POLITICS AN DSOCIETY 43now Lebanon, and also a group of otherwise unidentified generals. One would
have expected Hyrcanus to have inherited his mother’s patronage of the Phari-
sees, and Aristobulus therefore to have taken up his father’s Sadducees, yet
these religious groups play next to no role in Josephus’s accounts of the civil
war. The princes needed the support of generals and of others who could
deliver military manpower, not of Torah scholars.
In 66B.C.E., the Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey) in-
vaded Asia Minor, defeated Mithridates VI, the Asian king who had expelled
the Romans from the district, and accepted the surrender of his son-in-law,
the Armenian king Tigranes. In 65, a Roman detachment arrived in Syria,
and the warring brothers at once began to compete for the favor of the new
regional superpower. (Meanwhile, a contingent of Judaean aristocrats tried to
convince the Romans to remove the Hasmoneans altogether.) Pompey even-
tually backed Hyrcanus and in 63B.C.E. marched into Jerusalem and captured
Aristobulus. He then named Hyrcanus high priest (but not king), removed
the Gree kcities conquered by Alexander Yannai from Jewish rule, and re-
stored their Gree kconstitutions.
Scholars often treat the arrival of the Romans in Palestine in 63B.C.E.asa
watershed in Jewish history. But little changed for the first 140 years of Roman
rule. The Romans were more interventionist than their Hellenistic predeces-
sors but initially preferred to rule through local agents. The Romans made
many changes small and large in the administrative organization of Jewish
Palestine and meddled tirelessly in the affairs of the Jewish ruling classes, but
they allowed the Jews to remain a more or less autonomous nation centered
on the Jerusalem temple and governed by the laws of the Torah. This changed
only in the later first centuryC.E.
In any case, the short-term effect of the Roman conquest was to intensify
the Jewish civil war. The Roman Republic itself collapsed into factional war-
fare, which among other things allowed each of the Jewish parties to have the
support of one of the competing Roman senatorial factions. On the whole,
the Hyrcanian party enjoyed the upper hand, largely because of the talent of
Hyrcanus’s leading partisan, Antipater, at the all-important skill of making
friends with whichever Roman senatorial warlord was more powerful at the
moment. However, in 40, the Parthians too kadvantage of the chaos in the
Roman world by attacking and conquering Syria and Palestine. Antipater’s
sons Herod and Phasael tried but failed to win the Parthians’ favor. The Parthi-
ans named Antigonus, son of Aristobulus, king and dragged Hyrcanus off to
Mesopotamia, after his nephew had sliced off his ear, thereby rendering him
unfit to serve as high priest ever again. Phasael meanwhile committed suicide
in the course of battle and Herod escaped to Rome.
There, the senate declared Herod king, without specifying a constituency
or a territory, and assigned him the tas kof reconquering Palestine from the
Parthians. Herod gradually conquered the Palestinian hinterland—the Jewish