A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors Read Online Free PDF Page B

Crassus, a slave trainer and dealer on an enormous scale, bought houses when they were on fire at a cut-down price – otherwise he refused to put them out. He financed Caesar and was the third
man in the triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey. After four years Crassus defeated Spartacus and lined the Appian Way with the crucified bodies of rebellious slaves.
    Spartacus passed into Roman folklore as a bogeyman, like Napoleon, and was used to frighten the children. Voltaire described his struggle as ‘possibly the only just war in history’.
But history belongs to the conquerors. Roman history was played against a backdrop – painted bloody and brooding, occasionally lit by charm and consideration – of innumerable slaves.
They were essential to the life of their masters and their lives were not always a living death. They were also essential to the economy of the Empire and without them the roads, bridges, ports,
aqueducts, amphitheatres (though some were built by soldiers), triumphal arches, markets and public baths could not have been built or maintained. Maintenance is the essence of civilization and
without slavery Rome could not have been civilized.

THE ROMANS
AND THEIR JEWS
    The Romans may not have liked their Jews but they never attacked them with that committed hatred characteristic of Christian (and other) rulers in Europe from the Middle Ages
to the first half of the twentieth century. Judaism, one of many cults around for Romans looking for fresh religious experience, was respected; Jews were not.
    The religion was puzzling and unintelligible, the habits of its practitioners distasteful and inconvenient. ‘They worship nothing but the clouds and the sky . . . they despise Roman laws .
. . they have this man Moses . . . they smell of candles and tunny fish tails . . . they practise circumcision . . .’ (wrongly supposed to increase sexual potency), complained Juvenal. And on
the seventh day, the Sabbath, they absolutely refused to budge, rendering them unsuitable for military service. ‘No Jew on the Sabbath,’ wrote Augustus to Tiberius (getting it wrong),
‘fasted as seriously as I did . . .’
    Throughout our period, from Julius Caesar to the Emperor Nero (both venerated by the Jews), their privileges and exemptions were confirmed and honoured throughout the Empire, and, when
challenged by officials or rival subjects, were usually upheld. The annual levy of a drachma, paid by Jewry in the Diaspora to the temple in Jerusalem, was transmitted intact, even during a hard
currency crisis in Rome. Acenturion who raised his skirt and farted, to show his contempt, in the Temple precinct was reduced to the ranks. Roman standards bearing eagles, or
bulls, had to be covered when paraded through Jerusalem.
    Recent excavations in Aphrodisias, 5 near Smyrna in Turkey, have revealed an inscription in the stalls of the amphitheatre which reads, ‘reserved for
His Imperial Majesty’s loyal Jewish subjects’. Aphrodisias, a city as large as Pompeii, was destroyed by earthquakes in the seventh century and vanished from history. Like every other
town in the Empire, Aphrodisias had its quota (though there were no restrictions as that word implies) of Jews, and an inscription in creamy white marble, for which the place was famous, lists
seventy, mostly with non-Jewish-sounding names, which suggests proselytes – on whom, again, there was no restriction.
    Of the 4 million Jews in the Roman world (more, relatively, than in ours), half had emigrated, mostly voluntarily and happily, from Judaea. One explanation for their numbers may be that unlike
many peoples in the ancient world they did not practise infanticide. They spoke the language of the country where they had settled – often Greek, though they were not Hellenized. They could
read, but not necessarily understand – never a rabbinical requirement – the law and their prayers in Hebrew. Like overseas Chinese in Europe today, but emphatically not in the