“Why,” he asked, “are you giving me such a large sum unasked?”
“To strengthen our friendship,” I replied honestly. “But also because I know you can use this money in the right way if evil times befall. Naturally may all the gods of Rome protect us from such things.”
The money was still there, for he was a miserly man. But he knew how to behave when his time had come. It was he who got the Praetorians to abandon Nero when he realized his own skin was in danger. So at first no one wished him ill, and Galba received him well. It was Otho who had him murdered since he felt all too insecure on the tide of temporary popularity. I have always regretted his quite unnecessary death, for he deserved to see better days after his troubled youth. During Nero’s last years he lived under constant oppression so that he could not sleep and became even harder than before.
But why do I think about him? My most important task in besieged Jerusalem was accomplished in discovering that the temple treasure was still there and intact. Thanks to the completeness of our siege, I knew that not even a rat with a gold piece in its mouth could escape from Jerusalem.
You must understand that because of you and your future, I could not offer Vespasian the loan of the contents of my twenty iron chests in Caesarea to help him to the Imperial throne. I trusted his honesty, but Rome’s finances are in confusion, and civil war imminent. I had to secure my expectations which was the only reason why I risked my life and went to Jerusalem.
Naturally I also collected information on the city’s defenses, on the walls, catapults, food and water supplies, for that too would be to my advantage in my report to Vespasian. The city had more than sufficient water from underground cisterns. Right at the beginning of the siege, Vespasian had hopefully cut off the aqueduct which Procurator Pontius Pilate had had built forty years earlier, and which the Jews had opposed with all their might as they did not want to be dependent on water brought in from outside. This also proved how long the revolt had been prepared, and how long the Jews had awaited a favourable opportunity.
But the city had no stores of provisions. I saw shadow-thin mothers with bony children in their arms, trying in vain to squeeze a last drop of milk from their breasts. I felt sorry for the old people too, for they were given no rations. The fanatics bearing arms and fortifying the walls needed all the food.
At the meat market I saw that a pigeon and a rat were treasures paid for in their weight in silver. There were whole flocks of ewes at the temple for the daily sacrifices to the Jews’ bloodthirsty Jehovah, but the starving crowd did not even try to touch them. They scarcely needed guarding, for they were sacred animals. The priests and members of the Council were, of course, still well-fed.
The sufferings of the Jewish people oppressed me, for in the scales of the inexplicable god, the tears of a Jew presumably weigh as much as those of a Roman, and the tears of children more than those of adults, regardless of language and color of skin. But it was necessary to prolong the siege for political reasons, and the Jews owed their fate to their own stubbornness.
Any Jew who even mentioned capitulation or negotiating with the Romans was immediately executed and I think ended in the meat market, if I may give my own personal opinion. Josephus in his account, and only to arouse compassion, mentions only a few mothers who ate their own children. These things were so common in Jerusalem that even he was forced to mention them, to maintain at least some kind of reputation for historical accuracy.
Later I offered Josephus a reasonable fee for the edition of The Jewish War which my publishing house sold, although we had a legal right to publish it. But Josephus refused the money and in the way all authors do, simply complained about the cuts which I had had made to be able to sell the book better, and my assurances would not convince him that these cuts only improved his intolerably long-winded book. Authors are always conceited.
When we had agreed on what kind of misleading information on the city’s defenses I should bear to Vespasian and the ways in which the Julius Caesar synagogue in Rome could secredy support the Jewish revolt without any risk to themselves, the Jewish Council let me out of the city. Blindfolded, I was taken along an underground passage and pushed out into a quarry among rotting corpses. I scraped the skin off my knees and elbows crawling about in the quarry, and it was not very pleasant to trip and find one’s hand in a swollen corpse, for the Jews had forbidden me to remove the bandage from my eyes until a certain time had gone by. Otherwise they threatened to shoot an arrow straight through my body, without mercy.
Meanwhile they covered the opening to the secret passage so well that we had great difficulty finding it again. But it was finally discovered, since I had to have every hole blocked. The way I returned opened our eyes and taught us to search for outlets from the city in the most unlikely places. With promises of rewards I got the legionaries to dig them out. Nevertheless, in an entire year we found only three. But for some time after my return from Jerusalem I was afraid that the guarantees for your future were lessening. But I need not have worried. The treasure was still there when Titus captured the city, and Vespasian paid his debts.
But thus I spent a whole year in the East, uneasily circling around Vespasian before the time was ripe.
Book XIV
I made use of the intervening period to prepare my case with Vespasian in devious ways and he no doubt took the hint, but he was a cautious man. Nero died the following spring, that is, if he is dead. Within a year, Rome was ruled by three different Emperors, Galba, Otho and Vitellius. In some ways by four, if one counts the shameless coup d’etat in Rome the eighteen-year-old Domitian performed at his own father’s expense. But that was swiftly dispensed with.
It amused me that it was Otho who became Emperor after Galba. Poppaea would have been the Imperial consort after all, even had she not divorced Otho, so the prophecy was doubly confirmed. I am not superstitious, but every sensible person should occasionally keep an eye on the signs and omens.
Vitellius then took over the reins, supported by the German legions, as soon as he learned of Galba’s murder. I think the reason for Otho’s swift downfall was that he was bold enough to steal the sacred sword of your ancestor, Julius Caesar, from the Mars temple, which he had neither a legal nor a moral right to do. That right is yours, Julius Antonianus Claudius, since you are directly descended from both the Julian and Claudian lineages, as were all the Julian Emperors. Fortunately the sword was returned and was once again dedicated in the Mars temple.
Otho’s legions were defeated at Bedriacum and Otho committed suicide, for he did not wish to prolong the civil war although he had fresh troops to draw on. His last letter was written to Nero’s widow, Statilia Messalina, and in it he regretted that he could not fulfill his promise to marry her. His body and his testimony, he said in this letter, which for a commander and an Emperor was most inappropriately emotional, he left in Statilia’s care. In this way Statilia had, within a very short time, two Imperial graves to care for.
It is enough to say of Paulus Vitellius that he had spent his early youth in Capri as companion to Emperor Tiberius. I gladly acknowledge his famous father’s services to the State, but Paulus was so depraved that his own father did not even wish to give him the office of Proconsul. He managed to secure the favors of three Emperors by his vices rather than his virtues. Nero counted him among his friends, but I was never friendly with him. Indeed, I avoided his company as far as was possible.
His only honorable action was when he defied the Senate by daring to celebrate a sacrifice to Nero on Mars field in the presence of all the colleges of priests, after which, at the banquet he gave, he asked Rome’s most famous cittern-player to sing only songs which Nero had written and composed, and applauded them as enthusiastically as he had when Nero was alive. In this way he made good the insulting letter which Propraetor Julius Vindex had written to Nero and which became the cause of the civil war. In his letter Vindex called Nero a poor cittern-player, for he knew this would offend him more than any other accusation.