92 A History of Judaism
Mediterranean by the end of the third century. From 200 bce Roman
power spread rapidly east, using a combination of military force and
diplomacy to weaken Hellenistic rulers first in Macedon and then in
Asia Minor. By the early first century bce Rome was intervening fre-
quently in the Levant. In 31 bce, with the defeat of the Ptolemaic queen
Cleopatra VII of Egypt, the last of the kingdoms founded by Alexan-
der’s generals passed into Roman control.
This expansion of Roman power was not through chance. From the
late sixth to the first century bce, the constitution of the Roman Repub-
lic required power to be shared between aristocrats who competed for
popular favour primarily by appeal to their military achievements. Each
new conquest encouraged rival politicians to seek further regions to
bring under Roman domination. At precisely the point that Roman
expansion reached Judaea in the mid- first century bce, the success of
the Roman state was nearly the cause of its own undoing. The glory and
wealth accumulated by individual generals in foreign wars encouraged
their ambitions to retain power beyond the terms of the commands to
which they had been appointed by the Roman people. The civil war
between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar which began in 49 bce
started a protracted military struggle between competing Roman aristo-
crats into which the whole Mediterranean world was drawn. In 32 bce
Octavian, Caesar’s great- nephew and heir, emerged victorious, taking
the name Augustus, ‘Revered’, in 27 bce. The formal constitution of the
Roman state remained largely unaltered, but Augustus was in effect an
autocrat and Rome became an empire.
It took time for these geopolitical changes after Alexander’s conquests
to have an impact on the Jews. The Persian empire had shown no inter-
est in interfering in the local customs of the peoples it ruled, and we
have seen (Chapter 1) that Josephus recorded a tradition that Alexander
visited Jerusalem during his campaign and expressed his admiration for
the Jewish God and his Temple. But Alexander had conquered an empire
far too extensive to control simply with his Macedonian followers, and
both he and the rulers who succeeded him chose to create a new ruling
elite unified not only by obedience to the ruler but also by common alle-
giance to Greek language and culture. Many new cities were founded
with Greek colonists, often based on existing Greek trading settlements,
and numerous Greek cities, such as Scythopolis, Hippos and Gadara,
are attested in the neighbourhood of Judaea by the end of the third cen-
tury bce. But Alexander and his successors also encouraged native elites