ENEMIES OF ROME 67ADDENDUM
M. Goodman
There has not been a great deal of work over the past twenty fi ve years on the
general subject of political opposition to Rome in the provinces, as can be seen from
the useful survey in Woolf (2011a). Far more attention has been paid to how and
why provincials accepted Roman rule, from Zanker (1988) on the creation and
spread of imperial myths to Ando (2000) on the willingness of provincials to buy
into this consensus, and Lendon (1997) on the use of status within the system as a
means for the imperial state to encourage cooperation.
Quite a lot has been written on the processes that allowed local identities to
persist alongside integration and accommodation in particular provinces, sometimes
taking a lead explicitly from subaltern studies (Woolf 1998, on Gaul; Mattingly
2006, on Britain; Goldhill 2001, on Greece). Notable among studies emphasising the
persistence of local cultures are Mitchell (1993), on the persistence of local languages
and religious ideas and practices, and Millar (1993), with an exploration of the way
that in the Near East local identities could sometimes be defi ned by Rome and
expressed in Greek alongside pre- existing identities and semitic languages.
Of the individual revolts that have been subjected to intensive study, by far the
most discussed have been the revolts of the Jews. The overall issue of the causes of
Jewish rebelliousness have been much analysed, with increasing attention to the
extent that Jewish marginality in the Roman world may have been a product, rather
than a cause, of rebellion (Goodman 2007; on the Bar Kokhba war, see Schäfer
2003). The detailed politics of the Jewish revolt of AD 66–70 are subjected to intense
scrutiny in Price (1992). Much work has been done on analysing the reliability of
Josephus as the main source on which all narratives of this revolt rely, with some
expressing great scepticism about the possibility of extracting useful information
from an historian with such a complex political career and both the motivation and
skill to mislead (Mason 2005, Edmondson, Mason and Rives 2005, Popovic 2011).
The issue has by no means been resolved, and attempts to study the revolt by relying
primarily on archaeology (Berlin and Overman 2002) or numismatics (McLaren
2003) do not altogether solve the problem. Since Josephus is the only provincial
author to have left for us a detailed account of the anti-Roman uprising in which he
participated, clarity on his reliability would be very valuable, and the publication of
a new detailed commentary on his work (Mason 2001-) is encouraging further work
on this issue.
On the extent to which Jews after the Bar Kokhba war of AD 132–135 opted out
of wider Roman society, Schwartz (2001) presents a novel thesis, based on the
paucity of distinctively Jewish artefacts in the archaeology of Palestine in the late
second and the third century, that almost all the Jewish population of Palestine
(rabbis being the exception) assimilated into the wider culture of the region until
encouraged to express their identity in religious forms within a Christian Roman
empire from the fourth century AD.