserved them, providing a way to safety out of desperate straits, thereby showing that for those who look to him and trust in him alone, the fruit of piety is never lost. But these events we shall relate later.
Helena, the king's mother, seeing the kingdom at peace and her son blessed and admired by all — even by foreigners — through God's providence, conceived a desire to travel to Jerusalem, to worship at the temple of God renowned among all peoples and to offer thank-offerings; and she asked her son for leave to go.
He granted his mother's request very readily, made ample preparations for her journey, and gave her a great sum of money; and she went down to Jerusalem, her son escorting her a long way.
Her arrival proved very useful to the people of Jerusalem. A famine was pressing hard on the city at that time, and many were perishing for lack of provisions. Queen Helena sent some of her people, some to Alexandria to buy grain with a large sum of money, others to Cyprus to bring back a cargo of dried figs.
As soon as they returned with the supplies, she distributed food to those in need, and she has left behind the greatest memory of this benefaction throughout our whole nation.
When her son Izates too learned of the famine, he sent a great deal of money to the leading men of Jerusalem. But the good deeds these rulers did for our city we shall relate later.
Artabanus, king of the Parthians, learning that his satraps had formed a plot against him, and seeing that it was not safe to remain among them, resolved to set out for Izates, wishing to find through him a means of safety and, if possible, a way back to his throne.
So he arrived, bringing with him about a thousand relatives and servants, and met Izates on the road. Though he himself recognized Izates clearly, he was not recognized by Izates; drawing near, he first bowed before him in the traditional manner, then said,
"O king, do not overlook me, your suppliant, nor disdain me in my need. Brought low by a reversal of fortune, reduced from a king to a private citizen, I stand in need of your help. Look, then, at the instability of fortune, consider it something common to all, and take thought for yourself as well — for if I am left unavenged, many will grow bolder against other kings too."
He said this weeping, his head bowed low. But Izates, on hearing the name and seeing Artabanus standing before him as a suppliant, leapt down from his horse and said,
"Take courage, O king; do not let your present state overwhelm you as though it were beyond remedy, for the reversal of your grief will be swift. You will find me a friend and an ally beyond your hope — either I will restore you to the Parthian throne, or I will give up my own."
Having said this, he set Artabanus on his horse and himself walked alongside on foot, paying him this honor as though to a greater king. When Artabanus saw this, he was troubled, both by his present fortune and by the honor shown him, and swore he would get down unless Izates mounted again and rode ahead.
Persuaded, Izates leapt onto his horse, and having brought Artabanus into his kingdom, paid him every honor, both in councils and in the order of precedence at banquets, looking not at his present fortune but at his former rank — and giving some weight, too, to the thought that changes of fortune are common to all men.
He also wrote to the Parthians urging them to receive Artabanus back, offering as pledge of an amnesty for what had happened his own right hand, his oaths, and his mediation.
The Parthians, for their part, did not deny that they wished to receive him, but said they could not, since the throne had already been entrusted to another — Cinnamus was the name of the man who had taken it — and that they feared this might lead to civil strife among them. When Cinnamus learned of their intention, he himself wrote to Artabanus — for he had been raised by him, and was by nature a good and noble man — urging him to trust him and come to reclaim his own throne.
Artabanus trusted him and came. Cinnamus went out to meet him, bowed before him, hailed him as king, and set the diadem on his head, taking it off his own.
Thus, through Izates, Artabanus was restored to the throne he had earlier lost because of the nobles. Yet he did not forget the benefits done to him, but repaid Izates with the greatest honors current among the Parthians: he granted him the right to wear the upright tiara and to sleep on a golden couch, privileges and marks that belong only to Parthian kings.
He also gave him a large and fertile territory, cut off from the king of the Armenians — the land is called Nisibis, where the Macedonians had earlier founded a city, Antioch, which they named Epimygdonia. With these honors Izates was honored by the king of the Parthians.
Not long afterward, Artabanus died, leaving the kingdom to his son Vardanes. Vardanes came to Izates, intending to wage war on the Romans, and tried to persuade him to join the campaign and prepare an alliance. But he did not persuade him — Izates, knowing the power and the fortune of Rome, believed he was undertaking the impossible.
Moreover, since he had sent five young sons to learn our ancestral language and culture precisely, and his mother, as I said, to worship at the temple, he was all the more reluctant, and he kept restraining Vardanes, repeatedly describing to him the power and achievements of the Romans, thinking that by this he would frighten him and put a stop to his desire for the campaign against them.
Provoked by this, the Parthian at once declared war on Izates. But he gained no benefit from that campaign, for God cut short all his hopes: when the Parthians learned Vardanes's intention, and that he had resolved to march against the Romans, they killed him and handed the throne over to his brother Gotarzes.
He too, not long after, died as the result of a plot, and was succeeded by his brother Vologeses, who entrusted principalities to his two brothers by the same father — to Pacorus, the elder, the kingdom of the Medes, and to Tiridates, the younger, Armenia.
Monobazus, the king's brother, and his other relatives, seeing that Izates, through his piety toward God, had become admired by all men, likewise conceived a desire to abandon their ancestral customs and live by the customs of the Jews.
Their action became known to their subjects, and the nobles, angered at this, did not show their wrath openly, but, keeping it in mind, watched for a suitable opportunity, eager to exact punishment from them.
So they wrote to Abia, king of the Arabs, promising to pay him a great deal of money if he was willing to make war on their own king, and they promised also to abandon the king at the first engagement — for they wished to punish him for having come to hate their own customs. Binding their mutual pledge with oaths, they urged him to make haste.
The Arab was persuaded, and bringing a large force, marched against Izates. When the first engagement was about to begin, before the armies came to blows, all his men deserted Izates by prearranged signal, as though seized by a panic terror, turned their backs on the enemy, and fled.
Izates, however, was not thrown into confusion. Realizing that treachery had been committed by the nobles, he too withdrew to his camp; and when he inquired into the cause and learned they had conspired with the Arab, he put the guilty men to death. Engaging the enemy the next day, he killed a great many, forced the rest to flee, and, pursuing the king himself, drove him into a fortress called Arsamus.
Attacking it vigorously, he took the fortress, plundered all the booty inside it — and it was a great deal — and returned to Adiabene without finding Abia alive, for when he was on the point of being surrounded, he had killed himself.
Though the nobles of Adiabene had failed in their first attempt — God having delivered them into the king's hands — they did not remain quiet even so, but wrote again, this time to Vologeses, king of the Parthians, urging him to kill Izates and set up in his place another ruler, one of Parthian stock — for they said they hated their own king, who had abolished their ancestral customs and become a lover of foreign ones.
On hearing this, the Parthian was roused to war, and having no occasion for a just pretext, he sent demanding back the honors his father had given Izates; and when Izates refused, he declared war on him.
Izates was greatly troubled in soul when he heard this, thinking it would bring him condemnation if he seemed to give up the gifts out of fear by doing so. Yet knowing that even if the Parthian recovered the honors he would not remain at peace, he decided to entrust the danger to his life to God his protector; and considering that he had in him the greatest of allies, he placed his children and wives in the safest of his fortresses, burned all the grain stored in his strongholds along with the fodder and the pasture, and, having thus made ready, awaited the enemy.
When the Parthian arrived with a large force of infantry and cavalry sooner than expected — for he had marched swiftly — and was pitching camp by the river marking the boundary between Adiabene and Media, Izates too set his camp not far off, with about six thousand cavalry around him.
A messenger sent by the Parthian came to Izates and reported how great the Parthian power was, setting its borders from the Euphrates to Bactria and listing the kings subject to it. He threatened that Izates would pay the penalty for having proved ungrateful to his own masters, and that not even the god he worshiped would be able to rescue him from the king's hands.
When the messenger had said this, Izates replied that he knew the Parthian power far exceeded his own, but said he knew still better that God was mightier than all men.
Having given this answer, he turned to supplication of God: throwing himself on the ground and disfiguring his head with ashes, he fasted together with his wife and children, calling upon God and saying,
"If it was not in vain, Master and Lord, that I came to know your goodness, and if I have rightly held you alone, above all, as my Lord, come as my ally — not only to defend me against my enemies, but because they have dared to defy your power as well."
He cried out in prayer, weeping and lamenting, and God heard him: that very night Vologeses received letters reporting that a large force of Dahae and Sacae, scorning his absence from home, had marched out and were plundering Parthia; and so he withdrew, his campaign unaccomplished. Thus, by the providence of God, Izates escaped the threats of the Parthian.
Not long afterward, having completed his fifty-fifth year and having reigned for twenty-four years, he ended his life, leaving behind twenty-four sons and twenty-four daughters. He ordered that his brother Monobazus succeed to the throne, rewarding him because, during his absence after their father's death, he had faithfully kept the throne safe for him.
His mother Helena, on hearing of her son's death, bore it hard, as was natural for a mother deprived of a most pious son; yet she found some comfort on hearing that the succession had passed to her elder son, and she hastened to him. But once she arrived in Adiabene, she survived her son Izates only a short time.
Monobazus sent both her bones and his brother's to Jerusalem and ordered them buried in the three pyramids their mother had built, three stadia distant from the city of Jerusalem. But what King Monobazus did during his lifetime we shall relate later.
While Fadus was procurator of Judea, a charlatan named Theudas persuaded a very great crowd to take up their possessions and follow him to the Jordan river — for he claimed to be a prophet, and said that at his command he would split the river and provide them an easy crossing. By saying this he deceived many.
Fadus, however, did not let them enjoy the fruits of their folly, but sent out a squadron of cavalry against them, which fell upon them unexpectedly, killed many, took many alive, and, having captured Theudas himself, cut off his head and carried it to Jerusalem. Such were the events that befell the Jews during the procuratorship of Cuspius Fadus.
Fadus was succeeded by Tiberius Alexander, son of that Alexander who had served as alabarch in Alexandria and who was foremost there in his time, both in lineage and in wealth. He too was distinguished for piety toward God — that of the...
Alexander's son, for he did not remain faithful to his ancestral customs. It was under him that the great famine occurred in Judea, during which Queen Helena, having bought grain from Egypt at great expense, distributed it to those in want, as I said before. In addition, the sons of Judas the Galilean, who had led the people to revolt from the Romans in the days when Quirinius was assessing Judea, as we have shown in an earlier book, were brought up for trial — James and Simon — and Alexander ordered them crucified.
Herod, king of Chalcis, removed Joseph son of Camei from the high priesthood and gave the succession to that honor to Ananias son of Nebedaeus. Cumanus arrived as Tiberius Alexander's successor. And Herod, brother of the great King Agrippa, died in the eighth year of Claudius Caesar's reign, leaving three sons: Aristobulus, born to him by his first wife, and, by Berenice his brother's daughter, Berenicianus and Hyrcanus. Caesar Claudius gave Herod's kingdom to the younger Agrippa.
When sedition broke out in the city of Jerusalem while Cumanus was administering the affairs of Judea, many of the Jews perished in it. I will first relate the cause of what happened. When the feast called Passover was at hand, at which it is our custom to eat unleavened bread, and a great crowd had gathered from every quarter for the festival, Cumanus grew afraid that some disturbance might arise from them, and ordered one company of soldiers to take up arms and stand on the porticoes of the temple to suppress any uprising, should one occur — as those who had governed Judea before him had also done at the festivals.
On the fourth day of the feast, one of the soldiers exposed his genitals and displayed them to the crowd, and at the sight of this those watching were seized with rage and fury, saying that they themselves had not been insulted but that God had been blasphemed. Some of the bolder among them reviled Cumanus, saying that the soldier had acted at his instigation. When Cumanus heard this he too was provoked beyond measure by the abuse, but he urged them nonetheless to stop desiring revolution and not to kindle sedition at a festival. When he failed to persuade them — for they only pressed harder with their abuse — he ordered the whole army to take up their armor and come to the Antonia, a fortress, as we said before, that overlooked the temple.
When the crowd saw the soldiers arriving they were seized with fear and rushed to flee, but since the exits were narrow, they believed they were being pursued by enemies, and in the crush of the flight they crushed and destroyed many of one another in the narrow passages. Twenty thousand were counted among those who perished in that uprising. Mourning took the place of festival for the rest of the time, and everyone, forgetting prayers and sacrifices, turned to lamentation and weeping. Such were the sufferings brought about by the outrage of a single soldier.
Their first mourning had not yet ended when another disaster fell upon them: some of those in revolt, given to sedition, waylaid on the public road, about a hundred stades from the city, a slave of Caesar named Stephen as he was traveling, and plundered all his property. When Cumanus heard of what had been done, he immediately sent soldiers, ordering them to plunder the nearby villages and to bring their most prominent men to him in chains. In the course of this pillaging, one of the soldiers found a copy of the Laws of Moses lying in a certain village, brought it out into everyone's sight, tore it apart, and blasphemed it with much mockery. When the Jews heard of this, many of them ran together and went down to Caesarea, where Cumanus happened to be, begging him to avenge not themselves but God, whose laws had been so outraged — for they could not endure to go on living while their ancestral laws were so grossly insulted. Cumanus, fearing that the crowd might rise again, and on the advice of his friends, had the soldier who had insulted the laws beheaded, and so put an end to the sedition that was about to flare up a second time.
A hostility also arose between the Samaritans and the Jews for the following reason. It was the custom of the Galileans, when they came up to the holy city for the festivals, to travel through Samaritan territory. On this occasion, as they were on the road, near a village called Ginae, which lies on the border between Samaria and the great plain, some men joined battle with them and killed many of them. When the leading men among the Galileans learned of what had happened, they went to Cumanus and urged him to avenge the murder of those who had been killed. But he, having been bribed by the Samaritans, paid no heed. Indignant at this, the Galileans persuaded the mass of the Jews to take up arms and to hold fast to their freedom, saying that slavery was in itself bitter, but slavery joined to outrage was utterly unbearable.
When the men in authority tried to calm them and promised to persuade Cumanus to exact justice from those who had done the killing, they paid them no heed, but took up arms and, calling on Eleazar son of Dinaeus — a bandit who had spent many years living in the mountains — to help them, they burned and plundered a number of Samaritan villages. When word of this reached Cumanus, he took the cavalry unit of the Sebastenes and four infantry regiments, and having armed the Samaritans as well, marched out against the Jews. In the engagement he killed many of them and took even more alive. The leading men of Jerusalem in rank and family, when they saw the magnitude of the disaster they were facing, changed into sackcloth, covered their heads with ashes, and by every means begged those who had revolted
to consider, before their eyes, that their homeland would be razed, the temple burned to the ground, and they themselves, together with their wives and children, reduced to slavery — and so to change their minds, throw down their arms, and remain quiet henceforth, withdrawing to their own homes. By these arguments they persuaded them. The people dispersed, but the bandits went back once more to their strongholds. From that time on all Judea was filled with bands of robbers.
The leading men of the Samaritans went to Ummidius Quadratus, governor of Syria, who at that time happened to be in Tyre, and accused the Jews of having burned and plundered their villages. They said they were less indignant at what they themselves had suffered than at the fact that the Jews had shown contempt for the Romans — before whom, if they had really been wronged, they ought to have come as judges — and had instead, as though they had no Roman governors, taken to raiding on their own; they had therefore come to him to obtain redress. Such were the charges the Samaritans brought. The Jews, for their part, said that the Samaritans were responsible for both the sedition and the fighting, and above all that Cumanus had been corrupted by bribes from them and had suppressed the matter of the murdered men. Quadratus, on hearing this, deferred judgment, saying he would give his verdict once he had gone to Judea and learned the truth more precisely. So they departed without having achieved anything.
Not long after, Quadratus came to Samaria, where, after hearing both sides, he concluded that the Samaritans were responsible for the disturbance. Of the Samaritans and Jews whom he learned had taken part in the uprising, he crucified those whom Cumanus had taken captive. From there he went on to a village called Lydda, which was not smaller than a city, and, sitting on the tribunal, heard the Samaritans a second time; he learned from a certain Samaritan that a leading man among the Jews, named Doetus, together with four other revolutionaries, had persuaded the crowd to revolt from Rome. These men Quadratus ordered put to death, but Ananias the high priest and Ananus the commander he had bound and sent
to Rome to give an account of their conduct to Claudius Caesar. He also ordered the leading men of the Samaritans and of the Jews, together with Cumanus the procurator and Celer, a tribune, to go to Italy to be judged before the emperor concerning their disputes with one another. He himself, fearing that the Jewish crowd might rise again, went to the city of Jerusalem, and found it at peace, celebrating an ancestral festival to God. Satisfied, then, that no revolt would arise from them, he left them celebrating and returned to Antioch.
Cumanus and the leading men of the Samaritans, having been sent to Rome, were given a day by the emperor on which to plead their case against one another. Great effort was made on Cumanus's and the Samaritans' behalf by Caesar's freedmen and friends, and they would have prevailed over the Jews had not the younger Agrippa, who happened to be in Rome, seen the leading Jews being pressed hard and earnestly begged Agrippina, the emperor's wife, to persuade her husband to hear the case as befit his own sense of justice and to punish those responsible for the revolt.
Prompted by this request, Claudius heard the case and, finding that the Samaritans had been the instigators of the trouble, ordered those who had come up before him put to death, sentenced Cumanus to exile, and ordered that Celer the tribune be dragged through the whole city of Jerusalem in full view of everyone and then executed. He also sent Claudius Felix, brother of Pallas, to take charge of affairs in Judea.
Having now completed the twelfth year of his reign, Claudius bestowed on Agrippa the tetrarchy of Philip, adding to it Batanea together with Trachonitis and Abila — this last had been the tetrarchy of Lysanias — while taking from him Chalcis, which he had ruled for four years. Having received this gift from Caesar, Agrippa gave his sister Drusilla in marriage to Azizus, king of Emesa, who had consented to be circumcised.
Epiphanes, son of King Antiochus, had declined this marriage, being unwilling to adopt the customs of the Jews, though he had earlier promised her father he would do so. Agrippa also gave Mariamme in marriage to Archelaus, son of Helcias, to whom she had earlier been betrothed by their father Agrippa; from this marriage a daughter was born to them, named Berenice. Not long afterward, the marriage between Drusilla and Azizus was dissolved for the following reason.
At the time when Felix was procurator of Judea, he saw Drusilla — for she surpassed all women in beauty — and conceived a desire for her; he sent to her one of his friends, a Jew named Atomus, a Cypriot by birth, who claimed to be a magician, and through him urged her to leave her husband and marry him, promising to make her happy if she did not scorn him.
She, being in an unhappy situation and wishing to escape the envy she suffered from her sister Berenice on account of her beauty — for Berenice caused her no small harm through this — was persuaded to transgress her ancestral laws and marry Felix. She bore him a son whom she named Agrippa. But the manner in which this young man, together with his wife, perished in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the time of Titus Caesar, I will relate later.
As for Berenice, after the death of Herod, who had been both her husband and her uncle, she remained a widow for a long time; but when rumor arose that she was living with her own brother, she persuaded Polemon, king of Cilicia, to be circumcised and take her in marriage, thinking in this way to refute the false charges. Polemon consented, chiefly because of her wealth.
The marriage did not last long, however; Berenice, out of licentiousness, as it was said, left Polemon, who thereby was freed both from the marriage and from the obligation to keep the customs of the Jews. At the same time Mariamme left Archelaus and married Demetrius, a leading man among the Jews of Alexandria in birth and wealth, who at that time also held the office of alabarch.
A son was born to her by him, whom she named Agrippinus. But I shall report the details of each of these matters more precisely later on.
Claudius Caesar died after reigning thirteen years, eight months, and twenty days, and there was a rumor among some that he had been poisoned by his wife Agrippina. Her father was Germanicus, brother of Caesar, and her first husband was Domitius Ahenobarbus, one of the most distinguished men in the city of Rome. After his death, Claudius, finding her widowed for a long time, took her in marriage, along with her son Domitius, who bore the same name as his father.
Claudius had earlier put to death his wife Messalina out of jealousy; by her he had had children, Britannicus and Octavia — for she was of the Antonian line and the eldest of the sisters, whom he had by Petina, his first wife. He then married Octavia to Nero, for this was the name Caesar later gave him upon adopting him as his son.
Agrippina, fearing that Britannicus, once he came of age, might himself receive the empire from his father, and wishing to secure the succession beforehand for her own son, brought about the death of Claudius, as it was said, and immediately sent Burrus, the prefect of the troops, together with the tribunes and the most powerful of the freedmen, to bring Nero to the camp and hail him as emperor.
Nero, having thus taken power, first killed Britannicus by poison, in a manner concealed from most people, and not long afterward openly murdered his own mother, repaying her in this way not only for having given him birth but also for having, by her own schemes, secured for him the rule of the Romans. He also killed Octavia, whom he had married, and many distinguished men whom he accused of plotting against him.
But on these matters I will refrain from writing further, for many have composed histories concerning Nero, some of whom, out of gratitude for benefits received from him, neglected the truth, while others, out of hatred and enmity toward him, poured out shameless abuse in their falsehoods, so that they too deserve condemnation. Nor do I wonder that those who lied about Nero did so, since even those writing about men who lived before him have not kept to the truth of history, even though they bore those earlier men no such hatred, being far removed from them in time.
But let those who have no concern for the truth be free to write as they please, since that seems to be what pleases them; we, however, having set truth as our aim, shall give only brief mention to matters detached from the work before us, while setting forth in full what befell us Jews, shrinking from concealing neither our misfortunes nor our failings. I shall now return
Let me now turn back to the narrative of our own affairs. In the first year of Nero's reign, on the death of Azizus, ruler of Emesa, his brother Soaemus succeeded to the throne. The governorship of Lesser Armenia was granted by Nero to Aristobulus, son of Herod, king of Chalcis, and Caesar also presented Agrippa with a portion of Galilee, ordering Tiberias and Tarichaeae to obey him, and gave him besides the city of Julias in Perea and the fourteen villages around it.
Affairs in Judea meanwhile went from bad to worse, for the country was once again filled with brigands and impostors who deceived the populace. Felix arrested and put to death many of these every day, along with the brigands themselves. He also captured alive, through a trick, Eleazar son of Deinaeus, who had organized the brigand band: promising him immunity from harm, Felix persuaded him to come to him, then had him bound and sent to Rome.
Felix also harbored a grudge against the high priest Jonathan, because Jonathan had repeatedly urged him to govern the affairs of Judea more competently, so that Felix himself would not incur blame from the populace, since it was Jonathan who had asked that he be sent from Caesar as procurator of Judea. Felix therefore looked for a way to remove this man who was becoming a constant irritation to him — for continual admonition weighs heavily on those bent on wrongdoing. And so, for this reason, Felix persuaded Doras, a Jerusalemite and Jonathan's most trusted friend, promising him a large sum of money, to bring the brigands upon Jonathan to kill him. Doras agreed and arranged for the murder to be carried out by the brigands in this manner: some of them went up into the city as though to worship God, carrying daggers concealed under their garments, and mingling with Jonathan's company they killed him.
Since this murder went unavenged, the brigands from then on went up to the festivals with complete impunity, carrying their iron weapons likewise concealed, and mingling with the crowds they killed some who were their personal enemies, and others whom they were hired to kill for money — not only throughout the rest of the city but even within the temple itself, for they dared to slaughter there too, not even reckoning this an act of impiety. This, I believe, is why God, in hatred of their wickedness, turned away from our city and, no longer judging the temple a pure dwelling for himself, brought the Romans upon us and cast purifying fire upon the city, and laid slavery upon us together with our wives and children — wishing, by these calamities, to bring us to our senses.
Such were the works of impiety with which the brigands filled the city. Meanwhile impostors and deceivers persuaded the crowd to follow them out into the desert, promising to display clear wonders and signs wrought according to God's providence. Many who were persuaded paid the penalty for their folly, for Felix had them brought back and punished. At this same time a man arrived in Jerusalem from Egypt, claiming to be a prophet, and he advised the common people to accompany him to the mountain called the Mount of Olives, which lies opposite the city at a distance of five stadia. He declared that he wished to show them from there how, at his command, the walls of Jerusalem would fall, and through them he promised to provide them entry into the city. When Felix learned of this he ordered the soldiers to take up arms, and setting out from Jerusalem with a large force of cavalry and infantry he attacked the followers of the Egyptian, killing four hundred of them and taking two hundred alive. The Egyptian himself escaped from the battle and vanished.
Once again the brigands incited the populace to war against the Romans, telling them to obey them in nothing, and they burned and plundered the villages of those who would not comply. A conflict also arose between the Jews living in Caesarea and the Syrians there over equal civic rights. The Jews claimed precedence on the ground that Herod, the founder of Caesarea, had been a king of Jewish descent, while the Syrians, though conceding the point about Herod, maintained that the city had formerly been called Strato's Tower, and that at that time not a single Jew had lived there as a resident. On hearing this the governors of the province seized the leaders of the disturbance on both sides, had them scourged, and thereby suppressed the unrest for a while.
But the Jews of the city, emboldened by their wealth and consequently contemptuous of the Syrians, hurled abuse at them, expecting to provoke them. The Syrians, though inferior in wealth, took great pride in the fact that most of those serving in the Roman garrison there were Caesareans or Sebastenes; for a time they too merely insulted the Jews in words, but then they began throwing stones at each other, until many on both sides were wounded and fell — though the Jews had the better of it. When Felix saw that the rivalry had become a kind of open warfare, he rushed forward and urged the Jews to stop; when they would not obey, he armed the soldiers and set them loose upon them, killing many and taking still more alive, and he allowed the soldiers to plunder some houses in the city that were full of great wealth. The more moderate and prominent among the Jews, fearing for themselves, appealed to Felix to recall the soldiers by trumpet-signal, to spare the rest of them, and to grant them an opportunity to repent of what had happened. Felix was persuaded.
At this time King Agrippa gave the high priesthood to Ismael, son of Phabi. A quarrel then broke out between the chief priests on one side and the ordinary priests and the leading men of the Jerusalem populace on the other: each of them gathered a band of the boldest and most revolutionary men and set himself up as their leader, and in their clashes they reviled one another and threw stones. There was no one to check them, but as in a city with no one in charge these things were done with impunity. Such shamelessness and boldness overtook the chief priests that they even dared to send slaves to the threshing floors to seize the tithes owed to the ordinary priests, with the result that some of the priests who were in want died of starvation. So completely did the violence of these factions override all justice.
When Porcius Festus was sent by Nero to succeed Felix, the leading men among the Jews dwelling in Caesarea went up to Rome to accuse Felix, and he would certainly have paid the penalty for his crimes against the Jews had not Nero yielded to the earnest pleading of his brother Pallas, whom he held in the highest honor at that time. And the leading Syrians in Caesarea persuaded Beryllus — who was Nero's tutor and was entrusted with the office of secretary for Greek correspondence — with a large sum of money, to request from Nero a letter annulling the Jews' equal civic rights with them. Beryllus made his appeal to the emperor and succeeded in having the letter written. This letter became the source of the calamities that afterward befell our nation, for when the Jews of Caesarea learned of what had been written, they clung all the more fiercely to their quarrel with the Syrians, until at last they kindled the war.
On Festus's arrival in Judea, it happened that Judea was being ravaged by the brigands, all its villages being burned and plundered. And the so-called sicarii — for these too are brigands — multiplied especially at that time; they used daggers similar in size to the Persian akinakes, but curved, and resembling what the Romans call sicae, from which these brigands took their name, and they killed many people. For mingling with the crowds at the festivals, as I have said before, among the multitudes streaming into the city from every quarter for the sake of worship, they easily slaughtered whomever they wished, and often they even came armed to the villages of their enemies, plundering and setting them on fire. Festus sent a force of cavalry and infantry against those who had been deceived by a certain impostor promising them deliverance and an end to their troubles if they would follow him into the desert, and the soldiers sent destroyed both the deceiver himself and those who had followed him.
At this same time King Agrippa built, in the palace at Jerusalem near the Xystus, a chamber of extraordinary size. This palace had been built long before by the sons of Hasmonaeus, and being situated on high ground it afforded those who wished to look out from it a most delightful view of the city — a view the king desired, and from there, as he reclined, he could watch what was done in the temple. When the leading men of Jerusalem saw this, they were deeply angered, for it was not our ancestral custom for what took place in the temple, and especially the sacred rites, to be overlooked. They therefore built a high wall on the portico that stood within the inner temple, facing west. This wall not only cut off the view from the king's banquet hall, but also from the western portico of the outer temple, where the Romans used to keep watch during the festivals because of the temple. This angered both King Agrippa and, still more, Festus the procurator, and he ordered them to tear it down.
They, however, begged permission to send envoys to Nero about the matter, saying they could not endure to go on living if any part of the temple were demolished. Festus granted this, and they sent to Nero ten of their leading men, together with Ismael the high priest and Helcias the treasurer. Nero, after hearing them out, not only forgave what had been done but even permitted the structure to remain standing, granting this favor to his wife Poppaea, who was God-fearing and had interceded for the Jews; and she ordered the ten men to depart, but kept Helcias and Ismael with her as hostages. When the king learned of this, he gave the high priesthood to Joseph, son of the high priest Simon, called Cabi. Caesar then sent Albinus to Judea as procurator, on learning of the death of Festus, and the king took away the priesthood from Joseph and gave the succession to the office to Ananus, son of Ananus.
This elder Ananus, they say, was the most fortunate of men, for he had five sons, and all of them, as it happened, served as high priest to God — he himself having enjoyed that honor for the longest time before them, a thing that had never happened to any other of our high priests. But the younger Ananus, who as we have said had received the high priesthood, was of a bold and reckless disposition beyond others, and he followed the school of the Sadducees, who are more savage than all other Jews in judging offenders, as I have already shown. Being, then, a man of this sort, Ananus thought he had a favorable opportunity, since Festus had died and Albinus was still on his way. He convened a council of judges and brought before it the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, James by name, and certain others, and having accused them of transgressing the law, he handed them over to be stoned.
But those of the city who were considered the most fair-minded and strict in observance of the law were angered at this, and sent secretly to the king, urging him to write to Ananus that he should do no such thing again, since even this first action had not been proper. Some of them also went to meet Albinus, who was on his way from Alexandria, and explained to him that Ananus had had no right to convene a council without his consent. Albinus, persuaded by what they said, wrote to Ananus in anger, threatening to punish him. And King Agrippa, because of this, deposed him from the high priesthood, after he had held office for three months, and appointed Jesus, son of Damneus, in his place.
When Albinus arrived in Jerusalem, he exerted every effort and diligence to bring peace to the country, destroying most of the sicarii. The high priest Ananias, meanwhile, grew daily in reputation and was held in high honor and favor by the citizens, for he was skilled at amassing wealth; every day he cultivated Albinus and the high priest with gifts. But he had servants of a thoroughly wicked sort, who consorted with the boldest men and went to the threshing floors to seize by force the tithes belonging to the priests, not refraining from beating those who would not give them up. The chief priests behaved just like his servants, with no one able to stop them, and it came about that those priests who had of old been supported by the tithes now died for lack of food.
Once again the sicarii, during the festival then in progress, entered the city by night and seized alive the secretary of the captain Eleazar — this man being a son of the high priest Ananias — and bound him and led him away. They then sent word to Ananias that they would release the secretary to him if he could persuade Albinus to release ten of their comrades who had been captured. Ananias, under this compulsion, persuaded Albinus and obtained what he asked. This was the beginning of greater troubles, for the brigands now devised every scheme to seize members of Ananias's household, and, repeatedly seizing men alive, would not release them until they had recovered some of the sicarii in exchange; and being again numerous, they grew bold once more and ravaged the whole country.
At this same time King Agrippa, having enlarged the city called Caesarea Philippi, renamed it Neronias in honor of Nero, and he presented the people of Berytus with a theater built at great expense, along with the annual spectacles held there, spending vast sums on this — for he gave grain to the populace and distributed oil, and adorned the whole city with dedications of statues and copies of ancient images, transferring there almost the entire ornament of his kingdom. This aroused the hatred of his subjects against him, because their own possessions were being stripped away to adorn a foreign city.
Jesus, son of Gamaliel, then received the succession to the high priesthood from the king, who took it from Jesus, son of Damneus, and because of this a quarrel broke out between them, for each formed a faction of the boldest men, and often, from mutual abuse, they came close to throwing stones. Ananias surpassed the rest in wealth, winning over those ready to take bribes. Costobarus...
Saulus and his companions, meanwhile, gathered a rabble of ruffians on their own account. They were of royal blood, and enjoyed favor because of their kinship with Agrippa, but they were violent men, quite ready to plunder the property of the weak. From that time especially our city began to sicken, as everything went from bad to worse. When Albinus heard that his successor Gessius Florus was about to arrive, he wished to appear to have done the people of Jerusalem some service, so he brought out the prisoners and ordered the execution of all those manifestly deserving death, while those who had been thrown into jail on some slight or chance charge he released after taking money from them privately. In this way the prison was cleared of its inmates, but the countryside was filled with bandits.
As for the Levites — this is one of our tribes — those of them who were singers of hymns persuaded the king to convene the Sanhedrin and grant them permission to wear linen robes on equal terms with the priests, arguing that it would suit the years of his reign to be remembered for an innovation. Nor did they fail in their request: with the consent of those attending the Sanhedrin, the king allowed the hymn-singers to set aside their former dress and wear linen of whatever kind they wished. He also permitted a portion of that tribe who served in the Temple to learn the hymns, as they had requested. All of this ran contrary to the ancestral laws, and transgressing them could not go unpunished.
By this time the Temple had already been completed. The people, seeing that the workmen — more than eighteen thousand of them — were idle and would be left without wages, since they earned their living from work on the Temple, and the king unwilling to keep money in reserve for fear of the Romans but wishing to provide for the workmen and use the treasury funds for their benefit — for even a man who worked but one hour of the day received his wage for it at once — persuaded the king to rebuild the eastern portico. This portico stood outside the Temple proper, set in a deep ravine, four hundred cubits high, its walls built of squared, very white stone, each block twenty cubits long and six high — the work of King Solomon, who first built the whole Temple. The king, who had been entrusted by Claudius Caesar with the oversight of the Temple, considered that while any structure is easy to tear down, it is difficult to rebuild, and all the more so in the case of this portico, since it would require much time and much money for the work; he therefore refused those who asked for this, though he did not prevent the paving of the city with white stone. He also removed the high priesthood from Jesus son of Gamaliel and gave it to Matthias son of Theophilus, in whose term the war of the Jews against the Romans began.
I think it necessary, and fitting to this history, to give an account of the high priests — how they began, who is entitled to receive this honor, and how many there have been down to the end of the war. First of all, they say, Aaron the brother of Moses served as high priest to God, and after his death his sons succeeded him, and from them the honor passed down to their descendants without interruption. Hence it is our ancestral custom that no one may receive the high priesthood of God except one of the blood of Aaron, and no one of another family — not even a king, should he happen to be one — will obtain the high priesthood. In all, counting from Aaron, as we have said, the first to hold the office, down to Phanasus, who was appointed high priest by the rebels during the war, there were eighty-three.
Of these, thirteen served as high priests during the years in the wilderness under Moses, while the tent which Moses built for God was standing, down to the arrival in Judea, where King Solomon raised the temple to God. At first they held the high priesthood for life, but later they succeeded one another while the previous holder was still living. These thirteen, who were descendants of the two sons of Aaron, received the honor by succession. Their government was at first aristocratic, then monarchic, and thirdly royal. The number of years during which these thirteen ruled, from the day our fathers left Egypt under Moses down to the building of the temple which King Solomon raised in Jerusalem, is six hundred and twelve.
After those thirteen high priests, eighteen others held the high priesthood, succeeding to it from King Solomon in Jerusalem, until Nebuchadnezzar king of the Babylonians made war on the city, burned the temple, and carried our nation off to Babylon, taking the high priest Josadek captive. The period of their priesthood was four hundred sixty-six years, six months, and ten days, the Jews already being ruled by kings during this time. After the seventy years of captivity following the destruction by the Babylonians had passed, Cyrus king of the Persians released the Jews from Babylon to their own land again and permitted the rebuilding of the temple.
Then Jesus son of Josedek, one of those who returned from captivity, received the high priesthood. He himself held it, and his descendants after him, fifteen in all, down to King Antiochus Eupator, and their government was democratic for four hundred fourteen years. Antiochus, mentioned above, and his general Lysias were the first to depose Onias, surnamed Menelaus, from the high priesthood, putting him to death at Beroea, and they installed Jakimos as high priest, one of Aaron's line but not of that particular house. For this reason Onias, the cousin of the deceased Onias and bearing his father's name, went to Egypt, and by friendship with Ptolemy Philometor and his wife Cleopatra persuaded them to let him build a temple to God similar to the one in Jerusalem in the district of Heliopolis, and to install him as its high priest.
But of the temple built in Egypt we have often spoken. Jakimos held the high priesthood for three years and then died. No one succeeded him, and the city remained seven years without a high priest. Then the descendants of the sons of Hasmonaeus, entrusted with the leadership of the nation and having made war on the Macedonians, appointed Jonathan high priest, who ruled for seven years. When he died through the plot and ambush contrived by Trypho, as we have related earlier, his brother Simon received the high priesthood.
He too was treacherously destroyed at a banquet by his son-in-law, and was succeeded by his son, named Hyrcanus, who held the priesthood one year longer than his brother — thirty-one years — and, having enjoyed this honor, died in old age, leaving the succession to Judas, also called Aristobulus. His brother Alexander inherited it in turn, and though he died of disease, he had held the priesthood together with the kingship, for Judas had been the first to put on the diadem, for one year. Alexander, having reigned and served as priest for twenty-seven years, ended his life, entrusting to his wife Alexandra the appointment of the future high priest. She gave the high priesthood to Hyrcanus,
while she herself held the kingdom for nine years and then ended her life. Her son Hyrcanus held the high priesthood for the same length of time, for after her death his brother Aristobulus made war on him and, defeating him, took away his rule, while he himself both reigned as king and served as high priest of the nation. In the third year of his reign, and about as many months, Pompey came, took the city of Jerusalem by force, sent Aristobulus in chains to Rome with his children, and restored the high priesthood to Hyrcanus, entrusting him with the leadership of the nation but forbidding him to wear the diadem. Hyrcanus ruled twenty-four years in addition to the first nine. Then Barzapharnes and Pacorus,
the rulers of Parthia, crossed the Euphrates, made war on Hyrcanus, and took him captive, setting up Antigonus, son of Aristobulus, as king in his place. After he had ruled three years and three months, Sosius and Herod besieged and took him, and Antony had him put to death at Antioch. Herod, having received the kingdom from the Romans, no longer appointed high priests from the Hasmonean family,
but bestowed the honor on obscure men, only requiring that they be of priestly descent, with the single exception of Aristobulus. This Aristobulus, grandson of Hyrcanus who had been taken by the Parthians, he appointed high priest and married to his sister Mariamme, hoping thereby to win the goodwill of the people toward himself through the memory of Hyrcanus. Then, fearing that everyone would turn toward Aristobulus, he had him drowned at Jericho, contriving his death
while he was swimming, as we have already related. After him he no longer entrusted the high priesthood to the descendants of the sons of Hasmonaeus. His son Archelaus, and after him the Romans, who took over the government of the Jews, followed the same practice regarding the appointment of priests as Herod had. So those who served as high priests from the time of Herod down to the day on which Titus took and burned the temple and the city number twenty-eight in all, and the period of their tenure is one hundred seven years. Some of them held office while Herod was king and while his son Archelaus ruled, but after their deaths the government became an aristocracy, and the leadership of the nation was entrusted to the high priests. So much, then, for the high priests.
Gessius Florus, who was sent as Albinus's successor by Nero, filled the Jews with countless evils. He was by birth from Clazomenae, and had married a wife named Cleopatra, through whose friendship with Poppaea, Nero's wife — a woman whose wickedness matched his own — he obtained his position. He proved so wicked and violent in his exercise of power that, because of the extremity
of his crimes, the Jews came to praise Albinus as a benefactor by comparison. For Albinus at least concealed his wickedness and took care not to be caught out entirely, but Gessius Florus, as if he had been sent on display to exhibit wickedness, paraded his lawless acts against our nation openly, omitting no form of plunder nor of unjust punishment. He was unmoved by pity and insatiable for gain of every kind, so much so
that even the meanest sums were no different to him than the greatest, and he even took bandits into partnership; for many practiced banditry without fear, confident that they had guaranteed safety from him in exchange for a share of the spoils. Nor was even this the limit of the matter, for the unfortunate Jews, unable to endure the devastations caused by the bandits, were forced to abandon their own homes and flee, all of them thinking it better to go and live somewhere
among foreigners. What need is there to say more? It was Florus who forced us to take up war against the Romans, we judging it better to perish all at once than by degrees. And indeed the war took its beginning in the second year of Florus's administration, the twelfth of Nero's reign. But all that we were compelled to do, and all that we endured, may be learned in precise detail
by those who wish to consult the books I have written on the Jewish War. Here, then, I shall bring my Antiquities to a close, after which I began to write the War. This work covers the tradition from the first creation of man down to the twelfth year of Nero's reign, and all that befell us, the Jews, in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, all
that we suffered at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians, and what the Persians and Macedonians, and after them the Romans, did to us — for I believe I have set it all down with precision. I have also taken care to preserve the record of the high priests over a span of two thousand years, and I have made accurate the succession of the kings, reporting their deeds and their forms of government, whether monarchies
or dynasties, just as the sacred books record all these things; for this is what I promised to do at the beginning of my history. Now, having brought what I proposed to a conclusion, I may say with confidence that no one else, whether Jew or foreigner, could have wished to and been able to set forth this work in Greek with such precision. My own countrymen acknowledge that I surpass them by far in
our native learning, and I have also taken pains to share in Greek letters, acquiring a grasp of grammar, though long-standing native custom prevented precision in pronunciation. For among us, those who have mastered the languages of many nations are not admired, since this pursuit is considered common, open not only to free men of any station but even to slaves who wish it; only
those who know the laws accurately, and are able to interpret the meaning of the sacred writings, are credited with wisdom. That is why, though many have labored at this discipline, scarcely two or three have succeeded and reaped the fruit of their labors at once. Perhaps it will not seem invidious to give a brief account of my own family and of the events of my life,
while I still have those living who can either refute or bear witness to it. With this I shall end the Antiquities, comprised in twenty books and sixty thousand lines, and, if God permits, I will run once more in summary over the war and the events that have befallen us down to the present day, which is the thirteenth year of the reign of Domitian Caesar, and, in my own case, the fifty-sixth
year since my birth. I have also resolved to write, according to our Jewish beliefs, a work in four books concerning God and his essence, and concerning the laws — why by them some things are permitted to us and others forbidden.

======== Against Apion — Book 1 ========

I believe I have already made sufficiently clear, in my work on our ancient history, most excellent Epaphroditus, to those who have read it, the matter of the origin of our nation, the Jews — that it is extremely ancient, that it took its own original form independently of others, and how it came to settle in the land we now hold, a history covering some five thousand years, which I set down in Greek on the basis of our sacred books.
But since I observe a good many people paying attention to the slanders spread by certain ill-disposed persons, and refusing to believe what I have written about our antiquity, treating as proof that our nation is a recent one the fact that it has not been thought worthy of mention by the distinguished Greek historians, I have thought it necessary to write briefly about all these matters: to expose the deliberate falsehoods of those who slander us out of malice, to correct the ignorance of others, and to instruct everyone who wants to know the truth about our antiquity. As witnesses for what I say I will call on those judged by the Greeks themselves to be the most trustworthy authorities on all antiquity, while those who have written falsely and abusively about us I will expose out of their own mouths.
I will also try to give the reasons why not many Greeks have mentioned our nation in their histories, and at the same time I will bring to light those who did not omit our history, for the benefit of those who do not know this, or pretend not to.
First of all, then, I am utterly amazed at people who think that for the oldest events one must attend to the Greeks alone and learn the truth from them, while distrusting both us and the rest of mankind. I find the very opposite to be the case — if indeed one ought not to follow empty opinions but derive what is just from the facts themselves. Among the Greeks everything, one might say, will be found to be new — a thing of yesterday or the day before — I mean the founding of their cities, the invention of their arts, and the compiling of their law codes; and virtually the newest thing of all among them is their concern with writing history. As for the Egyptians, the Chaldaeans, and the Phoenicians — I leave aside for the moment placing ourselves in their company — they themselves, of course, admit to having the oldest and most enduring tradition of record-keeping.
For all these peoples inhabit lands least exposed to destruction from the surrounding climate, and they took great care that nothing done among them should go unremembered, but that it should always be consecrated in public records by their wisest men. The region of Greece, by contrast, has been overtaken by countless disasters that have wiped out the memory of past events, and since each generation was always establishing new ways of life, they supposed that everything began with themselves. It was late, and only with difficulty, that they came to learn the nature of writing. Those, at any rate, who wish to claim the oldest use of it pride themselves on having learned it from the Phoenicians and from Cadmus. Yet not even from that time could anyone point to a surviving record preserved either in temples or in public monuments — seeing that even about those who campaigned against Troy, so many years later, there has been great uncertainty and inquiry as to whether they used writing at all, and the truth prevails rather on the side of those who hold that the men of that time did not know the kind of writing now in use.
In general, no writing is found among the Greeks that is agreed to be older than the poetry of Homer, and he plainly lived even later than the Trojan War; indeed they say that not even he left his own poetry in writing, but that it was pieced together later from memory, out of the songs, and for this reason contains many discrepancies. As for those who undertook to write histories among them — I mean Cadmus of Miletus, Acusilaus of Argos, and any others said to have come after him — they preceded the Persian expedition against Greece by only a short time.
Moreover, the first among the Greeks to philosophize about the heavens and things divine — men such as Pherecydes of Syros, Pythagoras, and Thales — all agree, unanimously, that they became pupils of the Egyptians and the Chaldaeans and wrote only a little; and yet these writings are considered by the Greeks to be the oldest of all, and even so they can scarcely bring themselves to believe they were written by those men. How, then, is it not absurd that the Greeks should be so puffed up with the notion that they alone know antiquity and accurately hand down the truth about it? Who could not easily learn from their own writers that they wrote with no sure knowledge, but each simply conjectured about the facts as he saw fit? For the most part they refute one another through their own books, and do not hesitate to say the most contradictory things about the very same events.
I would be wasting effort teaching people who know better than I do how much Hellanicus disagrees with Acusilaus about genealogies, how much Acusilaus corrects Hesiod, how Ephorus shows Hellanicus to be mistaken in most matters, how Timaeus does the same to Ephorus, and those who came after Timaeus to him, and everyone to Herodotus. Nor did Timaeus think it worth agreeing with Antiochus, Philistus, or Callias about Sicilian affairs; nor again did the writers of the Atthides agree with one another about Attic affairs, or the historians of Argos about Argive affairs. And what need is there to speak of individual cities and lesser matters, when the most reputable writers disagree even about the Persian expedition and what happened in the course of it, and Thucydides himself is accused by some of falsehood, even though he is thought to have written the most accurate history of his own time?
There are, perhaps, many other reasons that might occur to anyone wishing to inquire into such disagreement, but I attribute the greatest weight to the two I am about to state, and I will speak first of the one that seems to me the more decisive: from the very beginning the Greeks took no care to keep public records of events as they occurred, and this above all gave those who later wished to write about early times both the opportunity to go astray and license to lie. For it was not only among the rest of the Greeks that record-keeping was neglected; not even among the Athenians, who are said to be indigenous to their land and devoted to learning, is anything of the sort found to have existed — rather, they say the oldest of their public documents are the laws on homicide written for them by Draco, who lived only a little before the tyranny of Peisistratus. As for the Arcadians, what need is there to speak of their boasted antiquity, when even after that time they were barely taught letters at all?
Since, then, no record had been laid down beforehand capable of instructing those who wished to learn and of refuting liars, great disagreement arose among their historians. A second cause, in addition to this, must be set down: those who set out to write did not concern themselves with the truth, although that is always the profession put forward, but displayed their rhetorical power instead; and depending on the manner by which each supposed he would outdo the rest in this respect, some turned to telling myths, others sought favor by praising cities or kings, while others still turned to attacking events or other writers, thinking they would win renown that way. In short, they persist in doing the very thing most opposed to history. For the mark of true history is that everyone should say and write the same things about the same events; whereas these men, by writing the same events differently, imagined they would thereby appear the most truthful of all.
For eloquence, then, and skill in that art, we must concede the field to the Greek writers; but not for the true history of ancient times, and especially not for the history proper to each nation's own affairs. That among the Egyptians and Babylonians, from the most remote ages, the care of record-keeping was entrusted to the priests, who made it their special study, and that among the Babylonians it was the Chaldaeans, and that among those who had the most contact with the Greeks the Phoenicians made use of writing both for the management of everyday affairs and for the transmission of public business — all this, since everyone concedes it, I think I may pass over.
But about our own ancestors — that they showed the same, or rather even greater, care in these matters of record-keeping, entrusting this task to the high priests and to the prophets, and that it has been preserved with great accuracy down to our own time, and — if I may say something bolder still — will continue to be preserved, I will try to show briefly. For not only did they from the beginning appoint to this office the best men, those devoted to the service of God, but they took care also that the priestly line should remain unmixed and pure. A man who is to share in the priesthood must father his children by a wife of his own nation, without regard to money or any other honors, but must examine his lineage, tracing his descent from the ancient records and producing many witnesses. And this we do not only in Judaea itself, but wherever there exists a body of our people, there too the priests maintain the same rigor concerning marriages.
I mean those in Egypt and in Babylon, and wherever else in the rest of the inhabited world any of the priestly line are scattered: they write to Jerusalem, setting down the name of the bride's father, and of her ancestors further back, and who the witnesses are. And if war should intervene — as has in fact happened many times, when Antiochus Epiphanes invaded the country, and again under Pompey the Great and Quintilius Varus, and especially in our own time — the priests who survive draw up new registers from the old records and examine the women left to them, for they do not admit women who have been taken captive, suspecting that such women have often had relations with men of another nation.
The greatest proof of this rigor is this: our high priests, for two thousand years now, are recorded in the registers as sons of their fathers by name. If any of the requirements I have mentioned is transgressed, the offender is forbidden to approach the altars or take part in any other sacred rite. It is reasonable, then — indeed it is necessary — since no one has the liberty to set down what he pleases, and since there is no disagreement in what is written, but only the prophets, learning the highest and most ancient matters through the inspiration that comes from God, and setting down clearly the events of their own times as they occurred — that we do not have countless volumes among us in disagreement and conflict with one another, but only twenty-two books, containing the record of all time, which are justly believed to be divine.
Of these, five are the books of Moses, comprising the laws and the tradition of human history from the creation down to his own death — a span of a little under three thousand years. From the death of Moses to the reign of Artaxerxes, who ruled the Persians after Xerxes, the prophets who came after Moses wrote the history of the events of their own times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and instructions for human conduct.
From Artaxerxes to our own time, everything has indeed been written down, but it has not been held worthy of the same trust as what preceded it, because the exact succession of the prophets ceased. It is plain from our actual conduct how we regard our own writings: though so long an age has now passed, no one has dared to add anything to them, to take anything away, or to alter anything; and it is instinctive in every Jew, from the very day of his birth, to regard them as decrees of God, to abide by them, and, if need be, gladly to die for them.
Many prisoners of our nation have often been seen, time and again, enduring tortures and every form of death in the theaters rather than let slip a single word against the laws and the records that accompany them. What Greek would ever endure that for the sake of his own writings? Not even to prevent the destruction of every one of their books would any Greek suffer the least injury, for they regard such writings merely as speeches composed at the whim of their authors — and they hold this opinion, rightly enough, even about the older writers, since they see that some among their own contemporaries are bold enough to write about events at which they were not present themselves, and about which they took no trouble to inquire from those who knew. Indeed, concerning the war that has just now taken place among us, certain men have published so-called histories without either visiting the places concerned or approaching anywhere near the events as they occurred, but have strung together a few things from hearsay and, with the utmost impudence, abused the very name of history.
I, however, have composed a true account of the entire war and of all that happened in its several parts, having myself been present at all the events. For I commanded those of our people called Galileans for as long as resistance was possible, and I was then taken prisoner by the Romans; and Vespasian and Titus, keeping me under guard, compelled me to remain constantly in attendance on them — bound at first, but later released — and I was sent along with Titus from Alexandria to the siege of Jerusalem. During that time nothing that took place escaped my knowledge, for I observed carefully and recorded what happened in the Roman camp, and I alone understood what was reported by the deserters. Later, having gained some leisure at Rome, with the whole undertaking already prepared, I made use of certain assistants for the Greek language and in this way composed my account of the events.
Such was my confidence in the truth of what I wrote that I thought it right to take, first of all, the commanders of the war themselves, Vespasian and Titus, as my witnesses; for it was to them that I gave the books first, and after them I sold copies to many of the Romans who had served in the war, and to many of our own people who also shared in Greek learning — men such as Julius Archelaus, the most honorable Herod, and the king himself, the most admirable Agrippa. All of these bore witness that I had scrupulously upheld the truth, for they would not have held back or kept silent had I, through ignorance or favoritism, altered or omitted anything that had happened.
Yet certain worthless men have undertaken to discredit my history, as though it were an exercise set in a school
young men's exercise in outlandish accusation and slander, when they ought to understand this: that anyone who promises others a record of true events must first have accurate knowledge of them himself, either by having followed the events as they happened or by inquiring of those who knew them. That, I think, is exactly what I have done in both of my works. The Antiquities I translated, as I said, from our sacred writings, since I am a priest by birth and have had a share in the philosophy contained in those writings; and the history of the war I wrote as one who took an active part in many of its events, was an eyewitness of most of them, and was ignorant of absolutely nothing that was said or done. How, then, could anyone fail to judge as reckless those who have undertaken to contend with me over the truth—men who, even if they claim to have consulted the memoirs of the emperors, were certainly not present, as I was, at the actual operations of our opponents?
On this subject, then, I have felt obliged to make this digression, wanting to expose the carelessness of those who profess to write history. Now that I have, I think, made it sufficiently clear that the recording of ancient events is a practice native to barbarian peoples rather than to the Greeks, I want first to say a little against those who attempt to argue
that our people's standing is a recent one, on the ground that, as they claim, nothing is said about us by the Greek historians. After that I will present the testimonies to our antiquity drawn from the writings of other peoples, and I will show that those who have slandered our nation are themselves guilty of far worse slanders in what they say. We, then, do not inhabit a coastal country, nor do we take pleasure in trade or in the mingling with others that trade brings, but our cities are built far from the sea, and since we occupy good land we work hard at cultivating it, caring above all else for the rearing of our children and for keeping our laws and the piety handed down through them, which we have made the most essential business of our whole life. Given all this, together with the peculiar character of our way of life, there was nothing in ancient times
to bring us into contact with the Greeks, the way the exports and imports of the Egyptians brought them into contact with others, or the way the inhabitants of the Phoenician coast, because of their love of profit, pursued shopkeeping and trade eagerly. Nor, unlike some other peoples, did our forefathers turn to piracy or to making war for the sake of gaining more, even though their country contained many tens of thousands of men who were far from cowardly. That is why the Phoenicians themselves, sailing to the Greeks for trade, quickly became known, and through them the Egyptians and all the other peoples from whom they carried cargo to the Greeks, crossing great seas, became known as well. The Medes, and later the Persians, became known once they had gained control of Asia, and some of the Persians even made expeditions into our own continent. The Thracians became known through their proximity and through the Scythian tribe, by way of those who sailed into the Pontus. In general, all the peoples who live along the sea, whether to the east or the west, became better known to those wishing to write anything, while those whose homes lay further inland remained largely unknown.
And this appears to have happened even in the case of Europe, where, although the city of Rome had long possessed such power and had accomplished such feats of war, neither Herodotus nor Thucydides nor any of their contemporaries makes any mention of it at all; it was only late, and with difficulty, that knowledge of the Romans made its way to the Greeks. Indeed, concerning the Gauls and the Iberians, even the most careful historians, Ephorus among them, were so ignorant that he supposes the Iberians, who inhabit so vast a part of the western world, to be a single city, and he has dared to write down customs that were neither practiced nor even spoken of among them, as though the Iberians actually followed them. The cause of their ignorance of the truth was excessive isolation from other peoples, while the cause of their writing falsehoods was the wish to appear to know more than others.
Why, then, should it still seem surprising if our own nation was not widely known and gave no occasion for mention in the writings of others, settled as far as it was from the sea and having chosen to live in the way it did? Suppose, then, that we should claim the right to argue, on the ground that nothing is said about the Greeks in our own records, that their race is not ancient—surely everyone would laugh at us for bringing forward these very arguments I have just made, and would produce their neighboring peoples as witnesses to their antiquity. Well then, I too will try to do this. I will make use above all of the Egyptians and the Phoenicians as my witnesses, since no one could plausibly charge their testimony with falsehood, for they clearly show the greatest hostility toward us—the Egyptians as a whole, and among the Phoenicians, the Tyrians in particular. Concerning the Chaldeans, however, I cannot say the same thing, since they are actually the ancestors of our race, and because of this kinship they make mention of the Jews in their own records. Once I have presented the evidence on these points, I will go on to show which of the Greek writers have made mention of the Jews, so that our detractors may be left with no pretext at all for their dispute with us.
I will begin first with the Egyptian records. It is not possible to quote these directly, but Manetho was by birth an Egyptian who had a share in Greek education, as is clear from the fact that he wrote the history of his own country in the Greek language, translating it, as he himself says, from the sacred writings, and he shows Herodotus to have been wrong on many points of Egyptian history through ignorance. This Manetho, then, writes as follows about us in the second book of his Egyptian History. I will set down his own words, just as if I were bringing the man himself forward as a witness:
"There was a king of ours whose name was Timaios. In his reign, I do not know why, god was displeased with us, and unexpectedly, out of the regions toward the east, men of obscure race, growing bold, marched against our land and, with no resistance, seized it by force. Once they had subdued the rulers of the land, they thereafter burned our cities savagely, razed the temples of the gods, and treated all the native inhabitants with the utmost hostility, slaughtering some and leading the wives and children of others into slavery. In the end they even made one of their own number king, whose name was Salitis.
"This man settled in Memphis, exacting tribute from both Upper and Lower Egypt and leaving garrisons in the most suitable places. He secured the eastern regions especially, foreseeing that the Assyrians, once they grew more powerful, would desire and invade his kingdom. Finding in the Sethroite nome a city most favorably placed, lying east of the Bubastite branch of the river and called, after some ancient theology, Avaris, he rebuilt it and made it exceedingly strong with walls, settling in it a garrison of as many as two hundred and forty thousand armed men. He would come there in summer, partly to measure out grain rations and pay wages, and partly to drill his troops carefully in arms in order to intimidate foreign peoples. After a reign of nineteen years, he died.
"After him another king reigned for forty-four years, called Beon. After him another, Apachnas, for thirty-six years and seven months. Then Apophis for sixty-one years, and Iannas for fifty years and one month. After all these, Assis, for forty-nine years and two months. These six were the first rulers among them, and they constantly longed to root out Egypt still further. Their whole nation was called Hyksos, that is, 'shepherd kings'; for in the sacred language hyk means 'king,' and sos in the common dialect means 'shepherd' or 'shepherds,' and combined in this way the word becomes Hyksos. Some, however, say they were Arabs."
In another copy it is said that this term does not signify 'kings' by the word hyk, but on the contrary indicates 'captive shepherds'; for hyk in turn, in Egyptian, and hak when aspirated, plainly mean 'captives.' This explanation seems to me the more plausible one, and closer to ancient tradition.
"These kings so named, and those called shepherds, together with their descendants, held power over Egypt, he says, for five hundred and eleven years. After this, he says, the kings of the Thebaid and of the rest of Egypt rose up against the shepherds, and a great and long war broke out between them. Under a king whose name was Misphragmuthosis, he says, the shepherds were defeated and driven out of the rest of Egypt entirely, and were confined to a place with a circuit of ten thousand arouras; the name of the place was Avaris.
"Manetho says that the shepherds surrounded this entire place with a great and strong wall, so as to keep all their possessions and their plunder secure within it. Misphragmuthosis's son Thummosis, he says, attempted to take them by siege, by force, with an army of four hundred and eighty thousand men laying siege to the walls; but when he gave up the siege, he made an agreement with them, that they should leave Egypt and go wherever they wished, all of them unharmed. Under the terms of this agreement, no fewer than two hundred and forty thousand of them, together with their households and possessions, made their way out of Egypt, through the desert, into Syria. There, fearing the power of the Assyrians, who then ruled over Asia, they built a city in what is now called Judea, one large enough to hold so many tens of thousands of people, and named it Jerusalem."
In another of his books on Egyptian history, Manetho says that this same people, called shepherds, are recorded as 'captives' in their own sacred books—and rightly so, he says; for indeed our earliest ancestors practiced shepherding, since that was their traditional way of life, and because they lived as nomads they were called shepherds. They were also, in turn, recorded as 'captives' by the Egyptians not without reason, since our ancestor Joseph told the king of the Egyptians that he himself was a captive, and later, with the king's permission, sent for his brothers to come into Egypt. But I will make a more exact examination of these matters elsewhere.
For now I set down these Egyptian witnesses to our antiquity. I will next lay out, once again, how Manetho's chronology stands with respect to the order of dates. He speaks as follows: after the people of the shepherds had gone out of Egypt to Jerusalem, the king who drove them out of Egypt, Tethmosis, reigned for twenty-five years and four months after this, and died; and his son Chebron succeeded to the throne for thirteen years. After him, Amenophis for twenty years and seven months. His sister Amessis for twenty-one years and nine months. Her son Mephres for twelve years and nine months. His son Mephramuthosis for twenty-five years and ten months. His son Thmosis for nine years and eight months. His son Amenophis for thirty years and ten months. His son Orus for thirty-six years and five months. His daughter Acencheres for twelve years and one month. Her brother Rathotis for nine years.
His son Acencheres for twelve years and five months. His son, another Acencheres, for twelve years and three months. His son Harmais for four years and one month. His son Ramesses for one year and four months. His son Harmesses Miamoun for sixty-six years and two months. His son Amenophis for nineteen years and six months. His son Sethos, also called Ramesses, who possessed a strong force of cavalry and ships, appointed his brother Harmais governor of Egypt and vested him with all his other royal authority, except that he charged him not to wear the diadem, nor to wrong the queen, the mother of his children, and to keep away from the king's other concubines as well. He himself campaigned against Cyprus and Phoenicia, and then again against the Assyrians and the Medes, and subdued them all,
some by the spear and some without a fight, through fear of his great power; and, elated by his successes, he pressed on still more boldly, subjugating the cities and lands to the east. When a considerable time had passed, Harmais, who had been left behind in Egypt, recklessly did everything his brother had warned him not to do; for he seized the queen by force and continued shamelessly to make use of the other concubines as well, and, persuaded by his friends, he put on the diadem and set himself up against his brother. But the man appointed over the priests of Egypt wrote a letter and sent it to Sethosis, informing him of everything, and telling him that his brother Harmais had risen against him. Sethosis at once returned to Pelusium and took back control of his own kingdom. The country was named Egypt
after his own name; for he says that Sethos was called Aigyptos, and his brother Harmais was called Danaus. So much for Manetho. Now it is clear, once one reckons up the years he has stated, that the so-called shepherds—our own ancestors—left Egypt and settled this land three hundred and ninety-three years before Danaus arrived at Argos, even though the Argives consider Danaus their most ancient figure. Manetho, then, has borne witness for us to two of the greatest facts drawn from the Egyptian records: first, our arrival in Egypt from elsewhere, and second, our departure from there, so ancient in date that it preceded the events at Troy by roughly a thousand years. As for the further claims Manetho has added—not from the Egyptian records, but, as he himself admits, from unauthenticated legendary material—I will later refute them point by point, showing his implausible falsehoods.
I want now to turn from these matters to what is recorded among the Phoenicians concerning our people, and to present the testimonies drawn from them. Among the Tyrians there are, from very many years back, public records, carefully written and preserved, concerning events among them and their dealings with others worthy of remembrance. In these it is recorded that the temple in Jerusalem was built by King Solomon one hundred and forty-three years and eight months before the Tyrians founded Carthage. And the building of our temple was recorded among them not without reason; for Hiram, the king of the Tyrians,
was a friend of our king Solomon, having inherited his father's friendship for him. Eager to match Solomon in the splendor of the undertaking, he gave a hundred and twenty talents of gold, and had the finest timber cut from the mountain called Lebanon and sent for the roof. In return Solomon gave him many gifts, and in particular a territory of Galilee called Chabulon.
But it was above all their shared love of wisdom that drew the two men into friendship: they used to send each other riddles to solve, and in this exercise, as in everything else, Solomon proved the wiser. Many of the letters they exchanged are preserved among the Tyrians to this day. That I have not invented this account of the Tyrian records, I will cite as my witness Dius, a man trusted for the accuracy of his history of Phoenicia. He writes, in his histories of the Phoenicians, in these words:
"When Abibalus died, his son Hiram succeeded to the throne. He filled in the eastern quarter of the city and so enlarged it, and joined to the city the temple of Olympian Zeus, which had stood by itself on an island, by filling in the space between; he adorned it with gifts of gold, and went up to Lebanon to cut timber for the construction of the temples. They say that Solomon, ruler of Jerusalem, sent riddles to Hiram and asked to receive some from him in return, on the understanding that whoever failed to solve them would pay a sum of money to the other. Hiram agreed, and being unable to solve the riddles, spent a great deal of money as the penalty. He then had a certain Tyrian named Abdemon solve the riddles that had been proposed, and propose others of his own, which Solomon failed to solve, so that he in turn had to pay Hiram a large sum of money."
Such is the testimony Dius has given us on these matters. But I will also cite, in addition, Menander of Ephesus. He wrote of the deeds of each of the kings, both Greek and non-Greek, taking pains to learn their histories from the local records of each people. Writing, then, of the kings who had reigned in Tyre, when he comes to Hiram he says: "When Abibalus died, his son Hiram succeeded to his kingdom; he lived fifty-three years and reigned thirty-four.
He filled in the Eurychorus and dedicated the golden pillar in the temple of Zeus, and went and cut cedar timber from the mountain called Lebanon for the roofs of the temples; he tore down the old temples and built new ones, to Heracles and to Astarte, and he was the first to hold the raising-festival of Heracles, in the month of Peritius. He also campaigned against the people of Utica, who were withholding their tribute; he subdued them and returned. In his time there was a young man named Abdemon, who always won the contests when Solomon, king of Jerusalem, set his riddles."
The chronology from this king down to the founding of Carthage is reckoned as follows: "When Hiram died, his son Baleazarus succeeded to the throne; he lived forty-three years and reigned seventeen. After him Abdastartus his son lived thirty-nine years and reigned nine. He was murdered by a conspiracy of the four sons of his nurse, of whom the eldest, Methusastartus son of Leastartus, became king; he lived fifty-four years and reigned twelve. After him his brother Astharymus lived fifty-eight years and reigned nine. He was killed by his brother Phelles,
who seized the throne and ruled eight months, having lived fifty years. He was killed by Ithobalus, priest of Astarte, who lived forty-eight years and reigned thirty-two. He was succeeded by his son Balezorus, who lived forty-five years and reigned six. He was succeeded by his son Mettenus, who lived thirty-two years and reigned twenty-nine. He was succeeded by Pygmalion, who lived fifty-eight years
and reigned forty-seven. In the seventh year of his reign his sister fled and built a city in Libya called Carthage. The whole period from the reign of Hiram to the founding of Carthage comes to one hundred and fifty-five years and eight months. And since the temple in Jerusalem was built in the twelfth year of Hiram's reign, from the building of the temple to the founding of Carthage there are one hundred and forty-three years and eight months."
What further need, then, is there to add to this Phoenician testimony? The truth stands strongly confirmed, and it is plain that the arrival of our ancestors in this land came long before the building of the temple; for it was only after they had taken possession of the whole country by war that they built the temple. I have shown this clearly from our sacred books in my Antiquities.
I will now set out what the Chaldeans have recorded and related concerning us, which agrees in most particulars with our own writings. My witness for this is Berossus, a man of Chaldean birth, well known to those engaged in learning, since he was the one who published for the Greeks the Chaldean writings on astronomy and philosophy.
This Berossus, then, following the most ancient records, has given an account of the flood and of the destruction of mankind in it that agrees with that of Moses, and also of the ark in which Noah, the founder of our race, was saved when it came to rest on the peaks of the mountains of Armenia. Then, after listing Noah's descendants and giving their dates, he comes down to Nabopolassar, king of Babylon and of the Chaldeans, and in recounting his deeds tells how he sent his own son Nebuchadnezzar with a great force against Egypt and against our land, on learning that they had revolted, and how he conquered them all and burned the temple that was in Jerusalem, and removing our whole people
resettled them in Babylon, and it happened that the city lay desolate for seventy years, until the time of Cyrus, king of the Persians. He says that the Babylonian conquered Egypt, Syria, Phoenicia, and Arabia, surpassing in his achievements all the Chaldean and Babylonian kings who had reigned before him. (Then, a little further on, Berossus again sets this out in his history of antiquity.) I will quote the very words of Berossus, which run as follows:
"When his father Nabopolassar heard that the satrap set over Egypt and the regions of Coele-Syria and Phoenicia had revolted, being no longer able to endure the hardship himself, he put some of his forces under the command of his son Nebuchadnezzar, who was still a young man, and sent him against the rebel. Nebuchadnezzar engaged the rebel in battle,
defeated him, and brought the country back again under their rule from the outset. It happened that at this same time his father Nabopolassar fell ill in the city of the Babylonians and died, having reigned twenty-one years. When Nebuchadnezzar learned of his father's death not long after, he settled affairs in Egypt
and the rest of the region, and entrusted the captives of the Jews, Phoenicians, Syrians, and the peoples of Egypt to some of his friends, to bring back to Babylonia together with the heaviest part of the army and the rest of the spoils, while he himself set out with a small escort and made his way through the desert to Babylon. There he found affairs being managed by the Chaldeans and the kingdom preserved
by the best of them, and took possession of the whole of his father's realm. To the captives who arrived he assigned settlements in the most suitable places in Babylonia, while he himself, from the spoils of the war, magnificently adorned the temple of Bel and the rest, and having added to the city that already existed a further city outside it, and having made it impossible for besiegers any longer
to divert the river against the city, he surrounded it with three walls on the inner side and three on the outer, some of baked brick and bitumen, some of the brick itself. And having fortified the city in a manner worthy of note and adorned its gates in a fashion befitting a sacred place, he added to his father's palace another palace adjoining it,
the height and the rest of whose magnificence it would perhaps take too long to describe if one went into detail, except to say that, immense and splendid as it was, it was completed in fifteen days. In this palace he built up high stone terraces, giving them the appearance of mountains, and planted them with trees of every kind, thus creating what is called the hanging garden, because his wife longed
for the mountain scenery in which she had been raised, in the region of Media." This is what he has recorded about the aforesaid king, and much more besides, in the third book of his Chaldean History, in which he criticizes the Greek historians for supposing, wrongly, that Babylon was founded by Semiramis of Assyria, and for falsely crediting her with the wonders built in it.
On these matters, then, the Chaldean record is to be regarded as trustworthy; moreover, in the archives of the Phoenicians there is recorded, in agreement with what Berossus says, an account of the king of the Babylonians, that he conquered both Syria and the whole of Phoenicia. On this point Philostratus agrees, in his histories, where he mentions the siege of Tyre, as does Megasthenes
in the fourth book of his Indica, in which he attempts to show that this same king of the Babylonians surpassed Heracles in courage and in the greatness of his deeds, saying that he conquered a large part of Libya and Iberia as well. As for what has already been said about the temple in Jerusalem, that it was burned by the Babylonians in their campaign and began to be rebuilt again once Cyrus had taken possession of the kingdom of Asia,
this will be clearly shown from what Berossus himself sets out; for in his third book he says: "Nebuchadnezzar, after beginning the wall I have mentioned, fell ill and died, having reigned forty-three years, and his son Evilmerodach became master of the kingdom. He governed affairs lawlessly and shamelessly, and was murdered
in a plot laid by his sister's husband, Neriglissar, after reigning two years. After his murder, Neriglissar, who had plotted against him, succeeded to power and reigned four years. His son Laborosoarchod took possession of the kingdom while still a boy, for nine months, but because he showed many vicious traits a plot was laid against him by his friends, and he was beaten to death. After his death, those who had conspired against him met together and jointly conferred the kingdom on a certain Nabonnedus, one of the Babylonians
who belonged to that same conspiracy. In his reign the walls along the river of the city of the Babylonians were faced with baked brick and bitumen. In the seventeenth year of his reign, Cyrus advanced out of Persia with a large force, and having subdued the whole of the rest of the kingdom, marched against Babylonia. When Nabonnedus learned of his approach, he went out to meet him
with his forces and gave battle, but was defeated and fled with a few men, and was shut up in the city of the Borsippeans. Cyrus took Babylon, and having ordered the outer walls of the city to be torn down, because it appeared to him a place that would be difficult to capture and troublesome to deal with, he set out for Borsippa to besiege Nabonnedus there. But Nabonnedus did not wait out the siege, and surrendered himself beforehand,
and Cyrus treated him kindly, giving him a residence in Carmania and sending him away from Babylonia. Nabonnedus then spent the rest of his life in that region and there ended his days." This account agrees in its truth with our own books; for it is written in them that Nebuchadnezzar, in the eighteenth year of his reign, laid waste our temple, and it lay unseen
for fifty years, and that in the second year of the reign of Cyrus its foundations were laid, and it was completed again in the second year of the reign of Darius. I will add also the records of the Phoenicians, for the abundance of proofs ought not to be left out. The reckoning of the years runs as follows: in the reign of king Ithobalus, Nebuchadnezzar besieged Tyre for thirteen years. After him Baal reigned ten years.
After him judges were appointed, and they held office as follows: Ecnibalus son of Baslechus, two months; Chelbes son of Abdaeus, ten months; Abbarus the high priest, three months; Myttynus and Gerastratus son of Abdelimus, judges, six years, during which time Balatorus reigned for one year. On his death they sent and summoned Merbalus from Babylon, and he reigned four years. On his death they summoned his brother Hiram, who reigned twenty years.
In his reign Cyrus held power over the Persians. So the whole period is fifty-four years and three months; for it was in the seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign that he began the siege of Tyre, and it was in the fourteenth year of Hiram's reign that Cyrus the Persian took power. The Chaldean and Tyrian records thus agree with our own writings about the temple, and the testimony I have set out concerning the antiquity of our nation is acknowledged and beyond dispute.
To those who are not excessively contentious, I think what has already been said will suffice. But for those who distrust the records of non-Greek peoples and insist on trusting only the Greeks, it is necessary to satisfy their demand as well, and to produce a good number of these too who were acquainted with our nation and who, whenever occasion arose, mentioned it and set it down in their own writings.
Pythagoras of Samos, then, a man of antiquity, and held to have surpassed all who have practiced philosophy in wisdom and in piety toward the divine, is clearly shown not only to have known of our institutions but even to have been for a long time an admirer of them. No writing of his own survives, it is true, but many have written accounts of him, and the most notable of these is
Hermippus, a man careful in all matters of history. He says, in the first of his books about Pythagoras, that Pythagoras, when one of his companions, named Calliphon, a Crotoniate by birth, had died, said that the man's soul stayed with him both night and day, and that he urged his followers not to pass over a spot where a donkey had knelt down, and to abstain from thirst-inducing waters, and from all
from cursing every kind of blasphemy. He then adds this as well: he did and said these things by imitating and transferring to himself the beliefs of the Jews and the Thracians. For it is truly said that this man transferred many Jewish practices into his own philosophy. Our people were not unknown in the past to the cities of the Greek world either, and many of our customs had already spread among some of them and were valued as objects of imitation.
Theophrastus makes this clear in his work On Laws. He says that the laws of the Tyrians forbid the swearing of foreign oaths, and among others he lists the oath called the corban. This oath would be found nowhere except among the Jews alone, and, one might say, it means, translated out of the Hebrew language, "gift of God."
Nor indeed was Herodotus of Halicarnassus ignorant of our nation, but he appears to mention it in a certain way. Writing about the Colchians in his second book, he says: "Alone of all peoples, the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians have practiced circumcision from ancient times. The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine themselves admit that they learned it from the Egyptians, while the Syrians who live around the Thermodon and Parthenius rivers, and the Macrones who are their neighbors, say they learned it recently from the Colchians; for these are the only people who practice circumcision, and they are clearly following the same practice as the Egyptians. As for the Egyptians and Ethiopians themselves, I cannot say which of the two learned it from the other."
He has thus stated that the Syrians of Palestine practice circumcision; but of those who inhabit Palestine, only the Jews do this. It is evidently in knowing this that he speaks of them. Choerilus too, an even older poet, mentions our nation, saying that it took part with Xerxes, king of the Persians, in his campaign against Greece. For after listing all the nations, he included ours last, saying: "And behind them there marched a people wonderful to see, letting a Phoenician tongue out of their mouths; they dwelt in the Solyman mountains beside a broad lake, with hair shorn round in a circle and left unwashed, and above they wore caps of horsehide, stiff and dried by smoke."
It is clear, I think, to everyone that he means us, since the Solyman mountains are in our own country, which we inhabit, and so is the lake called Asphaltitis; for it is broader and larger than any other in Syria. This, then, is how Choerilus mentions us.
That not only did the more discerning Greeks know the Jews, but that the finest among them in wisdom, not the meanest, actually admired those they encountered, is easy to establish. For Clearchus, the pupil of Aristotle and second to none among the philosophers of the Peripatetic school, says in the first book of his work On Sleep that Aristotle his teacher told this story about a certain Jewish man, presenting the account as coming from Aristotle himself. It is written as follows:
"But it would take long to tell most of it; still, it is not out of place to go through those points that show something of that man's remarkable character and philosophy in equal measure. Know well, Hyperochides," he said, "that what I am about to tell you will sound to you like a dream." And Hyperochides, being cautious, replied, "That is precisely why we are all eager to hear it." "Well then," said Aristotle, "following the rule of the rhetoricians, let us first go through his lineage, so that we do not disregard the teachers of narrative technique." "Speak," said Hyperochides, "whatever you think best."
"Well then, that man was by birth a Jew, from Coele-Syria. These people are descendants of the philosophers of India; the philosophers there, it is said, are called Calani, but among the Syrians they are called Jews, taking their name from the place they inhabit; for the place they occupy is called Judea, while the name of their city is quite awkward — they call it Hierusaleme. Now this man, since he was a guest of many and had come down from the interior to the coastal regions, was Greek not only in language but in soul as well. And at that time, while we were staying in Asia, he crossed over into the same regions and met with us and some other men of learning, testing their wisdom. And since he had become closely acquainted with many educated men, he imparted to them something in return for what he had received."
This is what Aristotle said as reported by Clearchus, and he goes on to describe at length the astonishing self-control and moderation this Jewish man showed in his way of life. Those who wish to learn more may find it in the book itself, for I am careful not to quote more than is sufficient. Clearchus said this in passing, since his stated purpose lay elsewhere; but that is how he came to mention us.
Hecataeus of Abdera, a philosopher and at the same time a highly capable man of affairs, who flourished in the time of Alexander the king and was an associate of Ptolemy son of Lagus, wrote a book about the Jews themselves — not a passing mention but a whole treatise — from which I wish to run briefly through some of what he says. First I will establish the date: he mentions the battle of Ptolemy against Demetrius near Gaza. This battle took place, as Castor records, in the eleventh year after the death of Alexander, in the hundred and seventeenth Olympiad.
Having noted this Olympiad, Castor says: "In this Olympiad, Ptolemy son of Lagus defeated in battle at Gaza Demetrius son of Antigonus, called Poliorcetes." Everyone agrees that Alexander died in the hundred and fourteenth Olympiad. It is clear, then, that our nation was flourishing both in his time and in that of Alexander.
Hecataeus goes on to say that after the battle at Gaza, Ptolemy became master of the region of Syria, and many people, hearing of Ptolemy's mildness and humanity, wished to go with him to Egypt and share in his undertakings. Among them, he says, was Ezekias, high priest of the Jews, a man of about sixty-six years, of great standing among his countrymen, not lacking in intelligence, moreover a capable speaker, and as experienced as anyone in matters of business — though, he says, the priests of the Jews in general who receive the tithe of produce and administer public affairs number about fifteen hundred.
Mentioning this man again, he says: this man, having attained this honor and become close to us, took some of his companions and read out to them the whole of their history, for he had it written down, both the settlement of the people and their form of government. Hecataeus then goes on to show our attitude toward the laws: that we choose to suffer anything rather than transgress them, and that we consider this a fine thing to do.
For this reason, he says, though ill-spoken of by their neighbors and by visitors, and though often insulted by the Persian kings and satraps, they cannot be made to change their minds, but face nakedly, for the sake of these laws, the harshest abuse and even death itself, sooner than deny their ancestral customs. He also offers no small evidence of this firmness about their laws: he says that once, when Alexander was in Babylon and had resolved to restore the fallen temple of Bel, and had ordered all his soldiers alike to carry the rubble, only the Jews refused to comply, and even endured many blows and paid great fines, until the king relented and granted them exemption.
He further says that when temples and altars were built in their country by those who came to settle there, the Jews tore them all down, and paid fines to the satraps for some of them, while for others they obtained pardon. And he adds that it is right to admire them for this. He also speaks of our nation having grown very populous: many tens of thousands of us, he says, were earlier carried off to Babylon by the Persians, and no small number migrated to Egypt and Phoenicia after the death of Alexander because of the unrest in Syria.
This same man has also recorded the size and beauty of the country we inhabit: they occupy, he says, about three million arourai of the best and most productive land, for Judea is that large. He also describes, in these words, how we have inhabited from the most ancient times the city of Jerusalem itself, the finest and greatest of cities, and speaks of the number of its men and the construction of its temple.
"Of the Jews," he says, "most of their strongholds lie scattered through the countryside, along with villages, but there is one fortified city about fifty stadia in circumference, which about a hundred and twenty thousand people inhabit, and they call it Jerusalem. There, roughly in the middle of the city, stands a stone enclosure about five plethra in length and a hundred cubits in width, with double gates, in which stands a square altar, built of unhewn, uncut stones gathered together, each side twenty cubits long and ten cubits high."
"Beside it stands a great building, where there is an altar and a lampstand, both of gold, weighing two talents. Upon these a light burns that is never extinguished, night and day. There is no image at all, nor any votive offering, nor any planting whatsoever, such as a sacred grove or anything of the kind. Priests spend both nights and days there, observing certain purifications and never drinking wine at all within the temple."
He further testifies that they served with Alexander the king and afterward with his successors. He also relates an incident he himself witnessed involving a Jewish man during a military campaign, which I will now set down. He tells it as follows: "When I myself was traveling toward the Red Sea, among those accompanying us with the other cavalry escorting us was a Jew named Mosollamos, a man quite strong in spirit and, by common agreement, the best archer of all, both Greek and barbarian."
"This man, then, as many were walking along the road and a certain seer was watching the flight of a bird and asking everyone to halt, asked why they were waiting. When the seer pointed out the bird to him and said that if it remained where it was, it was advantageous for all to wait there too, but if it rose and flew forward, they should advance, and if backward, they should retreat again, the man said nothing, drew his bow, and shot, striking and killing the bird."
"When the seer and some others grew angry and cursed him, he said, 'Why are you raving, you wretched men?' Then, taking the bird in his hands, he said, 'How could this creature, which failed to foresee its own safety, have given us any sound information about our journey? For if it had been able to foresee the future, it would not have come to this spot, afraid that Mosollamos the Jew would shoot and kill it.'"
But enough of Hecataeus's testimonies; for those who wish to learn more, it is easy to find the book itself. Nor will I hesitate to name Agatharchides too, even though he made mention of us in a mocking spirit of ridicule, as he himself supposes. In relating the story of Stratonice — how she came to Syria from Macedonia, abandoning her husband Demetrius, and how, when Seleucus refused to marry her, contrary to her expectation, while he was away on his campaign from Babylon, she stirred up revolt around Antioch —
and how, when the king returned and Antioch was captured, she fled to Seleucia, and though she might have sailed away quickly, she was persuaded by a dream that warned her against it, and so was captured and put to death — having told this story in advance, Agatharchides, mocking Stratonice's superstition, uses as an illustration an account concerning us, writing as follows: "The people called Jews, who inhabit the most fortified of all cities, one which the natives call Jerusalem, have a custom of resting every seventh day, on which they neither bear arms nor take up farming nor attend to any other task,"
"but instead, with hands outstretched in their temples, pray until evening. So when Ptolemy son of Lagus entered the city with his forces, and the people, instead of guarding the city, persisted in their folly, their homeland received a bitter master, and their law was exposed as containing a foolish custom." This incident has taught everyone else except the Jews themselves to flee to dreams and to the traditional interpretation of the law only when human reasoning fails them in matters of difficulty.
To Agatharchides this seems worthy of ridicule, but to those who examine it without hostility it appears something great and deserving much praise: that certain people should always value the keeping of their laws and their reverence toward God above their own safety and homeland.
That some of the historians, far from being ignorant of our nation, passed over its memory out of a certain envy or for other unsound reasons, I think I can offer proof. Hieronymus, who wrote the history of the successors of Alexander, lived at the same time as Hecataeus, and, being a friend of King Antigonus, governed Syria; and yet, while Hecataeus even wrote a whole book about us, Hieronymus nowhere mentioned us in his history, even though he lived for a considerable time in the same regions. So greatly do men's inclinations differ: to the one we seemed worthy of serious record, while in the other some ungracious feeling clouded altogether his regard for the truth.
Still, for demonstrating our antiquity, the records of the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and the Phoenicians suffice, along with so many Greek writers besides them. And further, in addition to those already named, Theophilus, Theodotus, Mnaseas, Aristophanes, Hermogenes, Euhemerus, Conon, Zopyrion, and perhaps many others — for I myself have not come across all their books — have made no passing mention of us.
Most of the men named, however, missed the truth about our earliest history, since they had not consulted our sacred books, but all of them alike have testified in common to our antiquity, which is the very point I have set out to discuss here. Demetrius of Phalerum, however, and Philo the Elder, and Eupolemus did not miss the truth by much. They deserve to be forgiven for this.
for they could not follow our writings with complete accuracy.
One point still remains of what I proposed at the outset of this discourse: to show that the slanders and abuses some have leveled against our people are false, and to make the very authors who wrote them witnesses against themselves. That this same thing has happened to many other peoples too, through the ill will of certain writers, I think those who read history more widely already know. Some nations, even the most illustrious cities among them, have had their nobility besmirched and their constitutions maligned by men who attempted it — Theopompus attacked the constitution of the Athenians, Polycrates that of the Spartans, and the author of the Tripolitikos (for it is not Theopompus, as some suppose) took on the city of Thebes as well, and Timaeus too has blasphemed much in his histories, both about the peoples already named and about others. They do this especially by attaching themselves to the most illustrious subjects, some out of envy and malice, others because they think that by saying something novel they will be thought worthy of remembrance. Among fools they do not fail of this hope, but those sound in judgment condemn their wickedness thoroughly.
Of the slanders against us, the Egyptians were the first to begin them; and certain people, wishing to curry favor with them, undertook to distort the truth, neither acknowledging the arrival of our ancestors in Egypt as it actually happened, nor telling the truth about the exodus. They had many reasons to hate and envy us: first, from the beginning, because our ancestors had once ruled over their country, and after departing from there had prospered again in their own land. Then the opposition between our two ways of life produced great enmity between them, insofar as our reverence for God differs from the religion they practice as much as the nature of God differs from that of irrational animals. It is a custom common to all of them to regard these creatures as gods, though they differ from one another in the honors paid to each. But being altogether frivolous and senseless people, accustomed from the start to hold base opinions about the gods, they were unable to imitate the dignity of our theology, and seeing it admired by many, they grew envious. Some among them reached such a pitch of folly and pettiness that they did not shrink from contradicting even their own ancient records, but in their blindness of passion wrote things that contradicted themselves without realizing it.
I will pause first on one of them, whom I cited a little earlier as a witness to our antiquity. This Manetho, who undertook to translate the history of Egypt from the sacred writings, first said that our ancestors came against Egypt with many tens of thousands and conquered its inhabitants, and then, admitting himself that they were later driven out again in the course of time, occupied the land now called Judea, founded Jerusalem, and built the temple — up to this point he followed the records faithfully. But then, granting himself license by claiming he would set down the myths and stories told about the Jews, he inserted implausible tales, wishing to mix in with us a crowd of Egyptian lepers and others afflicted with disease who, he says, had fled from Egypt after being condemned. He added a king named Amenophis — a false name — and for this reason did not dare fix the length of his reign, although in the case of the other kings he gives their years precisely; to this one he attaches certain myths, forgetting, it seems, that by his own reckoning the exodus of the shepherds to Jerusalem occurred five hundred and eighteen years earlier. For Tethmosis was king when they went out, and from him to the two brothers Sethos and Hermaeus, according to Manetho himself, there are three hundred and ninety-three years.
Of these two, he says, Sethos was renamed Aegyptus, and Hermaeus, Danaus; Sethos drove Danaus out and reigned fifty-nine years, and after him his elder son Rampses reigned sixty-six. Having thus admitted that our fathers left Egypt so many years earlier, he then inserts Amenophis as an interloping king and says that this man desired to see the gods, as Or, one of the kings before him, had done, and that he communicated this desire to a namesake of his, Amenophis son of Paapis, who was thought to share in a divine nature through his wisdom and foreknowledge of things to come. This namesake told him that he would be able to see the gods if he cleansed the whole land of lepers and other impure people. Delighted at this, the king gathered together all those whose bodies were disfigured out of Egypt — eighty thousand of them in all — and cast them into the stone quarries on the eastern side of the Nile, to work there along with the other Egyptians who had been segregated. Among them, he says, were some of the learned priests who had been afflicted with leprosy.
This Amenophis, the wise and prophetic man, feared the wrath of the gods against himself and the king, should they be seen to have been compelled; and he added, saying that certain people would ally with the impure ones and hold Egypt in their power for thirteen years, but he did not dare say this to the king himself. Instead he left a written account of everything and then took his own life, and the king fell into despondency. Then, word for word, he writes as follows:
"When those in the quarries had suffered hardship long enough, the king was petitioned to set apart for them, as a refuge and shelter, the city of Auaris, once abandoned by the shepherds; and this city is, according to theology, from ancient times sacred to Typhon. Those who entered it, having this place as a base for revolt, appointed as their leader a certain man of the priests of Heliopolis, named Osarseph, and swore an oath to obey him in all things. He first made it a law for them neither to worship the gods nor to abstain from any of the animals especially held sacred in Egypt, but to sacrifice and consume them all, and to associate with no one except those bound by the same oath. Having laid down such laws, and many others most opposed to Egyptian customs, he ordered them with many hands to repair the walls of the city and make ready for war against King Amenophis."
He himself, taking with him the other priests and those defiled along with him, sent envoys to the shepherds who had been driven out by Tethmosis, to the city called Jerusalem, and having explained his own situation and that of the others who shared his disgrace, he asked them to join him in a united campaign against Egypt. He promised to lead them first to Auaris, the ancestral homeland of their fathers, and to provide the multitudes with supplies without stint, to fight alongside them whenever needed, and to make the land easily subject to them. Overjoyed, they all eagerly set out, to the number of twenty thousand men, and soon arrived at Auaris.
Amenophis, king of the Egyptians, when he learned of their approach, was thrown into no small confusion, remembering the prediction of Amenophis son of Paapis. First he gathered a multitude of Egyptians, and after taking counsel with their leaders, he summoned to himself the sacred animals held in highest honor in the temples, and instructed the priests in each district to hide the images of the gods as securely as possible. His son Sethos, also called Rampses after his father Rapses, then five years old, he sent away to a friend of his own. He himself crossed over with the rest of the Egyptians, numbering three hundred thousand of the most warlike men, and when he met the enemy he did not engage them, but thinking it would be fighting against the gods, he turned back and came to Memphis, taking with him Apis and the other sacred animals that had been sent for there, and set sail at once for Ethiopia with his entire fleet and multitude of Egyptians; for the king of Ethiopia was, by a favor owed him, subject to him.
This king received him, and taking in all the multitudes, supplied them from what the land had for human sustenance, and assigned cities and villages sufficient for the destined thirteen years of exile from his kingdom, and stationed no less an Ethiopian garrison to guard those of King Amenophis's men on the borders of Egypt. Such were the events in Ethiopia.
Meanwhile the Solymites, coming down together with the impure Egyptians, treated the people so impiously that their domination made the earlier deeds seem like gold by comparison to those who then witnessed these outrages; for they not only burned cities and villages, and were not content with plundering temples and mutilating the images of the gods, but they went on using the very kitchens in which the sacred animals held in reverence were cooked, and forced the priests and prophets who sacrificed and slaughtered them to become butchers, and cast them out naked. It is said that the man who established their constitution and laws was a priest by descent from Heliopolis, named Osarsiph after the god Osiris worshiped at Heliopolis, and that when he went over to this people he changed his name and was called Moses.
Now this is what the Egyptians report about the Jews, along with many other things which I omit for the sake of brevity. Manetho says again that afterward Amenophis came from Ethiopia with a great force, and his son Rampses also with his own force, and the two of them joined battle with the shepherds and the impure ones, defeated them, killed many, and pursued them to the borders of Syria. Such then, and things like these, is what Manetho wrote.
That he is talking nonsense and lying openly I will show, first setting apart, for the sake of what I shall say to others later, this point: he has himself granted us and admitted that our race was not originally Egyptian, but came in from outside, conquered Egypt, and afterward left it again. That the disfigured Egyptians were not mixed in with us afterward, and that Moses, who led the people, was not one of them but had lived many generations earlier — these points I shall try to refute through his own statements.
The very first cause he lays down for his fabrication is ridiculous: he says King Amenophis desired to see the gods. What gods? If he meant those legally established among them — the bull, the goat, crocodiles, and dog-headed apes — he already saw them. But how could he see the heavenly gods? And why did he have this desire at all? Because, by Zeus, an earlier king before him had seen them. So he had learned from that king what sort of beings they were and in what manner he had seen them, so he had no need of any new device. But the seer was supposedly wise, through whom the king expected to accomplish this. And how did he not foresee in advance that his desire was impossible? For it did not turn out. And what sense did it make that because of the maimed or the leprous the gods should become invisible? For they are angered by impious acts, not by bodily defects. And how could eighty thousand lepers and diseased people possibly be gathered together in almost a single day?
And how did the king disobey the seer? For the seer told him to expel the disfigured from Egypt, but he instead threw them into the stone quarries, as though he needed laborers rather than intending to purify the land. He says that the seer himself, foreseeing the wrath of the gods and what would befall Egypt, killed himself, but left the prediction in writing for the king. Then how did the seer not know from the start that he himself would die? And how did he not immediately contradict the king when he wished to see the gods? And how was it reasonable to fear evils that would not even befall him personally? Could anything worse have happened to him than what he hastened upon himself?
But let us look at the silliest point of all: having learned this and being afraid of what was to come because of those disfigured men whom he had been told to cleanse Egypt of, he still did not drive them from the land, but when they begged him, gave them a city, as Manetho says, the one once inhabited by the shepherds, called Auaris.
Having gathered there, he says, they chose as their leader one of the priests who had once come from Heliopolis, and that this man taught them neither to worship the gods nor to abstain from the animals worshiped in Egypt, but to sacrifice and eat them all, and to associate with no one except those bound by the same oath, binding the multitude by oaths that they would surely abide by these laws; and having fortified Auaris, he waged war against the king. And he adds that he sent to Jerusalem, calling on those people to join him as allies and promising to give them Auaris, since it was, he claims, ancestral to those who would come from Jerusalem, from which base they would hold all Egypt. Then he says twenty myriads of them came, an army of two hundred thousand, and that the king of the Egyptians, Amenophis, not thinking it right to fight against the gods, fled at once to Ethiopia, having left Apis and some of the other sacred animals in the care of the priests, ordered to guard them.
Then the men of Jerusalem, having come, laid waste the cities, burned the temples, slaughtered the sacred animals, and in general abstained from no lawlessness or cruelty. And the priest who had established their constitution and their laws was, he says, by descent a Heliopolitan, named Osarseph after the god Osiris worshiped at Heliopolis, but he changed his name and called himself Moses. He says that in the thirteenth year — for that was the time destined for his exile — Amenophis came from Ethiopia with a large army, joined battle with the shepherds and the impure ones, defeated them in the fight, and killed many, pursuing them to the borders of Syria.
In these details again, without realizing it, he lies implausibly; for the lepers and the multitude with them, even if they had earlier been angry with the king and those who had done these things to them, in accordance with the seer's prediction, once they had come out of the quarries and received from him a city and land, would surely have become gentler toward him. But if they still hated him, they would have plotted against him privately, not have taken up war against everyone — clearly, since they had, being so numerous, the most extensive kinship ties. Yet even had they resolved to make war on men, they would not have dared to war against their own gods, nor set laws so utterly opposed to their ancestral ones and those by which
...and grew up. We should be grateful to Manetho for saying that the authors of this lawless act were not the leaders who came from Jerusalem, but the Egyptians themselves — especially their priests — who devised it and made the mob swear to it. Yet is it not absurd that none of their own relatives or friends joined the revolt or shared the risk of the war, while they sent these polluted men to Jerusalem to bring back an alliance from that quarter? What friendship or kinship had existed between them beforehand? On the contrary, they were enemies and differed most widely in their customs. He says the Egyptians at once obeyed those who promised to seize Egypt for them, as if they had no accurate knowledge of the land from which they had been driven by force. Now if they had been in desperate or wretched straits, perhaps they might have taken such a risk; but living as they did in a prosperous city and enjoying a large territory better than Egypt, why would they have risked helping men who had long been their enemies and were maimed in body, men whom not even their own relatives could bear? They could not have foreseen the king's coming flight, for Manetho himself says the opposite — that the king's son, with three hundred thousand men, met them at Pelusium. This much those who arrived certainly knew, but how could they have guessed his change of heart and his flight? Then he says that once the men from Jerusalem had gained control of Egypt they did many terrible things, and he reproaches them for it as though he had not himself brought enemies upon the Egyptians, or as though it were not the men summoned from outside whom one ought to blame — since the native Egyptians had already been doing these very things before their arrival, and had sworn to do them. But later Amenophis attacked, won the battle, and drove the enemy in slaughter all the way to Syria. For Egypt is altogether so easy a prey to any invader that those who then held it by force, on learning that Amenophis was alive, neither fortified the passes from Ethiopia, though they had ample resources for it, nor prepared any other force; yet he, killing them, Manetho says, pursued them as far as Syria through the waterless sand — clearly no easy or bloodless crossing for an army. According to Manetho, then, our people are neither of Egyptian stock, nor did any of that stock mix with us; for of the lepers and the sick, it is likely that many died in the quarries, having spent a long time there in misery, many more in the battles that followed, and the greatest number in the final battle and the flight.
It remains for me to speak to him about Moses. The Egyptians consider this man marvelous, even divine, yet they want to claim him as their own with an implausible slander, saying he was a Heliopolitan, one of the priests from there, driven out with the rest because of leprosy. But the records show he lived five hundred and eighteen years earlier, and that he led our fathers out of Egypt into the land we now inhabit. That he was not afflicted with any such bodily misfortune is clear from his own words: he forbade lepers to remain in a city or dwell in a village, but ordered them to walk alone with their garments torn, and he considered anyone who touched them or shared a roof with them unclean. Moreover, even once the disease was cured and a man had recovered his natural condition, he prescribed certain purifications, washings in spring water, and the shaving of all the hair, and commanded that many and varied sacrifices be performed before the man could enter the holy city. Yet it would have been natural for the opposite to happen — for a man who had suffered this misfortune himself to show forethought and kindness toward those who suffered the same. And he legislated this way not only concerning lepers, but he did not even allow men maimed in the smallest part of the body to serve as priests; indeed, if a man serving as priest suffered such a misfortune while in office, he was stripped of the honor. How likely is it, then, that such a man would thoughtlessly make laws against himself — a man gathered up out of just such misfortunes — framing statutes to his own reproach and harm? Moreover, he has changed the name most implausibly: Osarseph, he says, was his name. But this does not fit the change he makes, whereas the true name reveals the man saved from the water — for the Egyptians call water 'moy.' I think enough has been said, and it is clear that as long as Manetho followed the ancient records he did not stray far from the truth, but once he turned to unattested myths, he either composed them implausibly himself or believed some who had spoken out of hostility.
After him I wish to examine Chaeremon; for he too, claiming to write an Egyptian history, and giving the king the same name Manetho gave him — Amenophis — and his son Ramesses, says that in a dream Isis appeared to Amenophis, reproaching him because her temple had been razed in the war. Phritibautes, a sacred scribe, told him that if he purged Egypt of the men who carried the defilement, he would be freed from his terror. Amenophis then selected two hundred and fifty thousand of the afflicted and expelled them. Their leaders were Moses and Joseph, both scribes, Joseph also being a sacred scribe, and their Egyptian names were Tisithen for Moses and Peteseph for Joseph. These men came to Pelusium and there met three hundred and eighty thousand who had been left behind by Amenophis, men he had refused to bring into Egypt; and making an alliance with them, they marched against Egypt. Amenophis, unable to withstand their advance, fled into Ethiopia, leaving behind his pregnant wife, who hid in some caves and there gave birth to a son named Ramesses; and when he had grown to manhood, he drove the Jews, about two hundred thousand of them, into Syria, and welcomed his father Amenophis back from Ethiopia.
So much for Chaeremon. I think it is immediately obvious from what has been said that both men are lying: if there were some underlying truth, they could not possibly disagree so much, whereas men who invent falsehoods do not write in agreement with others but each shapes his own fancies. Manetho says the beginning of the expulsion of the polluted men was the king's desire to see the gods; Chaeremon has invented instead a dream of Isis. Manetho says it was Amenophis who foretold to the king the means of purification; Chaeremon says it was Phritobautes. As for the number of the multitude, the two come very close: one says eighty thousand, the other two hundred and fifty thousand. Further, Manetho first casts the polluted men into the quarries, then gives them Avaris to settle in, stirs up war between them and the rest of the Egyptians, and only then has them call in the aid of the people of Jerusalem; Chaeremon says that as they were leaving Egypt they found, near Pelusium, three hundred and eighty thousand men left behind by Amenophis, and invaded Egypt again together with them, while Amenophis fled into Ethiopia. And here is the most remarkable point of all: he does not even say who these many tens of thousands of soldiers were, or where they came from — Egyptian by race or foreigners — nor does he explain why the king was unwilling to bring them into Egypt, this same king who, on his account, invented the dream of Isis about the lepers. Moreover, Chaeremon has added Joseph to Moses as though expelled at the same time, when in fact Joseph had died four generations before Moses, a span of nearly a hundred and seventy years. And again, Ramesses the son of Amenophis, according to Manetho, is a young man who fights alongside his father and shares his flight into Ethiopia, whereas Chaeremon has made him born in a cave after his father's death, and afterward, victorious in battle, driving the Jews, some two hundred thousand of them, into Syria. What carelessness! He never even said earlier who the three hundred and eighty thousand were, nor how the twenty-three thousand who are missing perished — whether they fell in the battle or went over to Ramesses. And the most astonishing thing of all: it is impossible to learn from him whom exactly he means by 'the Jews,' or to which group he gives this name — the two hundred and fifty thousand lepers, or the three hundred and eighty thousand near Pelusium. But it would perhaps be foolish to spend more words refuting men already refuted by their own account; refutation at the hands of others would have been more restrained.
I will bring forward, in addition to these, Lysimachus, who adopted the same premise of falsehood about the lepers and the maimed as the others, but has outdone their implausibility in his inventions — clearly composing his account out of deep hostility. He says that under Bocchoris, king of the Egyptians, the people of the Jews, being leprous and scabby and afflicted with certain other diseases, took refuge in the temples and begged for food. And since a great many people fell ill, a famine came upon Egypt. Bocchoris, king of the Egyptians, sent men to the oracle of Ammon to ask about the famine, and the god replied that the temples must be purified of unclean and impious men by casting them out of the temples into desert places, and that the scabby and leprous must be drowned, since the sun was angered at their being alive, and that once the temples were purified, the land would again bear fruit. Bocchoris, having received the oracle, summoned the priests and the temple attendants and ordered them to make a selection of the unclean, hand them over to the soldiers to be led into the desert, and bind the leprous in sheets of lead to sink them in the sea. Once the leprous and scabby had been drowned, the rest were gathered together and set out in desert places to die; but they came together and took counsel about their own fate, and when night fell they lit fires and lamps to keep watch over themselves, and fasting through the following night they besought the gods to save them. The next day a certain Moses advised them to risk cutting a single road straight ahead until they reached inhabited places, and he charged them to show goodwill to no one, to give not the best advice but the worst, and to overturn the temples and altars of any gods they came across. The rest agreed, and carrying out what they had resolved, they made their way through the desert, and after considerable hardship they came to inhabited country, where they abused the people, plundered and burned the temples, and came to the land now called Judea; there they founded a city and settled. This town was named Hierosyla — 'temple-robbers' — after their conduct. Later, having grown powerful, they changed the name in time to avoid the reproach, calling the city Hierosolyma and themselves Hierosolymites.
This man did not even manage to name the same king as the others, but has invented a still newer name; and setting aside the dream, he has gone off instead to an Egyptian prophet at the oracle of Ammon to fetch a response about the scabby and leprous — for he says a multitude of Jews gathered in the temples. Did he give this name to the lepers alone, or only to those Jews who fell into these diseases? For he says 'the people of the Jews.' What sort of people — newcomers, or native by race? Why, then, do you call them Jews if they were Egyptians? But if they were foreigners, why do you not say from where? How, when the king had drowned many of them in the sea and cast the rest out into desert places, could so great a multitude have been left over? Or how did they cross the desert, take control of the land we now inhabit, found a city, and build a temple renowned among all peoples? He ought also, in speaking of the lawgiver, not merely to have given his name but to have made clear his race and lineage, and to have explained why he undertook to lay down for them such laws about the gods and about wrongdoing toward other men during their journey. For if they were Egyptian by race, they would not so readily have abandoned their ancestral customs; and if they were from elsewhere, they must surely have had laws of their own, kept through long habit. If, then, they had sworn never to show goodwill to those who had driven them out, that would have made reasonable sense; but that they should have declared undeclared war on the whole of mankind — if indeed they behaved as badly as he himself says, at a time when they needed help from everyone — this proves great folly, not on their part, but on the part of the liar, who has even dared to say that they named the city after their own temple-robbery, and later changed it. For it is clear that to those born afterward the name brought shame and hatred, whereas the founders of the city themselves, in naming it so, supposed they were honoring themselves. This noble fellow, in his great intemperance for abuse, failed to grasp that we Jews do not use the same word for 'commit sacrilege' that the Greeks do. What more, then, should one say against a man who lies so shamelessly? But since the book has now reached a fitting length, I will make a fresh beginning and try, in what follows, to complete the rest of what the subject requires.

======== Against Apion — Book 2 ========

In the first book, my most honored Epaphroditus, I demonstrated our antiquity, establishing the truth by the writings of the Phoenicians, Chaldaeans, and Egyptians, and producing many Greek writers as witnesses; and I made my reply to Manetho, Chaeremon, and certain others. I will now begin to refute the remaining writers who have said anything against us.
It occurred to me to wonder, in taking up a reply to the things ventured by Apion the grammarian, whether the effort was even worth making. Some of what he has written is similar to what others have said; some of it he has added with real coldness; and most of it displays sheer buffoonery and, to tell the truth, a great deal of ignorance, as though it were the composition of a man both base in character and a rabble-rouser his whole life long. But since most people, through their own foolishness, are captivated by talk of that sort more than by writing composed with any seriousness, and take delight in slander while resenting praise, I judged it necessary not to leave even this man's accusation against us unexamined, given that he wrote it as though delivering a formal indictment.
And indeed I notice something else that attends most people: an excessive satisfaction whenever a man who has set out to abuse another is himself shown up for the very faults he attributes to him. It is not easy to follow his argument through, or to grasp clearly what he means; but roughly speaking, amid much confusion and a welter of falsehoods, part of it falls into the same category as what has already been examined concerning our ancestors' departure from Egypt, part of it is an accusation against the Jews living in Alexandria, and mixed in with these, a third element, is an accusation concerning the sanctity of our temple and our other observances.
That our fathers were not Egyptian by race, and were not driven out from there because of bodily disease or any other such misfortune, I think I have already demonstrated, not merely adequately but more than adequately. I will now touch briefly on what Apion adds to this. In the third book of his Egyptian History he says the following: "Moses, as I have heard from the elders of the Egyptians, was a man of Heliopolis, who, bound by his ancestral customs, offered his prayers in the open air, facing the enclosures such as the sun has, all of them turned toward the east; for that is where the City of the Sun stands. In place of obelisks he set up columns, beneath which was carved a boat, and on it the shadow of a man positioned so as to show that it forever circles the sun on its course through the heavens."
Such, then, is the grammarian's marvelous account. But the falsehood needs no arguing against; it is exposed by the plain facts. For Moses himself, when he built the first tabernacle for God, put no carving of that kind into it, nor did he order those who came after him to make one; and Solomon too, who later built the temple in Jerusalem, kept entirely clear of any such elaborate device as Apion has concocted. As for his claim to have heard from the elders that Moses was a man of Heliopolis, clearly he himself is too young to know, and simply trusted men who knew and had lived with him only on account of their age. Yet this same man, grammarian though he is, could not say with certainty even where Homer the poet's homeland was, nor about Pythagoras either, who lived only, so to speak, yesterday or the day before; but about Moses, who preceded them by so vast a multitude of years, he pronounces so readily, trusting the hearsay of "elders," that he is plainly caught in a lie.
As for the dates on which he says Moses led out the lepers, the blind, and those crippled in the feet, our accurate grammarian is thoroughly at odds even with those before him. Manetho says that the Jews left Egypt in the reign of Tethmosis, three hundred and ninety-three years before the flight of Danaus to Argos; Lysimachus says it was under king Bocchoris, that is to say one thousand seven hundred years before; Molon and certain others give whatever date seemed right to them. But Apion, the most trustworthy of them all, has fixed the exodus with precision at the seventh Olympiad, and its first year at that, in which, he says, the Phoenicians founded Carthage. And he added this detail about Carthage entirely because he supposed it would be for him the clearest possible proof of the truth, without realizing that he was thereby drawing the refutation down on his own head.
For if one must trust the Phoenician records concerning this incredible claim, in those very records king Hiram is recorded as living more than one hundred and fifty years before the founding of Carthage — the same Hiram for whom I furnished proof earlier from the Phoenician records that he was a friend of Solomon, who built the temple in Jerusalem, and contributed a great deal toward the temple's construction. And Solomon himself built the temple six hundred and twelve years after the Jews left Egypt. As for the number of those driven out, Apion, improvising the same figure as Lysimachus, says they were a hundred and ten thousand, and he supplies a marvelous and plausible reason from which, he says, the Sabbath got its name: having journeyed, he says, a distance of six days, they developed swellings in the groin, and for that reason they rested on the seventh day, once they had reached safety in the land now called Judaea, and called the day sabbaton, preserving the Egyptian word — for the Egyptians call groin pain sabbatosis.
Could anyone fail either to laugh at this nonsense or, on the contrary, to despise the shamelessness of writing such things? For clearly, on this account, all hundred and ten thousand of them developed the swelling together. But if they were blind and lame and diseased in every way, as Apion says they were, they could not have covered even a single day's journey; and if they were fit enough to march through a vast wilderness, and moreover to defeat all who stood against them in battle, then they could not have developed the swelling en masse after the sixth day. For that sort of thing does not naturally happen to people simply because they are marching — many tens of thousands of soldiers march a moderate distance every day for many days on end — nor is it plausible that it happened by pure coincidence; that would be the most irrational explanation of all.
And this marvelous Apion has, on the one hand, already stated that they reached Judaea in six days, yet on the other hand says that Moses went up onto the mountain between Egypt and Arabia called Sinai and hid there for forty days, then came down and gave the Jews their laws. Yet how could the same people both remain forty days in a desert, waterless place, and also cross the whole distance between in six days? And this grammarian's transposition regarding the naming of the Sabbath betrays either great shamelessness or terrible ignorance; for sabbo and sabbaton are entirely different words. Sabbaton, in the language of the Jews, means rest from all labor, whereas sabbo, as he himself says, means among the Egyptians the pain of the groin.
Such, then, are the sort of things the Egyptian Apion has newly invented, beyond what others have said, about Moses and the departure of the Jews from Egypt. And why should one be surprised that he lies about our ancestors when he claims they were Egyptian by race, when about himself he told the opposite lie, and though born at the Oasis in Egypt, the foremost of all Egyptians, so to speak, he forswore his true homeland and people, and by falsely claiming to be an Alexandrian confesses the baseness of his own origin. Naturally, then, those he hates and wishes to abuse he calls Egyptians; for had he not considered Egyptians the basest of people, he would not have fled his own origin — since those who take pride in their own homelands glory in being known by them, and expose those who lay claim to them unjustly.
Toward us, however, the Egyptians have done one of two things: either, wishing to claim special distinction, they pretend kinship with us, or else they try to drag us in as partners in their own bad reputation. And this noble Apion appears to have wanted to offer his slander against us to the Alexandrians as a kind of payment for the citizenship granted to him; and knowing their hostility toward the Jews who live among them in Alexandria, he has set out to abuse those Jews in particular, while lumping in all the rest of us as well, lying shamelessly on both counts.
Let us, then, look at what dreadful and outrageous things he has charged against the Jews living in Alexandria. Coming from Syria, he says, they settled by a harborless sea, in the neighborhood of the surf thrown up by the waves. Well, if that location is a matter of reproach, he is reproaching Alexandria itself — not his homeland, but the city he calls his own — since that stretch of coast belongs to it, and everyone agrees it is the finest part for settlement. And if the Jews took possession of it by force, so firmly that they were never afterward expelled, that is proof of their courage; but in fact Alexander gave them the place to settle, and they received equal honor with the Macedonians. I do not know what Apion would have said had they settled near the necropolis instead of being established close to the royal quarters, and had their tribe to this day borne the name Macedonians.
If, then, he had read the letters of king Alexander and of Ptolemy son of Lagus and of the kings of Egypt who came after him, and had come upon their documents, and the pillar standing in Alexandria that contains the rights which the great Caesar granted to the Jews — if, knowing all this, I say, he still dared to write the opposite, he was a scoundrel; and if he knew nothing of it, he was uneducated. As for his wondering how, being Jews, they were called Alexandrians, that betrays the same ignorance; for all who are enrolled as colonists of some settlement, however much they may differ from one another in origin, take their name from the founders. And why speak of others? Among our own people, those who live in Antioch are called Antiochenes, since the founder Seleucus gave them citizenship. Likewise those in Ephesus and throughout the rest of Ionia share the name of the native citizens, this having been granted them by the successors of Alexander. And has not the generosity of the Romans extended their own name to virtually everyone, not only to individuals but to whole great nations? The Iberians of old, and the Etruscans, and the Sabines, are all now called Romans.
But if Apion means to strip away citizenship granted in this manner, let him stop calling himself an Alexandrian; for born, as I said before, in the depths of Egypt, how could he be an Alexandrian by grant of citizenship, given that he himself, in our own case, has argued for abolishing exactly that kind of grant? And yet it is only Egyptians whom the Romans, now masters of the world, have forbidden to share in any citizenship whatsoever. So noble is this man that, while claiming for himself a share in what he himself was barred from obtaining, he undertook to slander those who had rightfully received it. For it was not for lack of settlers that Alexander, in founding with such care the city he was building, gathered some of our people there; rather, testing everyone carefully for virtue and trustworthiness, he granted our people this honor. He held our nation in esteem, as Hecataeus also says of us, that because of the fairness and trust the Jews showed him, Alexander added to their possession the region of Samaria, free of tribute.
Ptolemy son of Lagus held the same view of those settled in Alexandria as Alexander did; for he entrusted the garrisons throughout Egypt to them, believing they would guard them both faithfully and bravely, and wishing to hold Cyrene and the other cities of Libya securely, he sent a portion of the Jews to settle in them. His successor Ptolemy, surnamed Philadelphus, not only released all of our people who were held captive under him, but often made them gifts of money, and, greatest of all, became eager to learn our laws and to read the books of our sacred writings. He accordingly sent, requesting that men be dispatched to translate the law for him, and entrusted the task of having it written out properly not to just anyone, but to Demetrius of Phalerum, Andreas, and Aristeas — Demetrius, distinguished among the scholars of his day, and the other two, men entrusted with the guard of his own person — assigning them to oversee this task, something he surely would not have done had he despised our laws and our ancestral philosophy, and not held it in the highest esteem, along with the men who practiced it.
But nearly all the successive kings of his own Macedonian ancestors, who were most closely disposed toward us, escaped Apion's notice entirely; for the third Ptolemy, called Euergetes, after conquering the whole of Syria by force, did not sacrifice thank-offerings for his victory to the gods of Egypt, but came to Jerusalem and, as is our custom, offered many sacrifices to God, and dedicated offerings worthy of his victory. And Ptolemy Philometor and his wife Cleopatra entrusted their entire kingdom to Jews, and the generals in command of the whole army were Onias and Dositheus, both Jews — whose names Apion mocks, though he ought rather to admire their deeds than abuse them, and to be grateful to them, since they saved Alexandria, the very city whose citizen he claims to be. For when they were at war with queen Cleopatra and in danger of perishing miserably, these men brought about a settlement and delivered the city from civil disaster. But afterward, he says, Onias led an army against the city while Thermus, the Roman envoy, was present there with only a small force. Yet I would say he acted rightly, and quite justly.
For Ptolemy, surnamed Physcon, when his brother Ptolemy Philometor died, came out from Cyrene wishing to expel Cleopatra and the king's sons from the throne, so that he might unjustly seize the kingdom for himself; and for this reason Onias took up war against him on Cleopatra's behalf, and never once, in her hour of need, abandoned the loyalty he owed to the royal house. God himself stood as manifest witness of his justice: for when Physcon Ptolemy presumed to give battle against Onias's army, and seized all the Jews living in the city together with their children and wives, stripped and bound them, and threw them before elephants, so that they might be trampled and perish, and even had the beasts made drunk for the purpose, the outcome turned out the very opposite of what he had prepared — for the elephants, abandoning the Jews set before them, charged instead upon...
His friends killed many of them in the charge. After this, Ptolemy himself saw a terrifying vision that forbade him to harm those people; and his dearest concubine—some call her Ithaca, others Irene—begged him not to carry out so great a crime, and he yielded to her, and repented of what he had already done and of what he had been about to do. This is why the Jews settled in Alexandria are known to keep this day, since they plainly won their deliverance from God, as a feast.
But Apion, the slanderer of everyone, has dared to accuse the Jews even over the war waged against Physcon, when he ought rather to have praised them. He also mentions the last Cleopatra, queen of the Alexandrians, as though reproaching us, because she was ungrateful toward us—and he did not think instead to condemn her, though no injustice or wicked deed was wanting in her, whether toward her own kin or toward the husbands who loved her, or in her common hostility against all the Romans and the emperors who had been her benefactors. She even killed her sister Arsinoe in the temple, though Arsinoe had done her no wrong; she murdered her brother by treachery; she plundered the gods of her fathers and the tombs of her ancestors. And after receiving her kingdom from the first Caesar, she dared to rebel against his son and successor, and by corrupting Antony with her seductions she made him an enemy of his own country and taught him to be faithless to his own friends, stripping some of their royal birthright and driving others out of their minds into wicked deeds. But what more needs to be said, when she abandoned that very man—her husband and the father of their common children—in the naval battle, forcing him to hand over his army and his command and to follow her instead? At the last, when Alexandria was taken by Caesar, she was driven to such a pitch that she judged her only hope of safety lay in killing the Jews with her own hand, since she had shown herself cruel and faithless toward everyone. Should we not be proud, then, if—as Apion says—in a time of famine the Jews had no share of the grain ration? She, at any rate, paid the penalty she deserved; we, however, have as witness to our comfort and our loyalty the greatest of Caesars himself, whom we served faithfully against the Egyptians, and likewise the Senate and its decrees, and the letters of Caesar Augustus, by which our merits are attested. Apion ought to have examined these documents and studied, class by class, the testimonies given under Alexander and under all the Ptolemies, and what was established by the Senate, and what came from the greatest of the Roman commanders.
If Germanicus was unable to distribute grain to everyone residing in Alexandria, this shows a shortage and scarcity of grain, not an accusation against the Jews. What all the emperors have thought of the Jews living in Alexandria is plain to see: the administration of the grain supply was handed over to them no less than to the other Alexandrians, and they have kept, from ancient times, the great trust granted them by the kings—namely, the guarding of the river and of the whole watch—since they were judged in no way unworthy of these responsibilities.
But beyond this, he says, how can they be citizens if they do not worship the same gods as the Alexandrians? To this I reply: how is it, then, that you Egyptians, though you are all Egyptians, fight one another in great and lawless battles over religion? Or do we not, for that very reason, call you all Egyptians and not simply human beings in common, since you worship animals that are hostile to our nature, nurturing them with great care, even though your own race is one and the same? And if such great differences of belief exist among you Egyptians yourselves, why be surprised that people who came to Alexandria from elsewhere have kept to the laws established for them from the beginning?
He also lays the causes of sedition at our door. Yet if he truly accuses the Jews settled in Alexandria on this basis, why does he blame all of us everywhere, when we are known to live in harmony wherever we are? Indeed, anyone will find that the instigators of sedition were citizens of Alexandria just like Apion. As long as the Greeks and Macedonians held this citizenship, they raised no sedition against us, but yielded to the ancient customs. But when the Egyptian population grew among them, on account of the disorders of the times, this trouble was added as well. Our own race, however, remained pure. It was the Egyptians themselves, then, who were the source of this trouble, since the population possessed neither Macedonian steadiness nor Greek good sense, but instead everyone gave way to the base habits of the Egyptians and carried on their ancient hostility toward us.
The truth, in fact, is the opposite of what they presume to reproach us with. Since most of them do not rightly hold the right of this citizenship, they call foreigners those who are known to have received this privilege from the very beginning. For no king ever seems to have granted any Egyptian the right of citizenship, nor does any emperor do so now; but us Alexander himself brought in, the kings increased our privileges, and the Romans have always seen fit to preserve them. So Apion has tried to disparage us on the ground that we do not set up statues of the emperors—as though they did not know this themselves, or needed Apion to defend them—when in fact he ought rather to have admired the greatness of soul and moderation of the Romans, since they do not force their subjects to transgress their ancestral laws, but accept the honors offered them as it is right and proper to give them; for they take no pleasure in honors extracted by compulsion and force. Among the Greeks and certain other peoples it is thought good to set up statues—indeed they take delight in painting the likenesses even of their parents, wives, and children; some even have statues made of people who mean nothing to them, and others do the same even for servants they are fond of. What wonder is it, then, if they are seen to offer this honor to rulers and masters as well? Our lawgiver, however—not because he foresaw that the power of Rome would not deserve honor, but because he judged the practice useless to both God and man—forbade the making of images, since he held it inferior even to that of any living thing, let alone to God, who has no body. He did not, however, forbid the honoring of good men by other means, after God; and by such honors we exalt both our emperors and the Roman people. We offer continual sacrifices on their behalf, and not only do we celebrate these daily at the common expense of all the Jews, but—since we offer no other sacrifices from the common fund, not even for our own children—we render this honor to the emperors alone, a distinction we grant to no other man. Let this, then, stand as our common answer to Apion concerning what has been said about Alexandria.
I am astonished, too, at those who supplied him with this kind of fuel—Posidonius and Apollonius Molon—since they accuse us of not worshiping the same gods as others, while at the same time inventing lies and composing absurd blasphemies about our temple, and do not think themselves guilty of impiety, though it is utterly shameful to lie about free people on any pretext, and far more so to lie about a temple renowned among all people for its great sanctity. In this very sanctuary, Apion has dared to declare, the Jews set up the head of a donkey and worshiped it and held it in the highest religious honor; and he claims this was discovered when Antiochus Epiphanes plundered the temple and found that head made of gold and worth a great sum of money.
To this I say, first, that even if an Egyptian had found any such thing among us, he would have had no right to reproach us for it, since a donkey is no worse than the cats and goats and other creatures that are gods among the Egyptians. Next, how did he fail to see that his own incredible lie is refuted by the facts themselves? For we have always used the same laws, in which we stand without change; and though various misfortunes have troubled our city, as they have others, and though Pompey the Great, and Sosius, and Licinius Crassus, and finally Titus Caesar, conquered it in war and took possession of the temple, none of them found anything of this kind there—only the purest piety, of which there is nothing we may reveal to outsiders. And as for Antiochus, he did not plunder the temple for any just cause, but was driven to it by lack of money; he was not our enemy, and he attacked us, his own allies and friends, without finding anything there deserving of mockery. Many worthy historians bear witness to this as well—Polybius of Megalopolis, Strabo of Cappadocia, Nicolaus of Damascus, Timagenes, Castor the chronicler, and Apollodorus—all of whom say that Antiochus, in need of money, broke his treaty with the Jews and plundered the temple, which was full of gold and silver. Apion ought to have looked into these facts, unless he himself had the heart of a donkey and the shamelessness of the dog they are accustomed to worship; for he lied without even any external reasoning to support him. As for us, we give donkeys neither honor nor any special standing, as the Egyptians do to crocodiles and asps, counting those who are bitten by these creatures or seized by crocodiles as blessed and favored by God. Among us, donkeys are simply what they are among other sensible people: beasts that bear the burdens laid on them; and if they wander into the fields and eat, or fail to keep to the road set for them, they receive many blows, since they serve our agriculture and its necessary tasks.
But either Apion was the most foolish of all men at composing false tales, or else, having taken some starting point from the facts, he was unable to carry it through, since no blasphemy against us can succeed. He has added another story, full of slander against us, drawn from the Greeks—about which it is enough to say this: those who presume to speak of piety ought to know that it is a lesser impurity to pass through temples than for priests to fabricate wicked words. These men were more concerned to defend a sacrilegious king than to write what was just and true about our people and our temple. Wishing to please Antiochus and to conceal his faithlessness and sacrilege, which he committed against our nation out of his need for money, they lied about us in matters yet to be told as well. Apion made himself the prophet of these others and said that Antiochus found in the temple a couch, and a man lying on it, with a table set before him laden with delicacies of sea, land, and air, and that this man was struck with astonishment at the sight; that he at once fell in worship at the king's entrance as though it would bring him the greatest relief, and, falling at his knees with his right hand outstretched, begged for his freedom; and when the king bade him take courage and say who he was, and why he lived there, and what was the reason for his food, the man, with groans and tears, told his sorrowful plight, or so Apion says. He said that he was a Greek, and that while traveling through the province to earn his living he had suddenly been seized by foreigners and brought to the temple, and shut up there, seen by no one, but fattened with every kind of delicacy prepared for him. At first these unlooked-for kindnesses had seemed to bring him only unexpected pleasure, then suspicion, then bewilderment, and at last, on questioning the attendants who came to him, he heard of the unspeakable law of the Jews, for the sake of which he was being fattened, and that they did this every year at a fixed time. They would seize a Greek foreigner, he said, and fatten him for a year, then lead him out to a certain wood and kill him, sacrifice his body according to their rites, taste his entrails, and swear an oath over the immolation of the Greek to maintain enmity against the Greeks, and then throw the remains of the dying man into a certain pit. He goes on to say the man declared that only a few days of his term remained, and begged that, out of shame before the gods of the Greeks, and by overcoming the treachery of the Jews with his own blood, the king would free him from the evils surrounding him.
Such a tale is not only utterly steeped in melodrama but overflows with cruel shamelessness as well; yet it does not clear Antiochus of sacrilege, as those who wrote it to flatter him supposed—for he did not, in fact, approach the temple with any such expectation, but, as they themselves say, found what he had not hoped for. He was, then, wicked by his own will, impious, and altogether godless in the excess of falsehood he ordered told—something very easy to recognize from the facts themselves. For it is not only with the Greeks that a conflict of laws is known to exist, but above all with the Egyptians and many other peoples. Which of these has never at some time sojourned among us, that we should have renewed our conspiracy through bloodshed against them alone? Or how is it possible that all the Jews could gather for these sacrifices, and that so many thousands could find enough entrails to taste, as Apion claims? Or why was the man discovered never named—for Apion did not record his name—or why did the king not escort him back to his own country with honor, since by doing so he could have been thought pious and a great lover of the Greeks, and gained great support for himself against the hatred of the Jews? But I leave this aside; for it is fitting to refute the senseless not with words but with facts.
All who have seen the construction of our temple know what it was like, and how inviolable was the integrity of its purification. It had four courts running around it, and each of these had its own guard prescribed by law. Into the outer court it was permitted for everyone to enter, even foreigners; only women in their menstrual period were forbidden to pass through. Into the second court all Jews might enter, along with their wives, provided they were free of all impurity. Into the third, only Jewish men who were clean and purified might enter. Into the fourth, the priests clothed in their priestly robes; and into the innermost sanctuary, only the chief priests, wrapped in their own distinctive robe. So great is the care given to every point of piety that the priests are appointed to enter only at set hours: in the morning, when the temple is opened, those performing the appointed sacrifices must enter, and again at midday, until the temple is closed. Moreover, no vessel of any kind may be carried into the temple; the only things placed within it are the altar, the table, the censer, and the lampstand, all of which are prescribed in the law as well. Nothing further is done there—no unspeakable mysteries, no feasting takes place inside; for what has already been said has the testimony and open evidence of the whole people. Although there are four tribes of priests, and each of these tribes has more than five thousand men, the service is nonetheless carried out in rotation, on fixed days, and when these are past, others succeed them and come to perform the sacrifices, gathering in the temple at midday to receive from those who preceded them the keys of the temple and all the vessels according to a fixed count, with nothing pertaining to food or drink brought into the temple. Even such things are forbidden to be offered at the altar, except what is prepared for the sacrifices themselves. What, then, are we to call Apion but a man who, examining none of these things, poured out incredible words? But this is shameful; for history...
The grammarian never promised to present the true facts. Knowing full well the piety of our temple, he passed it over, and instead invented the story of the captured Greek and the unspeakable fodder, the most lavish delicacy of foods, and slaves entering where not even the noblest of the Jews may enter, unless they are priests. This, then, is the basest impiety and a deliberate lie meant to seduce those unwilling to examine the truth. Through these evil and unspeakable inventions they have tried to slander us.
Again, playing the pious mocker, he adds Mnaseas to his fable. He says that Mnaseas reported that once, during a long war of Jews against Jews in a certain city of the Jews called Dora, a man who worshiped Apollo there came to the Jews — a man he calls Zabidos — who promised to hand over to them Apollo, the god of the Dorians, and that the god would come to our temple if everyone withdrew. And the whole multitude of the Jews believed him. Zabidos then built a wooden contraption, put it around himself, fixed three rows of lamps on it, and walked about in it so that to those standing far off he appeared as though stars were making their course across the ground. The Jews, struck with astonishment at the extraordinary sight, kept their distance and stayed quiet, while Zabidos, in complete calm, went into the sanctuary and tore off the golden head of the donkey — for that is how he wittily put it in his writing — and then hurried back to Dora.
Are we not entitled, then, to say the same of Apion — that he is loading a donkey, namely himself, and stuffing it full of both foolish talk and lies? He writes of places that do not exist and relocates cities he knows nothing about. Idumea borders our country near Gaza, and Dora is no city of Idumea at all; there is, however, a city called Dora in Phoenicia, by Mount Carmel, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Apion's nonsense — it lies four days' journey from Judea.
And what further does he accuse us of, in saying that we do not share the gods of others, if our own ancestors were supposedly so easily persuaded that Apollo would come to them, and imagined they saw him walking on the earth among the stars? Surely those who perform so many great lamp-lightings had never before seen a lamp! And not one of so many tens of thousands of people happened to meet him as he walked through the country — instead he found the walls empty of guards, even though war was underway. I pass over the rest. The doors of the temple were sixty cubits high and twenty wide, entirely gilded and all but wrought of solid gold; no fewer than two hundred men closed them each day, and it was forbidden to leave them open.
So this lamp-bearer supposed he could easily open them, holding, as he imagined, the donkey's head. Did he, then, bring it back to us again, or did he take it away and carry it off, so that Antiochus might have it ready for a second myth from Apion? He has also invented a lie about an oath of ours, claiming that we swear by the God who made heaven and earth and sea to show goodwill to no foreigner, and above all to no Greek. If he was going to lie, he ought at least to have said, once and for all, "to no foreigner, and above all to no Egyptian" — for that would have matched his original fabrications, if indeed our ancestors were driven out by their Egyptian kinsmen not for wickedness but because of misfortunes. As for the Greeks, we are separated from them more by geography than by way of life, so that we have no hostility or rivalry toward them. On the contrary, many of them have chosen to come over to our laws, and some have remained faithful to them, while others, unable to endure the discipline, have fallen away again. And not one of these has ever claimed to have heard this oath sworn among us — only Apion, it seems, has heard it, since he composed it himself.
One must marvel, too, at the sheer cleverness of Apion in what he is about to say. He claims it is proof that we neither follow just laws nor worship God as we should, but instead serve one nation after another, and that our city has met with certain misfortunes — as though it were not perfectly obvious that these men themselves belong to a city, the most imperial of all, the Romans, who from ancient times have been accustomed to rule rather than to serve! And yet one might well excuse anyone else this kind of arrogance. For there is no other people who could not fairly turn this very charge back against Apion himself: few nations have ever had the fortune to hold power at the right moment, and even these have in turn been yoked into servitude to others by the reversals of fortune, while the greater part of mankind has repeatedly obeyed others.
The Egyptians alone, it seems, because their gods — so they say — fled to their country and were saved by changing into the shapes of beasts, won the extraordinary privilege of never serving any of those who ruled Asia or Europe — they who in the whole of time have never enjoyed a single day of freedom, not even from their own masters! As for how the Persians treated them — not once but many times, sacking their cities, tearing down their temples, slaughtering the very animals they reckon as gods — I would not hold that against the Persians, for it is not fitting to imitate Apion's boorishness, who gave no thought to the misfortunes of Athens or of Sparta, whom everyone calls the bravest and most pious of the Greeks. I pass over the kings famed for piety — Croesus among them — and the calamities of life they suffered. I pass over the burning of the Athenian acropolis, the temple at Ephesus, the one at Delphi, and countless others — and no one has ever blamed these disasters on those who suffered them, but on those who committed them. Yet Apion has turned up as a novel accuser of us, forgetting his own people's troubles in Egypt: Sesostris, the legendary king of Egypt, blinded his own people! We, for our part, would never say of our own kings, David and Solomon, that they subdued many nations by force — but let us leave that aside. What is well known to everyone, Apion has simply ignored: that under the rule of the Persians, and after them the Macedonians, over Asia, the Egyptians were enslaved, no better than mere chattel, while we, being free, even ruled the surrounding cities for close on a hundred and twenty years, down to the time of Pompey the Great; and when every king everywhere was being warred upon by the Romans, our people alone were preserved as allies and friends, on account of their loyalty.
"But," he says, "we have produced no admirable men — no discoverers of arts, no one distinguished for wisdom." And he lists Socrates and Zeno and Cleanthes and men of that sort. Then, most astonishing of all in his list, he adds himself, and calls Alexandria blessed for having such a citizen! He needed himself, evidently, as his own witness — since to everyone else he appeared a wicked demagogue, corrupt in both life and speech, so that one might well pity Alexandria if it truly took pride in this man. As for the men who have arisen among our own people, those who study our Antiquities know that they deserve no less praise than anyone's.
The rest of what is written in the accusation might perhaps have been fitting to pass over as needing no defense, so that Apion could stand convicted by his own words, and by those of the other Egyptians as well. For he charges that we sacrifice animals and do not eat pork, and he mocks the circumcision of the genitals. Now the killing of tame animals is common to all other peoples as well, and Apion, in condemning those who sacrifice, has only proven himself Egyptian by race — for no Greek or Macedonian would have taken offense at this, since these peoples pray to sacrifice whole hecatombs to their gods and use the victims for feasting, and the world has not thereby been emptied of livestock, as Apion feared. And yet, if all peoples followed the customs of the Egyptians, the world would indeed be emptied of men, while it would be overrun with the most savage beasts, which these people, reckoning them gods, carefully rear.
Indeed, if one asked him which of all the Egyptians he considers the wisest and most god-fearing, he would surely admit it is the priests. For these, it is said, were charged by the kings from the very beginning with two duties: the service of the gods and the care of wisdom. And all of them are circumcised and abstain from pork, though not a single one of the other Egyptians ever sacrifices a pig to the gods. Was Apion, then, blind in his understanding, agreeing to abuse us on behalf of the Egyptians while accusing precisely those who not only practice the very customs he reviles, but even taught others to be circumcised, as Herodotus has recorded? For this reason it seems to me altogether fitting that Apion paid the penalty due for his blasphemy against his own ancestral laws: he was circumcised out of sheer necessity, from an ulcer that formed on his genitals, and having gained no benefit from the circumcision, he rotted away and died in terrible agony. Those of sound mind ought to abide strictly by their own laws concerning piety and not revile the laws of others — but he fled from his own laws and lied about ours. Such was the end of Apion's life, and let this also be the end of what we have to say about him here.
Since Apollonius Molon, and Lysimachus, and certain others as well, partly out of ignorance but mostly out of malice, have made speeches neither just nor true about both Moses, our lawgiver, and about our laws — slandering him as a charlatan and an impostor, and claiming that our laws teach us nothing but wickedness and no virtue at all — I wish to speak briefly, as best I am able, about the whole structure of our constitution and its particulars. For I believe it will become clear that we possess laws laid down in the best possible way with a view to piety, to fellowship with one another, to benevolence toward all mankind, and further to justice, to endurance under hardship, and to contempt of death. I ask those who take up this treatise not to read it in a spirit of envy, for I have not chosen to write a eulogy of ourselves, but I regard this defense, drawn from the very laws by which we continue to live, as the most just answer to the many false accusations made against us. Besides, Apollonius did not organize his accusations all together as Apion did, but scattered them here and there: at one point he reviles us as atheists and haters of mankind, at another he reproaches us for cowardice, and at yet another, conversely, he accuses us of recklessness and audacity. He says, too, that we are the most talentless of all barbarians, and that this is why we alone have contributed no discovery to human life. I believe all of this will be clearly refuted once it is shown that the opposite of what has been said is both prescribed for us by our laws and practiced by us with the utmost precision. But if I am forced to mention practices established among others that run contrary to our own, the blame for that rightly falls on those who insist on comparing our practices unfavorably with theirs — and I do not think they will be able to say either that we lack these laws, of which I shall set out the most essential, or that we fail, more than any other people, to abide by our own laws.
Taking up the argument again, then, from a little further back, I would say this first: that among peoples who live without law and without order, those who first desired a shared life of order and law, and were the first to establish it, would reasonably be recognized as excelling in gentleness and natural virtue. Indeed, every people tries to trace its own institutions back to the most ancient possible time, so as not to appear to be imitating others, but rather to have themselves guided others toward a lawful way of life. Given that this is how things stand, it is the mark of a good lawgiver to discern what is best and to persuade those who will use it to accept what he has established, while it is the mark of a good people to abide steadfastly by all that has been decided, and to change nothing on account of either good fortune or misfortune.
I therefore declare that our lawgiver surpasses in antiquity all lawgivers anywhere on record. The Lycurguses, the Solons, Zaleucus of the Locrians, and all those admired among the Greeks appear, by comparison with him, to have come into being only yesterday or the day before — since not even the word "law" itself was known among the Greeks in ancient times. Homer himself is witness to this, never once using the word anywhere in his poetry; indeed it did not yet exist in his day, and the people were governed instead by unformed opinions and by the commands of kings, and continued for a long time afterward to follow unwritten customs, constantly altering many of them to suit circumstance. But our lawgiver, who lived in the most ancient times — a point conceded even by those who say everything they can against us — proved himself the best leader and counselor to his people, and, having comprised the entire structure of their life within the law, persuaded them to accept it and ensured that it would be preserved most securely forever.
Let us look, then, at the first great achievement of his works. When our ancestors resolved to leave Egypt and return to their ancestral land, he took charge of many tens of thousands of them and brought them to safety through countless hardships and seemingly impossible dangers: they had to make their way through a vast, waterless expanse of sand, to defeat their enemies, and to protect their children, their wives, and their possessions while fighting. Through all of this he proved himself the best of generals, the wisest of counselors, and the truest guardian of all. He made the entire multitude depend on himself, and having secured their obedience in everything, he took from it no personal advantage of his own — even though this is precisely the moment when those in power seize armies and tyrannies for themselves, and accustom their peoples to live amid great lawlessness. Instead, holding such power, he judged it right to do the very opposite: to act piously and to show great goodwill toward his people, believing that in this way he would best display his own virtue and provide the surest safety for those who had made him their leader. Since his purpose was noble and his great achievements were being realized, he reasonably came to believe that he had God as his leader and counselor, and having first persuaded himself that everything he did and thought was in accordance with God's will, he considered that this conviction should come before everything else
...to instill this conviction in the multitudes: for those who are persuaded that god oversees their own lives will not tolerate committing any wrong at all. Such, then, was our lawgiver, no charlatan or deceiver, as those who slander him say unjustly, but of the sort the Greeks boast Minos was, and after him the other lawgivers. For while the rest merely propose their laws, Minos claimed that he referred the oracles of his laws to Apollo and his Delphic shrine, either because they believed this was really so, or because they supposed it would be easier to win persuasion that way. But who it was who most succeeded in establishing laws and hit upon the truest conviction about god can be discerned by comparing the laws themselves side by side; for that is now the point to discuss.
Now the differences in customs and laws in detail among all peoples are innumerable, but one may survey them under general heads: some entrusted authority over their government to monarchies, others to the rule of the few, others to the multitude. Our lawgiver, however, looked to none of these, but established what one might call, forcing the term a little, a theocracy, placing the beginning and the mastery of government in god's hands. And he persuaded everyone to look to him as the cause of all the good things shared in common by all people, and of whatever they themselves obtained by prayer in moments of helplessness; and he taught that nothing escapes his notice, neither anything done nor anything anyone might even contemplate within himself. He declared him to be one, uncreated, and unchanging through all eternity, superior in beauty to every mortal form, knowable to us in his power, though unknowable as to what he is in his essence. That the wisest of the Greeks were taught to think this way about god, through his leading the way, I forgo saying for now, but that these views are noble and fitting to the nature and majesty of god, they themselves have borne ample witness.
For Pythagoras and Anaxagoras and Plato, and the philosophers of the Stoa who came after him, and nearly all the rest, evidently held such views about the nature of god. But whereas they philosophized before the few, not daring to bring the truth of the doctrine before multitudes already possessed by other opinions, our lawgiver, since his deeds matched his words, not only persuaded his own contemporaries but instilled in all who would ever descend from them an unshakeable conviction about god. The reason is that he far surpassed everyone, always, in the usefulness of his manner of legislating: he did not make piety a part of virtue, but made the rest of virtue — I mean justice, self-control, endurance, and the harmony of citizens with one another in everything — parts of piety. For all our actions and pursuits and every word bear upon our piety toward god; he left none of these unexamined or undefined.
There are two ways, in general, of instruction and of shaping character: one is by word, through teaching; the other through the practice of habits. Now the other lawgivers differed in their judgments, and each, choosing whichever of the two seemed best to him, left the other aside — the Lacedaemonians and the Cretans, for instance, educated by habits, not by words, while the Athenians and nearly all the other Greeks prescribed by their laws what must or must not be done, but neglected to accustom people to it through actual practice. Our lawgiver, by contrast, joined both together with great care: he did not leave the practice of character mute, nor did he let the teaching that comes from the law go without effect, but beginning from the very first nourishment and the way of life within each household, he left nothing, not even the smallest matter, to the free choice and will of those who would use it.
Even concerning food — what one must abstain from and what one may eat — and concerning those who would share one's table, and the intensity of labor and, conversely, of rest, he himself set a boundary and standard: the law — so that living under it as under a father and master, we might do no wrong, whether willingly or through ignorance. For he did not even leave ignorance as an excuse, but declared the law itself to be the finest and most necessary education, not something to be heard once, or twice, or many times, but he ordered that every week, setting other work aside, people gather to hear the law and learn it thoroughly and accurately — something which, it seems, all other lawgivers have neglected. Indeed, most people are so far from living according to their own laws that they scarcely even know them, and only when they have done wrong do they learn from others that they have transgressed the law; and even those administering the greatest and most sovereign offices among them admit their own ignorance, since they appoint as overseers of the management of affairs men who profess expertise in the laws. Among us, however, ask anyone whatever you like about the laws, and he could tell them all more easily than his own name.
And so, from the very first moment of awareness, learning the laws thoroughly, we hold them, as it were, engraved on our souls; and the transgressor is rare, and there is no possibility of escaping punishment. This above all has produced among us that wondrous concord: for to hold one and the same opinion about god, and to differ in nothing from one another in way of life and habits, produces the finest harmony in human character. For among us alone will one hear no contradictory statements about god, of the kind that are common among others — spoken not only by ordinary people, moved by whatever feeling strikes each of them, but even ventured by some of the philosophers, some of whom have undertaken by their arguments to do away with god's nature altogether, while others strip him of his providence over mankind. Nor will one see any difference among us in the practices of daily life; rather, our deeds are common to all, and there is one single account, agreeing with the law, that god watches over all things. And indeed, that all other pursuits of life must have piety as their end — even the women and household servants among us would tell you that.
Hence, indeed, arises the charge some bring against us, that we have produced no men who are inventors of new deeds or words: others consider it a fine thing to abide by none of their ancestral customs, and give the highest testimony to the cleverness of those who dare to transgress them, whereas we, on the contrary, have supposed that wisdom and virtue consist in this alone — never doing or even thinking anything at all contrary to what was legislated from the beginning. This would reasonably be evidence that the law was laid down in the finest possible way; for practical trial exposes as needing correction whatever does not have this character. But for us, who are persuaded that the law was laid down from the beginning according to the will of god, it would not even be pious not to keep it. For what could anyone alter in it, or what better thing could he discover, or bring in from elsewhere as an improvement? Would it be the whole structure of the constitution?
And what could be nobler or more just than a constitution that has made god the leader of the universe, that entrusts to the priests in common the management of the greatest matters, and that has in turn entrusted to the high priest of all the leadership over the other priests? These the lawgiver from the very outset appointed to this honor not on the basis of wealth or any other advantages that come by chance, but whoever among those with him excelled the rest in powers of persuasion and self-control — to these he committed above all the service of god. This too was part of the exacting care he took over the law and the other practices; for the priests were appointed overseers of everything, judges in disputed matters, and punishers of the condemned. What office, then, could be more sacred than this one? What honor more fitting to god, when the whole multitude is prepared for piety, and the exceptional care of the priests is entrusted to them, and the whole constitution is administered as if it were some kind of sacred rite? For the things that others, observing only a handful of days each year, are unable to keep, though they call them mysteries and rites, these we keep with pleasure and unshakable resolve throughout all time.
What, then, are the prescriptions and prohibitions? They are simple and well known. First and foremost stands the one concerning god, declaring that god possesses all things, complete and blessed, self-sufficient to himself and to all, the beginning and middle and end of all things — manifest in his works and acts of grace, more evident than anything else whatsoever, yet his form and magnitude beyond our power to describe. No material, however costly, is fit for an image of him; every art is without skill to conceive an imitation. We have seen nothing like him, nor do we conceive of anything like him, nor is it holy even to guess. We see his works: light, sky, earth, sun, waters, the birth of living creatures, the springing forth of crops. These god made, not with hands, not with labors, not because he needed anyone to work with him, but simply because he willed it, and at once, beautifully, they came into being.
This god must be served by the practice of virtue; for this is the most sacred manner of god's service. One temple for the one god — for like is always dear to like — common to all, as befits the common god of all. Him the priests will serve continually, and the first among them, always by descent, will lead them. This man, together with his fellow priests, will sacrifice to god, will guard the laws, will judge disputed matters, and will punish those convicted. Whoever disobeys him will pay the penalty as one impious toward god himself.
We offer sacrifices not for our own drunken revelry — for this is unwanted by god — but for sobriety. And at the sacrifices one must first pray for the common welfare, and then for oneself; for we have come into being for fellowship, and whoever prefers this to his own private good is most pleasing to god. Our petition to god should not be that he give us good things — for he has given them of his own will, freely, and set them out in the open for all — but that we may be able to receive them, and, having received them, keep them. The law has prescribed purifications for sacrifices, after a funeral, after childbirth, after intercourse with a woman, and many others, which it would take long to write. Such, then, is our account of god and of his service — and it is, at the same time, the law itself.
What, then, are our laws concerning marriage? The law recognizes only intercourse that is according to nature, with a woman, and this only if it is meant to result in children. Intercourse of males with males it has abhorred, and death is the penalty if anyone should attempt it. It commands that a man marry not with an eye to a dowry, nor by violent seizure, nor again by persuading through trickery and deceit, but that he seek her hand from the one entitled to give her, being of suitable kinship. "Woman is inferior to man," it says, "in every respect." Therefore let her be obedient, not for the sake of degradation, but so that she may be ruled; for god has given mastery to the man. With her alone must the man who has married her live; to make an attempt on another man's wife is impious. And if anyone should do this, there is no escaping the death penalty — neither if he forces a virgin already betrothed to another, nor if he seduces a married woman.
It commanded that all children be reared, and forbade women either to abort or to destroy what has been conceived; a woman who does so would be a child-killer, for destroying a life and diminishing the race. And so, if anyone should even approach a woman after a miscarriage, he cannot count as clean at that time. And after lawful intercourse between man and wife, a washing is required; for the law supposed that the soul, in this act, undergoes a kind of separation into another region — since indeed, entering into bodies, it suffers, and again suffers when separated from them by death. For this reason it prescribed purifications in all such cases. Nor, indeed, did it permit at the births of children the holding of banquets and occasions for drunkenness, but ordained self-control from the very start of a child's upbringing. And it commanded that children be taught letters, both concerning the laws and concerning the deeds of their ancestors, so that they might imitate the latter, and, being reared together with the former, might neither transgress nor have any excuse of ignorance.
It took thought for the reverence due the dead, not through costly funerals or the building of conspicuous monuments, but by having the closest relatives perform the funeral rites, while all who pass by should approach and join in the mourning. It also requires that the house and its inhabitants be purified after a death, so that anyone who has caused a death may be as far as possible from seeming to be clean. It ranked honor for parents second only to honor for god, and hands over to be stoned the one who does not repay their kindnesses but falls short toward them in any way. And it says that the young must hold every older person in honor, since god is the oldest of all.
It allows nothing to be concealed from friends, for it holds that there is no friendship that does not trust in everything; and even if some enmity should arise, it has forbidden the disclosure of secrets. If a judge takes bribes, the penalty is death. To disregard a suppliant when one is able to help him makes one liable to punishment. Whatever a man has not deposited he may not take up; he shall lay hands on nothing belonging to others; he shall take no interest. These and many things like them hold together our fellowship with one another.
How the lawgiver also took thought for fairness toward foreigners is worth seeing, for he will be found to have provided for this better than anyone, so that we might neither corrupt what is our own nor begrudge those who wish to share in what is ours. All who wish to live under the same laws as we do he receives gladly when they come over to us, holding that kinship lies not in descent alone, but also in one's chosen way of life. But those who come merely in passing he was unwilling to admit into close association with us. He has prescribed besides all the other things whose sharing is a necessity: to provide fire, water, and food to all who need them, to point out the way, not to leave a corpse unburied, and to be fair even toward those judged to be enemies.
For he does not permit the burning of their land or the cutting down of fruit-bearing trees, and he has forbidden the stripping of those who have fallen in battle, and he has taken thought for captives, that they be spared outrage, especially the women. So thoroughly has he trained us in gentleness and humanity that he does not even allow disregard for irrational animals, but permitted only their lawful use, and forbade...
He forbade every other kind of hunting; but creatures that flee to houses as suppliants he forbade anyone to destroy. He did not even allow the young to be taken along with their parents, but ordered that even in enemy territory the animals used for labor should be spared and not killed. In this way he took thought from every side for gentleness, using the laws already mentioned to instruct, but appointing others, directed against transgressors, to punish without excuse. For most transgressions the penalty is death: if a man commits adultery, if he rapes a girl, if he dares to force himself on a male, or if the one so assaulted submits to it. The law is equally without mercy in the case of slaves.
But also if anyone commits fraud in weights or measures, or in an unjust and deceitful sale, or steals another's property, or takes up what he did not deposit, for all these offenses there are penalties, not such as prevail elsewhere, but harsher. As for wrongs against parents or impiety toward God, even if a man merely intends them, he is put to death at once. But for those who live by the laws, the prize is neither silver nor gold, nor a crown of wild olive or of parsley, nor any such public proclamation, but each man, with his own conscience bearing witness, has come to believe it—the lawgiver having prophesied it, and God having furnished sure confirmation of the belief, that to those who keep the laws, even if they must die for them, God has granted to come to be again and to receive a better life in the turning of the ages. I would hesitate to write this, were it not made plain to everyone by deeds, that many of our people, often, and in whole bodies,
have chosen to endure everything nobly rather than utter a single word against the law. [And even if nothing of this sort had happened to make our people known to all mankind, and to lay open to view our willing obedience to the laws,] still, someone either wrote an account which the Greeks used to read, or claimed to have encountered, somewhere beyond the known world, men holding such lofty opinions about God, and abiding steadfastly by such laws for so long an age—everyone, I think, would be full of wonder, given the constant changes of fortune elsewhere. Indeed, of those who have attempted to write anything comparable about a constitution and laws, as though they had composed something marvelous, others accuse them of having taken on impossible subjects. And I pass over the other philosophers who worked at anything of this kind in their writings,
but Plato, admired among the Greeks as one who surpassed in dignity of life, in power of speech, and in persuasiveness everyone who had ever engaged in philosophy, is all but continually mocked and ridiculed by those who claim to be skilled in political affairs. And yet, if one examines his work closely, one would find it far easier and much closer to the ordinary habits of most people; indeed Plato himself admitted that it was not safe to publish the true opinion about God to the folly of the masses. But some consider Plato's arguments empty words, elaborately composed with great license, whereas among the lawgivers they have admired Lycurgus most of all, and everyone sings the praises of Sparta, because the Spartans persevered in his laws for so very long a time. Let this much, then, be granted: that obedience to the laws is proof of virtue.
But let those who admire the Lacedaemonians set their span of time beside the more than two thousand years of our own constitution, and let them further reckon that the Lacedaemonians, for as long as they held their freedom on their own account, seemed to keep the laws with precision; but once changes of fortune came upon them, they all but forgot the laws entirely. We, however, though we have passed through countless vicissitudes because of the changes among the rulers of Asia, have not betrayed our laws even in the direst straits—and not for the sake of idleness or luxury did we cherish them, but, if one is willing to consider it, far greater contests and labors have been set upon us than the endurance that is thought to have been imposed on the Lacedaemonians. * They, at any rate, neither working the land nor toiling at crafts, but exempt from all labor, sleek and training their bodies for beauty, passed their time in the city, using other men as servants for all the needs of life and receiving their food ready-made from them—enduring to do and suffer everything honorable and humane for this one fine purpose alone, to prevail over all against whom they might make war. Yet that not even this they achieved, I forbear to say; for not once only, but many times, and in whole bodies, they neglected the commands of the law and surrendered themselves, arms and all, to the enemy. Has anyone, then, ever known among us—I do not say so many, but even two or three—who betrayed the laws, or feared death? I do not mean that easiest death which comes to men in battle, but the death that comes with the mutilation of the body, which seems of all deaths the harshest. Indeed, I think that some who have conquered us inflict it upon their captives not out of hatred, but because they want to see a marvelous spectacle: whether there really exist men who believe that the only evil for them is being forced to act, or to say a word, against their own laws. And one should not be surprised that we are braver in facing death for our laws than everyone else; for even the easiest of our practices others do not readily endure—I mean working with our own hands, frugality in food, never eating or drinking at random or as each man's appetite happens to prompt, never indulging in casual intercourse or extravagance, and again submitting to a fixed, unshakable order even in leisure.
But those who close with the sword and rout the enemy at the first charge have not been able to look steadily at our rules concerning diet. We, on the other hand, precisely from our willing obedience to the law in these matters, are able to display our nobility there as well. Then men like Lysimachus and Molon and other such writers—discredited sophists, deceivers of the young—revile us as the basest of all men. For my part, I would not wish to examine the customs of others; for it is our ancestral practice to guard our own, not to accuse those of other peoples. As for mocking or blaspheming the gods recognized by others, our lawgiver has expressly forbidden this to us, out of respect for the very word 'God.' But since our accusers think to refute us by comparison, it is not possible to remain silent, especially since the case
is about to be judged not by us as its present composers, but by many others who have already made it, and with great acclaim. For which of those admired among the Greeks for wisdom has not censured both the most illustrious poets and the most trusted lawgivers, because from the beginning they sowed such opinions about the gods among the masses—declaring them to be as numerous as they themselves wished, born from one another and coming to be by every kind of generation, and dividing them, moreover, by places and modes of living, just as the species of animals are divided: some beneath the earth, some in the sea, and the oldest of them chained in Tartarus—* while to those to whom they assigned heaven they set over them one who was a father in name but in deed a tyrant and a master, and because of this a conspiracy formed against him by his wife, his brother, and his daughter, whom he had begotten out of his own head, so that they might seize and imprison him, just as he himself had done to his own father. Men of superior judgment rightly find these tales worthy of much censure, and besides this they mock the idea that among the gods some must be beardless boys and others bearded elders, and that others are assigned to particular crafts—one at the forge, another weaving, another making war and fighting among men, others playing the lyre or delighting in archery—and then that quarrels and rivalries over human beings arise among them, to the point not only of raising hands against one another, but of being wounded by men and crying out in pain.
And, most shameless of all: how is it not absurd to attach to almost all of them—male and female gods alike—unrestrained lust in their unions and love affairs? Then the noblest of them, the father himself first of all, looks on while the women he has seduced and made pregnant are imprisoned or drowned, unable even to save his own offspring, mastered as he is by fate, nor can he endure their deaths without tears. Fine tales indeed, these, and the ones that follow them—adultery seen so shamelessly in heaven among the gods that some even confess to envying those caught in it! For what else could be expected, when not even the eldest of them, their king, was able to restrain his impulse for union with his wife long enough even to reach their bedchamber? And then there are the gods who serve mankind—now building for hire, now herding flocks, others bound like criminals in a bronze dungeon—what sensible person would these not provoke to rebuke those who invented such tales and to condemn as great folly those who accepted them? And others still have fashioned Dread and Fear, and even Madness and Deceit—indeed, what one of the worst passions have they not molded into the nature and form of God? And they have persuaded cities to sacrifice even to these, the more decently named among them. And so they find themselves under great necessity to regard some of the gods as givers of good things and to call others averters of evil, and then to buy these off with gifts and favors, just as they would the wickedest of men, expecting to suffer some great harm from them if they fail to pay the fee.
What, then, is the cause of such great inconsistency and offense in matters divine? I myself suppose it is that their lawgivers, from the beginning, neither grasped the true nature of God, nor, so far as they were able to attain any accurate knowledge of it, made this the basis for the rest of the ordering of the constitution, but left it, like any other trivial matter, to the poets to bring in whatever gods they pleased, suffering all things, and to the orators to enroll by decree of the people any foreign god that suited them; and painters and sculptors too enjoyed great license among the Greeks in this regard, each inventing some form of his own—one molding it from clay, another painting it—while those craftsmen most admired of all have ivory and gold at their disposal as material for their ever-fresh inventions. [And some of the temples lie utterly deserted, while others are elaborately adorned with purifications of every kind.] Then the gods who once flourished in honor have grown old; [and those next below them in rank have been demoted to second place—for that is the more decent way to put it]—while new ones, once introduced, receive their own cults, [as, in the digression from what we said before, we leave aside the places that have been left deserted,] and some of the temples lie desolate while others are newly founded, each man establishing one according to his own private wish, when in fact they ought, on the contrary, to keep their belief about God and the honor due to him unchanging.
Apollonius Molon, then, was one of the foolish and deluded; but those who truly philosophized among the Greeks were blind to none of what has been said, nor were they ignorant of the frigid pretexts of the allegories, and for that reason they rightly despised them, and came to agree with us on the true and fitting opinion about God. Starting from this, Plato says that none of the other poets should be admitted into his republic, and even Homer he dismisses with courtesy, crowning him and pouring myrrh over him, so that the right opinion about God should not be obscured by his myths. And Plato imitated our lawgiver most of all in this: that he prescribed no instruction for his citizens so important as that all should learn the laws exactly, and moreover, in the matter of not allowing outsiders to mingle in at random, he took care that the body of citizens should remain pure, made up only of those who abide by the laws. Of none of this did Molon Apollonius take account when he accused us of not admitting those who hold other preconceived opinions about God, and of being unwilling to associate with those who choose to live by a different way of life. But this too is not peculiar to us; it is common to everyone, not only to the Greeks, but also to those held in the
highest repute among the Greeks: the Lacedaemonians regularly practiced the expulsion of foreigners and did not permit their own citizens to travel abroad, suspecting corruption of their laws from both directions. One might perhaps reasonably reproach them for harshness, since they shared neither their citizenship nor their way of life with anyone; we, however, while we do not think it right to imitate the ways of others, gladly welcome those who wish to share in our own. This, I think, would be evidence at once of humanity and of magnanimity. I will say no more about the Lacedaemonians. But how did the Athenians, who thought their city common to all, stand on these matters? Of this Apollonius was ignorant: that they punished without mercy even those who merely uttered a word against their laws concerning the gods. For what other reason did Socrates die? He certainly did not betray the city to its enemies, nor did he plunder any of the temples; but because he swore new oaths and claimed that some divine sign spoke to him—or, as some say, in jest—for this he was condemned to drink hemlock and die. His accuser also charged him with corrupting the young, in that he led them to despise their ancestral constitution and its laws. Thus Socrates, a citizen of Athens, endured such a punishment. Anaxagoras was a Clazomenian; but because, when the Athenians held the sun to be a god, he said it was a fiery molten mass, they condemned him to death by a narrow margin of votes. And on Diagoras of Melos they set a price of one talent for anyone who should kill him, because he was said to mock the mysteries observed among them. And Protagoras, had he not fled in time, would have been seized and put to death for having, as they thought, written something inconsistent with what the Athenians believed about the gods. And why should one wonder that they treated men of such standing this way, when they did not even spare women? For they put to death a priestess, once someone accused her of initiating people into the worship of foreign gods—a thing forbidden by their law, which fixed a punishment against those who introduced a foreign god.
death is the penalty. Men who enforce such a law obviously did not think that other peoples' gods were gods at all - otherwise they would not have begrudged themselves the benefit of a larger pantheon. So much, then, for the Athenians. The Scythians, who delight in the murder of human beings and differ little from wild animals, nevertheless think they must guard their own customs jealously, and they killed Anacharsis, a man admired by the Greeks for his wisdom, when he returned to them, because he seemed to come back saturated with Greek habits.
One could find many put to death among the Persians for the very same reason. But apparently Apollonius delighted in the laws of the Persians and admired them, because the Greeks profited from Persian courage and from the unanimity the Persians held concerning the gods - profited from that unanimity, at least, by burning down their temples, and very nearly became slaves in return for their courage. Yet he became an imitator of every Persian practice, violating other men's wives and castrating boys. Among us, death is fixed as the penalty even if a man wrongs an irrational animal in that way. Neither fear of our conquerors nor rivalry with the practices honored among other nations has ever had the strength to draw us away from these laws of ours.
Nor have we cultivated courage for the sake of waging wars for the sake of greed, but for the sake of preserving our laws. Other losses we endure mildly, but whenever anyone forces us to move our institutions, then we choose war even beyond our strength, and hold out under disaster to the very last extremity. Why, indeed, should we envy the laws of others when we see that they are not kept even by the very people who established them? How could the Spartans not condemn their own exclusive constitution and their carelessness about marriage? How could the Eleans and Thebans not condemn their union with males, against nature and without any restraint?
Practices they once supposed most admirable and most advantageous, they have not entirely abandoned in deed, yet they no longer admit to them - rather, they swear off the very laws concerning them, laws that once held such power among the Greeks that they even attributed unions between males to the gods, and by the same reasoning marriages between full brothers and sisters, composing this as their defense of unnatural and monstrous pleasures.
I set aside for now speaking of the punishments - how many releases most lawgivers from the beginning granted the wicked, legislating fines of money for adultery and marriage for seduction - and how many pretexts of denial are allowed regarding impiety, should anyone attempt to examine them; for among most peoples it has already become a practiced skill to transgress the laws. Not so among us: even if we are deprived of wealth, of cities, and of every other good thing, our law at least remains immortal for us,
and no Jew, however far he might go from his homeland, and however much he might fear a harsh master, will fail to fear the law even before he fears that master. If, then, it is because of the excellence of our laws that we are so disposed toward them, let our critics concede that we have the very best laws. But if they suppose that we cling so persistently to base laws, what would they themselves justly deserve, they who do not keep the better ones?
Since long time is trusted as the truest judge of all things, I would make this my witness to the excellence of our lawgiver and to the account of God that he handed down; for an immense span of time has passed, and if one should compare him to the ages of other lawgivers, one would find him to surpass them all. Indeed, our laws have been proven sound by us, and they have produced in all other men, always and increasingly, a zeal that outstrips their own.
The first to do so were those among the Greeks who practiced philosophy: while seeming outwardly to preserve their ancestral ways, in their actual conduct and in their philosophizing they followed him, holding similar views about God and teaching frugality of life and fellowship with one another. Nor is this all - a great zeal for our piety has already spread for a long time even among the masses,
and there is no city of the Greeks, none whatsoever, nor any nation of barbarians, where the custom of the seventh day, on which we rest, has not spread, and where our fasts and the kindling of lamps and many of our food restrictions are not observed. They also try to imitate our harmony with one another, our distribution of goods, our diligence in crafts, and our endurance under the compulsions imposed for the sake of our laws.
For the most remarkable thing is this: our law has prevailed by itself, apart from any inducement of pleasure to draw men in, and just as God pervades the whole universe, so our law has made its way through all mankind. Let each man examine his own homeland and his own household, and he will not disbelieve what I have said.
One must therefore condemn deliberate wickedness in all mankind, if they have set their desire on emulating what is foreign and base rather than what is their own and good - or else they must stop slandering us out of envy. For we are not laying claim to anything that should provoke envy when we honor our own lawgiver and put our trust in what he prophesied concerning God;
even if we ourselves did not understand the excellence of our laws, we would still be led to think highly of them by the sheer number of those who emulate them. Concerning our laws and our constitution, I have given a precise account in my work on Antiquities. Just now I have mentioned them only so far as was necessary, with no intention either of disparaging the institutions of others or of praising our own,
but only so as to refute those who have written unjustly about us, men who have shamelessly quarreled with the plain truth itself. And now I think I have adequately fulfilled, through this account, what I promised at the outset: I have shown that our people is older in antiquity than our accusers claimed, who said it was very recent, and I have produced many ancient authors in their own writings who make mention of us,
when our accusers insisted that not a single one exists. They also said our ancestors were Egyptians - yet it has been shown that they came into Egypt from elsewhere. They falsely claimed our ancestors were expelled because of bodily disease - yet it has been shown that they returned to their own land by choice and through abundance of strength. Some have reviled our lawgiver as the most worthless of men; but God, long ago, and after him time itself, has proven to be the witness of his virtue.
Concerning the laws, no further discussion was needed, for they have been seen through their own operation teaching not impiety but the truest piety, calling men not to hatred of humanity but to fellowship in what they possess, hostile to injustice, careful of righteousness, banishing idleness and extravagance, teaching self-sufficiency and industriousness, restraining wars waged for greed while preparing men to be courageous in defense of the laws themselves,
unyielding in their punishments, unmoved by clever pretexts of argument, forever confirmed by deeds - for these we always furnish more clearly than any written record could. I would therefore say with confidence that we have introduced to the rest of mankind a very great number of the noblest things together at once. For what is nobler than unwavering piety? What is more just than obedience to the laws? Or what is more advantageous than harmony with one another,
neither breaking apart in misfortunes nor growing insolent and factious in good fortune, but in war holding death in contempt, and in peace devoting ourselves to crafts or farming, and being persuaded that in everything, everywhere, God oversees and directs it all? If these things had been written earlier or kept more faithfully by others, we would owe them gratitude as having become their disciples;
but if we are seen to make use of them more than anyone else, and if we have shown that their first discovery belongs to us, then let the Apions and the Molons, and all who delight in lying and slander, be refuted. And to you, Epaphroditus, who love the truth above all, and for your sake, so that those who likewise wish to know about our people may have it - let this book, along with the one before it, be written.

======== Life of Josephus (Vita) ========

My family is not without distinction, but rather descends far back from a line of priests. Just as different peoples have different grounds for claiming nobility, so among us a share in the priesthood is proof of the brilliance of one's lineage. My family belongs not only to the priesthood but to the first of the twenty-four priestly courses — and there is considerable distinction even within that group — and to the noblest of the clans within that course.
I also belong, through my mother, to the royal family. For the descendants of Asamoneus (Hasmoneus), of whom she was a descendant, held both the high priesthood and the kingship of our nation for a very long time. Let me trace the succession. Our great-great-grandfather was Simon, called "Psellus" (the Stammerer). He lived at the time when the high priesthood was held by the son of Simon the high priest, who was the first to be named Hyrcanus among the high priests.
Psellus's son Simon had nine children. Among them was Matthias, called "the son of Ephaeus." He married the daughter of Jonathan the high priest, the first of the descendants of Asamoneus to hold the high priesthood, who was the brother of Simon the high priest; and a son was born to him, Matthias, surnamed "the Hunchback," in the first year of the rule of Hyrcanus. To this Matthias was born Joseph, in the ninth year of the reign of Alexandra;
and to Joseph was born Matthias, in the tenth year of the reign of Archelaus; and to this Matthias I myself was born, in the first year of the principate of Gaius Caesar. I have three sons: Hyrcanus, the eldest, born in the fourth year of the principate of Vespasian Caesar; Justus, born in the seventh year; and Agrippa, born in the ninth year. This, then, is the succession of our family, as I found it recorded in the public records, which I set down in this way for the benefit of those who attempt to slander us — wishing them well.
My father Matthias was distinguished not only for his noble birth but was praised even more for his righteousness, being very well known in Jerusalem, the greatest city among us. I myself, educated together with my brother, who was named Matthias — for he was my full brother by both parents — made great progress in my studies, being reputed to excel in memory and understanding. While still a boy, about fourteen years old, I was commended by everyone for my love of letters, so that the chief priests and the leading men of the city constantly came to me to learn something more precisely about our laws.
When I was about sixteen, I decided to gain experience of the several sects existing among us. There are three of these: the first is that of the Pharisees, the second that of the Sadducees, and the third that of the Essenes, as we have often said. I reasoned that in this way I would be able to choose the best, if I examined them all. So I submitted myself to hard training and great exertion and went through all three; and not even considering the experience I had gained through them sufficient, when I learned that a certain man named Bannus was living in the desert,
wearing only clothing that came from trees, eating only what grew of itself, and bathing frequently in cold water, day and night, for purity's sake, I became his devoted follower. Having spent three years with him and fulfilled my ambition, I returned to the city. At nineteen years of age, I began to conduct my public life following the sect of the Pharisees, which is very similar to what the Greeks call the Stoic school.
After I had completed my twenty-sixth year, it fell to me to go up to Rome for the following reason. At the time when Felix was procurator of Judea, he had certain priests of my acquaintance, good and honorable men, bound in chains and sent to Rome on a small and trivial charge, to give an account of themselves to Caesar. Wishing to find some way to secure their release — especially when I learned that even in their hardship they had not forgotten their piety toward the divine, but were sustaining themselves on figs and nuts —
I arrived in Rome, having faced many dangers at sea. For when our ship went down in the middle of the Adriatic, we who numbered about six hundred swam through the whole night, and around daybreak, by God's providence, a ship from Cyrene appeared to us; and I, along with some others — about eighty of us in all — outstripped the rest and were taken up into the ship.
Having been saved and brought to Dicaearchia, which the Italians call Puteoli, I became acquainted, through friendship, with Halityrus, an actor of mimes who was a great favorite of Nero's and a Jew by birth; and through him I was introduced to Poppaea, Caesar's wife, and lost no time in asking her to secure the release of the priests. Having received great gifts in addition to this favor from Poppaea, I returned to my own country.
There I found the beginnings of revolutionary movements already under way, and many people greatly elated at the prospect of revolt from Rome. I therefore tried to restrain those bent on rebellion and urged them to reconsider, setting before their eyes those against whom they would be fighting, and pointing out that the Romans were superior not only in military experience but also in good fortune; and that they should not, rashly and altogether senselessly, bring upon their homelands, their families, and themselves the risk of the worst calamities.
This is what I said, and I pressed the point urgently, trying to dissuade them, foreseeing that the outcome of the war would be most disastrous for us. But I did not persuade them; for the madness of those bent on ruin prevailed by far. Fearing, then, that by continually saying such things I might come to be hated and suspected of favoring the enemy's cause, and might run the risk of being seized and put to death by them —
since the Antonia, which was a fortress, was already in their hands — I withdrew into the inner court of the Temple. But after the killing of Manahem and the leaders of the band of brigands, I came out of the Temple again and associated with the chief priests and the leaders of the Pharisees. No little fear gripped us as we saw the populace under arms, while we ourselves were at a loss what to do,
being unable to stop the revolutionaries, and with the danger plainly confronting us. We said that we agreed with their views, but advised them to hold their position and let the enemy come on, so that they might gain credit for justly taking up arms in their own defense. In doing this we were hoping that before long Cestius would come up with a large force and put an end to the revolt.
But when he came and joined battle, he was defeated, with many of his men falling. And the defeat of Cestius became a disaster for our whole nation; for those who desired war were emboldened all the more by this, and, having defeated the Romans, hoped to prevail to the end — a hope reinforced by another circumstance of the following kind: the inhabitants of the cities surrounding Syria seized the Jews living among them, together with their wives and children, and killed them, though they had no charge to bring against them;
for these Jews had neither planned any revolutionary act against Roman rule nor shown any hostility or treachery toward those very people. The people of Scythopolis committed the most impious and lawless acts of all: for when Jews attacked them from outside as enemies, they forced the Jews living among them to take up arms against their own kinsmen — a thing forbidden among us — and, having joined battle with them against the invaders, they overcame those who attacked;
but once they had won, they forgot their pledge of good faith toward these residents and allies, and put them all to death, though they numbered many thousands. The Jews living in Damascus suffered the same fate. But I have set forth these matters more precisely in my books on the Jewish War; I have mentioned them here now because I wish to make clear to my readers that the war against the Romans was not the choice of the Jews, but was, for the most part, forced upon them.
So then, after Cestius had been defeated, as I have said, the leading men of Jerusalem, seeing that the brigands and revolutionaries were well supplied with weapons, and fearing that, being themselves unarmed, they might fall into the power of their enemies — as indeed later happened — and learning that all of Galilee had not yet revolted from Rome, but that part of it was still quiet, sent me,
together with two other priests, good and honorable men, Joazar and Judas, to persuade the troublemakers to lay down their arms, and to teach them that it would be better for the arms to be kept in the hands of the best men of the nation. It was decided that these men should always keep their weapons ready for what might come, but should wait to see what the Romans would do. Having received these instructions, I set out
for Galilee. I found the people of Sepphoris embroiled in no small struggle over their homeland, since the Galileans had decided to plunder it because of its friendship toward the Romans and because it had offered its right hand and pledge of loyalty to Cestius Gallus, governor of Syria. But I freed all of these from their fear, persuading the crowds on their behalf and permitting them to send
whatever messages they wished, on account of their relatives held as hostages by Cestius at Dor — Dor being a city of Phoenicia. As for the inhabitants of Tiberias, I found that they had already taken up arms, for the following reason. There were three factions in the city: one consisting of respectable men, led by Julius Capellus; this man, together with all those associated with him — Herod son of Miarus and
Herod son of Gamalus, and Compsus son of Compsus (for Crispus, brother of the latter, who had once been prefect under the great king, happened to be residing on his own estates across the Jordan) — all those named urged that at that time they should remain loyal to the Romans and to the king. This view was not shared by Pistus, who was led astray by his son Justus;
for Justus was by nature somewhat unstable. The second faction, made up of the most insignificant people, was determined on war. Justus, son of Pistus, the leader of the third group, pretended at first to hesitate about the war, but in fact desired a change of affairs, thinking he would gain power for himself through such upheaval. Coming forward into the assembly, he tried to persuade the people that their city had always
ruled over Galilee, even in the days of Herod the tetrarch, its founder, though Herod had wished the city of Sepphoris to be subject to Tiberias, and that they had not lost this primacy even under King Agrippa the father, and had retained it up to the time when Felix governed Judea. But now, he said, they had suffered misfortune in being given as a gift to the younger Agrippa by Nero; for as soon as
Sepphoris submitted to the Romans, it had at once taken the lead in Galilee, while the royal treasury and the archives had been removed from Tiberias to it. Saying this and much else besides against King Agrippa, in order to incite the populace to revolt, he added that now was the time to take up arms and, gaining the Galileans as allies, they would readily rule over them, on account of
the hatred the Galileans bore toward the people of Sepphoris for maintaining their loyalty to the Romans — and so, with a large force, to turn to vengeance against them. By saying this he roused the crowd; for he was a capable demagogue, able to get the better of those who opposed him through trickery and deceit in speech. Indeed, he was not without some education in Greek learning, relying on which he undertook to write
a history of these events, thinking that by this composition he would get the better of the truth. But concerning this man — how base his life was, and how he, together with his brother, came close to being the cause of our ruin — I will make clear as my account proceeds. At that time, then, Justus persuaded the citizens to take up arms, and forced many who were unwilling to do so as well; and setting out with all
these men, he burned the villages of the Gadarenes and Hippenians, which happened to lie on the borders of Tiberias and the territory of the Scythopolitans. Such, then, was the state of affairs at Tiberias. The situation at Gischala was as follows. John, son of Levi, seeing some of the citizens greatly elated over the revolt from Rome, tried to restrain them and urged them to maintain
their loyalty. He was not able to succeed, however hard he tried; for the surrounding peoples — the Gadarenes, the Baraganaeans, and the Tyrians — gathered a large force, fell upon the Gischalans, and took Gischala by storm; and after burning it and then razing it further, they withdrew to their own territory. John, provoked by this, armed all his followers and, engaging the peoples just mentioned,
recaptured Gischala, and afterward rebuilt it with stronger walls for its future security. Gamala, however, remained loyal to Rome for the following reason. Philip, son of Jacimus, prefect of King Agrippa, having unexpectedly escaped alive from the royal palace at Jerusalem while it was under siege, fell into another danger: he came close to being killed by Manahem and the brigands with him.
Certain Babylonian kinsmen of his who were in Jerusalem prevented the brigands from carrying out the deed. Philip, having remained there four days, fled on the fifth, using a wig so as not to be recognized, and, arriving at one of his own villages lying near the fortress of Gamala, sent to some of his men, ordering them to come to him.
But as he was considering this, providence, for his own good, prevented it; for had this happened, he would certainly have perished. For a fever suddenly seized him, and he wrote letters to Agrippa's children, Agrippa and Berenice, and gave them to one of his freedmen to carry to Varus. This man was at that time the administrator of the kingdom, appointed by the kings themselves, since they
had gone to Berytus, wishing to meet Cestius. Varus, then, on receiving Philip's letter and learning that he had survived, took it badly, thinking that he himself would henceforth appear useless to the kings once Philip arrived. So he brought the bearer of the letters before the crowd, accused him of forgery, and, claiming he was lying in reporting that Philip was in Jerusalem fighting the Romans alongside the Jews,
had him put to death. When the freedman did not return, Philip, at a loss to know the reason, sent out a second man with letters again, to report to him what had happened to the one sent before, and why he was delayed. And this man too, when he arrived, Varus falsely accused and killed; for he had been puffed up with pride by the Syrians of Caesarea, who told him that Agrippa would be put to death by the Romans on account of
the sins of the Jews, and that he himself would receive the kingdom, being of royal descent; for Varus was, admittedly, of royal lineage, a descendant of Soaemus, who had been tetrarch of the region around Lebanon. For this reason, then, Varus, puffed up with conceit, kept the letters to himself, contriving that the king should not learn of their contents, and kept careful watch over all the roads out, lest anyone report
...to the king what was being done. And so, to gratify the Syrians at Caesarea, he put many of the Jews to death. He also resolved to take up arms, together with the Trachonites of Batanea, and march against the Babylonian Jews at Ecbatana (for that is the name they bear). He therefore summoned twelve of the most eminent Jews of Caesarea and ordered them, once they arrived at Ecbatana, to tell
their kinsmen living there that Varus, having heard that they were about to rise up against the king and not believing it, had sent them to persuade them to lay down their arms; for this would be proof to him, and a good one, that he should not believe those who spoke against them. He also ordered them to send the seventy leading men among them to answer the charge that had been brought. The twelve accordingly went
to their kinsmen at Ecbatana, and finding them entertaining no thought of revolt, persuaded them to send the seventy as well. These men, suspecting nothing of what was in fact about to happen, sent them off. They came down together with the twelve envoys to Caesarea. There Varus met them with the royal army and killed them all, envoys and all, and then set out on his march against
the Jews at Ecbatana. But one of the seventy had escaped ahead and brought them word, and they took up arms and withdrew, with their wives and children, into the fortress of Gamala, abandoning their villages, which were full of good things and possessed many tens of thousands of head of cattle. When Philip learned of this, he too came to the fortress of Gamala. On his arrival the crowd shouted for
him to take command and make war on Varus and the Syrians of Caesarea, for they had become convinced that the king was dead. Philip, however, restrained their impulse, reminding them of the king's benefactions toward them, and describing how great the power of the Romans was; he said it was not to their advantage to raise war against them, and in the end he persuaded them. The king, learning that
Varus intended to destroy in a single day the Jews of Caesarea, with their wives and children, who numbered many tens of thousands, sent for him and dispatched a successor to him, Aequus Modius, as we have related elsewhere. Philip kept hold of the fortress of Gamala and the surrounding country, which remained loyal to Rome. Now when I arrived in Galilee and learned these things from
those who reported them, I wrote to the council of the people of Jerusalem about the matter and asked what they wished me to do. They urged me, along with my fellow envoys, to remain, if we were willing, and to take charge of and provide for Galilee. My fellow envoys, however, having become well supplied with money from the tithes given to them (which, being priests, they received as their due), decided to return home. But when I urged them
to stay until we had settled affairs, they were persuaded. Setting out with them from the city of Sepphoris, I came to a certain village called Bethmaus, four stades distant from Tiberias, and from there I sent to the council of Tiberias and to the leading men of the people, inviting them to come to me. When they arrived, Justus having come with them as well, I told them that I had been sent by the community of Jerusalem, together with these men,
as an envoy to them, in order to persuade them that the house built by Herod the tetrarch, which had representations of living creatures on it, ought to be torn down, since the law forbids the making of any such thing; and I urged them to allow us to do this as quickly as possible. For a long time Capella and the leading men among them were unwilling to permit it, but under compulsion from us they at last agreed. But
Jesus son of Sapphias, who we said was the first to start the uprising of the sailors and the destitute, got ahead of us, taking some Galileans with him, and set fire to the whole building, expecting to gain much money from it, since he had seen that some of the ceilings of the rooms were overlaid with gold. He and his men plundered a great deal, acting against our wishes; for we, after our
meeting with Capella and the leading men of Tiberias, had withdrawn to Upper Galilee from Bethmaus. Jesus and his men killed all the Greek inhabitants there, as well as all who had been their enemies before the war broke out. When I learned of this I was extremely angry, and going down to Tiberias I took measures to recover, so far as possible, the royal furnishings from those who had seized them; these were Corinthian lamp-stands and tables of the
royal household, and a considerable weight of uncoined silver. Everything I recovered I resolved to keep safe for the king. I therefore summoned the ten leading men of the council, together with Capella son of Antyllus, and handed the furnishings over to them, giving orders that they were to be given to no one but myself. From there, together with my fellow envoys, I went to Gischala to John, wishing to learn what he had in mind. I quickly perceived that he was reaching
for revolution and had a desire for power; for he asked me to grant him authority to carry off the grain of Caesar that was stored in the villages of Upper Galilee, saying that he wished to spend it on repairing the walls of his native city. When I understood his design, and what he was really scheming to do, I told him I would not permit it; for I intended to keep it either for the Romans or for
myself, since the authority over affairs there had likewise been entrusted to me by the community of Jerusalem. Failing to persuade me of this, he turned to my fellow envoys, who were heedless of what was to come and only too ready to take money; he corrupted them with bribes to vote that all the grain in his province should be handed over to him. I alone, overruled, gave way and kept
silent. And John brought in a second piece of trickery: he claimed that the Jews living in Caesarea Philippi, being shut in there by order of the king's deputy who administered that domain, had sent to him begging that, since they had no pure oil to use, he should provide for their supply of it, so that they would not be compelled to transgress their ancestral laws by using oil handled by Greeks. But
John said this not out of piety but out of the most transparent greed for gain; for knowing that in Caesarea two sextarii were sold for one drachma, while at Gischala eighty sextarii went for four drachmas, he sent off all the oil that was there, having obtained authority to do so, ostensibly with my approval as well; for I did not grant it willingly, but out of fear of the crowd,
lest, if I opposed him, I should be stoned by them. So, having yielded, I allowed John to profit greatly from this piece of villainy. Having dismissed my fellow envoys from Gischala to Jerusalem, I turned my attention to the manufacture of weapons and the fortification of the cities. Summoning the most courageous of the brigands, I saw that it was not possible to take their weapons away from them, but I persuaded the people
to provide them with pay, telling them it was better to give a little willingly than to stand by and watch their property plundered by these men. And having taken oaths from them that they would not enter the country unless summoned, or except when they had not received their pay, I dismissed them, with instructions to make war neither on the Romans nor on their neighbors; for my chief concern was that Galilee should be at peace. As for the
leading men of the Galileans, about seventy in number, wishing to have them, under the pretext of friendship, as hostages of good faith, I made them my companions and fellow travelers, and I took them along to hearings and gave my decisions with their concurrence, striving neither to err from justice through rashness nor to be tainted by any bribe in these matters. Being then about thirty years of age, at a time when, even if one abstains
from unlawful desires, it is difficult to escape the slanders that arise from envy, especially when one holds great power, I kept every woman free from insult, and I disdained all the gifts offered to me as if I had no need of them; indeed I did not even accept from those who brought them the tithes owed to me as a priest. From the spoils, however, I did take a share when I defeated the Syrians inhabiting the surrounding cities,
and this I confess I sent to my kinsmen in Jerusalem. Twice I took Sepphoris by force, Tiberias four times, and Gadara once; and although I had taken John captive many times when he plotted against me, I punished neither him nor any of the peoples just mentioned, as my narrative will show as it proceeds. On this account, I believe, God himself, for those who do what is right do not escape his notice,
delivered me out of their hands, and afterward, when I fell into many dangers, preserved me safe, as I shall relate later. So great was the goodwill and loyalty of the mass of the Galileans toward me that, when their cities were taken by force and their wives and children reduced to slavery, they did not so much lament their own misfortunes as show concern for my safety. Seeing this,
John grew envious, and wrote to me asking permission to go down and make use of the hot springs at Tiberias for the treatment of his body. Suspecting no wrongdoing on his part, I did not prevent him; moreover, I wrote by name to those to whom the administration of Tiberias had been entrusted by me, instructing them to prepare lodging for John and for those who would come with him, and to supply them with an abundance of
provisions. At that time I was staying in a village of Galilee called Cana. But John, on arriving in the city of Tiberias, tried to persuade the people to abandon their loyalty to me and attach themselves to him. Many gladly welcomed his appeal, since they were forever eager for revolution and disposed by nature to change and delighted in factional strife. Above all
Justus and his father Pistus had set out to abandon me and go over to John. But I forestalled and prevented them; for a messenger came to me from Silas, whom I had appointed commander of Tiberias, as I said before, reporting the disposition of the people of Tiberias and urging me to hasten, since if I delayed the city would fall under the power of others. So, upon reading Silas's letter,
I took two hundred men and marched the whole night through, sending ahead a messenger to announce my arrival to the people of Tiberias. In the morning, as I drew near the city, the crowd came out to meet me, John among them; and greeting me in great agitation, fearing that if his conduct came under scrutiny he might be in danger of destruction, he withdrew hastily to his own
lodging. As for me, on reaching the stadium, I dismissed my bodyguard except for one man, and keeping ten soldiers with him, I tried to address the crowd of Tiberians, standing on a high parapet, and urged them not to abandon their allegiance so quickly; for such a change would bring condemnation upon them, and their next leader would rightly come to view them with suspicion, on the ground that
they would not keep faith with him either. I had not yet finished speaking when I heard one of my own people calling to me to come down, saying that this was no time to worry about the goodwill of the Tiberians, but about my own safety and how I might escape my enemies. For John had sent, choosing out the most trustworthy of the soldiers around him, from the thousand he had,
and had ordered those sent to kill me, having learned that I was alone with my own men, isolated. Those sent did come, and would have carried it out, had I not leapt down from the parapet more quickly, together with my bodyguard James, and been helped up by a certain Herod of Tiberias, who led me to the lake, where I got hold of a boat, boarded it, and, against all expectation, escaped my enemies and arrived at Tarichaeae.
When the inhabitants of that city learned of the treachery of the Tiberians, they were greatly incensed. Seizing their arms, they begged to be led against them, saying they wished to exact justice from them on the general's behalf. They also spread the news of what had happened among all the people of Galilee, and these too, being eager to move against the Tiberians, urged that as many as possible
should gather and come to them, so that they might act with the general's approval on whatever course was decided. So the Galileans came in great numbers from every side, under arms, and urged me to attack Tiberias, take it by storm, raze it entirely to the ground, and enslave its inhabitants along with their wives and children. My friends who had escaped from Tiberias gave the same advice. But I
did not consent, thinking it a terrible thing to begin a civil war; I believed that the quarrel ought to go no further than words. Moreover, I told them it was not to their advantage to do this, since the Romans were hoping that they would destroy themselves through their mutual strife. By saying this I checked the anger of the Galileans. As for John, his plot having failed, he grew afraid for himself, and taking
the soldiers around him, he departed from Tiberias for Gischala, and wrote to me defending his conduct, claiming that what had happened was not done with his approval, and begging me not to entertain any suspicion of him, adding oaths and dreadful curses by which he thought he would be believed concerning what he had written. But the Galileans, since many others again had gathered from the whole country, under
arms, knowing the man to be wicked and false to his oaths, begged me to lead them against him, promising to obliterate him utterly, along with Gischala itself. I acknowledged that I was grateful for their zeal, and promised to outdo their goodwill, but I nevertheless urged them to hold back, asking them to bear with me and to forgive me, since I had chosen to quell disturbances without bloodshed. Having persuaded
the mass of the Galileans, I arrived at Sepphoris. The men who inhabited that city, having resolved to remain loyal to the Romans, and fearing my arrival, tried to distract me with another affair, so as to be free of anxiety about themselves. They accordingly sent to Jesus, the chief brigand, on the border of Ptolemais, and promised to give a great sum of money if he, with the force under
him, numbering eight hundred, would be willing to kindle war against us. He, giving heed to their promises, wished to fall upon us while we were unprepared and had no foreknowledge of it. He therefore sent to me asking permission to come and pay his respects. When I consented, since I had no prior knowledge of the plot, he took his band of brigands and hastened against me. He did not, however, succeed in accomplishing his
villainy come to anything: for while he was already drawing near, one of his men deserted and came to me, disclosing his undertaking. Learning this, I went out into the marketplace, pretending to know nothing of the plot, but I brought with me a large number of armed Galileans, and some men of Tiberias as well. Then, having ordered that all the roads be most securely guarded, I instructed the men at the gates to let only Jesus in, together with his chief men, whenever he should arrive, but to shut out the rest, and to strike them if they used force.
When they had done as instructed, Jesus came in with a few men. And when I ordered him to throw down his weapons at once, telling him he would be killed if he refused, he saw the armed men surrounding him on every side, took fright, and obeyed. Those of his followers who had been shut out, learning of his capture, fled. And I, calling Jesus aside privately,
told him that I was not ignorant of the plot that had been contrived against me, nor of who had sent him, but that I would nonetheless forgive him what he had done, if he were willing to repent and become loyal to me. When he promised to do everything I asked, I released him, allowing him to gather again the men he had had before. But I threatened the people of Sepphoris that, if they did not cease their unruly conduct, I would exact justice from them. At about this time two great men from among those under the authority of the king arrived, from the region of the Trachonites,
bringing with them their own horses and weapons, and also secretly bringing money. When the Jews tried to compel them to be circumcised, if they wished to live among them, I did not allow them to be forced, saying that each man ought to worship God according to his own choice, and not under compulsion, and that these men, having fled to us for safety,
ought not to be made to regret it. The people were persuaded, and provided the newcomers generously with everything needed for their accustomed way of life. Meanwhile King Agrippa sent a force, with Aequus Modius as its commander, to take the fortress of Gamala. But those who were sent were not strong enough to surround the fortress; instead, stationing themselves at the open approaches to the place, they kept up a siege of Gamala.
Now Ebutius, the cavalry commander who had been entrusted with the command of the Great Plain, hearing that I was present in the village of Simonias, which lay on the borders of Galilee, sixty stadia from his own position, took with him by night the hundred horsemen he had with him, and about two hundred foot soldiers, and, adding as allies the inhabitants of the town of Gaba, marched through the night and arrived at the village
where I was staying. I drew up my forces to meet him with a large body of men, and Ebutius tried to draw us down into the plain, for he had great confidence in his cavalry. We did not comply, however; for I saw the advantage his cavalry would gain if we came down into the plain, since we were all infantry, and so I decided to engage the enemy where we were. And for a while Ebutius
held his ground bravely with the men around him, but seeing that his cavalry force was of no use in that terrain, he withdrew, having achieved nothing, to the town of Gaba, having lost three men in the fighting. I followed close behind with two thousand armed men, and having come to the town of Besara, which lies on the border of Ptolemais, twenty stadia from Gaba,
where Ebutius was staying, I stationed my men outside the village and, having ordered them to guard the roads securely so that the enemy would not trouble us while we carried off the grain — for a great quantity belonging to Queen Berenice, gathered from the surrounding villages, was stored at Besara — I loaded the camels and the many donkeys I had brought with me, and sent the grain into Galilee.
Having done this, I challenged Ebutius to battle, but when he did not respond — for he had been thoroughly cowed by our readiness and boldness — I turned instead against Neapolitanus, having heard that he was ravaging the territory of Tiberias. Neapolitanus was the commander of a cavalry squadron, and had taken charge of Scythopolis to guard it against the enemy. Having thus stopped him from doing further harm to the people of Tiberias, I turned my attention
to the care of Galilee. Now John, the son of Levi, whom we said was residing at Gischala, on learning that everything was going according to my wishes, and that I enjoyed the goodwill of my subjects while striking fear into the enemy, was not pleased at heart, and, thinking that my success would bring about his own downfall, gave way to an envy that was anything but moderate.
Hoping to put an end to my good fortune by kindling hatred against me among my subjects, he tried to persuade the inhabitants of Tiberias and Sepphoris, and, in addition, those of Gabara — these being the greatest cities of Galilee — to abandon their loyalty to me and attach themselves to him instead, claiming that he would command them better than I could. The people of Sepphoris, however, since
they favored neither of us, having chosen the Romans as their masters, did not agree to his proposal; the people of Tiberias, though they did not accept the idea of revolt, did agree to become his friends; but the inhabitants of Gabara went over to John. Simon was the one who urged them to do so — he was the leading man of the city, and was on terms of friendship and companionship with John. Openly, then, they did not
admit to their defection, for they were exceedingly afraid of the Galileans, having had frequent experience of their goodwill toward us; but secretly they watched for a suitable opportunity and plotted against me. And indeed I came into the greatest danger, for the following reason. Some bold young men, natives of Dabaritta, having noticed the wife of Ptolemy, the king's steward, passing with a large equipage and some cavalry accompanying her for safety,
as she made her journey through the Great Plain from territory subject to the kings into the Roman-controlled territory, fell upon them suddenly. They forced the woman to flee, and plundered everything she was carrying, and came to Tarichaeae bringing to me four mules laden with clothing and other goods; there was also no small weight of silver, and five hundred gold pieces. This
I wished to preserve for Ptolemy, since he was in fact a fellow Jew, and our laws forbid us to rob even our enemies; so I told those who had brought the goods that they must be kept safe, so that from their sale the walls of Jerusalem might be repaired. The young men were angered at not receiving a share of the spoils, as they had expected, and went off to the surrounding
villages of Tiberias, saying that I intended to betray their country to the Romans; for, they said, I had used a clever pretense with them, claiming that I was keeping the goods taken in the raid for the repair of the walls of the city of Jerusalem, whereas in truth I had resolved to give the stolen goods back to their owner. And in this at least I was not mistaken in my judgment; for after they had left, I sent for the two leading men,
Dassion and Jannaeus the son of Levi, who were among the king's closest friends, and ordered them to take the vessels taken in the raid and send them on to him, threatening them with death as the penalty if they reported this to anyone else. But when a rumor spread through the whole of Galilee that their country was about to be betrayed by me to the Romans, and everyone was inflamed against me
in their rage, the inhabitants of Tarichaeae, themselves also supposing the young men to be telling the truth, persuaded my bodyguards and the armed men, leaving me asleep, to come quickly to the hippodrome, in order to deliberate there with everyone about their general. When they were persuaded and had assembled, a great crowd had already gathered, and they all raised a single cry, that the traitor who had done them such wrong ought to be punished. Above all
the one who incited them was Jesus, the son of Sapphias, at that time the ruler of Tiberias, a wicked man by nature and given to causing great disturbances, a factious troublemaker if ever there was one; and taking the laws of Moses in his hands and coming forward into their midst, he said, 'Fellow citizens, even if you cannot bring yourselves to hate Joseph for your own sakes, at least look to the ancestral laws, which
your own commander was about to betray, and out of hatred of wrongdoing on their account, punish the man who dared such things.' Having said this, and with the crowd shouting in agreement, he took some armed men and hastened to the house where I was lodging, intending to kill me. I, having no forewarning of this, was overcome with fatigue and was resting before the disturbance broke out. But Simon, who had been entrusted with the guarding of my person, and who alone
had remained with me, seeing the onrush of the citizens, woke me and told me of the danger threatening me, urging me to die nobly, as befitted a general, by his own hand, before the enemy should arrive to force me to it or to kill me themselves. He spoke thus, but I, committing my fate to God, resolved to go out and face the crowd. So I changed into black clothing and fastened my sword
about my neck, and went by another road, by which I thought none of my enemies would meet me, to the hippodrome. Appearing there suddenly, I fell face down, drenching the ground with my tears, and seemed to everyone a pitiable sight. Perceiving the change in the crowd's mood, I tried to divide their opinions before the armed men could return from the house. I conceded that I had done wrong, as
they themselves believed, but I asked to be allowed first to explain for what purpose I had kept the money taken in the raid, and then to die, if they so ordered. When the crowd bade me speak, the armed men arrived, and, catching sight of me, rushed forward intending to kill me. But when the crowd ordered them to hold back, they obeyed, expecting that, once I had confessed to them that I had kept the money for the king, they would then, on the strength of my having admitted the treachery,
put me to death. When silence had fallen over all of them, I said, 'Men, my kinsmen, if it is just that I should die, I do not beg to be spared. Yet I wish, before I die, to tell you the truth. I knew that this city was most hospitable to strangers, and was eagerly filled with so many men who had left their own homelands to come and share our fortune, and so I resolved to build walls from the money',
'about which your anger is directed, spending it on their construction.' At this, a voice arose from the people of Tarichaeae and the foreigners, acknowledging their gratitude and urging me to take courage, but the Galileans and the people of Tiberias persisted in their anger, and a dispute broke out among them, some threatening to punish me, others urging contempt for such threats. But when I promised to build walls for Tiberias as well
and for their other cities that needed them, they trusted me and each withdrew to his own home. And I, having escaped, beyond all hope, the danger just described, returned to my house with my friends and twenty armed men. But once again the bandits and those responsible for the sedition, fearing for themselves lest I exact justice from them for what they had done, took six hundred armed men and came against
the house where I was staying, intending to burn it down. When the attack was reported to me, I thought it unbecoming to flee, and decided instead to risk something and make use of some boldness. So I ordered the doors of the house to be shut, and going up myself to the upper room, I called out for some men to be sent in to receive the money; for I said that in this way they would cease from their anger. When they sent in the boldest of them, I had him whipped,
and ordered one of his hands to be cut off and hung about his neck, and had him thrown out in that state to those who had sent him. Terror and no small fear seized them, and, fearing that they too would suffer the same fate if they remained — for they supposed I had more men inside than they had — they took to flight. And I, by using such a stratagem, escaped this second plot as well. But again certain persons stirred up the crowd,
provoking it against the royal grandees who had come to me, saying that men who were unwilling to change over to their customs ought not to be allowed to live, when they had come there to be kept safe among them; and they also slandered the Romans as sorcerers, saying it was by this means that they prevailed. The crowd was quickly persuaded, deceived by the plausibility of things said merely to please them. But when I learned of this, I again tried to teach the people that it was not right
to persecute those who had taken refuge with them; and I ridiculed as nonsense the charge concerning sorcery, saying that the Romans would not maintain so many tens of thousands of soldiers if it were by sorcery that they defeated their enemies. While I was saying this, they were persuaded for a little while, but then, drawing back again, they were incited by wicked men against the grandees, and once, armed, they went off to attack their house
in Tarichaeae, intending to kill them. When I learned of it, I was afraid that, once this abomination had run its course, the city would become inaccessible to those wishing to take refuge there. So I went to the house of the grandees with some others, and, having shut it up and made a channel from it leading to the lake, I sent for a boat, and, embarking in it with them, crossed over to the borders of Hippos,
and, having given them the value of their horses — for I had not been able to bring the horses with me, given how the escape had happened — I sent them off, after urging them at length to bear the misfortune that had befallen them with courage. I myself was greatly distressed at being forced to send those who had taken refuge with me back again into enemy territory, though I judged it better for them to die at the hands of the Romans, should that happen, than in my own country. As it turned out, however, they were saved,
for King Agrippa forgave them their offenses. And that is how the affair concerning them ended. Meanwhile the inhabitants of the city of Tiberias wrote to the king, asking him to send a force to guard their territory, saying that they wished to attach themselves to him. That is what they wrote to him. But when I arrived among them, they asked me to build walls for them, as I had promised;
for they had heard that Tarichaeae was already walled. I agreed, then, and, having made all the preparations needed for the building, I ordered the master-builders to set to work. On the third day after this, as I was on my way to Tarichaeae, thirty stadia from Tiberias, it happened that some Roman cavalry were seen riding not far from the city, which gave the impression that the force sent by the king had arrived. At once, then,
they raised cries in praise of the king, but full of abuse against me. And someone came running to report their intention to me, that they had resolved to revolt from me. When I heard this I was greatly disturbed; for I had, as it happened, sent the armed men away from Tarichaeae to their own homes, since the next day was the Sabbath — for I was unwilling that the
...the crowd of soldiers to trouble the people of Tarichaeae. Indeed, whenever I spent time among them, I took no precaution at all for my own protection, having often had proof, from the inhabitants themselves, of their loyalty toward me. Having with me only seven of the men-at-arms and my friends, I was at a loss what to do. To send for my own force was not something I approved, since the present day was already coming to a close; for even if it arrived on the following day, the laws forbade us to take up arms, however great the necessity might seem to press. And if I allowed the people of Tarichaeae and the foreigners among them to plunder the city, I saw that they would not be sufficient for the task, and that any delay of mine would prove very long indeed; for I judged that the force from the king would arrive first, and that I would be driven out of the city.
So I resolved to employ a certain stratagem against them. At once I stationed the most trustworthy of my friends at the gates of Tarichaeae to keep watch, so as to let out safely any who wished to leave, and having summoned the leading men of the households, I ordered each of them to launch a boat, board it, take along its pilot, and follow me to the city of Tiberias. I myself, together with my friends and the men-at-arms — seven in number, as I said — boarded and sailed for Tiberias. When the people of Tiberias realized that the force from the king had not in fact come to them, but saw the whole lake full of boats, they were afraid for their city, and, terrified at the thought that the vessels were full of soldiers, they changed their minds. Throwing down their weapons, they came out with their wives and children to meet me, uttering many words of praise for me, since they supposed that I had not yet learned of their intentions, and they begged me to spare the city.
When I drew near, I ordered the pilots to cast anchor while still far from the shore, so that the people of Tiberias would not discover that the boats were empty of soldiers; and drawing close myself in one of the boats, I rebuked them for their folly and for being so ready, without any just cause, to abandon their loyalty to me. I promised, however, that I would grant them full pardon for the future, if they would send me ten of the leading men of the populace. When they readily obeyed and sent the men I had named, I put them aboard and sent them off to Tarichaeae, to be held under guard. By this stratagem I gradually got the whole council into my hands, a few at a time, and sent them off to the city just mentioned, together with the most prominent men of the common people, no fewer in number than the councillors. When the populace saw into what depth of trouble they had come, they begged me to punish the man responsible for the sedition. His name was Clitus, a bold and rash young man.
Since I considered it unholy to kill a man of my own people, yet was compelled to punish him, I ordered one of my bodyguards, Levi, to go forward and cut off one of Clitus's hands. But the man so ordered was afraid to go forward alone into so great a crowd, and, unwilling to let his cowardice become apparent to the Tiberians, I called Clitus himself and said, "Since you deserve to lose both your hands for having proved so ungrateful toward me, be your own executioner, lest by refusing you incur a worse punishment." When he begged repeatedly to be allowed to keep one hand, I scarcely consented; and he, glad not to lose both hands, took a sword and cut off his own left hand. And this put an end to the sedition. The people of Tiberias, once I had reached Tarichaeae and they learned of the stratagem I had used against them, marveled that I had put a stop to their disloyalty without any bloodshed.
As for myself, I sent for those of the Tiberian populace who were in prison — among them were Justus and his father Pistus — and made them my guests at dinner; and during the feast I told them that I myself was well aware that the power of Rome surpassed all others, but that I kept silent about this on account of the brigands. I advised them to do the same, waiting for a favorable opportunity, and not to be exasperated with me as their commander, since they would not easily find another so reasonably disposed toward them. And I reminded Justus that, before my arrival from Jerusalem, the Galileans had cut off the hands of his brother, charging him with the crime of having forged letters, even before the war; and that after the withdrawal of Philip, the people of Gamala, in their strife with the Babylonians,
had killed Chares, who was a kinsman of Philip, and how they had chastised — with moderation — Jesus, his brother, the husband of Justus's sister. Having said these things at the feast to Justus and his companions, I ordered at daybreak that they all be released from custody. Before these events it happened that Philip, son of Jacimus, departed from the fortress of Gamala for the following reason. Philip, having learned that Varus had been removed by King Agrippa, and that his successor, Modius Aequus, a man who was his friend and long acquainted with him, had arrived, wrote to him, reporting his own circumstances and asking him to forward the letters he sent on to the kings. Modius, having received the letters, was overjoyed to learn from them that Philip was safe, and sent the letters on to the kings, who were then near Berytus.
When King Agrippa learned that the report about Philip had been false — for a rumor had spread that he was commanding the Jews in the war against the Romans — he sent horsemen to escort Philip. When Philip arrived, Agrippa greeted him warmly, and pointed him out to the Roman commanders, showing them that this indeed was the Philip about whom the rumor had circulated, that he had revolted from Rome. He ordered him to take some horsemen and go as quickly as possible to the fortress of Gamala, to bring out from there all his household, and to restore the Babylonians once more to Batanea. He further charged him to take every precaution against any revolutionary movement arising among the subjects. Philip, then, upon receiving these instructions from the king, made haste to carry out what had been ordered. But Joseph, son of the midwife,
having incited many bold young men to join him, rose up against the leading men of Gamala and persuaded them to revolt from the king and take up arms, on the ground that through this they would recover their freedom. Some he compelled by force; those who did not agree with their views, they put to death. They also killed Chares, and along with him a kinsman of his, Jesus, and they also killed the husband of Justus of Tiberias's sister, as I have already said. They also wrote to me, asking me to send them a force of men-at-arms and men to rebuild the walls of their city. I refused neither of their requests. The region of Gaulanitis also revolted from the king, as far as the village of Solyma. At Seleucia and Sogane, villages naturally very strong, I built walls, and likewise I walled the villages of Upper Galilee
that were exceedingly rocky — their names being Jamnia, Ameroth, and Achabare. I also fortified the cities of Lower Galilee — Tarichaeae, Tiberias, and Sepphoris — and the villages of the cave of Arbela, Bersobe, Selame, Jotapata, Capharath, Comus, Sogane, Japha, and Mount Tabor. In these places I also stored up much grain and weapons for the security to come afterward. As for John, son of Levi, his hatred toward me grew ever more intense, since he bore my success with resentment. Having therefore resolved by all means to get me out of the way, he set about building walls for his own native city of Gischala, and sent his brother Simon, together with Jonathan, son of Sisenna, with about a hundred men-at-arms, to Jerusalem, to Simon son of Gamaliel, to urge him to persuade the community of the Jerusalemites
to take the command away from me and to vote him the authority over the Galileans instead. This Simon was a native of the city of Jerusalem, of very distinguished lineage, and of the sect of the Pharisees, who are reputed to surpass the others in strict observance of the ancestral laws. He was a man full of understanding and judgment, capable of setting right, by his own good sense, affairs that had fallen into a bad state; he was, moreover, an old friend and intimate of John, though at that time he was on unfriendly terms with me. Having received the request, he set about persuading the chief priests Ananus and Jesus, son of Gamalas, and some others of their party, that they should cut me down while I was still growing, and not allow me to increase to the utmost degree of reputation, saying that it would be to their advantage if I were removed from Galilee; and he urged those around Ananus not to delay,
lest, learning of it beforehand, I should march against the city with a large force. Such was the counsel Simon gave; but the chief priest Ananus declared that the matter was not easy to accomplish, for many of the chief priests and of the leading men of the populace testified that I commanded well; and to bring an accusation against a man against whom they could say nothing just would be the act of base men. When Simon heard this from Ananus, he asked them to keep silent and not spread their words abroad among many, saying that he himself would see to it that I should be removed from Galilee all the sooner; and, summoning John's brother, he instructed him to send gifts to Ananus and his associates, saying that in this way, perhaps, he would persuade them to change their minds. And in the end Simon accomplished what
he had set out to do; for Ananus and those with him, corrupted by the money, agreed to expel me from Galilee, without anyone else in the city knowing of it. And indeed they resolved to send men who differed in rank but were alike in education. Two of them were of the common people, Jonathan and Ananias, Pharisees by sect, while the third, Jozar, was of a priestly family, himself also a Pharisee; and Simon was the youngest of the group, from among the chief-priestly families. They instructed these men, upon arriving, to inquire of the Galilean populace the reason why they loved me; and if they said it was because I was of the city of Jerusalem, they too were to say that all four of them were from that city; and if it was because of my knowledge of the laws, they too were to claim that they themselves were not ignorant of
the ancestral customs; and if, further, they said they loved me because of my priesthood, then two of them were to reply that they too were priests. Having given these instructions to Jonathan and his companions, they gave them forty thousand pieces of silver out of the public funds. And when they heard that a certain Galilean named Jesus, who had about him a company of six hundred men-at-arms, was staying in Jerusalem, they then summoned him and, giving him three months' pay, ordered him to accompany Jonathan and his party in obedience to them; and to three hundred of the citizens also they gave money for provisions for the whole company and ordered them to follow the envoys. When these men had been persuaded and made ready for the expedition, Jonathan and his companions set out, taking with them also John's brother and a hundred men-at-arms, having received instructions from those who had sent them,
that if I laid down my arms willingly, they should send me alive to the city of Jerusalem, but if I resisted, they should kill me without any hesitation, for the order was theirs to give. They had also written to John, telling him to make ready for war against me, and they instructed the inhabitants of Sepphoris, Gabara, and Tiberias to send military support to John. When my father wrote to me of these things — for Jesus, son of Gamalas, one of those who had taken part in that very council, a man who was my friend and intimate, had disclosed them to him — I was deeply pained to learn that the citizens had proved so ungrateful toward me as to order my death out of envy, and also because my father, in his letters, earnestly begged me to come to him, saying that he longed to see his son before he died.
I told these things to my friends, and said that within three days I would leave their territory and set out for my own homeland. Grief seized all who heard this, and they begged me, weeping, not to abandon them to destruction, if they should be deprived of my command. When I did not yield to their entreaties, but was concerned for my own safety, the Galileans, fearing that if I departed they would become an easy prey for the brigands, sent messengers throughout the whole of Galilee to announce my intention of leaving. Many gathered together from every quarter, on hearing this, with their wives and children — not, I think, so much out of affection for me as out of fear for their own safety, since they supposed that as long as I remained they would suffer no harm. So they all came to the
great plain in which they were encamped; its name is Asochis. During that night I saw a wondrous dream. For when I had gone to bed, grieved and troubled over what had been written to me, I seemed to see someone standing over me and saying: "Cease, man, from your grief of soul, and rid yourself of all fear; for the very things that grieve you shall make you great, and most fortunate in all things, and you shall prosper
not only in this but in many other matters besides. Do not lose heart, but remember that you must also fight against the Romans." Having seen this dream, I rose, eager to go down to the plain. And at the sight of me the whole multitude of the Galileans — among them were women and children — threw themselves upon their faces and, weeping, begged me not to abandon them to their enemies, nor to depart and leave their country to become an object of outrage to their foes. When I would not be persuaded by their entreaties, they compelled me by oaths to remain among them, and reviled the people of Jerusalem bitterly for not allowing their country to be at peace. Hearing these things and seeing the dejection of the crowd, I was moved to pity, and judged it right, for the sake of so great a multitude, to face even manifest dangers.
So I consented to remain, and, having ordered five thousand of them to come as men-at-arms, provided with their own rations, I sent the rest away to their homes. When the five thousand had arrived, I took them, along with the three thousand soldiers who were with me, and eighty horsemen, and made my way to the village of Chabolo, on the border of Ptolemais, and there I kept my forces together, making ready, on the pretext of the war against Placidus. This man had arrived with two cohorts of infantry and one squadron of cavalry, sent by Cestius Gallus to burn the villages of the Galileans that lay near Ptolemais. While he was pitching a camp before the city of the Ptolemaeans, I too set up my camp about sixty stadia from that village. Time and again, then...
We led our forces out as if for battle, but nothing came of it beyond a few skirmishes; for Placidus, seeing how eager I was for a fight, took fright himself and held back, though he did not withdraw from Ptolemais. At this same time Jonathan arrived with his fellow envoys, whom we said had been sent from Jerusalem by Simon and Ananus the high priest, plotting to seize me by treachery, since he did not dare to make an open attempt.
He wrote me the following letter: “Jonathan and those sent with him by the people of Jerusalem, to Josephus, greetings. We have been sent many times, on the report of the leading men in Jerusalem that John of Gischala has repeatedly plotted against you, to rebuke him and to urge him to obey you from now on. Wishing to consult with you about our common business, we call on you to come to us quickly, and not with many men; for the village could not accommodate a large body of soldiers.” They wrote this expecting one of two things: either that I would come to them without weapons and so fall into their hands, or that if I brought many men with me they would judge me an enemy.
The letter was brought to me by a horseman, an insolent young fellow who had once served in the king's army. It was already the second hour of the night, at which time I happened to be feasting with my friends and the leading men of Galilee. When a servant announced to me that a Jewish horseman had come, he was called in at my order; he did not so much as offer a greeting, but simply held out the letter and said, "This is what the men who have come from Jerusalem have sent you. Write your reply quickly, for I am in a hurry to return to them."
Those reclining at table were amazed at the soldier's impudence, but I invited him to sit down and dine with us. When he refused, I kept the letter in my hands just as I had received it, and turned my conversation with my friends to other matters. After no great while I rose, and having dismissed the rest to their beds, I asked only four of my closest friends to remain, and having ordered my servant to prepare wine, I unfolded the letter without anyone watching, and quickly grasping from it the intent of what was written, I sealed it up again.
And as though I had not read it beforehand, but simply held it in my hands, I ordered that twenty drachmas be given the soldier for his journey. When he took the money and expressed his thanks, I saw that he was greedy for gain and that this was the way to catch him. "But," I said, "if you are willing to drink with us, you shall receive one drachma for every cup." He gladly agreed, and drinking a great deal of wine in order to get more money, and becoming drunk, he could no longer keep the secret, but blurted out unasked both the plot that had been laid and the fact that I had been condemned to death by them.
On hearing this I wrote back in the following terms: "Josephus to Jonathan and those with him, greetings. I am glad to learn that you have arrived safely in Galilee, especially since I shall now be able to hand over to you the charge of affairs here and go to my own country — something I have long wished to do. I ought indeed to have come to meet you not only at Xaloth but far beyond it, even without being asked, but I beg your pardon for not being able to do this, since I am keeping watch over Placidus at Chabolo, as he has it in mind to march up into Galilee. Come to me, then, once you have read this letter. Farewell."
Having written this, I gave it to the soldier to carry, and sent along with him thirty of the most reputable men of Galilee, instructing them to greet Jonathan and his companions but to say nothing else. I also assigned to each of them one trusted soldier to keep watch, so that none of those I sent should have any conversation with Jonathan's party. So they set out. But Jonathan and his men, having failed in their first attempt, sent me another letter of this kind: "Jonathan and those with him, to Josephus, greetings. We instruct you to come to us within three days, without soldiers, to the village of Gabaroth, so that we may hear the charges you have against John."
Having written this and taken leave of the Galileans whom I had sent, they arrived at Japha, the largest village in Galilee, very strongly fortified with walls and full of many inhabitants. The populace came out to meet them with their wives and children, shouting and calling on them to go away and not to begrudge them so good a governor. Jonathan and his companions were provoked by these shouts, and though they did not dare show their anger openly, since the people would not even grant them a hearing, they went on to the other villages. Similar outcries met them everywhere, the crowds shouting that nothing would persuade them to give up having Josephus as their governor. Failing in their purpose with these people, Jonathan and his men came to Sepphoris, the largest city in Galilee.
The people there, whose sympathies looked toward the Romans, welcomed Jonathan's party, but toward me they neither praised nor reviled. Going down from Sepphoris to Asochis, those there likewise raised outcries against them, just as the people of Japha had done. Jonathan's men, no longer able to contain their anger, ordered their soldiers to strike the shouting crowd with clubs. When they reached Gabara, John met them with three thousand armed men.
I, having already realized from the letter that they had determined to make war on me, set out from Chabolo with three thousand armed men, leaving the most trustworthy of my friends in charge of the camp, and came to Jotapata, wishing to be near them, at a distance of about forty stades, and I wrote to them as follows: "If you are altogether determined that I should come to you, there are two hundred and four cities and villages in Galilee.
I will come to whichever of these you wish, except Gabara and Gischala — the one being John's native place, the other his ally and friend." On receiving this letter, Jonathan and his men no longer wrote back; instead, sitting in council with their friends and bringing in John, they deliberated on how they might move against me. John's proposal was to write to all the cities and villages of Galilee — for in each of them, he said, there was certain to be at least one or two men opposed to me — and to summon these as if against an enemy, and to send this same decree to the city of Jerusalem too, so that its people, learning that I had been judged an enemy by the Galileans, might likewise vote against me; for once this was done, he said, even those Galileans well disposed toward me would abandon me out of fear.
John's advice pleased the others greatly, and they approved what he had said. About the third hour of the night this came to my knowledge, since a certain Sacchaeus, one of their party, deserted to me and reported their plan; there was no longer any need, I judged, to delay. Deeming it worth the effort, I ordered Jacob, a trusted soldier among my guard,
to take two hundred armed men and guard the roads leading from Gabara into Galilee, arresting any who passed and sending them to me, especially those caught carrying letters. Jeremiah too, one of my own friends, I sent with six hundred armed men to the border of Galilee to watch the roads leading from there to the city of Jerusalem, giving him the same order to arrest those traveling with letters,
to keep the men themselves in bonds on the spot, and to send the letters on to me. Having given these instructions to the men I sent, I announced to the Galileans that they should take up arms the next day and come to me at the village of Gabaroth with three days' provisions. I also divided my own bodyguard into four companies, assigning the most trustworthy of them to guard my person,
setting captains over them and ordering them to see to it that no soldier unknown to them should mingle among them. The next day, about the fifth hour, on arriving at Gabaroth, I found the whole plain before the village full of armed men from Galilee who had come to join me as I had ordered; and a great crowd besides came streaming in from the villages.
When I had taken my place and begun to address them, they all cried out, calling me the benefactor and savior of their country. And I, acknowledging my gratitude to them, counseled them neither to make war on anyone nor to defile their hands with plunder, but to encamp on the plain, content with their own provisions; for I said I wished to put down the disturbances without bloodshed. It happened that on that very day the men sent by Jonathan with the letters fell into the guard posts I had set on the roads.
The men themselves were kept under guard on the spot, as I had ordered, but when I read the letters, finding them full of slanders and lies, I decided to say nothing of this and to move against them at once. But Jonathan and his men, hearing of my approach, took all their own followers and John
and withdrew into the house of Jesus — a large mansion, in no way inferior to a fortress. Hiding a company of armed men inside it and locking all the other doors but one, they expected me to come to them straight from the road to pay my respects. And indeed they gave orders to the soldiers that, when I arrived, they should let me enter alone and keep the rest out; for in this way they thought
they would easily get me into their power. But they were disappointed in their hope; for I, having gotten wind of the plot beforehand, on arriving from the road took lodging directly opposite them and pretended to be going to sleep. Jonathan and his men, supposing that I really was resting and asleep, went down among the crowd to try to turn them against me, on the ground that I was a bad commander. But the opposite happened to them; for as soon as they were seen, a shout went up from the
Galileans in my favor as their commander, worthy of their goodwill, and they began to reproach Jonathan's party, saying that they had come though they had suffered no wrong themselves, only to overturn that man's affairs, and they urged them to leave, saying that nothing would ever persuade them to take another leader in my place. When this was reported to me, I did not hesitate to come forward among them. So I went down at once, wishing to hear for myself what Jonathan's men were saying.
As I came forward, applause at once arose from the whole crowd, with cheers and shouts of thanks acknowledging my generalship. Hearing this, Jonathan and his men were afraid that they might even be in danger of death if the Galileans should attack them out of gratitude toward me; so they began to think of flight. But unable to get away — for I asked them to remain —
they stood downcast at my words. I then ordered the crowd to hold their acclamations, and stationed the most trustworthy of my soldiers along the roads to guard against a sudden attack by John, and after urging the Galileans too to take up arms, not against the enemy's approach, but so that they should not be thrown into confusion should any sudden disturbance arise, I first reminded Jonathan's party
of the letter, in what terms they had written that they had been sent by the community of Jerusalem to settle my quarrels with John, and how they had invited me to come to them. And as I recounted this I held the letter out before the crowd, so that they could deny nothing, the document itself convicting them. "And indeed," I said, "Jonathan, and you his fellow envoys, if I, on trial before John concerning"
my own conduct, had brought forward two or three honest and good witnesses to establish my manner of life, it is clear you would have been bound, after first examining the lives of these men, to acquit me of the charges. So then, that you may know well that my administration of Galilee has been good, though I consider three witnesses too few for a man who has lived honorably, I give you all of these people as witnesses. Ask them, then,
in what manner I have lived, whether I have conducted my public affairs here with complete honor and complete virtue. And I adjure you, men of Galilee, to hide none of the truth, but to speak before these men as before judges, if anything has not been done rightly." While I was still speaking these words, cries arose from everyone together, calling me benefactor and savior, and while they testified concerning what had already been done,
they made requests concerning what was still to be done, and all swore that their wives had never been insulted, and that they had never once suffered any wrong at my hands. After this I had two of the letters read out to the Galileans — letters which the guards I had stationed had seized when they were sent by Jonathan's party and had forwarded to me — letters full of many slanders and falsehoods, alleging that I exercised over them tyranny rather than lawful command. Much else besides
was written in addition to this, omitting no shameless lie. I told the crowd that I had received the letters only because those who carried them had given them up willingly; for I did not want them to know about the guard posts, lest the enemy, taking fright, should give up writing such letters. On hearing this the crowd, greatly enraged, rushed at Jonathan and those present with him as though to destroy them; and they would have carried out the deed,
had I not restrained the Galileans' anger and told Jonathan's party that I would pardon what had already been done, if they were willing to repent and, going back to their own country, tell those who had sent them the truth about my administration. Having said this I let them go, though I knew well that they would do none of what they had promised. But the crowd's anger against them kept blazing up,
and they begged me to allow them to punish those who had dared such things. I did everything I could to persuade them to spare the men, for I knew that any faction was ruinous to the common good; but the crowd's anger against them remained unshaken, and they all rushed toward the house in which Jonathan's party was lodging. Seeing that their impulse
could not be checked, I leaped onto a horse and ordered the crowds to follow me to the village of Sogane, twenty stades from Gabara. By this stratagem I managed to avoid appearing to have started a civil war. When I reached the region of Sogane, I halted the crowd, and after urging them not to give way so hotly to their anger, especially in inflicting irreparable punishments, I ordered those already advanced in years and the foremost men among them, a hundred in all,
to prepare to go to the city of Jerusalem, to lay a complaint before the people against those who were stirring up factions in the country. "And if," I said, "they are moved by your words, ask the assembly to write to me ordering me to remain in Galilee, and ordering Jonathan's party to withdraw from there." Having given them these instructions,
Once I had given these instructions and they had quickly complied, I made the dispatch on the third day after the assembly, sending along five hundred armed men. I also wrote to my friends in Samaria asking them to see to it that the journey would be safe for them, since Samaria was already under Roman control and, in any case, those wishing to travel quickly had to go through it; for in three days one can get from Galilee to Jerusalem by that route.
I myself also escorted the envoys as far as the borders of Galilee, stationing guards along the roads so that no one could easily learn of their departure. Having done this, I spent some time at Iaphia. Meanwhile Jonathan and his companions, having failed in their scheme against me, sent John off to Gischala, while they themselves went to the city of Tiberias, expecting to gain control of it, since Jesus too had at this time written to them promising to persuade the populace to come and receive them, and to choose to join them. They set off, then, in such hopes, and Silas -- whom I said I had left behind as overseer of Tiberias -- reported this to me by letter and urged haste. I quickly obeyed him, and upon arriving I fell into mortal danger, for the following reason.
Jonathan and his party, once among the Tiberians, had persuaded many who were hostile to me to revolt from me; but when they heard of my arrival, they grew afraid for themselves and came to me, and after greeting me they began to congratulate me, saying how fortunate it was that I had conducted myself so well regarding Galilee, and that they rejoiced I was held in such honor -- for my reputation, they said, was an ornament to themselves, seeing that I had been their teacher and was a fellow citizen, and that my friendship toward them was more just than John's. They said they were eager to go home, but would wait until they had made John subject to me. And as they said this they swore the most fearsome oaths current among us, oaths which I thought it impious to disbelieve. They then asked me to make my lodging elsewhere, since the next day was the Sabbath, and they said the city of the Tiberians ought not to be troubled by their presence.
Suspecting nothing, I went off to Tarichaeae, though I left behind in the city men to find out carefully what was being said about me. All along the road leading from Tarichaeae to Tiberias I stationed a number of men, so that they might signal to one another whatever they learned from those left behind in the city. On the following day, then, everyone gathered in the synagogue, a very large building capable of holding a great crowd. Jonathan entered and, while not daring to speak openly about the revolt, said that their city needed a stronger commander. Jesus the ruler, holding nothing back, said openly, "It is better for us, fellow citizens, to obey four men rather than one, men distinguished both by birth and by no mean intelligence" -- and he pointed to Jonathan's party.
When Jesus had said this, Justus came forward and praised him, and won over some of the people. But the crowd was not pleased with what had been said, and would certainly have broken into faction, had not the sixth hour, on which it is customary for us to take our midday meal on the Sabbath, arrived and dissolved the assembly; and Jonathan's party, putting off their plan to the next day, departed having accomplished nothing. As soon as I was informed of this, early the next morning I decided to go to the city of Tiberias, and about that hour I arrived from Tarichaeae, and found the crowd already gathering at the synagogue -- though those assembling did not know for what purpose the meeting had been called.
Jonathan's party, seeing me present unexpectedly, were thrown into confusion. Then they contrived to circulate a report that Roman cavalry had been seen on the border, at a place called Homonoia, thirty stades from the city. When this news was passed around by way of a planted rumor, Jonathan's party urged that we should not allow their land to be plundered by the enemy. They said this with the intention of getting me removed on the pretext of urgent assistance being needed, so that they could render the city hostile to me on their own. I, though I knew their scheme, nevertheless complied, so as not to give the Tiberians the impression that I was neglecting their safety. So I went out, and on reaching the place, finding not even a trace of an enemy, I turned back and marched swiftly, and found the entire council assembled along with the common crowd, with Jonathan's party bringing many accusations against me, claiming that I was neglecting to lighten the war for them and was living in luxury.
As they said this they produced four letters, purporting to have been written to them by people on the border of Galilee, asking for help, saying that a Roman force of cavalry and infantry was about to plunder their territory within three days, and begging them to hurry and not overlook it. Hearing this, the Tiberians, thinking they spoke the truth, raised an outcry, saying that I ought not to sit still but should go and assist their countrymen. In response I -- for I understood the design of Jonathan's party -- said I was ready and promised to set out for the war without delay, but nevertheless I advised, since the letters indicated that the Romans were attacking at four places, that we should divide our forces into five divisions and place Jonathan and his companions in command of each of these; for it befitted good men not merely to give advice, but, when urgent need required it, to take the lead in helping. I myself, I said, could not undertake to lead more than one division.
This proposal pleased the crowd greatly, and so they compelled Jonathan's men to go out to the war. But their minds were thrown into considerable confusion at not having accomplished what they had intended, since I had countered their schemes with a strategy of my own. One of them, a man named Ananias, a wicked and villainous fellow, proposed to the crowds that they should all observe a fast to God on the following day, and ordered that at the same hour they should appear unarmed at the same place, to demonstrate to God that, unless they received help from him, they considered every weapon useless. He said this not out of piety, but in order to catch me and my men unarmed. I, out of necessity, complied, so as not to seem to disdain the counsel concerning piety.
So when we had withdrawn to our own quarters, Jonathan's party wrote to John telling him to come to them at dawn with as many soldiers as he could muster; for they would readily get me into their power and would do with me as he wished. He, on receiving the letter, intended to comply. The next day I took two of my bodyguards, the most tested for courage and most reliably loyal, and ordered them to hide daggers under their clothing and go out with me, so that if any attack should come from the enemy we might defend ourselves. I myself took a breastplate and girded on a sword, as inconspicuously as I could manage, and went to the synagogue.
Jesus the ruler ordered all who were with me to be shut out, for he himself stood at the doors, and allowed only me and my friends to enter. Already, as we were performing the customary rites and had turned to prayer, Jesus stood up and began asking me about the vessels of unminted silver taken from the burning of the royal palace, wanting to know with whom they happened to be lodged. He said this wanting to spend time until John should arrive. I said that Capella had all of it, along with the ten leading men of Tiberias -- "Question them yourself," I said, "I am not lying." But when they said that they had it among themselves, he said, "But the twenty gold pieces you got by selling a certain weight of unminted silver -- what has become of them?" I said I had given these to their envoys as travel money when they were sent to Jerusalem.
At this Jonathan's party said I had done wrong to give the envoys their pay from the common fund. When the crowd grew angry at this -- for they had perceived the wickedness of the men -- I, understanding that faction was about to break out, and wishing rather to provoke the people further against the men, said, "But even if I did not act rightly in giving the pay to your envoys from the common fund, do stop being angry; for I myself will repay the twenty gold pieces."
When I had said this, Jonathan's party fell silent, but the people grew still more incensed against them, seeing plainly their unjust hostility toward me. Jesus, perceiving this change in the people's mood, ordered the crowd to withdraw, but asked the council to remain, saying that an inquiry into such matters could not be conducted amid a disturbed crowd. But as the people shouted that they would not leave me alone among them, someone came secretly to report to Jesus' party that John was approaching with his armed men. And Jonathan's party, no longer able to restrain themselves -- perhaps also because God was providing for my safety, for had this not happened I would certainly have been destroyed by John -- said, "Tiberians, stop this inquiry over twenty gold pieces; for it is not on account of these that Josephus deserves to die, but because he has desired to be a tyrant, and by deceiving the Galilean crowds with words has secured the government for himself."
As he said this they laid hands on me at once and tried to kill me. But when my companions saw what was happening, they drew their swords and, threatening to strike if any violence were used, rescued me from the enemy's violence, just as the people had taken up stones and rushed to throw them at Jonathan.
When, having gone forward a little, I was about to meet John as he approached with his armed men, I grew afraid and turned aside from him, and, escaping through a narrow lane to the lake, and getting hold of a boat, I embarked and crossed over to Tarichaeae, having unexpectedly escaped the danger. I immediately sent for the leading men of the Galileans and told them the manner in which I had been treacherously attacked by Jonathan's party and the Tiberians and had very nearly been destroyed by them.
At this the crowd of Galileans grew angry and urged me to delay no longer in waging war against them, but to allow them to go and utterly destroy John and Jonathan's party. But I restrained them, angry as they were, telling them to wait until we learned what those they had sent to Jerusalem would report; for I said I would act as they thought fit, in accordance with the judgment of those men. And having said this I persuaded them. At that time, too, John, since his plot had not succeeded, withdrew to Gischala.
Not many days later, those we had sent returned again and reported that the populace was greatly incensed against Ananus and Simon the son of Gamaliel, because, without the consent of the assembly, they had sent men to Galilee and thereby brought about my expulsion from it. The envoys said that the people had even set out to burn down their houses. They also brought letters, by which the leading men of Jerusalem, at the people's urgent request, confirmed my command of Galilee and ordered Jonathan's party to return home as quickly as possible.
Having received these letters, I went to the village of Arbela, where, having assembled the Galileans, I ordered the envoys to relate the anger and hatred of wrongdoing on the part of the people over what had been done by Jonathan's party, and how they had confirmed to me the leadership of their country, and what had been written to Jonathan's party about their departure -- to whom I also immediately sent the letter, ordering the bearer to find out carefully what they intended to do.
They, on receiving the letter and being no little disturbed, summoned John and the members of the Tiberian council and the leading men of Gabara, and put before them the question of what they should do. The Tiberians decided rather to hold their ground, for they said they ought not to abandon their city, once it had joined that side, especially since I was not going to spare them either -- for they falsely claimed that I had threatened this. John not only agreed with them, but also advised that two of them should go and accuse me before the assembly of not administering the affairs of Galilee properly, saying that he would easily persuade them, both because of his own standing and because the whole crowd was readily disposed to it.
Since John's proposal seemed the best, it was decided that two men, Jonathan and Ananias, should go to the people of Jerusalem, while the other two should remain behind at Tiberias. They took with them, for their own protection, a hundred armed men. The Tiberians, for their part, saw to it that the walls were secured, and ordered the inhabitants to take up arms, and also sent to John for a good number of soldiers to assist them against me, if need arose. John was at Gischala. Jonathan's party, then, setting out from Tiberias, on reaching the village of Dabaritta, which lies on the edge of Galilee in the great plain, fell in about midnight with my guards, who ordered them to lay down their weapons and kept them under guard in chains on the spot, just as I had instructed them.
Levi, to whom I had entrusted the guard, wrote to inform me of this. I let two days pass, pretending to know nothing, then sent to the Tiberians advising them, once they had laid down their arms, to release the men to their own homes. But they -- for they supposed that Jonathan's party had already made their way to Jerusalem -- returned an abusive answer. Undismayed, I set about outmaneuvering them. I did not think it pious to kindle war against my own countrymen, but, wishing to draw them away from the Tiberians, I chose ten thousand of my best-armed men and divided them into three divisions.
These I ordered to lie in ambush unseen in some buildings and wait, while a thousand others I led into another village, likewise in the hill country but four stades from Tiberias, with orders that as soon as they received the signal they should come down at once. I myself went forward from the village and sat in plain view. The Tiberians, seeing me, kept running out and heaping abuse on me -- so great was...
such was the folly that possessed them that they even made ready a couch, set it out, and stood around it lamenting me, all in jest and laughter. I, for my part, was pleased at heart to watch their foolishness.
Wishing to catch Simon by a trick, along with Jozar, I sent to them and invited them to come a little way outside the city with many friends who would guard them, saying that I wished to come down and make a settlement with them and divide the leadership of Galilee between us. Simon, then, being young and deceived by the hope of gain, did not hesitate to come; but Jozar, suspecting a trap, stayed behind. When Simon had come up with the friends who were guarding him, I went to meet him, greeted him warmly, and professed my gratitude that he had come. Not long after, as we were walking together as though I wished to say something in private, I led him further away from his friends, then seized him bodily and handed him over to my own friends to take to the village, while I ordered the soldiers to go down and, together with them, attacked Tiberias.
A fierce battle developed on both sides, and the Tiberians were on the very point of winning — for our soldiers had fled — when I saw what was happening and, rallying those with me, drove the now-victorious Tiberians back into the city. I also sent another force in by way of the lake, with orders that whoever took the first house should set it on fire. When this was done, the Tiberians, believing that their city had been forcibly captured, threw down their arms in terror and, together with their wives and children, begged that their city be spared. Moved by their entreaties, I restrained the soldiers from their onset; and I myself — for evening had now come — withdrew with the soldiers from the siege and turned to attend to my body's needs. I invited Simon to the meal, comforted him about what had happened, and promised, giving him provisions for the journey, that I would send him and those with him to Jerusalem in full safety.
On the following day I came to Tiberias bringing ten thousand soldiers, and, summoning the leading men of the populace to the stadium, I ordered them to say who was responsible for the revolt. When they pointed out the men, I sent those men in chains to the city of Jotapata, but Jonathan and Ananias and their companions I released from their bonds and, giving them provisions, sent them off to Jerusalem with Simon and Jozar and five hundred soldiers to guard them. The Tiberians then came forward again asking pardon for what had been done, saying that they would make amends for their offenses by their future loyalty to me, and they begged that I save for those who had lost property whatever surplus remained from the plunder. So I ordered those who held such goods to bring everything into the open; and when they were slow to obey for a long while, I noticed one of the soldiers around me wearing a garment finer than usual and asked him where he had gotten it. When he said it was from the plunder of the city, I punished him with blows, and I threatened all the others with a heavier penalty if they did not bring into the open whatever they had plundered. Many things were then brought together, and I restored to each of the Tiberians what was recognized as his.
Having reached this point in my narrative, I wish to say a few things about Justus himself, who has written an account of these events, and against others as well who, while professing to write history, are careless of the truth and, out of either hostility or favor, are not ashamed to lie. Such men do something like those who forge documents of contract, but since they fear no punishment resembling that which forgers face, they hold the truth in contempt. Justus, at any rate, in attempting to write of these events and of the war, has lied about me — for the sake of seeming industrious — and he has not told the truth about his own homeland either. Since I am now compelled to defend myself against his false testimony, I will speak of matters until now passed over in silence. And let no one wonder that I did not disclose these things long ago; for although it is necessary for one writing history to speak the truth, he may nevertheless refrain from harshly exposing the wickedness of certain men — not out of favor toward them, but out of his own restraint.
How is it, then — to speak to him as though he were present — Justus, cleverest of historians (for that is what you boast of yourself), that I and the Galileans became the cause of your homeland's rebellion against the Romans and the king? For before I was appointed general of Galilee by the council of the Jerusalemites, you and all the Tiberians had not only taken up arms but were also making war on the ten cities of Syria; you at least burned their villages, and your own servant fell in that battle. And I do not say this alone, but it is written thus in the memoirs of the emperor Vespasian himself, and how the inhabitants of the ten cities cried out against you before Vespasian at Ptolemais, demanding that you, the guilty party, pay the penalty. And you would have paid the penalty at Vespasian's order, had not King Agrippa, who had been given authority to kill you, kept you bound for a long time instead of putting you to death, at the earnest entreaty of his sister Berenice. Your later political conduct, moreover, plainly reveals both the rest of your life and the fact that you brought your homeland to revolt from the Romans — the proofs of which I too shall soon set forth.
I wish also to say a little to the other Tiberians on your account, and to show those who will read these histories that you have proved yourselves neither friends of Rome nor friends of the king. Of the cities in Galilee, the greatest are Sepphoris and Tiberias, your own homeland, Justus. But Sepphoris, situated in the very middle of Galilee and having many villages around it, and quite capable of showing some boldness toward the Romans had it wished to do so easily, resolved instead to remain loyal to its masters, and shut me out of their city, and prevented any of its citizens from serving with the Jews. And, so that their position toward us might also be secure, they deceived me into urging them to fortify their city with walls, and they willingly received a garrison from Cestius Gallus, who commanded the Roman legions in Syria — thereby showing contempt for me, though I then held great power and was an object of everyone's dread. And while our greatest city, Jerusalem, was under siege, and the temple common to us all was in danger of falling into enemy hands, they sent no aid, unwilling to seem to be taking up arms against the Romans.
Your homeland, however, Justus, situated on the Lake of Gennesaret, and thirty stadia from Hippos, sixty from Gadara, and a hundred and twenty from Scythopolis — all subject to the king — with no city of the Jews adjoining it, could easily have kept its loyalty to the Romans had it wished; for you were a numerous population and well supplied with arms. But, as you say, I was to blame for you at that time. What came after that, Justus? For you know that before the siege of Jerusalem I had already come under Roman power, that Jotapata had been taken by storm along with many strongholds, and that a great multitude of Galileans had fallen in battle. At that time, then, freed from all fear on my account, you ought to have thrown down your arms and
submitted to the king and the Romans, showing that it was not willingly but under compulsion that you had rushed into war against them. Instead, you waited for Vespasian, until he himself arrived with his whole force and approached your walls, and only then, out of fear, did you lay down your arms; and your city would certainly have been taken by storm, had not Vespasian yielded to the king's entreaty and his pleading on behalf of your folly. It is not I, then, who am to blame, but you who were bent on war. Or do you not remember that, though I so often had you in my power, I destroyed no one, whereas you, quarreling among yourselves — not out of goodwill toward the Romans and the king, but out of your own wickedness toward one another — killed a hundred and eighty-five of your fellow citizens, at the very time when I was under siege
at Jotapata by the Romans? And why should I not mention that during the siege of Jerusalem two thousand of the Tiberians were destroyed, some falling in battle, others taken captive? But you will say that you were no enemy, because you fled to the king at that time. And this too, I say, you did out of fear of me. And I, according to you, am the wicked one, while King Agrippa —
who granted you your life when you had been condemned to die by Vespasian, who bestowed on you so much wealth — why did he later imprison you twice, and order you so many times to flee your homeland, and, having once ordered your death, grant you your safety only because his sister Berenice begged so earnestly for it? And after so many misdeeds of yours, when he entrusted you with a post of secretary and found you a rogue even in that, he banished you from
his presence. But I leave it to others to examine these matters closely. What amazes me is your shamelessness, in that you dare to say that you have described these events better than all those who have written this history, though you neither know what was done in Galilee — for you were then in Berytus with the king — nor followed what the Romans suffered at the siege of Jotapata or what they inflicted on us,
nor were you able to learn what I myself did while under siege; for all who could have reported it would have perished in that battle. But perhaps you will say that you have written with accuracy of the events at Jerusalem. And how could that be? For you were neither present at the war nor have you read Caesar's memoirs. Here is the greatest proof: you have written an account that contradicts Caesar's memoirs. And if
you are confident that you have written better than everyone else, why, while the emperors Vespasian and Titus, who brought the war to its conclusion, were still alive, and King Agrippa and all his kinsmen — men who had attained the highest degree of Greek culture — were still living, did you not bring your history forward? For you had had it written twenty years before, and you might have obtained from those who knew the events testimony to its accuracy;
but now, when those men are no longer among us and you think you cannot be refuted, you have grown bold. I, however, did not fear in the same way for my own account, but delivered the books to the emperors themselves while the events they described were almost still visible; for I was conscious in myself that I had preserved the tradition of truth, and, expecting to receive testimony to this, I was not disappointed.
I also gave the history at once to many others, some of whom had actually taken part in the war, such as King Agrippa and certain of his relatives. For the emperor Titus wished that knowledge of the events should be handed down to men from these alone, so much so that he gave orders, marking the books with his own hand, that they be published; and King Agrippa wrote sixty-two letters testifying to the
faithfulness of the account. I have appended two of these below, and anyone who wishes may learn from them what was written: "King Agrippa to Josephus, his dearest friend, greeting. I have gone through the book with the greatest pleasure, and you seem to me to have been far more accurate than those who have written on these matters before you. Send me the remaining volumes too. Farewell." "King Agrippa to Josephus, his dearest friend, greeting. From what you have written, you seem to need no
instruction to make us understand the whole matter from the beginning. Yet when you meet with me, I myself will tell you a great deal that you do not know." And when the history had been completed, Agrippa testified to its truth not out of flattery — for that would not have suited him — nor out of irony, as you will say, for he was far removed from such malice, but he bore witness to the truth, as all who read histories do. But let what has been said concerning
Justus, this necessary digression, suffice for us at this point. Having settled matters at Tiberias, I called together a council of my friends and deliberated about what should be done regarding John. It seemed good to all the Galileans that everyone should take up arms and go against John and exact punishment from him, as the one responsible for the whole revolt; but I did not approve of their
opinion, having a preference for putting down disturbances without bloodshed. For this reason I advised that every care be taken to learn the names of those under John's command. When this had been done and I knew who the men were, I put out a proclamation offering pledge and right hand to those with John who wished to receive pardon, and I gave a period of twenty days to those who wanted
to deliberate about what was to their advantage. I also threatened that, if they did not throw down their arms, I would burn their dwellings and confiscate their property. On hearing this, the men, thrown into no small confusion, abandoned John, and, throwing down their arms, came to me, four thousand in number. Only the citizens of his own town remained with John, along with some foreigners
from the mother-city of Tyre, about fifteen hundred in all. John, then, having been thus outmaneuvered by me, remained for the rest of the time fearfully in his own country. At this same time the people of Sepphoris, growing bold and relying both on the strength of their walls and on the fact that I was occupied elsewhere, took up arms. They sent to Cestius Gallus, who was governor of Syria,
asking either that he come himself quickly to take possession of their city or that he send men to garrison it. Gallus promised to come, but did not make clear when. When I learned of this, I took the soldiers with me and, marching against the people of Sepphoris, captured their city by storm. The Galileans, seizing the opportunity and unwilling to let the moment for their hatred pass — for they
bore ill will also toward this city — rushed to destroy everyone utterly, together with the settlers. Running in, they set fire to the houses, finding them empty, for the inhabitants in fear had taken refuge in the citadel; they plundered everything and left no form of pillage untried against their own countrymen. When I saw this I was deeply distressed and ordered them to stop, reminding them that
it was not lawful to treat fellow countrymen so. But since they listened neither to my appeals nor to my commands, and hatred overpowered my exhortations, I ordered my most trusted friends to spread word that the Romans had broken in with a large force on the other side of the city. I did this in order that, by the spread of this rumor, I might check the Galileans' onset and rescue
the city of the Sepphorites. And in the end the stratagem succeeded, for when they heard the report they were afraid for themselves, and abandoning their plunder they fled, especially since they saw that I, their general, was doing the same; for to lend credibility to the rumor I pretended to be affected in the same way as they were. So the people of Sepphoris, against their own expectation, were saved by my device. Tiberias too came close to being seized by the Galileans, for the following reason arose. The leading men of the council wrote to the king, urging him to come and take possession of the city. The king promised to come, and wrote back, and gave the letters to one of his chamberlains, Crispus by name, a Jew by birth, to carry to the people of Tiberias. But when this man brought the letter, the Galileans recognized him and seized him and brought him to me. The whole populace, when they heard of it, were roused to anger and took up arms. Gathering from many places, a great crowd came the next day to the town of Asochis, where I was then lodging, and they made a great outcry, calling Tiberias a traitor and a friend of the king, and demanding to be allowed to go down and utterly destroy it — for they were hostile to the people of Tiberias just as they were to the people of Sepphoris.
When I heard this I was at a loss as to how I might rescue Tiberias from the wrath of the Galileans; for I could not deny that the people of Tiberias had written inviting the king, since the letters he had written back to them proved the truth of the matter. So, after being deep in thought for a long while, I said: "I too know, men of Tiberias, that they have done wrong, and I will not prevent you from plundering their city. Yet such great actions ought to be carried out with due judgment. It is not the people of Tiberias alone who have become traitors to our freedom, but many also of the most eminent men in Galilee. Wait, then, until I have learned precisely who is responsible, and then you shall have them all in your power, as many as you can individually bring to account." By saying this I persuaded the crowd, and, their anger abating, they dispersed.
As for the man sent by the king, I ordered him bound; but not many days later, pretending some urgent business of my own required me to leave the kingdom, I secretly summoned Crispus and instructed him to make the soldier guarding him drunk and to flee to the king, telling him he would not be pursued. He, persuaded by this advice, made his escape; and Tiberias, though on the point of being destroyed a second time, escaped so sharp a danger through my strategy and my forethought concerning it.
About this same time Justus, son of Pistus, escaping my notice, ran off secretly to the king. I shall now relate the reason why he did this. When the war of the Jews against the Romans had begun, the people of Tiberias had resolved to obey the king and not to revolt from the Romans. But Justus persuaded them to take up arms, since he himself was reaching for power and had hopes of ruling over both the Galileans and his own native city. Yet he did not obtain what he hoped for; for the Galileans, being hostile to the people of Tiberias because of the resentment they bore them for what they had suffered at his hands before the war, would not tolerate his generalship over them. And I, having been entrusted by the common council of the people of Jerusalem with the leadership of Galilee, often came into so great a rage that I very nearly killed Justus, being unable to bear his wickedness. Fearing, then, that my anger might at last reach its end, he sent to King Agrippa Crispus, thinking he would live more safely with him. But the people of Sepphoris, having unexpectedly escaped the first danger, sent to Cestius Gallus, urging him either to come himself and take possession of their city more quickly, or to send a force that would beat back the enemy's raids against them; and in the end they persuaded Gallus to send them a force of both cavalry and infantry, which arrived by night and was received into the city.
Since the surrounding country was being harried by the Roman army, I took the soldiers under my command and went to the village of Garis. There I pitched camp twenty stades from the city of Sepphoris, and at night I advanced against it and assaulted its walls, and, bringing many of my soldiers up by ladders, I gained possession of the greater part of the city; but not long after, through ignorance of the terrain, we were compelled to withdraw, having killed two of the Roman cavalry and ten infantry, and a few of the Sepphorites, while we ourselves lost only one man. Later, in an engagement on the plain against the cavalry, after a fierce struggle prolonged for a good while, we were defeated; for when the Romans encircled us, those with me took fright and fled backward. In that battle there fell one of those entrusted with the guarding of my person, a man named Justus, who had once held the same office at the king's court. At this same time the force sent by the king arrived, both cavalry and infantry, with Sulla, the commander of the king's bodyguard, in charge of it.
He, having pitched camp five stades from Julias, set guards on the roads, both the one leading to Seleucia and the one leading to the fortress of Gamala, in order to cut off the inhabitants from the assistance the Galileans might give them. When I learned of this, I sent two thousand armed men and Jeremiah as their commander, who, having pitched camp a stade from Julias near the Jordan river, accomplished nothing beyond some skirmishing, until I myself took up three thousand soldiers and came to them. On the following day, having stationed an ambush in a certain ravine not far from their camp, I challenged the king's men to battle, having instructed my own soldiers to turn their backs, until they should draw the enemy on to advance — which indeed came to pass. For Sulla, supposing that our men were truly fleeing, went forward and was ready to pursue them, when those from the ambush took him from the rear and threw them all into great confusion. I myself, immediately wheeling about sharply with my force, met the king's men and put them to flight.
And I would have carried the day's action to a successful conclusion, had not some supernatural power intervened; for the horse on which I was fighting fell into a marshy spot and threw me to the ground. Having suffered a fracture of the bones of my wrist, I was carried to a village called Cepharnocus. When my men heard of this and were afraid that I might have suffered something still worse, they broke off the pursuit any further and turned back to me in great distress. So, having sent for physicians and been treated, I remained there that day with a fever, and on the physicians' advice I was carried by night to Tarichaeae. Sulla and his men, learning what had happened to me, took heart again, and, perceiving that the guarding of the camp was being neglected, stationed a troop of cavalry in ambush by night on the far side of the Jordan, and at daybreak challenged us to battle. When our men responded and advanced as far as the plain, the cavalry appeared from the ambush and, throwing them into confusion, put them to flight and killed six of our men; they did not, however, carry the victory through to the end, for on hearing that some armed men had sailed down from Tarichaeae to Julias, they withdrew in fear.
Not long after this, Vespasian arrived at Tyre, and with him King Agrippa. The people of Tyre began to abuse the king, calling him an enemy of the king of Tyre and of the Romans; for they said that his camp-commander Philip had betrayed the royal palace and the Roman forces stationed in Jerusalem, acting on his orders. When Vespasian heard this, he rebuked the Tyrians for insulting a man who was both a king and a friend of the Romans, but advised the king to send Philip to Rome to give account to Nero of what had been done. Philip, having been sent, did not come into Nero's presence; for finding him in extremity because of the disturbances that had broken out and the civil war, he returned to the king. When Vespasian arrived at Ptolemais, the leading men of the ten cities of Syria cried out against Justus of Tiberias, on the ground that he had burned their villages. Vespasian accordingly handed him over to the king to be punished by the subjects of his kingdom; but the king imprisoned him, concealing this from Vespasian, as I have shown above. The people of Sepphoris, meeting Vespasian and welcoming him, received a force and a commander, Placidus, and, going up with these troops, followed after me until Vespasian's arrival in Galilee.
As for how this came about, and how he fought his first battle against me near the village of Garis, and how I withdrew from there to Jotapata, and what happened to me during the siege of that city, and how, taken alive, I was bound, and how I was released, and all that befell me in the course of the Jewish war and the siege of Jerusalem — all this I have set forth with precision in my books on the Jewish war. But it is necessary, I think, now to add whatever events of my life I did not record in the account of the Jewish war. When the siege of Jotapata had come to its end, I was kept in custody among the Romans with every care, Vespasian holding me in great honor for the most part, and indeed, at his command, I took as wife a young woman from among the captives taken at Caesarea, a native of that region. She did not remain with me long, but was released when I was set free and Vespasian had gone to Alexandria; I took another wife at Alexandria. From there, sent along with Titus to the siege of Jerusalem, I was often in danger of death, since the Jews were eager to get me into their power for punishment, while the Romans, whenever they were defeated, supposed this happened because of my treachery, and there were constant outcries before the emperor demanding that I be punished, as being a traitor to them as well. But Titus Caesar, well aware of the fortunes of war, restrained by silence the soldiers' impulses against me. When the city of Jerusalem was already in the enemy's grip, Titus Caesar repeatedly urged me to take whatever I wished from the ruin of my homeland, saying that he himself gave permission for it. But I, having nothing more precious than my homeland now that it had fallen, which I might keep to take as consolation for my own misfortunes, made request of Titus for the freedom of some persons, and I also received sacred books, Titus granting them to me. Not long after, I also asked for my brother, together with fifty friends, and did not fail to obtain them.
And having gone into the temple, with Titus granting me the authority, where a great multitude of captive women and children had been shut up, as many as I recognized to be my friends and acquaintances I rescued, about one hundred and ninety in number, and I released them without their even paying ransom, restoring them to their former condition. Being sent by Titus Caesar together with Cerealius and a thousand cavalry to a village called Tekoa, to examine beforehand whether the place was suitable to receive a camp, as I was returning from there I saw many captives who had been crucified, and I recognized three of them as men who had been my acquaintances. I was pained at heart, and, coming to Titus with tears, told him of it. He at once ordered them to be taken down and to receive the most careful treatment; and two of them died while being treated, but the third survived.
When Titus had put an end to the disturbances in Judea, judging that the fields I had in Jerusalem would be of no use to me because of the Roman garrison that was to be stationed there, he gave me other land in the plain; and when he was about to set sail for Rome, he took me along as a fellow passenger, showing me every honor. When we arrived in Rome, I received much consideration from Vespasian; for he gave me lodging in the house he had occupied before his reign, honored me with Roman citizenship, and gave me an allowance of money, and he continued to honor me until the end of his life, never diminishing his kindness toward me — kindness which, because of envy, brought danger upon me. For a certain Jew named Jonathan, who had stirred up sedition in Cyrene and persuaded two thousand of the local inhabitants to join him, became responsible for their destruction; and he himself, having been bound by the governor of the region and sent to the emperor, claimed that I had sent him weapons and money. But his lie did not escape Vespasian's notice; rather, he condemned him to death, and he was handed over and executed. Often afterward too, when those who envied my good fortune brought accusations against me, by God's providence I escaped them all. I received from Vespasian, as a gift, no small amount of land in Judea. At about this time I also divorced my wife, not being pleased with her ways, though she had borne me three children, of whom two died and one survives, whom I named Hyrcanus. After this I married a woman who had been living in Crete, but was Jewish by birth, of parents most noble and among the most eminent in the region, one who surpassed many women in character, as her subsequent life showed. By her I had two children, the elder Justus, and after him Simonides, also called Agrippa. Such, then, are the affairs of my household. My relations with the emperors likewise continued unchanged; for when Vespasian died,
Titus, succeeding to the rule, kept up the same honor toward me as his father had, and though I was often accused, he did not believe it. When Domitian succeeded Titus, he further increased the honors paid to me; for he punished the Jews who had accused me, and ordered the punishment of a slave, a eunuch, the tutor of my son, who had brought an accusation, and he granted me exemption from taxation on my land in Judea, which is the greatest honor one can receive. And Domitia, the wife of Caesar, likewise never ceased to do me kindness. These, then, are the things done by me throughout the whole of my life; let others judge my character from them as they will. And to you, most excellent Epaphroditus, having rendered the whole record of my ancestry, I here bring this account to its end.