THE JEWS AND THE ROMANS


The life and works of Flavius Josephus are bound up with the struggle of
the Jews against the Romans, and in order to appreciate them it is
necessary to summarize the relations of the two peoples that led up to
that struggle.

It is related in the Midrash that the city of Rome was founded on the
day Solomon married an Egyptian princess. The Rabbis doubtless meant by
this legend that the power of Rome was created to be a scourge for
Israel's backslidings. They identified Rome with the Edom of the Bible,
representing thus that the struggle between Esau and Jacob was carried
on by their descendants, the Romans and the Jews, and would continue
throughout history.[1] Yet the earliest relations of the two peoples
were friendly and peaceful. They arose out of the war of independence
that the Maccabean brothers waged against the Syrian Empire in the
middle of the second century B.C.E., when the loyal among the people
were roused to stand up for their faith. Antiochus Epiphanes, anxious to
strengthen his tottering empire, which had been shaken by its struggles
with Rome, sought to force violently on the Jews a pagan Hellenism that
was already making its way among them. He succeeded only in evoking the
latent force of their national consciousness. Rome was already the
greatest power in the world: she had conquered the whole of Italy; she
had destroyed her chief rival in the West, the Phoenician colony of
Carthage; she had made her will supreme in Greece and Macedonia. Her
senate was the arbiter of the destinies of kingdoms, and though for the
time it refrained from extending Roman sway over Egypt and Asia, its
word there was law. Its policy was "divide and rule," to hold supreme
sway by encouraging small nationalities to maintain their independence