Josephus was writing after the fact as a favoured historian in the house of the Emperor Vespasian, and later of his son Titus, but at the time he was Yusaf ben Matthias, by his own account, a man venerated for his wisdom, courage and foresight throughout Judaea and Galilee: certainly he was intimately involved in the Hebrew defences during the ensuing hostilities and he was a contemporary to most of the events in our time scale.
This notwithstanding, his recounting of the history is inevitably designed to show the Romans in their best light and he skips over some of the most momentous achievements of his people.
Most notable of these, in my opinion, was the taking of Masada by Menachem (or Menahem, or Menaheim), grandson
of Judas the Galilean, the insurgent who had taunted Rome’s power with his Sicari assassins for the first third of the century.
Those who wish to know the detail can do no better than to read
Wars of the Jews
, Book 2, chapters 14–18. For those of you who would rather not, there follows a list of the characters in this book who have a historical basis, bearing in mind that while Josephus was my primary source for the action, a multitude of other sources, both contemporary and modern, have informed the narrative.
In particular, I am indebted, as is any writer of this period, to Suetonius, Tacitus and Philo. In the modern period, I am indebted to Hyam Maccoby for
The Mythmaker
, his outline of Saul (Saulos), to Martin Goodman for his
Rome and Jerusalem
, to Daniel T. Unterbrink for his new synopsis of the possible historical versions of Christ,
The Three Messiahs: The
Historical Judas the Galilean, the Revelatory Christ Jesus, and the Mythical Jesus of Nazareth
and to various authors for their insight into the archaeology of Masada.
Characters with a basis in historical fact
The Emperor Nero
(
AD
37–68
) Although he is never centre stage in this novel, Nero’s presence underpins the narrative. In
AD
66, he was nearing the end of his reign – and his life – and becoming increasingly paranoid. In addition to the Pisoan conspiracy of which Seneca was a part, a number of other attempts had been made on his life and a great deal of his energy was spent in removing opponents. The intelligent, resourceful and highly popular general, Corbulo, who was in control of most of the eastern legions and had led a successful campaign against the Parthian empire, was summoned to Greece and then ordered to commit suicide around the time of the events related here. Had he not been, he would undoubtedly have had command of the legions which in
AD
70 eventually razed Jerusalem to the ground. Nero, meanwhile, clung on only until
AD
68, when the
infamous ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ wrought havoc on Rome and the empire.
All that said, Nero was not quite the maniac that later history has made out. The early years of his reign, when he allowed Seneca to rule through him, were considered by many to be a golden period of the empire and even as late as the fire of
AD
64 he was beloved of the proletariat, if not, by then, of the Senate. On the night of the fire, he was in Antium, a good eleven miles from Rome. He could have remained there in safety, but, according to Tacitus, chose instead to ride back into the flames, and threw open his palace to the people. The architectural changes he made later were sane and went a long way to preventing a future fire. The fact that he bankrupted the treasury in doing so is not entirely his fault: it had been strained to destitution by wars in Britain and Corbulo’s venture against Vologases of Parthia, neither of which was entirely of Nero’s making: war is ever a powerful eater of money. His attempts to gain gold from the provinces, while appalling in our eyes, were hardly so to the ancient mind-set: from Rome’s perspective, provinces existed in order that Rome might drain their wealth; it was the reason they had been conquered in the first place.
It remains to be said that his wife, Poppaea, died in suspicious circumstances in
AD
65. Later sources claim that Nero killed her, either accidentally or deliberately, but the fact that she was carrying his only child makes this seem immensely unlikely.
Yusaf ben Matthias, later Titus Flavius Josephus
(
AD
37–100)
Josephus, known in our narrative as Yusaf, was the ultimate survivor. If his date of birth is accurate – we only have his word for it and he wouldn’t be the last to pretend to be younger than his years – he was appointed young to the defence of Galilee when Vespasian’s assault began. Later, as the city fell, he arranged for his co-defendants to commit mass suicide and, as the one man left alive, threw himself on the mercy of Vespasian, the commander of the Roman forces who had just successfully raised the siege of Jopata.
The fact that he got as far as Vespasian, and wasn’t decorating a cross within hours of his surrender, suggests to me that he was already a Roman agent. But even if he were not, he threw himself on his face and publicly declared Vespasian to be the inheritor of the Star Prophecy, which had long ago declared that a king would come out of the east who would rule the whole world. This may not have pushed Vespasian to become emperor, but it certainly did his cause no harm.
In later years, having been adopted into Vespasian’s family, Josephus wrote the books which are our only true history of Palestine under the Roman republic and early empires. Without them, the Christian gospels would be very much the poorer and there is a strong argument (see
Caesar’s Messiah
by Joseph Atwill) that they are all written by the same man, or group of men, at the behest of the then-emperor Titus Vespasian, son of the Vespasian who took the Star Prophecy for himself. Josephus was a self-serving misogynist, but probably no worse than many men of his time, and his work is still well worth reading.
Governor Gessius Florus
was governor of Judaea from
AD
64 to 66 (his death in the beast garden is my fiction). Josephus is scathing in his account of this man, who achieved the rare notoriety of being more corrupt than his predecessor. It was common for men to use their rank as a means of enriching themselves – indeed, that was often the point – but some went about their assault on their unfortunate subject territories with more delicacy than others. What stands out about Florus is his singular insensitivity to the Hebrews. If he was not deliberately endeavouring to spark a rebellion in Jerusalem, then he was inordinately stupid. Apart from robbing the Temple, he taunted the people, publicly humiliated them when they became restive, and crucified individuals picked up at random, including, according to Josephus, Roman citizens. This latter was explicitly illegal. It’s hard to put any other explanation on his behaviour than that he wished to spark a revolt.
Agrippa II
, grandson of Herod the Great. Brought up in Rome, Agrippa was Roman to his core and was used as a client king by both Claudius and Nero. Josephus gives him an impassioned speech which ‘proves’ Rome’s superiority to the Hebrews and is supposed to be an attempt to talk the rebelling zealots to peace. In reality, it was Roman propaganda, about as plausible as Boudica’s speech to her warriors or Calgacus’ famous speech before the battle of Mons Graupius, ‘They wreak a desolation and call it peace’, both of which were written by Tacitus as a way of speaking to his contemporaries without being charged with treason. Agrippa was weak, and achieved little with his reign. The rumours surrounding his sister were almost certainly false, but he died without issue, although even if he had sired a dozen sons the client kingships would still have been lost in the aftermath of the rebellion.
Berenice of Cilicia
, Agrippa’s much-married sister, sounds as if she was made of sterner stuff than her brother, for all that ancient historians give more weight to her fabled beauty and her many lovers than to her undoubted political acumen. Following her brother’s failure to subdue the rebellion by speech, she is said to have walked barefoot with her head shorn in Jerusalem in ‘fulfilment of a vow’. Historians are agreed that there was no known vow which required this, but it might well have been required as a penance. I have written it accordingly. Her son
Hyrcanus
is mentioned, but little else, and her sister
Drusilla
is important to us as being mother of Kleopatra, a fictional character (her real daughter was named Antonia Clementiana).
The Poet:
Jocasta Papinius Statius is a fiction, but her brother
Publius Papinius Statius
was a well-known poet of the era. I have no evidence at all of a poetic sister, but it would not be the last time an accomplished woman had her work passed off as by a man.
The Teacher: Seneca the Younger
, also known as Lucius Annaeus Seneca, died by his own hand at Nero’s order in late
AD
65 following the failure of the Pisoan conspiracy, which was aimed first at deposing Nero and then – possibly – at installing Seneca in his place. We have no record of his being a spymaster, but he was remarkably well informed throughout his life and it is improbable that he could have been so without a network of agents.
Jucundus, commander of the cavalry
in Caesarea, is mentioned in the incident of the dove that was sacrificed on the upturned vessel. Josephus himself makes no mention of the meaning of this act, presuming that his listeners will know. I am indebted to the Whiston translation for its explanation of the act of desecration thereby symbolized.
Saulos (Saul of Tarsus, St Paul)
is one of the most divisive figures in early first-century history. Depending on your viewpoint, he was either the vehicle by which Christianity was brought to the Gentiles, and a saint, or a charismatic egotist who believed he had a hotline to his own private deity and was prone to outbreaks of verbal violence to an extent that nowadays would be classified as psychologically unstable.
There are seven attested letters by someone who called himself Paul and who wrote first person, as if to congregations under his pastoral care. My thesis, explained in greater detail in the Author’s Note following
Rome: The Emperor’s Spy
, is that Saulos was a Roman agent, that he initially endeavoured to suppress by extreme violence the insurgency that was sweeping Judaea and Palestine and was named by Josephus the ‘Fourth Philosophy’, and when that failed, instead of trying to coerce the people of Israel into denying their god, he took that same god and changed it.
Inventing a messiah, based on the death of the insurgent leader Judas the Galilean, also known as Judas of the Sicarioi, he removed the conditions of the previous covenant: namely
the table laws and the need to circumcise the boy children. He preached his new cult round the eastern Mediterranean in the face of considerable opposition from the Jerusalem Assembly. (See
James, the Brother of Christ
by Robert H. Eisenman for full details of the enmity between Paul and James.)
Those who had known the Galilean in life were, not surprisingly, unhappy about this development, and when Saulos was finally summoned to Jerusalem there were men among their number who took vows not to eat, drink or go near a woman until he was dead. The Romans, hearing this, sent in several brigades of men to get him out; not a likely act unless to rescue someone of high value.
Thereafter, Saulos vanishes from our historical record. He is conveniently absent by the time James, brother to the Galilean, was assassinated by the Sanhedrin for the crime of being too popular. James, the Nazarite, was a vegetarian, pacifist and celibate who kept order in Jerusalem for approximately thirty years. It was his death that set the War Party and the Peace Party at each other’s throats, and led, ultimately – and with the help of Governor Florus’ idiocy – to the war that destroyed their city.
And yet – the great fire of Rome began in
AD
64 on the night the dog star rose over Rome and we know that there were at the time apocalyptic manuscripts declaring that the Kingdom of Heaven could not arise unless or until Rome had burned under the eye of that star. Somebody, in my view, lit the fire in an effort to bring about the prophecy. I believe that person to have been Saulos, or his agents.
Although I have no proof, it seems to me also likely that someone was acting to push Gessius Florus to his acts of overt insanity in Jerusalem: there is no other reason for him to have behaved as he did, except to instigate the ultimate riot that would see the destruction of that city, and therefore of Judaea as a semi-independent province.
And so I have built my fiction around this supposition: that Saulos required Jerusalem to fall in order to fulfil a prophecy. Or
at least, to tell his followers that he had fulfilled the prophecy. He himself, I imagine, would have been very happy to rule a client kingdom under Rome, where his cut of the taxes would have left him a wealthy man, ruling at last over people he had failed otherwise to subdue.
Menachem, grandson of Judas the Galilean
, also known as Judas of the Sicarioi. Menachem was the hero-seed around which this book grew. His assault on Masada is written so simply in Josephus:
In the mean time, one Menahem, the son of that Judas, who was called the Galilean (who was a very cunning sophister [sic] and had formerly reproached the Jews under Cyrenius, that after God, they were subject to the Romans), took some of the men of note with him, and retired to Masada, where he broke open King Herod’s armoury, and gave arms not only to his own people, but to other robbers also. These he made use of for a guard, and returned in the state of a king to Jerusalem; he became the leader of the sedition.
For nearly two thousand years, history has skipped past this passage, moving on to the more exciting moments of the siege, or the final assault by the Roman legions on Masada, five years later, when nine hundred Hebrews held off the might of Rome’s army until, finally surrounded, they drew lots and killed themselves.