All posts tagged Galilee

Salome by Oscar Wilde

‘Salomé’ is a one-act tragedy by Oscar Wilde. Wilde wrote it in French and the French version (title ‘Salomé’, with an accent) was published in Paris in 1893. Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, then translated it into English and this version (title ‘Salom’ without the accent) was published in London in 1894.

Setting

The play is set at the time of Jesus in the Roman province of Judaea i.e. around 30 AD and is based on contemporary sources, namely references in the New Testament and the history of Josephus.

John the Baptist – referred to throughout by the archaic name Jokanaan – has been arrested by officers of King Herod. His full historical name was Herod Antipas (21 BC to 39 AD) and he was the son of Herod the Great. Herod Antipas was tetrarch (ruler of a minor principality in the Roman Empire) of Galilee in northern Palestine, and Peraea east of the Jordan River and Dead Sea.

Anyway, this Herod is very aware that:

he only rules with the permission of the Roman emperor who, during Jesus’s ministry, was the Emperor Tiberius (ruled 14 to 37 AD)
he must implement Roman laws and, especially, taxes, while at the same time trying to manage the often restive and even rebellious Jewish population of Judaea

These issues occur in Wilde’s play where a) Herod is made to boast about his friendship with the emperor and admire him despite his gout; and b) to mock the ruler of the neighbouring Roman province, the King of Cappadocia; and c) there is a kind of chorus of Jewish voices heard offstage which periodically interrupt and comment on the action (‘What an uproar! Who are those wild beasts howling?’ ‘The Jews. They are always like that. They are disputing about their religion’) who then accompany Herod and the court onstage half way through the action and carry on an extended digression into the precise status of the Baptist and then of the alleged Messias (as the play spells it) who everyone is talking about.

Herod and Herodias

But all this is just background to the central action of the play which is pretty straightforward. Herod has married Herodias, the wife of his brother (Herod II). Herod had had Herod II arrested and imprisoned for 12 years before he was eventually strangled on his orders. It was John the Baptist’s relentless criticism of these acts as incest and against Jewish law (‘the prophet says that our marriage is not a true marriage, he says that it is a marriage of incest, a marriage that will bring evils’) which prompted Herod to have him arrested. The play is set thus:

A great terrace in the Palace of Herod, set above the banqueting-hall. Some soldiers are leaning over the balcony. To the right there is a gigantic staircase, to the left, at the back, an old cistern surrounded by a wall of green bronze. The moon is shining very brightly.

Improbably and strangely, Herod has got John-Jokanaan imprisoned in this ‘old cistern’. It’s a solution to the dramatic problem Wilde gave himself which is that he wants the voice of Jokanaan, quoting Biblical prophecies and curses, to be able to come in at various points, commenting on the dialogue of Herod and his family, and allowing the latter, in their turn, to execrate Jokanaan. He has to be onstage so as to do this, but at the same time clearly imprisoned and so this rather unconventional ‘cistern’ setup is the solution. This is what Jokanaan sounds like:

The voice of Jokanaan: After me shall come another mightier than I. I am not worthy so much as to unloose the latchet of his shoes. When he cometh, the solitary places shall be glad. They shall blossom like the rose. The eyes of the blind shall see the day, and the ears of the deaf shall be opened. The suckling child shall put his hand upon the dragon’s lair, he shall lead the lions by their manes.

Salome

Anyway, we finally arrive at the character of Salome herself. So Herod and his new wife, Herodias, are in their 40s. Herodias brought to the marriage her daughter by her first husband, the very attractive and nubile (18, 20-year-old?) Salome. So Salome is Herod’s step-daughter. And through the first half of the play it becomes clear that Herod cannot take his eyes off her. He is obviously looking at her in an obsessive if not lascivious way. We know this because the angry, jealous mother, Herodias, comments on it continually. And he’s not the only one. Wilde has the captain of Herod’s guard (‘a young Syrian’) also watching Salome obsessively, despite the warnings of his friend, the page of Herodias, that he shouldn’t.

The core event in the play is that Salome, wandering off from Herod’s dinner party, hears the voice of Jokanaan coming from the cistern and is lazily, sensually intrigued, looks down into its black depths and finds herself perversely, sensuously, cruelly attracted to the dirty ragged figure of Jokanaan in his cistern. She bullies Herod’s captain of the guard, Narraboth, into opening the cistern so that the prophet can emerge, and she can see him and touch him.

Jokanaan appears, denouncing Herodias and her husband. At first frightened by the sight of the holy man, Salome becomes fascinated by him, begging him to let her touch his hair, his skin and kiss his mouth. When she tells him she is Herodias’s daughter he calls her a ‘daughter of Sodom’, tells her to scatter ashes on her head and seek out the Son of Man.

All Salome’s attempts to attract him fail, he swears she will never kiss his mouth, cursing her as the daughter of an adulteress and advising her to seek the Lord.

At this point in a bizarre and excessive event, the young captain of the guard, unable to bear Salome’s desire for another man, fatally stabs himself and falls right between Salome and Jokanaan. What makes it especially bizarre is that Salome ignores this and carries on her futile requests for the Baptist to let her kiss him, ‘Suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan’ until the Baptist, in disgust, returns to his cistern.

At which point Herod, Herodias, their courtiers and their Roman guest, Tigellinus, enter from the feast they’ve been having offstage. Herod is struck by the odd appearance of the moon but slips in the blood of the dead captain, correctly seeing this as a bad omen, and indeed the captain’s blood obviously adds to the macabre and decadent atmosphere.

His servants set up the table and feast and Herod invites Salome to come drink some wine or eat some fruit with him, which she refuses. Jokanaan delivers a broadside and Herodias asks Herod why he doesn’t hand the troublesome man over to the Jews who’ve been clamouring for him for 6 months but Herod refuses, maintaining that Jokanaan is a holy man and has seen God.

His words spark a digression, an argument among the Jews attending the court concerning the true nature of God and whether Jokanaan is the reincarnation of the prophet Elias. Others explain to Herod that Jokanaan is describing the advent of the Jewish Messiah and some men from Nazareth describe the miracles of Jesus such as turning water into wine and healing lepers and raising a girl from the dead. Herod approves of healing lepers, that sounds socially useful, but disapproves of raising the dead, that sounds like a bad idea.

Herod: Let them find Him, and tell Him, thus saith Herod the King, ‘I will not suffer Thee to raise the dead!’ To change water into wine, to heal the lepers and the blind. . . . He may do these things if He will. I say nothing against these things. In truth I hold it a kindly deed to heal a leper. But no man shall raise the dead. It would be terrible if the dead came back.

After this digression about Jesus Herod’s attention wanders back to Salome who he’s been staring at and he asks her to dance for him. Salome plays on Herod’s obvious obsession with her and tempts and goads him into promising her anything, all the riches and rare jewels in his treasury, even half of his kingdom, if she will dance for him. Herod, virtually drooling, agrees that he will give her anything she desires and so Salome dances a strange barbaric dance, which Wilde calls The Dance of the Seven Veils. Apparently this is Wilde’s invention and his main contribution to what was, of course, a well-known Bible story.

Having made Herod’s day by performing what, in the productions I’ve seen, is a very sensual and provocative striptease for Herod, she then forces him to fulfil his promise and names her price, which is the head of Jokanaan, for Jokanaan to be executed. Herod is shocked and horrified because, although he’s had Jokanaan arrested:

he is a popular figure, whose religious prophecies have won him a large following and strike a chord with many Jews, many of whom claim he is the reincarnation of Elias the Old Testament prophets – so killing him will alienate many of Herod’s people
Herod himself feels the force of Jokanaan’s integrity and trembles to harm such an obviously holy man who ‘has seen God’
Herod is also uneasily aware of the figure Jokanaan keeps referring to, the Messias (as it is spelt here), the Son of Man, the one who has come to judge the world, and worried what will happen about him if Jokanaan is harmed

Which is why Herod spends a couple of pages listing everything else he will give Salome rather than Jokannan’s head but Salome is absolutely inflexible. Herod agonises but decides a king must keep his promise, especially a promise made in front of the whole court, courtiers and attendants who fill the stage. And so he gives the ring of death to a servant to hand to the Executioner, Namaan (‘a huge Negro’) who goes down into the cistern and chops Jokanaan’s head off. Up from the cistern comes a hand holding a tray on which is the freshly severed head still dripping blood.

Salome takes the tray and delivers a cruel and sensual soliloquy to the head which leads up to her kissing the severed head on the lips. Disgusted, Herod orders his courtiers to pack up the feast and leave the room, dousing the lamps.

The last event of the play is that, as he climbs the staircase to leave, Herod turns and sees Salome holding Jokanaan’s head so close that she has kissed it and now, thoroughly disgusted by the same young woman who, only ten minutes earlier he was lusting after, orders his soldiers to kill her, and the soldiers rush forward and crush her beneath their shields.

Presumably there’s a fair bit of screaming and squelching but this isn’t mentioned in the stage directions for ‘Kill that woman!’ are the play’s last words and the lights go out as they crush Salome to death.

Salome in contemporary literature and art

Wilde had been considering the subject of Salome since his undergraduate days at Oxford when Walter Pater introduced him to Flaubert’s story Hérodias in 1877. The biographer Peter Raby comments that Wilde’s interest had been further stimulated by descriptions of Gustave Moreau’s paintings of Salome as described in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours, by Heinrich Heine’s Atta Troll, Jules Laforgue’s Salomé in his ‘Moralités Légendaires’ and Stéphane Mallarmé’s Hérodiade. Not exactly an obscure subject, then. In fact getting on for being a cliché of the period.

Wilde never saw the play produced. The only performances given in his lifetime were in 1896, by which time he was serving a prison sentence for illegal homosexual activity. The play was first given, in the original French, in a one-off performance on 11 February 1896 by the Théâtre de l’Œuvre company at the Théâtre de la Comédie-Parisienne.

Historically, Wilde’s play was overshadowed by the opera written by Richard Strauss. Strauss’s opera was directly inspired by Wilde’s play which he saw in Berlin in 1902. He began to compose his opera in summer 1903, and completed and premiered it in 1905.

A blunt way of comparing the two is to say that Strauss’s music very powerfully conveys a sense of barbaric decadence, sensuality and depravity, in a way that Wilde’s prose poetry very much doesn’t.

Comments

Hard work

There’s more to comment on and analyse in ‘Salome’ than there is to enjoy. It’s more of a chore to read than the four comedies which are, obviously, worlds away, and this is reflected in its performance history. ‘Salome’ was occasionally performed in private theatres in Britain until given a licence in 1931 to be publicly performed but has never enjoyed a high reputation. It is treated more as an oddity, as a literary work to be read rather than a piece of drama.

Indebtedness

Critics noted at the time and ever since that Wilde’s play:

it is heavily indebted to Flaubert’s 1877 story Herodias
it echoes and repeats phrases and metaphors from French poets

Thus missing the broader point that it is most heavily indebted of all, like most symbolist works, to its basis in Christian legend and theology, so obvious that it’s often not mentioned.

An English symbolist play

‘Salome’ is a rare instance of an English symbolist play although it is symptomatic that it was written in French and first performed in France. It is heavily indebted to the north European movement of symbolism, and to symbolist drama as epitomised in the very recently completed and performed Axël by French writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1890).

It is symbolist in at least the following ways:

the setting is stylised and unnaturalistic
the dialogue is not intended to be realistic but is highly formalised, for example the way characters repeat the same lines
these lines are themselves often not dramatic in the sense of conveying what characters are thinking or doing, but a) descriptive, designed to convey atmosphere, as in the repeated descriptions of the changing appearance of the moon throughout the play or b) repetition for its own sake to create an incantatory quality, as in the formal repetitions of religious ceremonies for example the Christian liturgy

And it uses potent symbols which are laboriously repeated to create the sense of ominousness and doom.

The moon The changing appearance of the moon (mentioned 31 times), as described by the characters and as demanded by stage directions, is maybe the most obvious one.

Blood Then the importance of blood (mentioned 16 times), very crudely and obviously spilled all over the stage when the young captain, grotesquely, eviscerates himself on stage, referred to again and again in speeches, and then literally brought on a second time when the head of Jokanaan is presented, still dripping with arterial blood.

Wings Less gruesomely, Herod refers repeatedly to hearing the wings (10 times), as if of some giant bird or maybe the angel of death flapping overhead.

White And Wilde obsessively refers to the colour white (16 times).

She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet…She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver…Her little white hands are fluttering like doves that fly to their dove-cots. They are like white butterflies. They are just like white butterflies…Thy little feet will be like white doves. They will be like little white flowers that dance upon the trees…

And from Salome’s hymn of lust to Jokanaan:

Thy body is white like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed. Thy body is white like the snows that lie on the mountains of Judaea, and come down into the valleys. The roses in the garden of the Queen of Arabia are not so white as thy body…There is nothing in the world so white as thy body.

Maybe because pure unstained white is rare in nature and so white is a very unnatural colour. And also white hands, feet and flesh were symbols of unnatural purity in a place and time (first century Judaea) where most people would be nut brown by natural complexion, plus being labourers exposed to the sun. It is white rather than gold in the play which denotes rarity and value. And then, again, all this mention of lilywhite skin makes all the more shocking the contrast with the red blood of first the Syrian captain and then Jokanaan.

White was the talismanic colour for the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé who places a white swan at the centre of his 1866 poem about Salome, Hérodiade.

Orientalism

I’ve written a detailed critique (in three parts) of Edward Said’s famous and important book Orientalism which, as long ago as 1978, argued that the academic study of the Muslim Middle East and North Africa, from the late 1700s onwards, provided stereotypes of Eastern decadence, barbarism, laziness, illiteracy and so on, which the imperial powers (mainly Britain and France) then used to justify their rule over the ‘backward’ peoples of the region for nearly 200 years, throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

Well, ‘Salome’ is a prime culprit, a classic example of the orientalism Said detected and criticised in so much Victorian literature, ethnography and political discourse. It barely needs to be pointed out how it took whatever Biblical sources existed and transfigured them into an orgy of orientalising stereotypes and clichés, from the lustful ruler to the cruel and sensual young beauty etc etc. The decadent movement sought out images of extravagant luxury, sensuality and cruelty and ‘the Orient’ was a very convenient place to locate them (compare and contrast the use of orientalising tropes in Wilde’s surprisingly violent fairy story, ‘The Fisherman and His Soul‘).

Douglas’s translation

I read ‘Salome’ in the English translation by Wilde’s boy lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and it is bad. Hopefully the original French is mellifluous and flowing but this English translation is poor. Hardly anywhere does it have the flowing rhythm you associate with Wilde’s prose in his essays and especially in the wonderful fairy stories. The prose here is very run-of-the-mill, sometimes descending into bathetic everyday phrases, sometimes just poor quality, fake Bible tones, or fake Shakespeare, as here with ‘I know not what it means’ and then ‘Of a truth…’

SALOME: I will not stay. I cannot stay. Why does the Tetrarch look at me all the while with his mole’s eyes under his shaking eyelids? It is strange that the husband of my mother looks at me like that. I know not what it means. Of a truth I know it too well.

Douglas’s sparkle-free translation reveals the banality of the technique of repetition which Wilde deployed to try and build up his effects. The opening lines are typical:

THE PAGE OF HERODIAS: Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.
THE YOUNG SYRIAN: She has a strange look. She is like a little princess who wears a yellow veil, and whose feet are of silver. She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet. One might fancy she was dancing.
THE PAGE OF HERODIAS: She is like a woman who is dead. She moves very slowly.

Or take the repetition of the colour symbolism in Salome’s long speeches to and about Jokanaan:

SALOME: It is his eyes above all that are terrible. They are like black holes burned by torches in a tapestry of Tyre. They are like the black caverns of Egypt in which the dragons make their lairs. They are like black lakes troubled by fantastic moons

That’s fairly ornate repetition – elsewhere there’s just flat, bucket reiteration:

FIRST SOLDIER: The Tetrarch has a sombre aspect.
SECOND SOLDIER: Yes; he has a sombre aspect.
FIRST SOLDIER: He is looking at something.
SECOND SOLDIER: He is looking at someone.

This phrase (‘He is looking at someone’) is repeated later, just before Salome dances for Herod, with, I thought, little or no dramatic effect.

Maybe in French these repetitions of phrases, words and images work in some mystical incantatory way, but not in English. In English they create not a hieratic, ritualistic atmosphere but a sense of boredom and wasted time. You want to shout, ‘Get on with it.’ Compare and contrast its clunky style with the fluency of The Picture of Dorian Gray which I’ve just read. Here’s the opening paragraph of the novel:

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

This is fluent and sensuous in a way most of the English version of Salome tries but fails to achieve.

You can see what Wilde’s trying to do by repeating certain images – the changing appearance of the moon, Salome’s tiny hands and feet the image of blood – to give them the archetypal power sought by the symbolists but, in my reading, it doesn’t work. It falls flat.

Only in some of the long speeches of Herod and Salome towards the end do you get a sense of the sensual force I think Wilde must have been looking for. Here’s Salome:

SALOME: Ah, Jokanaan, thou wert the man that I loved alone among men. All other men were hateful to me. But thou wert beautiful! Thy body was a column of ivory set upon feet of silver. It was a garden full of doves and lilies of silver. It was a tower of silver decked with shields of ivory. There was nothing in the world so white as thy body. There was nothing in the world so black as thy hair. In the whole world there was nothing so red as thy mouth. Thy voice was a censer that scattered strange perfumes, and when I looked on thee I heard a strange music.

Looking closely at this passage and pondering why it works where lots of the rest of the play doesn’t, I think it’s because it’s gentle. It is soft and shimmering, passive and sensuous. In this respect it is like the wonderful descriptions of treasures and trees and fireworks which illuminate the lovely fairy tales. But when Wilde tries to be more active, when he tries to convey menace and threat – in Jokanaan’s preaching or, even more, the speeches of lascivious Herod or furious Herodias – they don’t come off. They don’t, in my opinion, have real aggressive feeling behind them and so fall flat.

Maybe ‘Salome’ could be effectively staged but it would require a completely new translation, done by someone with a really good feeling for poetic prose, and probably a completely new adaptation which would modernise its themes of sex and violence for a more explicit age. It remains an anomaly and a problem.

Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations

It’s probably a well-worn observation that the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations commissioned for the first English edition are head and shoulders above to Douglas’s prose.

Illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome by Aubrey Beardsley (1894)

You can see them all, and read the full text, via the link below:

Related reviews

The Year One by M.I. Finley (1968)

History tends to be the history of the winners, with the losers assigned the passive, largely unvoiced, faceless role of the people on whom the winners operated.
(‘Aspects of Antiquity’, page 189)

Notes on ‘The Year One’, a short essay included in Finley’s 1968 collection, ‘Aspects of Antiquity’.

Ancient calendars

People living through a momentous year (1066, 1789, 1939, 2000) usually know about it. The most obvious thing to say about the year 1 is nobody living through it knew about it at the time. The entire chronological framework of Western civilisation, whereby we divide years into before Christ (BC) or after Christ (in the year of the Lord, anno Domini, AD) hadn’t been invented.

Instead, all the different cultures of the ancient world kept their own calendars relating to their own cultural landmarks. The Greeks thought in terms of four year blocks or ‘Olympiads’ which began with the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, so year one was the first year of the 195th Olympiad.

The Romans had, for centuries, dated events by referring to the two consuls who were in office for that year, thus ‘in the consulship of Caius Caesar, son of Augustus, and Lucius Aemilius Paullus, son of Paullus.’

Only the learned wanted to look back deeper than a few decades and, for those purposes, Roman historians had worked out the year of the legendary foundation of Rome, and dated everything AUC standing for ‘ab urbe condita’ or ‘since the founding of the city (Rome)’. Many centuries later Christian historians aligned this legendary date to 753 years before the birth of Christ. So the year one was 754 AUC. This system was devised by the Christian historian Dionysius Exiguus, a Greek-speaking monk.

The evidence of the gospels

Of the four gospels only two give details of the birth of Jesus, Matthew and Luke

Matthew’s Gospel

Matthew’s gospel includes the story of ‘the massacre of the innocents’ (chapter 2, verses 16 to 18). Herod the Great, king of Judea, is said to have heard a prophecy that his kingdom will be overthrown by a child about to be born in Bethlehem, so he ordered the execution of all male children aged two and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem. The Catholic Church regards them as the first Christian martyrs, and their feast – Holy Innocents’ Day (or the Feast of the Holy Innocents) – is celebrated on 28 December. In this story, Joseph and Mary were warned by angels about the impending massacre and so made their way secretly to Egypt, ‘The Flight to Egypt’, a journey depicted in countless paintings.

Unfortunately for the veracity of this version, Herod the Great died in 4 BC. If Matthew is literally correct, Jesus must have been born in 4 BC at the latest.

Luke’s Gospel

Luke’s story is different. He says the Romans sent out a decree that everyone had to return to their home town in order to take part in a national census of the population of Judea so they could be taxed more efficiently.

Unfortunately, the only census decreed by the Romans that we know of occurred in either 6 or 7 AD.

In 6 AD the Romans deposed Herod’s son, Archelaus, themselves took over Judea, and installed a Roman governor with instructions to conduct a census. (The northern province of Galilee remained under the rule of the Herod family; Finley says this slight inconsistency between direct and indirect rule was common in provinces on the edge of the empire.)

The Roman Empire

Was an empire in the full sense. The ‘Roman people’ i.e. citizens of Rome and central and northern Italy, ruled all the other inhabitants of the empire as subjects. The empire outside Italy was divided into provinciae. In 1 AD the Roman empire covered about 1,250,000 square miles with a population of about 60 million (population figures are deeply contested). Censuses were taken in the provinces to maximise tax revenue, but at different times in different provinces, using different methods and definitions, so…

The tax collector, along with the soldier, was the most obvious and ubiquitous link between the provinces and Rome. (p.187)

The limits of Empire

In 9 AD a Romanised German warrior chief named Arminius lured three legions into an ambush in the Teutoburg Forest and annihilated them, seizing the precious standards. Traumatised by this terrible news, the emperor Augustus ordered the remaining two legions and all Roman citizens to withdraw back across the Rhine, a decision reinforced by his successor Tiberius, which crystallised into a fiat. The Romans never attempted to conquer and colonise Germany and the north European border settled for the next four centuries along the Rhine-Danube line.

The borders finalised as England in the north-west, the Atlantic in the west, the Atlas mountains, the Sahara and the cataracts of the Nile in Africa, Judea in what is now the Middle East, and Asia i.e. half of Anatolia up to the border with Armenia.

Imperial exploitation

The Romans had no shortage of writers and propagandists (Horace, Virgil and so on) praising Augustus’ rule and, by extension, Rome’s right to rule the entire world (Virgil). The Christian European empires 1700 years later (Spain, France, Britain, Holland) made lengthy attempts to justify their imperial conquests in terms of bringing civilisation etc to barbarian lands. The Romans used the same rhetoric but were much more honest about the sheer greed and looting involved in conquest. As Finley says in his essay about slavery, Julius Caesar set out for Gaul a penniless aristocrat from a down-at-heel family and he returned 8 years later a multi-millionaire and the most powerful man in Rome. That’s what 8 years of burning and looting did for him.

Once a province had been conquered and pacified there an infrastructure was imposed designed to extract wealth, consisting of extensive taxes(in goods and services and money) for the state, but great personal income skimmed off by high officials and members of the tax farming corporations.

Rome had no mission to civilise comparable to France’s great pretension to a mission civilisatrice. Some of her propagandists later developed this idea but the reality was that, so long as they paid their taxes, Rome left her subject peoples largely to themselves, only interfering if there was disorder, rebellion etc. Over a century of conquering and administering other peoples had shown that minimal interference paid off and…was cheap to run.

This was particularly true in the East, which had well-established cultures/civilisations long before the Romans arrived. Latin was the language of the new rulers but Greek remained the language of intellectuals and the ruling classes which sat directly below the Roman governor. Educated Romans learned Greeks but Greeks rarely bothered to learn Latin, a far simpler, cruder language.

Josephus

Finley makes a pit stop to spend a page profiling Joseph ben Matthias, member of a Jewish priestly family known to history as Josephus and for the epic history of the Jewish War, an account of the 4-year rebellion of Jews against Roman rule 66 to 70 AD which led up to the Romans storming Jerusalem and destroying the Great Temple built by Herod.

Josephus was a Pharisee, a member of the elite priestly caste who identified with law and order and the Romans, so the enemies in his book are the Zealots, who he calls rebels and bandits, religious visionaries who stirred up the people to revolt by playing on their grievances, their extreme poverty and promises of a new world.

Augustus

The essay then turns to consider Augustus’s achievement, namely bringing to an end 60 odd years of chaos as the Roman Republic proved incapable of managing its empire, or, more precisely, the scale of the wealth and power pouring into Rome exacerbate the toxic rivalries among great men which had previously been contained by its republican institutions, but now boiled over into repeated civil wars by over-mighty rulers. Until Octavian put a stop to it (helped by the fact that all the eminent men of his generation had been killed in the civil wars, committed suicide or been murdered in his ‘proscriptions’, leaving him the last significant military-political figure standing).

Augustus’s titles

In 27 BC Octavian was awarded the title ‘Augustus’ by the senate. But his other titles are significant. He wanted to be known as ‘princeps’ i.e. principle figure, partly because it avoided the dreaded term rex or king. And also kept the title Imperator, originally given to victorious generals, but now awarded him a) as recognition of victorious campaigns but b) as continual reminder of where his power lay – the complete loyalty of the army.

Around the time of Christ’s birth, in 2 AD Augustus was awarded a further title, ‘Father of the Nation’, which is not as cuddly as it sounds, given the draconian authority the father of a family had over all its other members, male or female.

Augustus tries to ensure heirs

In his magisterial biography of Augustus Adrian Goldsworthy goes out of his way to emphasise that through most of his rule Augustus appears to have not wanted to create a dynasty and been succeeded by one heir. On the contrary he tried to create a cohort of experienced young men who, Goldsworthy thinks, were meant to form a small cabinet, to rule collegiately.

The two problems with this was that they all tended to come from within his own close family, so royal, monarchical, imperial logic was hard to deny – but worse, that almost all his proteges died, leaving, the grumpy, surly, graceless Tiberius as the last most obvious figure standing.

But before all this had become clear Augustus spent time and energy grooming a succession of young male relatives for rule and in doing so rode roughshod over many of the conventions of the Republic he claimed to be defending. Thus in 4 BC the Senate was prevailed upon to decree that Augustus’s two grandsons (who he had adopted to make legally his sons) Gaius and Lucius, should be designated consuls at the tender age of 15 and then awarded the actual posts, for a year, when they turned 20. Each was titled ‘Princeps of the Youth’. In the Year One Gaius was indeed ‘elected’ consul (as everyone the Princeps recommended to the voters tended to be). But then the curse struck…Lucius died in 2 AD, Gaius in 4 AD.

Augustus’s propaganda machine

Augustus had statues of himself carved and erected in cities all over the empire. Instead of realistic depictions they show an idealised, tall virile commander of men. He ensured his face was on all coinage, so even the illiterate knew who he was. He encouraged his inclusion in the ceremonies of all the religions and cults practiced across the empire. Via his unofficial minister of the arts, Maecenas, he ‘encouraged’ praise by the leading poets of the day, poets like Virgil, Horace and Ovid whose words of sycophantic praise have survived down to our time, 2,000 years later.

Augustus’s campaign for moral regeneration

Alongside a major programme of rebuilding and renovating not only Rome but all the major cities in the Empire, Augustus tried to bring about a moral revival as well. He had roughly two concerns: one was that the ancient noble families of Rome had been severely depleted by the civil wars and so he passed successive legislation promoting marriage and punishing adult men who failed to marry or have children. He gave legal and financial incentives to families with three or more children – legislation collectively known as the Leges Iuliae.

Augustus wasn’t concerned about sexual morality as such but was concerned about its impact on the stability and fecundity of the ruling class which he wanted to grow and stabilise in order to secure Rome’s future. It’s in this context that he passed legislation severely punishing adultery. He wanted more sons of the aristocracy, and that they should marry and do their military and civic duty, instead of not marrying and frittering away their family fortunes on increasing displays of opulence.

Exiling the Julias

It was in this context that in 2 BC he exiled his only biological child, his daughter Julia the Elder (39 BC to 14 AD), who he married to an unwilling Tiberius, allegedly for flagrant adultery and sexual depravity. Several men who had allegedly been her partners were also exiled. In 8 AD he similarly exiled Julia the Elder’s daughter and so Augustus’s grand-daughter, Julia the Younger, again for adultery.

On each of these occasions the ostensible reason was breaching the emperor’s own code of morality, but he also spoke about Julia the Elder being involved in some kind of plot against his life. The details remain obscure but most modern historians think there was more to both affairs than meets the eye, and that in both cases the exiled women were in some way figureheads of attempts to overthrow Augustus’s rule. Hence historians speak of a ‘Julian’ party at his court.

Although the details continue to elude us, Finley draws the central point which is that as soon as you have courts you have courtly intrigue, you have palace plotting – in the later empire this kind of conspiracy became endemic but it is instructive to note that it appears to have arisen as soon as there was a court, in the close family of the very first emperor.

Ovid is exiled

This is the view of Peter Green who devotes most of the long 80-page introduction to his translation of Ovid’s Art of Love to a forensic analysis of events and accusations surrounding the 8 AD exiling of Julia the Younger, because the poet was caught up in the same event and, with little or no warning, exiled by Augustus to the furthest border of the Roman empire, to the miserable provincial town of Tomis on the Black Sea. Ovid wrote a large number of letters to former friends and officials begging to be allowed to return, and a series of poems elaborating on the wretchedness of his fate – but to no avail. Even when Augustus died, his successor, Tiberius, renewed his exile and Ovid died miserably, far from his beloved Rome.

Frustratingly, despite writing a huge amount about his exile, Ovid never anywhere specifies the nature of his error. He insists it was minor, that he never plotted against the emperor, or planned to use poison or a knife or anything like that. Green weighs all the evidence and thinks Ovid must have seen something or been present at meetings where such plots were discussed and failed to report them to the authorities. Because he wasn’t an active plotter, Ovid’s life was spared; but because he didn’t report whatever he saw, his lack of loyalty to the emperor – and to the entire peaceful regime which Augustus had spent a lifetime creating – was called into doubt. Hence exile.

The Augustan peace

It’s easy to criticise Augustus’s early career, his cut-throat manoeuvres, his participation in the proscriptions i.e. mass murder of anyone who stood in the way of the Second Triumvirate, his hugely unpopular land redistribution away from traditional farmer and to veterans of the military campaigns leading up to the decisive Battle of Philippi. But by these expedients he secured the end of the civil wars which had lasted as long as anyone could remember, brought military, civil and social peace, order and stability. He secured the longest period of continuous peace the Mediterranean world had ever known. In this atmosphere of peace and stability business flourished and people got rich.

If the theatre was the characteristic secular building of the ancient Greeks, the amphitheatre was its Roman counterpart, and the long peace saw them built in cities all around the Central Sea.

Augustus worship

The result, especially in the East, was that people began to worship Augustus:

as Saviour, Benefactor and God Manifest (Epiphanes) just as they had deified a succession of Ptolemies, Seleucids and other rulers of the preceding centuries. (p.194)

In Rome he couldn’t be worshipped as a god while alive, only his spirit was said to be holy. But the east had no such hesitations and built temples to Augustus the god. This had nothing to do with love or respect but simple pragmatism. Most people were utterly powerless to influence events, least of all the slaves. It made simple sense to venerate and appease the mighty; that was the way of the world. Finley draws the major conclusion with huge implications for the growth of Christianity, that:

Religion became increasingly centred on salvation in the next world, whereas it had once been chiefly concerned with life in this one. (p.194)

Client kings and dependent rulers had a vested interest in encouraging the cult of Augustus as it underpinned their own authority, for most of the East was a patchwork of cults and religions which, for the most part, co-existed peacefully enough.

The Jewish Revolt

The Jews stood apart in their fierce insistence on monotheism. Jews had migrated and had communities all around the Mediterranean and in Rome (where Ovid recommends the synagogue as a good place to pick up women in The Art of Love). The Old Testament writings had been translated into Greek as far back as the third century BC as Jews in the diaspora lost touch with Hebrew.

Herod the Great, King of Judaea, had more in common with his Roman rulers than his Jewish subjects. When he introduced an amphitheatre and gladiator fights in the Roman style there were mutterings of discontent, but when he tried to impose official worship of Augustus the god there was an outcry and an assassination attempt.

The Jews’ dogged insistence on the uniqueness of their god puzzled the Romans (and their neighbours). Neither Augustus nor Tiberius took any steps against the Jews, but Roman officials in the provinces were less tolerant and insistence on conformity to Augustus worship or other religious practices led to repeated clashes. Many Jews were nervous of their masters’ lack of understanding and religious extremists – the Zealots so criticised by Josephus – played on these fears and encouraged proactive rebellion.

All these forces led to the outbreak of the First Jewish–Roman War (66 to 73 AD), sometimes called the Great Jewish Revolt or The Jewish War. It began in the twelfth year of the reign of Nero, with anti-taxation protests leading to attacks on Roman citizens by the Jews. The Roman governor, Gessius Florus, responded by plundering the Second Temple, claiming the money was for the Emperor, and the next day launching a raid on the city, arresting numerous senior Jewish figures. This prompted a wider, large-scale rebellion and the Roman military garrison of Judaea was quickly overrun by the rebels.

It took the Romans with all their might four full years to quell the rebellion, marked by the sack of Jerusalem, the destruction of Herod’s Temple and the displacement of its people around the Mediterranean, followed by three years of further mopping-up operations. Most other Roman provinces suffered from extortionate taxation, harsh military rule, severe punishment for anyone who breached the peace. What made the Jews different was the involvement of fierce religious belief which shaded into millenarian visions of a Final Battle and Second Coming of the Promised One. Egypt, Greece, Britain, Spain and other equally exploited provinces had nothing like this.

The rise of Christianity

Obviously nobody alive in the Year One had a clue that it would one day, centuries later, be singled out as the start of a new dispensation on human history. If you’re not a Christian, chances are you still use the Christian system of numbering years, if only for business purposes. If you are a Christian this year marked the start of a completely new epoch of world and human history, one in which Divine Grace entered the human realm and all people were offered the chance of salvation through faith in the risen Christ.

Finley dwells on the fairly well-known textual records of early Christianity, within his realm of Roman studies, for example the famous letters of Pliny the Elder to the emperor Trajan asking for advice on how to deal with the men and women being denounced to him as ‘Christians’.

Returning to borders, Finley points out that this same emperor Trajan conquered ‘Dacia’, roughly modern Transylvania, and embarked on a foolhardy campaign against the Parthians (graveyard of the ambitions of Crassus and Anthony to name but two) but Hadrian, who succeeded him, gave up the Parthian gains and settled the borders of the empire for good. Thus, give or take a few small provinces and the elimination of a few client-kingdoms, such as Judaea, the frontiers established by Augustus in the Year One were not far from being the final, definitive borders of the Empire.

Trade

One of the consistent surprises when reading about pre-modern history is the extent and complexity of pre-modern trade routes. It was one of the big messages of the British Museum’s great Vikings exhibition, showing just how far-flung Viking exploration and trade was. Whether considering the trading networks of ancient China or the early explorations of the Portuguese or the vast extent of the Mongol conquests, the message is always the same: pre-modern trading networks were always more wide-reaching than you would have thought.

Same here: Finley points out that the Romans bought silk from as far afield as China (via middlemen in Chinese Turkestan), and more directly with China and Ceylon. Indo-Roman trading stations existed as far away as Pondicherry. ‘There was a drain of Roman coins to India and further East’. Yet references to India were thin and misleading. In the works of the elegiac poets India is usually just linked as a name alongside Parthia to represent the furtherst ends of the earth.

Similarly, there was trans-Sahara trade, especially for ivory, but almost total ignorance of the African continent below the desert. (p.198)

In a way the northern border was more intriguing. After the catastrophe of the Teutoburg Forest (described in vivid detail by Goldsworthy in his biography of Augustus) Augustus withdrew all legions, merchants and settlers in Germany back south of the Rhine and the Rhine-Danube became de facto the northern border of the empire for the next four centuries.

Despite interacting with them extensively, despite making treaties with chieftains, trading with them, understanding something about their societies, in a sense the Romans never got to grips with the Germans. Finley explains part of this was because the Germans were illiterate so had no texts for the Romans to study; no history, art, no architecture.

Also, the Germans were made up of loose and constantly changing tribal confederations. The Parthians had an emperor, the Armenians a great king and so on: you knew who you were dealing with and what they had to offer and how to bargain. None of this worked with the Germans.

(He makes the interesting point that, in their relative ignorance, the Germans relied on ‘primitive agricultural techniques’ which rapidly exhausted what agricultural land they created by forest clearance, and this was a factor in their constant migrations. That and the periodic arrival of entire peoples from further east, which pushed the nearby Germans over the Rhine, often for safety.)

Lastly, he makes a quick point that despite trade with far-flung places outside the empire, most of the cultural and especially religious innovation came from within the empire.

The great matrix of religion innovation was within the empire, in its eastern regions: Egypt, Syria and Palestine, Asia Minor. And, of course, in the end the triumphant contribution from that area in this period was Christianity. (p.198)

East and West

He concludes with the Big Idea that the whole notion of Western Europe in a sense owes its existence to the Augustan settlement which secured Italy, Spain, France and Britain for Roman rule for centuries to come, bequeathing them a common culture, no matter how far it decayed during the Dark Ages.

The East, with far deeper cultural roots of its own, was not ‘Romanised’ to anything like the same extent, retaining a cultural independence which was expressed, first through the survival of the Byzantine Empire for another 1,000 years, and then through its conquest by another Eastern religion, Islam, tearing the Middle East and North Africa out of the Roman Christian family of nations, setting up a profound geographical and cultural divide which lasts to this day.

Credit

‘The Year One’ was included in a collection of essays by M.I. Finley titled Aspects of Antiquity, published by Penguin books in 1968. References are to the 1977 Penguin paperback edition.

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