60 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
peace within the Roman state and that the society that had been destroyed
in Judaea could safely be rebuilt.^11
Josephus’ history, when combined with other evidence from Judaea and
especially the religious texts preserved in the Christian Apocrypha and the
Dead Sea scrolls, provides quite a good insight into contemporary Jewish
understanding of the motives for revolt. Josephus blamed the tactlessness or
worse of Roman governors and, on the Jewish side, the rashness of peasants,
bandits and the urban poor. It is probably signifi cant that, despite his
apologetic for Judaism, he felt impelled to implicate in the revolt a certain
form of Judaism, which he dubbed the ‘Fourth Philosophy’ in order to
distinguish it from the three more respectable trends of the day (among
those Jews who espoused any particular philosophy at all); according to
Josephus, the Fourth Philosophy originated in AD 6, when Judaea fi rst came
under direct Roman rule, and taught the anarchist belief that Jews should
have no ruler but God ( B.J. 2.118; A.J. 18.4–10, 23). Other Jewish texts
provide similar religious explanations; struggle against Rome heralded the
last days when the Messiah would come to redeem Israel ( 4 Ezra 11.1–12.
34). Even if religious explanations may not by themselves account for the
revolt (see below), this does not diminish the signifi cance of Jews at the time
thinking that they could.^12
The extant Roman and provincial comments about revolt surveyed above
do not provide a very satisfactory model to explain why rebellion occurred
in some provinces at some times and not at others, and it is reasonable for a
modern historian with the benefi t of hindsight to look for common patterns
that may have been less obvious to contemporaries. Certain factors stand
out in all the revolts begun soon after conquest by Rome. In Pannonia and
Dalmatia in AD 6, Germany in AD 9, Britain in AD 60 and on the Rhine in AD
69 apparently dependable natives from among the local ruling class joined
the rebels, in each case under the leadership of a charismatic fi gure. The
revolts took place in interior regions just getting a real sense of the
signifi cance for their society of Roman rule, with the imposition of money
taxes and the continued presence of rapacious middlemen in the collection
of tribute. In most cases the rebel leaders belonged to the generation of the
local elite that came after that which had known defeat and conquest by
Rome. They had acquired self- confi dence in Roman service as commanders
of auxiliary forces. They took advantage of a new sense of communal
solidarity engendered, ironically enough, by the service of natives of
each region in locally recruited cohorts and by their joint care of the altars
of the imperial cult set up, for example, at Lugdunum in 15 BC and
at Cologne. Such altars were established precisely to engender such unity
in the hope that this would foster loyalty to the emperor, but the imperial
cult, which in good times focussed provincial loyalty on the state, was in
bad times the target of the rebels’ loathing, and the temple of Divus
Claudius at Colchester was an early victim of Boudicca’s uprising (Tac.
Ann 14. 31).^13