In the time of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (“Rabbi”), there was a revolution in the relationships between the authorities and the Jews in Palestine. This revolution was linked with the special personality of Rabbi and his way of leadership, as well as the succession of the Severan dynasty to the imperial throne, and Roman policy in the provinces in general in the time of the Severans. After the Severans came the imperial crisis, which left its mark especially on the eastern provinces, which were subjected to such a heavy economic burden that many Jews emigrated to Babylonia, the home of the largest Jewish diaspora community outside the borders of the Roman empire.

The chapter argues against an influential thesis according to which Jews and Judaea were treated with extraordinary harshness in the wake of the Great Rebellion, due to the new Flavian dynasty’s political needs. It is argued that Vespasian enjoyed considerable legitimacy at the beginning of his reign; he did not need to base his legitimacy on a continuous ‘war against the Jews’; nothing he did needs to be explained by attributing this motivation to him. The harshness of the treatment endured by the defeated Jews was, fundamentally, “normal’ imperial harshness.

The reasons for the long stability and the centuries-long, uncontested Roman rule over the entire Mediterranean basin and bordering territories are a perennial topic of discussion. In that respect, the willingness of Rome to grant citizenship to former subjects is an essential chapter to be written in this history. Yet it is less often asked to what extent the induction of individuals from the subject states and peoples into the Roman Senate contributed to that stability. The positive and negative consequences of this phenomenon are discussed in this chapter.

This chapter addresses what appears to be a puzzling paradox. The Romans enjoyed a reputation for broad-mindedness in matters of religion. Their empire contained a multitude of diverse peoples with varied and sometimes outlandish rites, beliefs, and gods. Far from suppressing such practices, the Romans even imported alien cults and made them part of their own extended system of honoring divine powers. Acceptance and embrace of a wide range of modes of worship characterized Roman image and practice. Could this liberal attitude toward religious pluralism extend even to the Jews, notorious as an exclusivist monotheistic sect? The evidence, on the face of it, suggests hostility among Roman intellectuals toward Jewish separatism and offers disturbing examples of official actions against practitioners of the religion itself. How does one account for this apparent exception to general Roman policy? This chapter questions many of the assumptions behind this ostensible paradox. It argues that Jews were not as separatist as often thought, that their diaspora communities in the empire were acknowledged and supported by Roman authority, that official actions against the religion were decidedly exceptional and not at all characteristic, and that abusive comments by Roman intellectuals were no more meaningful than those expressed about numerous other cults that flourished in the empire.

The chapter addresses the question of the definition of a Jewish collectivity as it was formed in Hellenistic and Roman times by Jews. Having a single Hebrew term to designate themselves, Bney Israel (“the sons of Israel”), Jews had to do without concepts such as ethnos, genos, laos, dēmos, populus, natio, polis, and civitas when referring to themselves as a collective group. The chapter examines the notions that Jews used in order to refer to themselves as an entity, and shows that the definition of Judaism by Jews was modeled in view of different concepts of other entities that were predominant in the Greco-Roman world and was influenced by the tension between political, geo-ethnic, historical, juridical and civic definitions. Each type of collective definition served a different realpolitik and was conditioned by different political circumstances, which determined the way in which Jews demarcated themselves as a group. The chapter aims to reveal the evolution that the definition of Judaism underwent in a period of great changes and focuses in particular on the transition between the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

It is a great privilege to dedicate a chapter in honour of Prof. Benjamin Isaac, whose contribution to the studies of the Roman Army and Aelia Capitolina are well known. In recent years, as a result of archeological excavations in Jerusalem in which I was involved, and research discussing the main streets of Aelia Capitolina (under the supervision of Professor Yoram Tsafrir), I met and had long conversations and correspondence with Professor Benjamin Isaac. I would like to thank Professor Isaac for sharing his wide knowledge with me and answering my questions with detailed explanations. His opinion regarding several issues raised in our meetings contributed a lot to my views concerning the development of the Roman colony of Aelia Capitolina, near the camp of legio X Fretensis.

This chapter examines the involvement of the Roman empire in administrating education in provincial cities during the High Empire, through regulation of exemption from tutelages. It uses the case of Aelius Aristides, who appealed against his own exemption being revoked. The chapter traces the various interests and forces which shaped provincial education both in the civic arena as well as in the imperial one.

When Greek historians turned their attention to the Roman Empire, the main question they sought to answer, which they displayed prominently in their introductions, was the reason for the success of the Empire. Success was defined in terms of acquisition, extent, stability and duration of conquest. Polybius, although not the first Greek historian of Rome, was perhaps the first to formulate the question, which he stated like a banner in the introduction to his complex work: his purpose was to explain ‘by what means and under what system of government the Romans succeeded in less than fifty-three years in bringing under their rule almost the whole of the inhabited world, an achievement which is without parallel in human history’. A century later, Dionysius of Halicarnassus did Polybius one better by adding duration of rule to Rome’s achievement: ‘the supremacy of the Romans has far surpassed all those that are recorded from earlier times, not only in the extent of its dominion and in the splendor of its achievements – which no account has as yet worthily celebrated – but also in the length of time during which it has endured down to our day’; and his long preface is filled with other such proclamations. In the second century CE, Appian of Alexandria wrote the same idea in less florid prose: ‘No ruling power up to the present time ever achieved such size and duration’, after stating which he embarked on a long proof. These three historians are representative of a prevailing trend.

The status of Rome vis-à-vis the Roman empire is analyzed. Fears that it might be replaced and the imperial capital would be transferred are reported from the first century BC onward. Foundation myths suggested that Rome originated in the East, in Troy, and it was suspected that the capital might move back to the East. These suspicions did not materialize for centuries but became reality under Constantine with the refoundation of Byzantium as Constantinople. The choice of Constantinople as (eastern) capital may not have been a matter of course from the start. Other cities seem to have been considered first, and it is not certain why it was chosen. Furthermore, there is no contemporary evidence that Constantine always conceived his new foundation as the eastern capital of the empire, or that he intended that it should replace Rome. Claims, made first by Christian authors, that Constantine’s city was conceived from the start as the new or second Rome and also as a purely Christian city cannot be confirmed. The city actually took time to develop into an imperial capital. The city became the undisputed centre of the late Roman empire only in the reign of Theodosius I.

This chapter offers a brief study of mainly Latin ethnic proverbs that apply collective names of ethnic groups and associate them with fixed attributes. By analyzing such proverbial allusions, it shows that the “others” from the point of view of the Romans were located anywhere in the inhabited known world at the time, but there was special interest either in neighbouring and well-known people or in remote groups dwelling at the fringes of the world. The first, closer group, became the focus of mockery and the second, remote group, was so distant and unknown that its members became typed as strange and weird.

Historical sources, and epigraphical and archeological finds attest to the presence of the Roman military presence and the establishment of the Roman base at Legio-Kefar ‘Othnay, first by soldiers of the Legio II Traiana, and slightly thereafter by the Legio VI Ferrata. An archaeological survey in the Legio area proposed the precise location of the Roman legionary base. A geophysical survey and excavation seasons allow us to assess that its size resembles Roman legionary bases in other parts of the empire during the second–third centuries CE. In this chapter we discuss the small finds from the site such as roof tiles/bricks with Roman military stamps, coins with countermarks and Roman weapons and assess their contribution to the understanding of Roman military presence by the II Traiana and the VI Ferrata legions at the site from the second to the beginning of the fourth century CE, at the latest.

Certain universal and more or less perennial aspects of human perceptions of the night influence the representation of nightlife in ancient texts. But beyond the stereotypes, we may recognize tensions between conservative perceptions and a continually changing reality. In the Roman empire, we may observe certain recurring elements of a ‘nocturnal koine’, the result of general trends. The factors that shaped nightlife in the Roman empire include the diffusion of voluntary associations and their convivial activities, the donations of benefactors for nighttime activities (baths, gymnasia, public banquets), the prominent place of nocturnal rites in cults with a soteriological or initiatory aspect, and efforts to increase the safety in cities during the night. These factors should be considered within a broader context—that of the gradual and continuous colonization of the night with the activities of the day.