{"id":4763,"date":"2018-04-09T11:30:55","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T09:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moked.it\/international\/?p=4763"},"modified":"2018-09-04T17:00:16","modified_gmt":"2018-09-04T15:00:16","slug":"italics-rome-eyes-flavius-josephus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/2018\/04\/09\/italics-rome-eyes-flavius-josephus\/","title":{"rendered":"ITALICS Rome, Through the Eyes of Flavius Josephus"},"content":{"rendered":"

By David Laskin*<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even without a book or a guide, even after two millenniums of crumbling, the image of the seven-branched candelabrum \u2014 the Jewish menorah \u2014 is unmistakable on the inner wall of the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. Stand at the base of the single-passage arch and look up, and the scene in bas-relief ripples to life with almost cartoon clarity: Straining porters, trudging along what is plainly the route of a Roman triumph, bear aloft the golden menorah and other sacred loot plundered from the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The opposite side of the arch depicts the victory lap of the chief plunderer, Emperor Titus \u2014 who, as an ambitious young general, crushed the Jews\u2019 revolt, leveled their Temple and brought enough booty and slaves back to Rome to finance an epic construction program that included the Colosseum.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve gazed on the Arch of Titus many times in previous trips, marveling at its muscular grace, recoiling from its brazen braggadocio. But it wasn\u2019t until I returned to Rome in October with Flavius Josephus as my guide that I fully grasped the significance of this monument in Jewish and Roman history.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe luckiest traitor ever,\u201d in the words of the historian Mary Beard, Flavius Josephus was a first-century Jewish general who threw in his lot with the Roman legions that destroyed his homeland. When Titus and his father, Vespasian, returned to Rome after the Judean war to inaugurate the Flavian dynasty \u2014 successor to the Julio-Claudian dynasty that Augustus founded and Nero destroyed \u2014 Josephus went with them. \u201cThe Jew of Rome,\u201d as the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger called him in an eponymous historical novel, spent the rest of his days living in luxury in Flavian Rome and writing the history of his times.<\/p>\n

Turncoat? Asylum seeker? Pragmatic visionary? Historians have long debated Josephus\u2019s motives and character. What\u2019s indisputable is that most of what is known about the violent encounter between Rome and Judea during this period comes out of his work. What\u2019s astonishing is that, with a sharp eye and a bit of research, you can still walk in Josephus\u2019s footsteps in contemporary Rome. Where but in the Eternal City is it possible to map a 2,000-year-old eyewitness account onto an intact urban fabric?<\/p>\n

The silvery morning light was soothing on my jet-lagged retinas, but traffic was already roaring along Via di San Gregorio as I waited by the gate of the Palatine Hill for Mirco Modolo, the archeologist-archivist who had agreed to take me on a walking tour of Flavian Rome. Today this artery is a rather featureless channel running between the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus \u2014 but Mirco, whose youth and reserve belie a tenacious erudition, reminded me that we were standing on the likely processional route chiseled into the marble of the Arch of Titus and inked even more indelibly on the pages of Josephus\u2019s book \u201cThe Jewish War.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the break of dawn,\u201d Josephus writes, \u201cVespasian and Titus issued forth, crowned with laurel and clad in the traditional purple robes, and proceeded to the Octavian walks [the Portico d\u2019Ottavia, now a soaring ruin at the edge of the Jewish ghetto].\u201d From the Portico d\u2019Ottavia to the top of the Capitoline Hill, where all proper Roman triumphal processions culminated, is \u2014 and was \u2014 a 10-minute stroll. But it is clear from Josephus\u2019s account that the imperial entourage took the long way around, circling counterclockwise around the outer precipices of the Palatine before entering the Forum on the side now dominated by the Colosseum.<\/p>\n

Mirco and I hiked halfway up the Palatine to a terraced ledge overlooking the Forum. \u201cSee those tourists following the lady with the flag?\u201d he asked. \u201cThey\u2019re walking on the Via Sacra \u2014 the main axis through the Forum that the Flavian procession traversed before ascending the Capitol.\u201d<\/p>\n

I tried to mentally erase the T-shirts and selfie sticks and resurrect the fallen columns. Vespasian and Titus, riding chariots, would have been two dabs of purple surging up the ramparts of the Capitoline through a sea of white togas. In their train, thousands of Jewish slaves shuffled with bowed heads while the heaps of plundered gold and silver bobbed above them, winking in the sun. \u201cLast of all the spoils,\u201d writes Josephus, \u201cwas carried a copy of the Jewish Law\u201d \u2014 the Torah.<\/p>\n

Josephus reveals exactly where these spoils ended up. Vespasian had a new temple \u2014 the Templum Pacis (Temple of Peace) \u2014 built adjacent to the Forum where \u201che laid up the vessels of gold from the temple of the Jews, on which he prided himself; but their Law and the purple hangings of the sanctuary he ordered to be deposited and kept in the palace.\u201d The palace, in ancient Rome, meant the Palatine (the word palace derives from the hill\u2019s name) \u2014 and so, as the autumn sunlight brightened from silver to gold, I mounted the imperial summit.<\/p>\n

After the buzzing, marble-strewn congestion of the Forum, the Palatine is like a country stroll. The huge squares of weedy grass and clumps of umbrella pines outlined in brick stubs could almost be farm fields \u2014 but, in fact, most of the stubs are remains of a colossal royal residence, the Domus Flavia, inaugurated by Vespasian and completed by his wicked, wildly ambitious second son, Domitian. Josephus, whose life spanned all three Flavian emperors, would have come to the Domus Flavia to pay homage to his patrons and perhaps murmur a prayer before the sacred scroll they had cached here.<\/p>\n

I lingered on the Palatine for half an hour, trying to conjure the nerve center of an empire from its ruins. Somewhere buried under the dandelions and broken shards stood an inlaid niche or marble alcove where the stolen Torah was caged like a captive king.<\/p>\n

Josephus\u2019 footsteps lie closer to the surface in the Templum Pacis. I\u2019d never heard of this monument, though I must have passed its ruins a score of times on the wide glaring Via dei Fori Imperiali (Street of the Imperial Fora) that Mussolini carved out as his own triumphal route between the Colosseum and Piazza Venezia. On my second morning in Rome, Josephus\u2019s text in hand, I stood by the railing near the Forum ticket booth and peered down at the ongoing excavations of the temple\u2019s sanctuary, arcades, fountains and gardens. Josephus notes that the Templum Pacis, built \u201cvery speedily in a style surpassing all human conception,\u201d housed not only the spoils of Jerusalem, but \u201cancient masterpieces of painting and sculpture \u2026 objects for the sight of which men had once wandered over the whole world.\u201d<\/p>\n

These masterpieces have long since vanished, but a wall of the temple still stands at the entrance of the sixth-century Basilica of Saints Cosmas and Damiano, now a Franciscan convent. One of the resident brothers, who humbly insisted on anonymity, showed me around. \u201cThe Templum Pacis was not only a shrine but a kind of cultural center,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re standing on the site of the temple\u2019s library where the Forma Urbis \u2014 an immense marble map of the city \u2014 was displayed.\u201d He pointed out a rusty bent spike that once fixed marble veneer to the rough-hewed stone. \u201cGo ahead and touch \u2014 it\u2019s been here since the first century A.D.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was itching to get down to the crypt, which covers part of the footprint of the Templum Pacis, but first we ducked into the basilica and took a moment to savor its principal artistic treasure: a shimmering 6th-century apse mosaic of Christ surfing roseate clouds flanked by saints. Perhaps I\u2019ve read too many thrillers, but as I gazed up at this solemnly joyous creation, I imagined a plumb line dropping from the tiles of Christ\u2019s outstretched hand and coming to rest, magically, on the exact spot where the menorah had been stashed \u2014 fanciful, but not impossible.<\/p>\n

The sacred loot has disappeared without a trace, but a shelf of thrillers could be spun from the theories, myths, sightings and urban legends about where it supposedly ended up: hidden in a cave, glittering on the altar of the Basilica of St. John Lateran, carted off to Constantinople, tossed in the Tiber, and, most recently, squirreled away in a sub-subbasement of the Vatican. Alessandro Viscogliosi, a professor of the history of architecture at the University of Rome whom I met toward the end of my stay, has a more plausible \u2014 though mundane \u2014 explanation: When the Templum Pacis burned in 191 A.D., the gold and silver vessels melted and were subsequently salvaged and recast, probably as coins.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one really knows what happened to the stuff,\u201d said Steven Fine, a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University in New York and the director of the Arch of Titus Project. \u201cThere\u2019s a common desire to establish continuity through things \u2014 and certainly the visual environment of Rome fosters this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Copies of Josephus\u2019s books likely burned in the fire as well, but the texts survived, thanks in large part to Christian scholars who embraced him for his early, impartial (but much disputed) mentions of the historical Jesus \u2014 the so-called Testimonium Flavianum \u2014 in \u201cJewish Antiquities.\u201d His fellow Jews, on the other hand, have until recently written Josephus off as a traitor and a Roman sycophant.<\/p>\n

Still, 1,917 years after his death around 100 A.D., Josephus remains one the most famous Jews of Rome \u2014 best-selling author, confidante of emperors, member of a religious community that was already well-established when he arrived in 71 A.D. \u2014 and is still going strong today with families tracing their lineage \u201cda Cesare,\u201d from the time of Caesar.<\/p>\n

I reflected on Josephus\u2019s life and legacy as I made a final trek to the Palatine at the end of my stay. The southwest edge of the hill commands an unforgettable view over the Circus Maximus to the skyline beyond, and in the luminous October haze I picked out the distinctive squared-off metallic dome of the Tempio Maggiore \u2014 the main Jewish synagogue \u2014 and beyond it, the majestic drum of St. Peter\u2019s. Roman, Jewish, Christian: Josephus\u2019s footsteps lead us through the time and place where these three spheres aligned most exuberantly, most surprisingly.
\n<\/p>\n

*This article was published in The New York Times, on March 28, 2018.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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