Agrippa Pleads for Peace

Florus, contriving another opening for the war, wrote to Cestius falsely accusing the Jews of revolt. He laid the start of the fighting on them, and said they had done what in fact they had suffered. But the leaders of Jerusalem did not keep silent either; they and Bernice wrote to Cestius about the crimes Florus had committed against the city. Cestius read both accounts and took counsel with his officers. Some of them thought Cestius himself should go up with an army, either to punish the revolt if it had happened, or to settle the Jews more firmly in their loyalty if they were standing by it. He himself, however, decided to send ahead one of his companions to look into the situation and report faithfully on the Jews’ intentions. So he sent one of his tribunes, Neapolitanus. He met King Agrippa at Jamnia on his way back from Alexandria, and told him who had sent him and why. [a]

There the high priests of the Jews, with the powerful men and the council, came to welcome the king. After paying him their respects they lamented their own misfortunes and described Florus’s cruelty. Agrippa was indignant at it, but as a matter of tactics he turned his anger on the Jews he pitied, wanting to humble their pride and, by making it seem they had not been so unjustly treated, to turn them from revenge. These leading men, being men of rank who wanted peace because of their possessions, understood that the king’s rebuke was kindly meant. But the people came out from Jerusalem about seven and a half miles to welcome Agrippa and Neapolitanus. The wives of those who had been slaughtered ran ahead, wailing, and at their mourning the people broke into lamentation too. They begged Agrippa to help them, and cried out to Neapolitanus about all they had suffered from Florus; and when they had come into the city, they showed them the market laid waste and the houses plundered. Then, through Agrippa, they persuaded Neapolitanus to walk round the city as far as Siloam with a single attendant, so that he might see that the Jews yielded to all the other Romans and were hostile only to Florus, because of his extreme cruelty to them. He went through the city, and having had proof enough of how peaceable they were, he went up to the temple. There he called the people together, praised them highly for their loyalty to the Romans, and urged them strongly to keep the peace. Then, having worshiped God from as near the holy places as he was permitted to come, he returned to Cestius. [b]

The multitude of the Jews turned to the king and the high priests and asked that envoys be sent to Nero against Florus, so that they would not, by keeping silent after such slaughter, leave themselves under suspicion of revolt. They would be thought to have started the fighting themselves, they said, unless they got in first and showed who had started it; and it was plain that they would not stay quiet if anyone prevented the embassy. Agrippa saw that electing men to accuse Florus would stir up ill will, but that standing by while the Jews were fanned into war was not to his own advantage either. So he called the people together at the Xystus, and placed his sister Bernice where all could see her on the house of the Hasmoneans, which stood above the Xystus on the far side of the upper city, where a bridge joined the temple to the Xystus. Then Agrippa spoke as follows: [c]

“If I saw that all of you were bent on war with the Romans, and that the soundest and most honest part of the people had not chosen to live in peace, I would not have come before you or ventured to give you advice. Every speech urging men to do what they ought is wasted when all who hear it are of one mind for the worse. But some of you are spurred on by youth and inexperience of the evils of war, some by an unreasoning hope of liberty, and some by greed and the profit to be made from the weak if everything is thrown into confusion. So I thought it right to bring you all together and tell you what I think is for your good, so that these men may come to their senses and change their minds, and the good may not suffer for the folly of a few. Let no one shout me down if what he hears does not please him. Those who are set past cure on revolt can still think the same after I have spoken; but my words will be lost even on those who want to hear them, unless all of you keep quiet. I know that many make a tragedy of the insults you have suffered from your procurators, and of the praises of liberty. But before I examine who you are and whom you are undertaking to fight, I will first untangle the pretexts that have been woven together. If you mean to avenge yourselves on those who wronged you, why do you glorify liberty? But if you think slavery unbearable, your complaint against the governors is beside the point, for even if they were moderate, slavery would be just as shameful. Consider each of these, and see how slight a ground for war it is. Take first the charges against the procurators. Those in authority should be humored, not provoked. When you make great reproaches out of small offenses, you turn the very men you reproach into your enemies, and instead of wronging you secretly and with some shame, they plunder you openly. Nothing checks blows like bearing them, and the quietness of those who are wronged shames the wrongdoers into stopping. But suppose the Romans’ officials are cruel past cure. Still, it is not all the Romans who are wronging you, nor Caesar, against whom you are choosing war. It is not by their command that a wicked man comes to you; those in the west cannot see those in the east, nor is it easy for them even to hear quickly there what happens here. It is absurd to make war on many for the sake of one, on so great a power for such small causes, and on people who do not even know what we complain of. Our grievances may soon be put right, for the same procurator will not stay forever, and those who succeed him are likely to come more moderate. But once war is stirred up, it is not easy to lay it down, or to carry it, without disaster. As for your present desire for liberty, it comes too late. You ought to have fought long ago never to lose it. The first taste of slavery is hard, and the struggle not to come under it at all is just; but the man who has once been subdued and then breaks away is a stubborn slave, not a lover of liberty. The time to do everything to keep the Romans out was when Pompey invaded the country. Yet our ancestors and their kings, who were far better placed than you in money, in bodies and in spirit, could not withstand a small part of the Roman power. And will you, who have inherited obedience from generation to generation, and whose resources are so far below those of the men who first submitted, stand up against the entire empire of the Romans? Think of the Athenians. For the freedom of Greece they once gave up their own city to the flames. When proud Xerxes sailed over land and marched over the sea, when the seas could not hold him and he led an army too broad for Europe, they chased him off like a runaway in a single ship, and at little Salamis they broke the might of all Asia. Yet now they are slaves to the Romans, and the leading city of Greece is governed by orders from Italy. The Spartans, after Thermopylae and Plataea, and after Agesilaus, who searched out Asia, are content with the same masters. The Macedonians, who still picture Philip in their minds and see the empire of the world that he and Alexander sowed for them, bear so great a change and bow before those to whom fortune has passed. Countless other nations, with more boldness to claim their freedom, give way. You alone think it a disgrace to serve those to whom all things are subject. What army, what weapons are you trusting in? Where is your fleet to seize the Roman seas? Where is the treasury to meet the cost of your enterprise? Do you think you are making war on Egyptians and Arabs? Will you not look around at the empire of the Romans? Will you not measure your own weakness? Have not our forces often been beaten even by the neighboring nations, while their strength is unconquered throughout the world? Indeed, they have sought for something even beyond it. The whole Euphrates was not enough for them on the east, nor the Danube on the north, nor Libya, explored as far as the uninhabited lands, on the south, nor Gades on the west. They looked for another world beyond the ocean, and carried their arms as far as the Britons, who were unknown to history before. [e]

“What then? Are you richer than the Gauls, stronger than the Germans, wiser than the Greeks, more numerous than all the peoples of the world? What confidence lifts you up against the Romans? ‘Slavery is hard,’ someone will say. How much harder for the Greeks, who surpass every people under the sun in nobility and occupy so large a country, yet yield to six Roman rods; and the Macedonians to as many, though they have a better right than you to claim their freedom. What of the five hundred cities of Asia? Do they not, without a garrison, bow to one governor and the consular rods? Why speak of the Heniochi and the Colchians and the tribe of the Taurians, the people of the Bosporus, and the nations around the Black Sea and Lake Maeotis? Among them not even a native master was known before; now they are subject to three thousand soldiers, and forty warships keep the peace on a sea that was once wild and unnavigable. What strong claims to liberty Bithynia, Cappadocia, the people of Pamphylia, the Lycians and the Cilicians could make! Yet they pay tribute without an army. And the Thracians? Their country is about a hundred miles wide and a hundred and forty long, rougher and far stronger than yours, and it turns back invaders with deep frost. Do they not obey two thousand Roman guards? Their neighbors the Illyrians, who live in the land that runs as far as Dalmatia and is bounded by the Danube, do they not yield to just two legions, with whose help they themselves beat back the raids of the Dacians? And the Dalmatians, who so often reared up for liberty, and every time they were subdued gathered their strength and revolted again, do they not now live quietly under one Roman legion? If great advantages ought to provoke any people to revolt, it should have been the Gauls above all, walled in as they are by nature: on the east by the Alps, on the north by the river Rhine, on the south by the Pyrenees, and on the west by the ocean. Yet though they are surrounded by such barriers and number three hundred and five nations, though they have, so to speak, the springs of prosperity at home and flood almost the whole world with their goods, they put up with being a source of revenue for the Romans and having their own prosperity doled out to them by Rome. They endure this not from softness of spirit or lack of breeding — they fought eighty years for their freedom — but because they stand in awe of the power of the Romans and of their fortune, which wins them more than their arms do. So they are kept in slavery by twelve hundred soldiers, when they have almost more cities than that. Nor was the gold they mine enough for the Iberians to wage war for their freedom, nor their great distance from the Romans by land and sea, nor the warlike tribes of the Lusitanians and Cantabrians, nor the neighboring ocean, whose ebb tide terrifies even the natives. The Romans stretched their arms beyond the Pillars of Hercules, marched through the clouds over the Pyrenees, and enslaved these peoples too; and one legion was enough to guard nations so hard to fight and so far away. Which of you has not heard of the multitude of the Germans? Their strength and the size of their bodies you have no doubt seen often, since the Romans have captives from them everywhere. Yet these men, who occupy a boundless country, whose spirits are greater than their bodies, whose souls despise death and whose rage is fiercer than the wildest beasts’, have the Rhine as the limit of their onslaught. Tamed by eight Roman legions, those who are captured are slaves, and the nation as a whole saves itself by flight. You who trust in the walls of Jerusalem, consider the wall the Britons had. The ocean surrounded them, and they lived on an island no smaller than the whole world we live in; yet the Romans sailed over and enslaved them, and four legions guard that great island. But why say more, when even the Parthians, the most warlike of races, rulers of so many nations and armed with such great power, send hostages to the Romans, and in Italy you can see the nobility of the East in servitude under the name of peace? When almost every people under the sun bows to the arms of Rome, will you alone make war, without considering the end of the Carthaginians? They boasted of the great Hannibal and of their noble Phoenician descent, yet they fell under the right hand of Scipio. Neither the Cyrenians, of Spartan descent, nor the Marmaridae, a race stretching as far as the thirsty desert, nor the Syrtes, terrifying even to hear of, nor the Nasamonians and Moors and the countless Numidians, could check the valor of the Romans. The third part of the world, whose nations cannot easily even be counted, bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Pillars of Hercules and feeding countless Ethiopians as far as the Red Sea, they have subdued entirely. Besides the yearly harvests that feed the population of Rome for eight months, these peoples pay tribute of every kind besides, and readily supply contributions for the needs of the empire. They do not, like you, think any command an outrage, though only one legion stays among them. But why point to Rome’s power far away, when you can see it in Egypt next door? Egypt stretches as far as Ethiopia and Arabia the Happy, and is the port for India. It has seven and a half million people, not counting the inhabitants of Alexandria, as can be judged from the poll tax. Yet it does not scorn Roman rule, though Alexandria is so great a spur to revolt, with its population, its wealth and its size — about three and three-quarter miles long and no less than a mile and a quarter wide. In a single month it pays the Romans more than you pay in a year, and besides money it sends Rome grain for four months. It is walled on every side by trackless deserts, harborless seas, rivers or marshes. Yet none of these proved stronger than the fortune of the Romans: two legions stationed in that one city bridle the depths of Egypt together with the noble Macedonians. Where, then, will you find allies for the war? In the uninhabited world? For all who live in the inhabited world are Romans — unless someone stretches his hopes beyond the Euphrates and thinks his kinsmen in Adiabene will come to help. But they will not entangle themselves in so great a war for no good reason, and if they did decide so badly, the Parthian king would not allow it. He takes care to keep the truce with the Romans, and he will consider it a breach of the treaty if any of his subjects marches against them. What is left is to take refuge in God’s help. But that too is ranged on the Roman side, for without God so great an empire could never have been built. Think, too, how hard it would be for you to keep your religion in its strictness even if you were fighting an easy enemy; and if you are forced to break the very laws for which you most hope to have God as your ally, you will turn him away. If you keep the custom of the Sabbath and will not be moved to any action on it, you will easily be taken, as your forefathers were by Pompey, who pressed his siege hardest on the very days when the besieged rested. But if you break your ancestral law in the war, I do not know what you will be fighting for after that, since your one concern is to abolish nothing of your ancestral customs. How will you call on God to defend you, when you have willingly broken the worship due to him? All who take up war trust either in divine or in human help; but when, in all likelihood, both are cut off, those who go to war are choosing certain capture. What, then, prevents you from killing your children and wives with your own hands and burning this most beautiful homeland of yours? By such madness you would at least spare yourselves the disgrace of defeat. It is good, my friends, it is good, while the ship is still in harbor, to foresee the coming storm, and not to put out into the middle of the hurricane only to be lost. Those who meet disaster they could not foresee are at least pitied; but the man who rushes into plain ruin is reproached as well. Unless perhaps someone imagines that you will make war on agreed terms, and that the Romans, once they have mastered you, will treat you with moderation, and will not rather burn the holy city as an example to the other nations and destroy your whole race. For not even those of you who survive will find a place to flee, since all men either have the Romans as their masters or fear they soon will. And the danger is not only to those here, but to those who live in other cities too, for there is no people in the world without some share of ours among them. If you go to war, their enemies will slaughter them all, and through the folly of a few men every city will be filled with Jewish blood. Those who do it will be pardoned; and if it is not done, consider how impious it is to take up arms against people so humane. Let pity come into your hearts, if not for your children and wives, then at least for this mother city and its sacred precincts. Spare the temple, and keep the sanctuary and its holy things for yourselves; for if the Romans master them, they will no longer hold back, since their sparing of them before has been met with ingratitude. I call to witness your holy things, and the holy angels of God, and the country we share, that I have held back nothing that could save you. If you decide as you ought, you will have peace in common with me; but if you are carried away by your passions, you will face the danger without me.”

When he had said this, he wept, and his sister with him, and by their tears he checked much of the people’s fury. But they cried out that they were not making war on the Romans but on Florus, because of what they had suffered. To this King Agrippa replied, “But your actions are already those of men at war with the Romans. You have not paid Caesar his tribute, and you have cut down the colonnades from the Antonia. You can rid yourselves of the charge of revolt if you join them up again and pay the tax; for the fortress does not belong to Florus, and it is not to Florus that you will pay the money.” [r]