Galileans, Samaritans and Cumanus

Enmity also arose between the Samaritans and the Jews, for the following reason. It was the custom of the Galileans, when they went up to the holy city for the festivals, to travel through the country of the Samaritans. At this time, on their road, at a village called Ginae, which lies on the border between Samaria and the Great Plain, some men joined battle with them and killed many of them. When the leading men of the Galileans learned what had happened, they went to Cumanus and asked him to punish the murder of those who had been killed. But he had been bribed by the Samaritans, and he paid no attention. At this the Galileans were indignant, and they urged the mass of the Jews to take up arms and hold fast to their freedom. Slavery, they said, was bitter in itself, but slavery joined with outrage was altogether unbearable. Their authorities tried to calm them and promised to persuade Cumanus to punish the killers, but they paid no attention. They took up their weapons and called on Eleazar son of Dinaeus to help them (he was a robber who had lived for many years in the mountains), and they burned and plundered some of the Samaritans’ villages. When news of this reached Cumanus, he took the squadron of cavalry from Sebaste and four units of infantry, armed the Samaritans, and marched out against the Jews. He engaged them, killed many and took still more alive. Then those who were foremost in rank and family among the people of Jerusalem, seeing how great a disaster they had come to, changed into sackcloth and covered their heads with ashes, and did everything they could to appeal to the rebels and persuade them. They urged them to set before their eyes their country razed to the ground, the temple burned, and themselves, their wives and their children sold as slaves; and so to change their minds, throw away their weapons, go home and keep quiet from now on. These words persuaded them. The people dispersed, and the robbers went back to their strongholds. From that time all Judea was filled with robber bands. [a]

The leading Samaritans went to Ummidius Quadratus, the governor of Syria, who happened to be at Tyre at the time, and accused the Jews of burning and plundering their villages. They said they were not so much indignant at what they themselves had suffered as at the Jews’ contempt for the Romans. If they had been wronged, they ought to have come to the Romans as judges, instead of overrunning the country as though they did not have Romans as their governors. So the Samaritans had come to him to obtain justice. This was their accusation. But the Jews said that the Samaritans had caused the uprising and the fighting, and above all that Cumanus had been corrupted by their bribes and had passed over in silence the murder of those who were killed. When Quadratus had heard them, he postponed judgment, saying that he would give his decision when he came to Judea and had learned the truth more exactly. So they went away with nothing settled. Not long afterward Quadratus came to Samaria. There he heard the case and concluded that the Samaritans had caused the disturbance. Then he crucified those of the Samaritans and of the Jews who he learned had taken part in the uprising: the prisoners Cumanus had taken. From there he went to a village called Lydda, which was not short of a city in size. He sat on the tribunal and heard the Samaritans a second time, and he learned from a certain Samaritan that one of the leading Jews, named Doetus, and four other revolutionaries with him, had persuaded the crowd to revolt from the Romans. Quadratus ordered these to be put to death. But Ananias the high priest and Ananus the captain, with their associates, he sent in chains to Rome to give an account of what had been done to Claudius Caesar. He also ordered the leading men of the Samaritans and of the Jews, together with Cumanus the procurator and Celer, who was a tribune, to go to Italy to the emperor, to be judged before him on their disputes with one another. Then, fearing that the Jewish people might revolt again, he went to the city of Jerusalem. But he found it at peace and celebrating one of the ancestral festivals to God. Confident that there would be no uprising from them, he left them celebrating the feast and returned to Antioch. [d]

Cumanus and the leading Samaritans, who had been sent to Rome, were given a day by the emperor on which they were to argue their dispute with one another. Caesar’s freedmen and friends were working hard for Cumanus and the Samaritans, and they would have prevailed over the Jews, had not the younger Agrippa, who was in Rome at the time, seen the leaders of the Jews being hurried to their ruin. He earnestly begged Agrippina, the emperor’s wife, to persuade her husband to hear the case in a manner worthy of his own justice, and to punish those who were truly responsible for the revolt. Claudius was well disposed beforehand by this request. When he had heard the case and found that the Samaritans had been the ringleaders in the mischief, he ordered those of them who had come up to him to be put to death, and he sentenced Cumanus to exile. And he ordered that Celer the tribune be taken to Jerusalem, dragged around the whole city in the sight of everyone, and so put to death.