JUDAH THE MACCABEE AND HIS BROTHERS
2nd century BC
God forbid that we should forsake the law and our ordinances. We will not hearken to the king’s words to go from our religion
1 Maccabees 2:19
The Maccabees, so named for their hammer-like military force, were five brothers—and their elderly father—who, against all odds, rebelled against and defeated the oppressive Greek empire of the Seleucid dynasty to win religious and political freedom—and establish their own Jewish kingdom.
The Greek kings of Asia who then dominated the Near East were descended from Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great’s generals who, after his patron’s death, had seized a vast empire. Now, thanks to the conquests of Antiochus III the Great, they ruled a Middle Eastern empire that included Judaea, where the Jews worshipped their one god. The dynasty practiced religious tolerance, but after the early death of Antiochus III his beautiful but unhinged son changed all that.
Antiochus IV tried to add Egypt to his empire. He successfully conquered Egypt but the Romans foiled his plan—and the Jews of Judaea rebelled at his rear. The furious Antiochus, who took for himself the name Epiphanes (meaning the manifestation of a divine being), decided to crush the Jewish religion. He issued a series of decrees banning Judaism in all its manifestations. Observance of the Torah, the laws of keeping kosher, the practice of circumcision—all were forbidden on pain of death. In 168 BC the Jewish Temple, the holiest place in Jerusalem, was forcibly converted to a shrine to Zeus, while troops patrolled the streets and the countryside to make sure the Judeans were now worshipping Hellenic gods. Antiochus himself entered the Temple and sacrificed pigs on its altar.
Many Judaeans did comply with the new laws, while a minority fled. It was old Mattathias, a priest at the hill town of Modin, who initiated active resistance by lashing out at a Jew complying with the new orthodoxies and killing a soldier of the evil empire. With his five sons, Mattathias retreated to Jordan to marshal his Jewish forces into a formidable guerrilla army. People flocked to join them from across Judaea, rightly sensing that in these men they had found the champions of their faith.
The events of 168–164 BC are testimony to their bravery and leadership. Having dispensed with the essentially suicidal refusal to fight on the Sabbath (a prick of conscience that had ensured early defeats for them), the rebels achieved dazzling victories against the Seleucids and the Jewish “collaborators” ranged against them. Much of this success was thanks to the inspired leadership of the eldest son Judah, dubbed Maccabeus (“The Hammer”) before the name was applied to the family as a whole. The Maccabeans inflicted a series of crushing defeats on better-equipped troops who vastly outnumbered them.
Within three years the Maccabees had taken Jerusalem, and in 164 BC the now more accommodating Antiochus died and his successor sued for peace (albeit a temporary one). Vitally, Jewish freedom of worship was restored. The Temple was cleansed and rededicated in December 164 BC. Even though the oil for the Temple lamp had run out, the lamp remained alight for eight days, a miracle that inspired the joyful Hanukkah Festival of Lights, in which Jews still celebrate religious freedom from tyranny.
Having won the right to practice their religion, the Maccabees fought on for the political freedom that would protect it. The result was the creation of an independent Jewish state, with Mattathias’ descendants at its head. Fighting to drive the Syrian empire out of Judaea, Judah was killed in battle. His successor, Jonathan “the cunning,” secured his brother’s military achievements with diplomacy. As dynastic struggle and civil war consumed the Seleucid empire, Jonathan’s astute appraisal of the political balance, and judicious offers of support, secured him substantial territorial gains. But the Seleucids tried to re-conquer Judaea: Jonathan was tricked, captured and killed. In 142 BC Simon the Great, the youngest and by now the only surviving son of Mattathias, negotiated the political independence of Judaea. It was the culmination of all his family had fought for. A year later, by popular decree, he was invested as hereditary leader and high priest of the state. This marked the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty, which took its title from Mattathias’ family name. For the next century and a half, the Maccabees ruled an independent Jewish kingdom as kings and high priests, conquering an empire that soon extended to much of today’s Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. Gradually the family’s gifts weakened and they became Hellenic tyrants—until Rome imposed its will on the Middle East.
The Maccabees represent nobility, courage and freedom, as well as the audacity to resist an empire and the right of all to worship as they wish. In a David-and-Goliath struggle, the first recorded holy war, a small band of warriors succeeded in defeating the mighty phalanxes of an arrogant despot.
CICERO
106–43 BC
There was a humanity in Cicero, a something almost of Christianity, a stepping forward out of the dead intellectualities of Roman life into moral perceptions, into natural affections, into domesticity, philanthropy, and conscious discharge of duty …
Anthony Trollope, in the introduction to his Life of Cicero (1880)
Cicero was a supreme master of the spoken word whose stirring calls in defense of the Roman republic finally cost him his life. In his own day he was uncontested as Rome’s finest orator, a statesman whose devotion and loyalty to the republic was unquestioned. He was also a man of exceptional intellect and refinement who has exerted an enduring influence on Western civilization.
In spite of being a novus homo (“new man”)—none of his ancestors had attained the highest offices of state—Marcus Tullius Cicero went on to become one of Rome’s leading statesmen. A brilliant youth who studied under the best minds of the day, he entered the law as a route to politics. He rose swiftly and was renowned for the brilliance of his mind and his dazzling oratorical skills.
Cicero was never troubled by false modesty, but the Roman people generally shared his high opinion of himself. An outsider to the patrician-dominated political system, he won election to the highest offices of state, in each case at the earliest permitted age. In 63 BC, after reaching the pinnacle of political preferment, the consulship, he quickly established himself as a national hero. Discovering the Catiline conspiracy, a patrician plot to overthrow the republic, Cicero successfully swayed the senate into decreeing the death penalty for the conspirators, trouncing Julius Caesar in debate in the process. When he announced their execution to the crowds with just one word, vixerunt (“their lives are done”), Cicero was hailed with tumultuous rapture as pater patriae—“father of the country.”
In the space of a few sentences he could move juries and crowds from laughter to tears, anger or pity. Using simple words he could expose the heart of a complex matter, but if required he could befuddle his audience with rhetoric, winning cases by, as he put it, “throwing dust in the jurymen’s eyes.” His renowned declaration “Civis romanus sum” (“I am a Roman citizen”) has come to encapsulate the defense of a citizen’s rights against the overbearing power of the state. Cicero’s highly distinctive speaking style transformed the written language. His ability to layer clause upon clause while maintaining his argument’s clear line became the model for formal Latin.
A century after Cicero’s death, Plutarch eulogized him as the republic’s last true friend. In a time of civil unrest Cicero harked back to a golden age of political decorum. Idealistic yet consistent, he was convinced that virtue in public life would restore the republic to health. Refusing to be involved in political intrigue that might undermine the system, he rejected Caesar’s offer to join him in the so-called First Triumvirate of 60 BC. Cicero played no part in Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, but he seized on the end of his dictatorship to vigorously re-enter politics. Over the following months, taking his lead from the renowned Athenian orator Demosthenes, Cicero delivered the Philippics, a series of fourteen coruscating orations against the tyranny of Caesar and against his faithful henchman Mark Antony. It was a magnificent, if ultimately forlorn, cry for
political freedom.
After Caesar as dictator had encouraged the staunch republican to refrain from politics, Cicero turned to philosophy to keep himself amused. As a youth he had been tutored by the famous Greek philosophers of the day. His knowledge, as broad as it was deep, was unmatched in Rome. Cicero’s treatise on the value of philosophy, Hortensius, was practically required reading in late antiquity. St. Augustine credited it as instrumental in his conversion. The early Catholic Church deemed Cicero a “righteous pagan.”
Cicero introduced to Rome the Greek ideas that formed the basis of Western thought for the next 2000 years. His works have sometimes been criticized as derivative, but he laid little claim to originality in his treatises. “They are transcripts,” he wrote to a friend. “I simply supply words and I’ve plenty of those.” It is a remarkably humble statement for a man who made such an extraordinary contribution to Western philosophy: he translated Greek works, invented Latin words to explain hitherto untranslatable concepts, and elucidated the main philosophical schools. His vast discourse amounted to an encyclopedia of Greek thought.
In the end, Cicero’s inability to hold his tongue proved his undoing. When Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son and the future Augustus, learned of Cicero’s remark about him—“the young man should be given praise, distinctions, and then disposed of”—it spelled doom for the orator. Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate shortly afterward, and Cicero was declared an enemy of the state. Pursued by soldiers as he halfheartedly fled Italy, Cicero was brutally murdered, his head hacked off, and the hand with which he had written the offending speeches displayed in the Roman forum.
“There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier,” Cicero reportedly said to his assassin, “but do try to kill me properly.”
CAESAR
100–44 BC
I had rather be first in a village than second at Rome.
Gaius Julius Caesar, possessed of all the talents of war, politics and literature, was born of a noble but no longer rich family. Ruthless, cold and irrepressibly energetic, (yet an epileptic), he climbed the cursus honorum of Roman republican politics with astonishing speed, a rise made possible by the brutal civil war between Marius and Sulla. At age nineteen and keeping his distance from Sulla, he first distinguished himself in the wars of the east (where he was accused of a gay affair with the king of Bithynia). Caesar was captured by pirates, who ransomed him. Typically, once he was freed, he put together a flotilla and returned to hunt them down, killing all of them. Caesar was a keen practitioner of the adventurous school of politics and a serial seducer of married women—a sexual adventurer, nicknamed the bald adulterer who slept with the wives of his rivals Crassus and Pompey as well as the mother of his future assassin, Brutus. And then there was Cleopatra.
As a nephew of Marius, Caesar was almost murdered by Sulla—and was only able to begin his career after the dictator’s death. His rise was initially limited by the supremacy of Pompey the Great, the conqueror of Syria and Rome’s greatest soldier and wealthiest statesman, who had been awarded an exceptional three triumphs. Elected consul in 61 BC, Caesar managed to form the First Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus to rule Rome peacefully. But he really made his name with his astounding nine-year conquest of Gaul and the west for Rome, a campaign he later recounted (in the third person) in his Commentaries, revealing his expertise as a historian. He personally fought fifty battles. It was in Gaul that Caesar made his reputation—and his fortune.
Caesar was forty-one. It was late in life for a conqueror—Alexander was dead at thirty-three, Hannibal fought his last battle at forty-five, Napoleon and Wellington both fought their last battle, Waterloo, at forty-six.
In 54 and 55 BC he invaded, but did not occupy, Britain. In 53 the Triumvirate fell apart; Pompey dominated Rome and the Senate ordered Caesar to resign his command. Caesar refused. Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, the river that separated his own Gallic provinces from Italy itself, marked his bid for power. Pompey retreated to rally his forces in Greece, and Caesar took Rome, where he was appointed dictator. Caesar defeated his enemies at Pharsalus in 48 BC. Pompey was afterward murdered in Egypt, where Caesar fell in love with the young queen Cleopatra and fought to establish her rule. They celebrated and rested on a luxurious cruise down the Nile. On the way home, he stopped in Asia to defeat King Pharnaces of Bosporus at the Battle of Zela, his quickest victory, which he celebrated with the laconic “Veni, vidi, vici”—“I came, I saw, I conquered.” Caesar fought and defeated the Pompeyans not only in Greece but in Italy, Spain and then in Africa. He finally returned to Rome in 46 BC to celebrate a record four triumphs. In 44 BC he planned new campaigns in the Balkans and against Parthia. In Rome, he was politically supreme, his power absolute and nearly monarchical, but though his supremacy was feared and resented, he did not rule by terror and was forgiving and clement, using his power for the greater good. Caesar turned down the throne but received the titles Father of the Country, imperator, dictator for life and consul for ten years, and he was declared to be sacred.
Caesar’s monarchical powers led to an assassination plot under his erstwhile supporters Brutus and Cassius. Caesar was warned that he might be assassinated on the Ides of March, but he ignored the warnings. On the Ides of March 44 BC, sixty senators attacked and stabbed Caesar as he received petitioners at a Senate meeting. When he lay dead, he was found to have 23 wounds. After the conspirators were defeated in a civil war, the empire was divided uneasily between Caesar’s commander Mark Antony and his heir, great-nephew and adopted son, Octavian. In 31 BC, however, Octavian defeated Antony at Actium, thereby uniting the Roman empire and emerging as its first emperor: Caesar became a title synonymous with “emperor” or his heir. “Caesar” came to signify legitimate power, the German “Kaiser” and Russian “Tsar” being its derivatives.
HEROD THE GREAT
c. 73–4 BC
Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.
Matthew 2:16
Herod the Great was the half-Jewish, half-Arab King of Judaea and Roman ally, whose thirty-two-year reign saw colossal achievements and terrible crimes. Famously handsome in his youth, he was a talented, energetic and intelligent self-made monarch who combined Hellenistic and Jewish culture, presiding over the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple, the embellishment and restoration of Jerusalem, and the building of great cities and impressive fortresses. He created a large, rich and powerful kingdom with a special status at the heart of Rome’s eastern empire. Yet in his lust for power, women and glory, he became the bloodthirsty villain of the Christian Gospels and the despot of Josephus’ Histories of the Jews. Even though he did not actually order the Massacre of the Innocents, as told in the Gospels, he killed three of his own sons, as well as his wife and many of his rivals, and used terror and murder to hold on to power right up until his death.
Born around 73 BC, Herod was the second son of Antipater, an Idumean convert to Judaism and chief minister of the Jewish king Hyrcanus II, great-grandson of Simon the Maccabee, who had established Judaea in 142 BC as an independent Jewish state. The Maccabees had ruled Judaea as both kings and high priests ever since, but to win back his throne in 63 BC, after his brother Aristobulus had wrested it from him, the ineffectual Hyrcanus was forced to ally himself with the Roman strongman Pompey the Great, ceding control of Judaea to Rome. Herod and his father Antipater were shrewd students of politics in Rome, always supporting the winner in the civil wars, from Pompey to Augustus, in order to keep power. When Julius Caesar subsequently appointed Antipater as governor of Judaea in 47 BC, Hyrcanus continued as king in name only, and though he survived a revolt in 43 BC led by his popular nephew Antigonus—a revolt in which Antipater was poisoned—he was exiled three years later. The Parthians, Rome’s rival empire, invaded and overran the Middle East, and Antigonus became king
under their patronage. Herod escaped to the protection of Queen Cleopatra of Egypt and thence to Rome, where the two dominant strongmen, Mark Antony and Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) appointed him king of Judaea. It took him three years to conquer his kingdom. When he took Jerusalem, he slaughtered forty-six of the Jewish ruling council.
Already hated by his people, Herod attempted to legitimize his position by discarding his first wife Doris and marrying the Maccabee princess Mariamme, the teenage granddaughter of Hyrcanus. In all, he was to marry ten times and produce fourteen children, three of whom he murdered while another three eventually succeeded him.
Herod ordered a series of grandiose construction projects, which included aqueducts, amphitheaters, the stunning trading port of Caesarea (considered by many to be one of the great wonders of the world), and the fortresses of Masada, Antonia and Herodium. Most ambitious of all was the rebuilding of the Second Temple in Jerusalem—a massive project that took years to complete. Over 10,000 men spent ten years constructing the Temple Mount alone, and work on the Temple courts and outbuildings continued long after Herod’s death. The last supporting wall remains today the holiest site of Judaism: the Western Wall.
He ruled by terror, having the high priest—his wife’s brother Aristobulus, whom he feared as a potential rival—drowned in 36 BC. Old King Hyrcanus was also killed. Herod’s marriage to the gorgeous, proud Maccabean princess Mariamme was passionate and destructive. They both loved and hated each other, but had two sons together. In 29 BC, he ordered the execution of Mariamme following suggestions she was plotting against him. Later, in 7 BC, he ordered the execution of Aristobulus and Alexander—his sons by Mariamme—after being persuaded by Antipater (his son by Doris) that the two were scheming against him. Augustus joked that he would rather be Herod’s pig than his son since Jews do not eat pigs.