ENEMIES OF ROME 61Why should such Romanized provincials be particularly hostile to Rome?
Romans naturally saw it as treachery – thus Velleius Paterculus described
the uprising led by Arminius, once his fellow offi cer, as a crime (2.118.2).
These men were at the forefront of the change coming over their society.
They appear to have become suddenly aware of the extent of that change
and its consequences. They took the last chance to reverse it.
Persuading the people to follow was not always easy. There is little
evidence that an abstract nationalism would have much attraction. It can be
reasonably assumed that appeal could always be turned to resentment at
taxation. Most evidence concerns manipulation of religion to whip up anti-
Roman emotion.
Such use of religion to comfort and sustain rebels should be distinguished
from any suggestion that revolt was caused by such religious factors. It is
certainly true that anti-Roman sentiment was expressed throughout the
empire in religious terms. Jews saw Rome as the fourth kingdom of the Book
of Daniel, which would in time perish. In one Alexandrian pagan martyr- act,
Isidore is portrayed as appealing to Serapis against Rome and the Jews.
Oracles that could foretell an emperor’s glory could as easily predict disaster,
although charges of maiestas might discourage wide publication of such
prophecies and temple authorities reserved anti-Roman miracles for the
protection of their own rights, as when the statue of Zeus at Olympia laughed
when Caligula tried to transport it to Rome (Suet. Cal. 57.1). In Egypt, the
Potter’s Oracle and Lamb’s Oracle and the Asclepius apocalypse preserved in
the Hermetic corpus were all copied in the early imperial period, and their
predictions of the victory of Egypt and her gods over foreigners may have
comforted the oppressed. But none of these religious notions led to an actual
uprising.^14 Roman belief that druids whipped up opposition to their
hegemony cannot be documented for any particular incident in Gaul or
Britain. The ideological misfi ts who took advantage of the asylum of temple
sanctuaries in the East to avoid the hand of the Roman state ( Epist. Apoll.
Ty. 65) were no threat to that state. Even the Jewish belief in the eventual
universal rule of the Jewish God and the coming of a messiah seems to have
had little infl uence on the outbreak of the revolt of AD 66–70, before and
during which messianic fi gures are conspicuously absent both in Jewish
sources (including Josephus’ writings) and in the account by Tacitus ( Hist. 5:
1–13), despite the prevalence of general messianic expectations. Jewish
religious susceptibilities led to riots at indecent exposure by a Roman soldier
in the Temple in Jerusalem (Jos. A.J. 20.108–12) and at the destruction of a
sacred scroll of the Pentateuch (Jos. A.J. 20.115–17), but not to revolt. On
the other hand, a messianic hope may have been an important element in the
Jewish uprising in Cyprus and in Cyrene in AD 115 (Dio 68.32.1–3), and
later rabbinic sources claim that some Jews saw Bar Kosiba (Kochba), the
leader of the rebellion of 132–135, as a messiah.^15
In most revolts, then, religious emotion functioned not as a cause of war
but as comfort and encouragement once war was underway. A priest led the