158 CHAPTER FOUR
I Justus, Leontes’ son, lie dead, son of Sappho,
I who have plucked the fruit of all wisdom
have left the light, my poor parents eternally mourning,
and my brothers, alas, in... Besara (= Beth Shearim).
And I, Justus, have gone to Hades... lie here,
with many of my people [?], for so mighty Fate willed.
Courage, Justus, no one is immortal.It would be an amusing and instructive irony if thesophiewhose fruits
Justuspluckedturnedouttobethebiblical“treeoflife,”theTorah.Although
there is no way of being certain, it is perhaps more likely that it was rhetoric
or some other skill. The importance of this assemblage is that it indicates
something of the tastes and interests of the large landowners of a big country
town in Jewish Lower Galilee. Like the elites of Tiberias and Sepphoris who
put images of gods on their cities’ coins and decorated their houses with rich
mythologicalmosaics,someoftheruralelites,too—anditisworthremember-
ing that Beth Sheari mwas a big town that probably aspired to municipal
status, which it seems never to have received—participated hopefully in the
common urban culture of the high imperial east. There is in Justus’s tomb
no indication of his Jewishness; he may have studied Greek rhetoric. He was
almostcertainlyburiedina sarcophagusdecoratedwithmythologicalscenes,
and he was certainly commemorated in a (rather rough) epigram whose only
religious content is its invocations of Hades and Moira. Yet Justus “lay with
many of his [Jewish? Besaran?] people.” The sarcophagi from Beth Shearim
catacomb 20, and perhaps the lintel in catacomb 19, show that even Jews
who utilized the symbolic language of Judaism in their burials—a language
that around 300, the date of most of the burials, was just beginning to de-
velop—still participated, or aspired to participate, in aspects of the common
urban culture.
The Jews and Urban Culture: A SummaryInthesecondandthirdcenturies,the“Jewish”citiesofPalestineandthelarger
villages in their vicinity were normal participants in the urban culture of the
Roman east, a culture that was suffused with pagan religiosity. This participa-
tion was not forced on the cities by the emperor but was in part the response
of the city elites to conditions created by the end of Jewish autonomy and the
imposition of direct Roman rule, among other factors. In other words, we
shouldneithersentimentalize norhastentocondemn(depending onourpre-
dispositions) the decision of the city elites, for the freedo mwith which it was
madewasvariouslyconstrained:surelytheviolenceoftheRomanstateplayed
a large, if indirect, role in the “normalization” of life in the Palestinian cities.