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us for their appearance in the New Testament. Pontius Pilate was corrupt, bad-tempered and tactless; Felix, who imprisoned Paul and whom he disdained to bribe, was
bent; Festus, who wanted to acquit Paul, was straight; the worst was Cestius Gallus, the legate of Syria whose behaviour at Passover in Jerusalem in AD 66 provoked the
Jewish War.
    The Jewish War, which lasted six years – a long time if the relative strength of the parties is considered, especially since the Jews spent much of their energy
fighting each other – was painful and exasperating for the Romans and catastrophic for the Jews. If Josephus is to be believed, 9 and there is no one
else to turn to since the usual sources – Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio Cassius – are either brief, silent, contemptuous or not extant, the Jews brought their final solution on
themselves.
    Josephus worked on his
History of the Jewish War against the Romans
from the comfort of a large house in Rome, a large income and the friendship of the Emperors Vespasian and his son
Titus. His objectivity was therefore dimmed by his circumstances, but the history is exciting and readable and has been a steady seller for nearly 2,000 years. It was especially popular in
Victorian households.
    Aged nineteen, son of a middle-class Jewish family with property in Jerusalem, Josephus, having studied both the Sadducees and the Essenes, became a Pharisee. In the war he was commander in
Galilee, one of the six regions into which the cappointedountry had been divided, but at the Siege of Jotapata, which he was defending, he changed sides – like John Churchill, first Duke of
Marlborough, on the eve of the Battle of Sidgwick, but after more thought and with more copious explanation. Josephus maintains in his history that the Romans held him in such esteem that they
thought the war would be virtually over when they secured his person. He surrendered to ‘an old friend’, the tribune Nicanor, having addressed his comrades-in-arms as follows:
‘Why, my friends, are we so anxious to commit suicide? Why shouldwe make those best of friends, body and soul, part company?’ So Josephus opted out of a provincial
war into Roman history. On meeting Vespasian, he prophesied for him the imperial purple and, if he is to be believed, became one of Vespasian’s ‘kitchen cabinet’, steering him in
the ‘year of the four Emperors’ towards his destiny.
    Meanwhile the war, even after Josephus’ defection to the Romans, continued. The war had begun well enough for the Jews, who had taken advantage of the disarray and rebelliousness in the
provinces, caused by Nero’s rackety behaviour towards the end of his reign, to attack the occupying power. (When concentrating, Nero had been capable of quite effective foreign policy.) One
Sabbath day in September AD 67 the legate Cestius, a greedy bloodthirsty brute, was booted out of Jerusalem, losing in the process 5,300 infantry and 480 cavalry. Among the
dead was the commander of the 6th Legion. Jewish losses were negligible. Romans would not have been astonished by the success of the Israeli army though they would have been surprised by its
discipline and its unity with the state, for though the Jews of their day fought with daring and often fanatical courage, they were dangerously disorganized. After the Roman débâcle
‘many prominent Jews fled from the city, like swimmers from a sinking ship’ (Josephus), and here we must distinguish the factions, who hated each other as much as they hated the
Romans.
    The Sadducees were the hereditary high priests, no more religious than the
noblesse
of the
ancien régime
who monopolized the plump offices of the Church in France. They were
property-owners who employed hard men to collect their rents. From their palaces on Mount Zion, 10 special only because it was the
highest point in the city and attracted the first rain, they could walk along a covered way to the Temple. The Sadducees, perhaps because they