Jerusalem. The Biography

kill his own malignant mother Agrippina. Yet Poppaea also became one of the semi-Jewish ‘God-fearers’. Through his actor friend, Josephus reached the empress, who helped free his friends. Josephus had done well, but when he and his friends returned home, they found Jerusalem pervaded ‘with high hopes of a revolt against the Romans.’ Yet revolt was not inevitable: Josephus’ acquaintance with Poppaea shows how the lines between Rome and Jerusalem were still open. The city filled annually with vast numbers of Jewish pilgrims with little sign of trouble despite the presence of only one auxiliary Roman cohort (600–1,200 men) in the Antonia. The rich Temple city existed ‘in a state of peace and prosperity’, run by a Jewish high priest appointed by a Jewish king. It was only now that the Temple was finally completed, causing the unemployment of 18,000 builders. So King Agrippa created more work for them by commissioning new streets. *
    At any time, a more diligent emperor, a more just procurator, could have restored order among the Jewish factions. While the empire was run by Nero’s efficient Greek freedmen, his posturings as actor and athlete, even his blood purges, were tolerable. But when the economy started to fail, Nero’s ineptitude spread down to Judaea, where there was now ‘no form of villainy’ that his procurators ‘omitted to practise’. In Jerusalem, the latest incumbent ran a protection-racket, taking bribes from the grandees whose thuggish retinues competed with the Sicarii to terrorize the city. No wonder another prophet, ironically named Jesus, loudly cried in the Temple, ‘Woe to Jerusalem!’ Judged insane, he was scourged but not killed. Yet Josephus recounts little anti-Roman sentiment.
    In 64, Rome caught fire. Nero probably oversaw the fire-fighting and he opened his gardens to those who had lost their homes. But conspiracists claimed that Nero had started the fire to enable him to build a larger palace and that he had neglected to fight the fire because he was plucking on his lyre. Nero blamed the fast-spreading semi-Jewish sect, the Christians, many of whom he caused to be burned alive, torn to pieces by wild animals or crucified. Among his victims were two arrested in Jerusalem years earlier: Peter was said to have been crucified head down; Paul beheaded. Nero’s anti-Christian pogrom earned him his place in the Christian Book of Revelation, the last in the canon of what became the New Testament: Satan’s ‘beasts’ are Roman emperors and 666, the number of the beast, probably a code for Nero. *
    The ‘exquisite tortures’ he devised for the Christians did not save Nero. At home, he kicked his pregnant empress Poppaea in the stomach, accidentally killing her. As the emperor killed enemies real and imagined while promoting his acting career, his latest procurator in Judaea, Gessius Florus, ‘ostentatiously paraded his outrages upon the nation’. The catastrophe started in Caesarea: Syrian Greeks sacrificed a cockerel outside a synagogue; the Jews protested. Florus was bribed to support the gentiles and then marched down to Jerusalem, demanding a tax of seventeen talents from the Temple. When he appeared at the Praetorium in the spring of 66, Jewish youths collected pennies and tossed them at him. Florus’ Greek and Syrian troops attacked the crowds. Florus demanded that the Temple grandees hand over the hooligans, but they refused. His legionaries ran amok, ‘plunged into every house and slaughtered the inhabitants’. Florus flagellated and crucified his prisoners, including Jewish grandees who were Roman citizens. This was the last straw: the Temple aristocrats could no longer count on Roman protection. The brutality of Florus’ local auxiliaries inflamed Jewish resistance. As his cavalry clattered through the streets with ‘a degree of madness,’ they even attacked King Agrippa’s sister, Queen Berenice. Her guards bundled her back into the Maccabean Palace but she resolved to save Jerusalem. 54

AD 66–70
     
    BERENICE THE BAREFOOT QUEEN: REVOLUTION
     
    Berenice walked barefoot to the Praetorium herself – the same route Jesus would have taken from Herod Antipas back to Pilate thirty years earlier. The beautiful Berenice – daughter and sister of kings, and twice a queen – was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to thank God for her recovery from an illness, fasting for thirty days and shaving her head (surprising in this Romanized Herodian). Now she threw