The internal politics of the Jewish state from a.d. 67 to a.d. 70 have proved to be susceptible to the same kind of analysis as was appropriate for the faction struggle before and at the start of the war. Josephus' account is therefore to be dismissed when he marks a distinct break in the nature of the Judaean leadership after the middle of a.d. 67: just as he was misleading when he suggested that all generals appointed by the people before he was elected in a.d. 66 did not hold legitimate authority (above, p. 156), so he was mendacious when he asserted that all who remained on the rebel side after his own defection to the Romans were rabid scoundrels prevented only by their wickedness from realizing the uselessness of revolt.

For his own peace of mind Josephus was bound to condemn in this way his erstwhile colleagues who continued the revolutionary struggle after his capitulation. He even persuaded himself that his knowledge of the impiety of further resistance to the Romans had been vouchsafed to him by a divine vision (B.J. 3.352–4). But it is not necessary for modern historians to follow Josephus' prejudices, though surprisingly many of them do.

The problems faced by the government of Judaea before a.d. 66 were, as has been seen, considerable. A disintegrating society had been thrown into turmoil by growing economic disparities, while native ideology encouraged Jews to blame the Roman aliens for their plight. It was imperative that Jewish leaders should guide their people safely into calm cooperation with Rome if catastrophe was to be avoided. But in fact, as has been shown (above, pp. 40–6), the Jewish ruling class lacked the confidence of the Jewish nation which might have enabled them to carry out such a task. The reasons for this lack of trust and natural authority will be the subject of this chapter. It has already been noted that the men treated as rulers by Rome after a.d. 6 did not in the first place come to power with any status in Jewish eyes inherited from their role in previous regimes (above, pp. 38–40), but the Romans may have expected that occupancy of the leading positions within national institutions by such men, and their ownership of great landed estates, would in time give them the local prestige they so lacked at the beginning. Precisely such a transformation had, after all, taken place within the Roman ruling class itself under Augustus. There were special Jewish reasons why this Roman expectation was to be dashed in Judaea.

In a.d. 66 the ability of any of the ruling class to win power through the procurator's favour rapidly declined as the country moved towards revolt. The slide into war was rapid and dramatic.

Intercommunal tensions led to fighting between Jews and Greeks in the city of Caesarea early in the year. The procurator Florus favoured the Greek cause, as Nero had done six years earlier, and, ignoring Jewish grievances in that city, compounded his unpopularity with the Jews by taking seventeen talents from the Temple in Jerusalem ‘for Caesar's use’ (B.J. 2.293).

It is likely that the money was needed for arrears of tribute (cf. B.J. 2.405), but if so this justification for Florus' behaviour was ignored by his subjects and his action was greeted by widespread rioting in Jerusalem. Incensed by this display of opposition, and in particular by the ridicule poured on his greed by a few wits, Florus marched to the city and ransacked a good part of it. But when he attempted to achieve a public display of Jewish submissiveness by forcing the population to greet with humility two further cohorts sent from Caesarea, and to accept without demur the insulting silence with which their greetings were received by the troops (B.J. 2.318–19), his plan misfired and the mob's anger proved so violent that he was forced to withdraw to Caesarea himself, leaving only one cohort behind (B.J. 2.332).

THE PROBLEM

The Roman emperor Augustus created the province of Judaea in a.d. 6 by subjecting to direct Roman rule the central part of the domain once ruled by the Jewish king Herod the Great. Herod's kingdom had proved unruly on his death in 4 b.c. when the widespread resentment he had evoked was able to surface, and a series of revolts then had been suppressed only after intervention by the Roman governor of Syria. Herod's son Archelaus had nonetheless been permitted to inherit control of the area around Jerusalem, although he was granted the title merely of ethnarch. But by a.d. 6 even this appointment no longer seemed satisfactory in the eyes of his Roman patron. Archelaus was sent into exile in Gaul, and Judaea was incorporated into the Roman empire.

The following sixty years witnessed many crises in the relationship of the Jewish population to the Roman government. They ended with the great war of a.d. 66–70 which is the main subject of this book. Hostility to Rome was shown from the foundation of the province. Violent opposition to the imposition of a census was quelled only with difficulty, and in the following years a variety of issues led to frequent riots and demonstrations.

The equilibrium in Judaean politics achieved by the end of a.d. 66 under the leadership of Ananus b. Ananus was not to last. The coalition's prestige was severely shaken by its failure in Galilee: Josephus' efforts to hold the area against Rome on behalf of the Jerusalem government were finished by the summer of a.d. 67, and by the autumn his successor John of Gischala had also given up the struggle.

In Jerusalem Eleazar b. Simon, the powerful priest deposed from office by Ananus after Cestius Gallus' defeat, began, with his associates who sported the name of ‘Zealots’, to campaign for more effective leadership. At first tolerated by Ananus, he was by the winter penned up with his supporters inside the Temple where he had taken refuge. In the meantime John of Gischala, who had at least seen action against the Romans, became something of a popular hero on his escape from Galilee and his arrival in Jerusalem, and in early spring a.d. 68 he abandoned his alliance with Ananus and joined forces with Eleazar b. Simon.

The fate of Ananus' party was sealed when the leaders of the Idumaeans, who had hitherto remained neutral in the Judaean political struggle, threw in their support for John and Eleazar. On a dramatically stormy night in late spring a.d. 68, they infiltrated into the city, and Ananus and many of his more prominent followers were killed.

Reasons for blaming the propensity of the Jews to rebel on attitudes derived from their religious ideology have been examined in some detail in Chapter 1 (above, pp. 11–12), as have the limitations in ascribing responsibility for the revolt entirely to such a cause (pp. 15–16). Prime among these limiting factors was the fact that Judaism was too varied for easy generalizations about Jewish beliefs to be made. A few attitudes were standard among all Jews: there was, for instance, universal acceptance that the Torah was in some form the divine law given to Israel in recognition of the Jews' agreement to the covenant with God. But for most of the rest of his explanation of the world each individual Jew felt himself free to drift, as Josephus claims that he did (Vita 10–11), from one religious philosophy to another, seeking any one of the many different paths to virtue laid out before him. As a result there were within the Jewish tradition disparate reactions to the social chaos of first-century Judaea.

Of course, the possible reactions to social malaise uncontrolled by accepted authority were logically almost infinite. To some it might seem sensible to withdraw from society altogether, whether alone or in the company of others equally disillusioned. Or it might seem best to accept disasters with resignation, either making a virtue of hopelessness or indulging in speculation about future happiness for individuals or for all society.

The ambitions and divisions of the Judaean ruling class thus brought war onto their country. Shunned by the Roman procurator after a series of mishaps, of which the most serious was the cover-up for the perpetrators of the joke which had hurt the governor's dignity, the rulers of Judaea clung onto power by courting popularity through the advocacy of rebellion. Their leadership turned popular discontent into full-scale revolt against Rome, and the Romans recognized this both by the power and ferocity of their response to the ruling class in a.d. 66 and by the exceptional violence with which the province was treated after its defeat.

The Judaean ruling class was consigned to oblivion and the worship of God in the Jerusalem Temple was brought to an end. Many rich landowners were imprisoned, enslaved or executed. Priests who surrendered when the Temple was already on fire were put to death on the grounds that, as Titus said, it behoved them to perish with the sanctuary (B.J. 6.322). His attitude to the rest of the rebels was as rigorous: many of Josephus' friends and acquaintances, including his brother, were rescued from punishment only by the historian's intervention with Titus (Vita 419), and three other acquaintances were saved by him only after they had already been crucified with many other prisoners; two of these had already suffered too much to survive (Vita 420–1).

This has been a most enjoyable book to write not least because so many people have helped me to write it. Many of the ideas were tried out first on final-year students in Birmingham and then on members of Geza Vermes' seminar at Oxford. An invitation to a conference in Israel by the Universities of Haifa and Tel Aviv and by the Yad ben Zvi opened my eyes to a variety of evidence and theories of which I had previously been culpably ignorant. Dr I. Ben-Shalom kindly sent me a copy of his thesis, which is soon to be published. Fergus Millar, Simon Price, Tessa Rajak and Chris Wickham all made detailed comments of the first draft of the book, Benjamin Isaac on the second. Between them they have radically altered the book's structure and caused me to re-examine more ill-founded assumptions than I care to recall; I know that some of them remain sceptical about my rasher arguments and they should not be held responsible for the misjudgements that remain. My greatest academic debt is to Tessa Rajak, who with great generosity allowed me to see her Josephus before publication, criticised my typescript with care and acumen, and encouraged me to press ahead with my own views even when they diverged from hers.

The half-century which separated the tribunate of Ti. Gracchus in 133 from Sulla's return to Rome in 82 was of immense significance for the history of the Roman republic. In Spain the same period, beginning with Scipio Aemilianus' capture of Numantia and ending with the first phase of the Sertorian wars, has left almost no trace in the extant historical sources. Appian, whose account of Scipio's campaign alone covers eight pages of the Teubner text, deals with the next 50 years in just one page. The disasters of the wars against Numantia and Viriathus, and the eventual defeat of both those enemies, had a glamour which was evidently lacking from the events which followed.

As a result of this silence, it is difficult to make any evaluation of the activity of the men sent to command in Spain, or of the policy of the senate which assigned them to the two provinciae. It is possible, however, by comparing such little information as survives with the clearer patterns of the earlier part of the second century, to trace elements both of continuity and of development in Roman attitudes to Spain, it is important that the attempt be made, because the end of this period marked an important stage in the gradual emergence of the idea of the province as part of a Roman empire.

This bronze, the left-hand section of a tablet, and including the upper, lower and left edges, was discovered in the course of the excavation of a hill-top site known as Villavieja, near Alcántara, in the province of Caceres, on the southern side of the river Tagus towards the frontier with Portugal. It was first published by R. López Melero, J. L. Sánchez Abal and S. García Jiménez in Gerión 2 (1984) 265–323.

The bronze contains virtually the whole of the text of a record of the deditio of a people, whose name is partially lost at the break at the end of line 2, to L. Caesius, presumably the moneyer of 112 or 111 BC (Crawford, RRC no. 298), but previously unknown as a magistrate or pro-magistrate in Spain. It is unlikely that there was a second column of text, since the indenting of the names of the consuls in the first line suggests that the consul-date was centred with respect to the inscription as a whole; even if the word CONSVLIBUS appeared in full, the tablet would still be insufficiently wide for a further column.

The text which follows is based on the reading of the first editors, with supplements of my own.

In 1896 Ed. Schwartz, in what remains the best survey of the sources of Appian's histories, remarked that for the period between the end of the second Punic war and the end of Polybius' histories Appian's account is so close to that of Polybius as to indicate a use of the latter by the former, either directly or through an intermediate source. A closer examination, he argued, revealed sufficient discrepancies to suggest that there was an intermediary, and Schwartz believed this to be an annalist of the Sullan period, but not Valerius Antias. The passages on which he based this analysis were Lib. 67.302–135.643, the fragments of the Makedonikē, Syr. 1.2–47.244 and Mithr. 2.3–7.23. He also added, though with less certainty, Ib. 39.158–60.255. The problems of this section of the Ibērikē and the identification of its sources were complicated by Livy's use of annalistic rather than Polybian material for his account of events in Spain. At any rate Appian does not seem to be using Livy or Livy's sources, as is shown by a comparison of their accounts of Ti. Gracchus in 180–179.

In 1911 Adolf Schulten, in a discussion of the writings of Polybius and Poseidonius on the Iberians, argued that the work of these two historians survived in the accounts of Appian and Diodorus respectively. He pointed out in particular the precision of Appian's placing and description of the camps with which Scipio surrounded Numantia, as revealed in his own excavations, and suggested that this could only have come from Polybius' monograph on the Numantine war.