Steve Mason,
a History of the Jewish War:
There used to be a monumental arch in Rome’s greatest entertainment facility, the Circus Maximus, southwest of the Palatine Hill and Forum. If a ninth-century visitor copied it accurately, it honoured the emperor Titus (ruled A.D. 79–81) in the following terms: The Roman Senate and People: for the Imperator Titus Caesar Vespasian Augustus, son of the Deified Vespasian, Pontifex Maximus, with tribunicia potestas for the tenth time, imperator for the seventeenth,Consul for the eighth, pater patriae, their princeps, Because on the advice and counsel of his father, and under his auspices, he subdued the nation of the Judaeans (gentem Iudaeorum domuit).
The city of Jerusalem, either attacked in futility or left entirely untried by all the leaders, kings, or nations before him, he destroyed (urbem Hierusolymam … delevit).3 Every informed person knew that the last lines were nonsense. To speak only of Roman conquerors: Pompey the Great besieged and occupied Jerusalem in 63 B.C. A generation later (37 B.C.) Gaius Sosius, Syria’s governor under Marc Antony, repeated the exercise to remove Jerusalem from the Parthian sphere and install King Herod. Both generals received triumphal processions, memorialized on a marble record in the Roman Forum, fragments of which survive.4
Pompey’s abundant coins featured Judaea’s submission alongside that of other nations in Syria, and Antony’s coins proudly co-opted Sosius’ victory.5 Those were only the Roman conquerors. Half a millennium earlier, the neo-Babylonian NebuchadnezNebuchadnezzar had destroyed Jerusalem, and between 586 and 63 B.C. Jerusalem had passed to Persian, Ptolemaic, and Seleucid imperial powers before Rome’s. Titus was very far, then, from being Jerusalem’s first conqueror. Yet he was still being feted as such in the 90s: “He will bring an end to wars with the fierce people of Palestine!” (Silius Italicus 605–606).
Overdone rhetoric was hardly rare when it came to emperors’ achievements. A lost arch created for Claudius boasted of his British campaign (A.D. 43): “[H]e first brought the barbarian peoples across the Ocean under the authority [or sway, indicio] of the Roman people.”6 Writing just before that triumph, Pomponius Mela professed joy at finally being able to describe Britain accurately: “Look: the greatest of emperors is opening up what for so long lay closed, the conqueror of nations that were previously not only ungovernable but indeed were unknown!”7 But Britain’s tribes had been clients of Rome for decades before Claudius,8 and Pomponius’ accuracy was not noticeably improved by Claudius’ invasion. Then again, Silius Italicus flatters Vespasian as the first to open up “unknown” areas of Britain (3.597–98), while Tacitus claims that his father-in-law was the first to subdue Britain properly (Agr. 10).
The model emperor Augustus had set the pace for such exaggerated claims to primacy: “The Pannonian peoples, whom before I was first citizen the army of the Roman had people never approached, were conquered …” (RG 30).9 People cannot remember everything, and Rome’s residents were accustomed to giving rhetoric a wide berth. It is not shocking that the Senate of the 70s would invite the populace to imagine Titus’ Jerusalem victory as unprecedented. It only hurt if one thought about it.
In the absence of modern-style media, Rome’s leaders had three principal means for advertising their achievements:10 a magnificent procession for the home constituency (senators and people); the construction of public monuments, arches, statues, temples, and public facilities, ostensibly funded from the new wealth generated by the foreign conquest; and an empire-wide distribution of coins. Literary propaganda was also possible, but lengthy historical narratives were not well suited to that task, being open to varied and uncontrollable interpretations and risking mischief on the part of clever authors or audiences.11 For the simple points that needed making, spectacles of overwhelming impact, along with images and brief statements on stone and coin-metal, were most reliable.12 Even before Jerusalem’s fall, the Flavians and their supporters began exploiting all three media. Monuments and celebratory coinage they took to with an energy matching that of predecessors who had actually conquered large new territories. Building and minting coins required no evidence from the conquered territory. These were zones of free creativity; the Flavians could craft any imagery that suited them. Only the triumph, in principle, required material from the conquered territory.
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Roman tradition was clear about what constituted a proper war (bellum iustum). A special college of priests, the fetiales, had the principal task of making treaties and declarations of war, both of which were possible only with foreign peoples not already part of Rome’s empire.23 In spite of Josephus’ incidental remark that Vespasian landed in Syria when “war had been declared” (War 7.46), it seems impossible to imagine this fetial process having been conducted in the case of Judaea, which had been part of Roman Syria since Pompey’s famed conquests.24 Scholars’ efforts to find a loophole for the Flavians by suggesting that Judaea had become effectively independent, and the Flavians “had reconquered a small rebellious province,”25 founder on the definition of Judaea. If there had been a province of Judaea before the Flavians, its capital would have been coastal Caesarea, and it would have included Samaria, western Galilee, and some of the coastal plain. During the Flavian conflict, however, those regions remained steadfastly loyal. The Judaea in question, evidently, was the ethnic hinterland of Jerusalem and not a formal province (Chapter 4). On any account the Flavians were engaged in political malarkey. But malarkey was the order of the day in political life. How much has changed in that respect, readers may decide. Many questions about Roman triumphs remain uncertain, and no ancient guide survives. The processions we hear about are described in vague and contradictory ways, usually by writers remote from the events.26 If we assumed a coherent system, we might well ask: What did someone do to earn a triumph? But evidence from the Republic shows that senators debated the merits of each case, sometimes denying a triumph even to a great conqueror because of political conditions, or changing their minds, or forcing the man to choose between a triumph and a consulship, or offering a compromise that fell short of a full triumph.27 The criteria that some scholars have proposed are merely cobbled together from those debates over particular cases, but already in the Republic it is easy to find exceptions to any imagined rules.28 Even the eminent Cicero could not contrive a triumph for himself.29 Under the Empire, autocratic rulers basically did as they pleased, although to be sure they must have weighed considerations of prestige, seemliness, and political need ‒ or what they could get away with ‒ in consultation with advisors.
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If doubt remains about the fabricated nature of the triumph as Josephus presents it, the “large number of ships” should settle the matter (7.147). Pompey and Augustus had won great naval battles, but landlocked Judaea was not suited for that kind of thing. Vespasian would nevertheless produce coins featuring Victory on the prow of a ship, with the legend Victoria Navalis. Assuming that the triumph’s producers had some sense of reality, scholars have imagined that these coin motifs must allude to Vespasian’s control of the sea lanes from Alexandria, which cut off Vitellius’ supplies.93 But that would not easily explain ships in the triumph against the foreign enemy in Judaea, and we should prefer to explain similar evidence in the same way if we can.94 The small frieze on the arch beneath the architrave depicts a river-god image, seeming to confirm that the Flavians made an issue of naval victory in the Judaean War itself.95
Just a few bits of the first chapter, but the picture sketched is one of Josephus contradicting his own contradictions whenever it suits him, seemingly unaware of the gross exaggerations narrated by himself at an earlier point
There is little doubt that Josephus made Judea appear a thousand times "bigger and badder" than it was in reality, and his entire description of the triumphal parade shows the complete absence of anything - anything, really - Judean