Max Radin

“ Religious scruples, my dear Laelius, are primarily national concerns. We have our own, and other states have theirs. And as a matter of fact, even while Jerusalem was standing, and the Jews were at peace with us, there was very little in common between the religious customs of which their rites are examples and those which befit an empire as splendid as ours, or a people of our character and dignity. Our ancestral institutions are as different from theirs as they well can be. ”

“ Many of the nations of modern Europe have a military budget relatively and absolutely greater than that of the Roman empire of the third century; but in these nations the economic system has a high degree of efficiency, compared with that of the older state, and the waste is incalculably less. The great difference lies in the slave system, which was the foundation of ancient society. The total absence of individual incentive wherever the slaves were worked in gangs—and that was, perhaps, true of the majority of slaves—made the efficiency and consequent productivity of each laborer much less. ”

“ We must remember that the wandering of the god is often merely the wandering of a name. That is especially true in those cases in which an old divine name becomes the epithet or cult-title of the intruding deity. Here obviously there was no change in the nature of the god worshiped and no interruption of his worship. It is very likely, too, that very few deities ever completely disappeared, even when there was a real migration of a god. ”

“ Consequently Jews who felt the pull of Greek art and literature, who, like other subjects of Greek sovereigns, were eager to gain the favor of their masters, had to realize to themselves the qualifications of their Hellenism, or determine to discard wholly their Judaism. And this latter step, even to enthusiastic Philhellenes, was intensely difficult. For so many generations “Thou shalt have no other gods” had been inculcated into men’s hearts that it was no simple thing to undertake in cold blood to bow before the abominations of the heathen. ”

“ But from a hero, limited and obscure, to a god, seated in full effulgence at the table of Zeus, was a big step, and bigger yet was the deification of living men. It may even be that the latter conception was not Greek, but was borrowed from Egypt or Mesopotamia. There is no indication of its presence before Alexander. That a man in the flesh might be translated from mortality to immortality—entrückt—was a very ancient conviction. The son-in-law of Zeus, Menelaos, had been so privileged. ”

“ The significance of these Eastern marches for the stability and safety of Rome was even greater than those of the North along the Rhine, where also constant turbulence was to be feared, and eternal vigilance was demanded. In the East, however, there was not merely a horde of plundering savages to be repelled, but the aggression of an ancient and civilized power, bearing a title to prestige compared with which that of Macedonian and Roman was of recent growth. And Parthian successes here immediately jeopardized Egypt, already rapidly becoming the granary of the Empire. ”

“ For a short time disaster seemed imminent, and the desperate reaching out to the ends of the earth for divine support could not fail to make a deep impression upon thousands of men. In that moment of dreadful stress, it was not the Etruscan Triad on the Capitol nor Father Mars, but the mystic Ma, the Ancient Mother of Phrygia with her diadem of towers, her lion-chariot and her bloody orgies, that stayed the rush of the Carthaginian. It is true that the city’s ultimate triumph caused a reaction. ”

“ We find enumerated for us the extent and wealth of the Roman possessions with a fervor of patriotism that might have shamed many a Roman. “Are you richer than the Gauls, more powerful in body than the Germans, wiser than the Greeks, more numerous than all the inhabitants of the earth put together?” ”

“ The reverence for the living monarch, to be transformed into an undisguised worship at his death, was, however, to be superimposed upon existing forms. Nothing was more characteristically Roman than Augustus’ eagerness to make it clear that the vast domain of the empire was to remain, as before, a mass of disparate communities of which the populus Romanus was only one, although a paramount one, and that in each of these communities every effort was to be made to maintain the ancestral ritual in government and worship. ”

“ So the “king of Yavan,” who received the submission of Jerusalem, passed, on his way to Egypt, among a people to whom the name of Greek was quite familiar—who had long known of Greek skill in craftsmanship, Greek prowess on the field of battle, and Greek shrewdness in bargaining. The new empire, on the dizzy throne of which Alexander placed himself, seemed to all the East commensurate with the whole world, and to the kinsmen of the new king of kings and lord of lords all men were ready enough to grant the deference formerly owed to Persians. ”

“ Decimus Junius Juvenalis was born near Aquinum in Southern Italy, where the Italic stock had probably suffered less admixture with foreign elements than was the case at Rome. What his intellectual training was we can only conjecture from its results, the turgid but sonorous and often brilliant eloquence of his Satires. Whether they are true pictures of Roman life and society or not may be doubted. But they indubitably reflect his own soul. We see there a soured raté, a man embittered by his failure to receive the rewards due to his merits. ”

“ If it has to be painfully gathered and swept together from forgotten corners, success is more than problematic. The Jewish reactionaries were fortunate in that the ancient institutions still held their ground, and in having no huge gap of disuse to fill.
They were also fortunate that the actively Hellenizing party was limited in numbers, and the line of demarcation was the easily noticeable one of wealth and position. Not all men of wealth were in this class. Such a man as Ben Sira, in whose book some have detected Greek elements, betrays no Hellenizing tendencies. ”

“ It is so very easy to assume for oneself the whole glory of national achievements. No doubt every Italian peasant and artisan believed that it was qualities existing in himself that commanded the obedience of the magnificent potentates of the East. The earliest attitude of Roman to Jew could not have been different from that toward Syrians or foreigners in general. If in 150 B.C.E. the term Iudaei had reached the ears of the man in the street, it denoted a Syrian principality existing like all other principalities at sufferance and upon the condition of good behavior. ”

“ There is no reason to question the Jewish tradition that the synagogue was Exilic or pre-Exilic in origin. In fact, it is not easily conceivable that it could have been otherwise. Worship was a social act in the ancient world, and properly to be performed in concert. It was inevitable therefore that just as soon as the Jews were removed from those places where the ancestral and traditional ritual was performed without any conscious organization for that purpose, they would combine themselves in groups in order to satisfy the strongly marked religious emotion that characterized them. ”

“ THE JEWISH PROPAGANDA The preaching of a gospel seems to us as natural as the existence of a religion. That is because the religions we know best are universal ones, of which the God is a transcendent being, in whose sight human distinctions are negligible. But for the Mediterranean world that was not the case. The religions were not universal; many of the gods were concretely believed to be the ancestors of certain groups of men, and not always remote ones. ”

“ The salient fact of modern religions is that for most men the group is very large indeed, that it vastly transcends all national limits. Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, all profess the purpose of gaining the entire human race for their adherents, and have actively attempted to do so. The fact that the religions with which we are most familiar are “world-religions,” and the abstract character of the predicates of the Deity in them, would seem to make religion as such practically free from local limitation. ”

“ Their intellectual outlook was wholly Greek, and all their thinking took on a Greek dress. But they received Greek ideas, not only through Homer and Sophocles, but also through Plato and Aristotle. Not popular Greek religion, but sophisticated religious philosophy, was brought to the intellectual leaders of Rome. One of the very first works of Greek thought to be brought to Roman attention was the theory of Euhemerus, a destructive analysis of the existing myths, not merely in the details usually circulated, but in respect to the fundamental basis of myth-making. ”

“ We may say, in conclusion, that the economic and political position of the Jews in the empire was unique in one sense. There were no other groups that had exactly the same rights, or were subject to exactly the same demands as the Jews. But in another sense that position was not at all unique. Many other groups of men had rights somewhat like those of the Jewish synagogues, and played a part in the social economy similar to theirs; and, as individuals, there was probably nothing to mark out the Jew from his fellows in the community. ”

“ The leveling tendencies of the autocracy removed a great many of the reasons of this friction, and in part succeeded in giving even the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West a common culture to maintain. But by that time new movements of population made such race-concepts as were based on blood-kinship too plainly out of accord with the facts to be seriously asserted. At the close of the period we are discussing, every man was either a Roman citizen, with a pressingly heavy share of the burden of maintaining the Roman system, or he was not. ”

“ If we desire to trace the development of this all-overwhelming factor in our reckoning, it will not be possible to go back very far. During the fifth century B.C.E., in which Greek genius is believed to have reached its apogee, it is doubtful whether even the faintest whisper had reached Greeks that told of the race of Italic barbarians destined so soon to dominate the world. Little as was known of the Jews by Greeks of this period, the Romans were still less known. The eyes of men were persistently turned east.
Rome, however, even then was not wholly insignificant. ”

“ On the Roman side, the responsible senatorial oligarchy learned with undisguised satisfaction that a previously unknown tribe of Syrian mountaineers, grouped about a famous temple-rock not far from the Egyptian frontier, had successfully maintained themselves against a troublesome and unaccountable tributary king. On the Jewish side, the leaders of the victorious rebels, conscious of the precarious nature of their success, turned at once to that mighty people—known as yet scarcely by report—which from far off directed men’s destinies. ”

“ Now, however, there surely can be all the less obligation upon us to respect Jewish religious observances when the nation has demonstrated in arms what its feelings are toward Rome, and has made clear how far it enjoyed divine protection by the fact that it has been conquered, scattered, enslaved. ”

“ In reality the Greek myths were not coherent. It is hard to discover in many of them a folkloristic kernel that had to be kept intact. Almost everywhere we are dealing with the free fantasies of highly imaginative poets. So fully was this understood that the stories most familiar to us are generally alluded to in serious Greek literature with an apologetic, ὡς oἱ ποιηταί φασι, “as the poets say,” or some similar phrase. And as these stories were largely unrelated, so also were the gods of whom they were told, even though they bore the same name. ”

“ He is aware that in point of religious observance the Jews are strikingly different from other tribes. The contrast he emphasizes in his speech may be an allusion to the imageless cult of the Jews and the inference of meanness and poverty of ceremonial which Romans would draw from it. And the taunt quam dis cara, “how dear to the gods,” seems an unmistakable fling at the claim of the Jews, loudly voiced in their propaganda, to possess in a high degree the favor of the Divinity, or even a special communion with the Deity in their mysteries. ”

“ Never were men more eager for curious tales of out-of-the-way peoples. Their earliest historians won their chief success in this way. But Greeks had beaten back the conquerors of the world, and had maintained themselves aggressively as well. It was very natural that something of this attitude was apparent in dealing with barbarians even on terms of comity. The Greeks had at least colorable ground for believing that in military matters they were masters wherever they chose.
One phrase of which some Greek writers were fond need not be taken too seriously. ”