xiv Introduction
‘Judaism and Hellenism,’ ’’ ). We should strongly resist the tendency of
modern historiography to search for deeper reasons and ‘‘look to sources
other than the reigning Seleucid king himself for the explanation of a per-
secution carried out by royal command and by royal agents’’ (chapter , text
to n. ; cf.RNE, ). Instead, we should see the desecration of the Temple
in Jerusalem for what it was: in no sense syncretistic but the arbitrary impo-
sition of a pagan cult.
The reader of chapter , ‘‘Polybius between Greece and Rome’’ (),
where Millar denies the attribution of Roman sympathies to the historian,
cannot but recall Millar’s first book,A Studyof Cassius Dio(). In the span
of time separating the two, a Greek historian not only ceased to regard Rome
as the invader, but could become Roman himself while ‘‘staying Greek’’—
a fusion of cultures that could rightly be described as Hellenism. In similar
vein, the Greek city of the imperial period (chapter , ‘‘The Greek City in
the Roman Period,’’ ) ‘‘would be more correctly described as ‘Graeco-
Roman’: that is, as a fusion or mélange of languages and constitutions, types
of public entertainment, architectural forms, and religious institutions’’ (text
to n. ), detached from its place of birth, Greece and Asia Minor, and tran-
scending even the borders of the Empire—‘‘a symbol of the fact that in the
endGraecia captadid indeed imprison her captor.’’
The second part is rather heterogeneous and the least cohesive of the three,
but it is far from chaotic. All six chapters reveal the complex and subtle im-
pact of the Roman presence in the East, never to be dismissed, never to be lost
to sight, but always working in intricate and unexpected ways. Each of them
raises problems to which solutions and interpretations have been offered in
the past, solutions and interpretations that are now shown to be less than
satisfactory and sometimes patently wrong.
Chapter , ‘‘Reflections on the Trials of Jesus’’ (), is dedicated to Geza
Vermes, coeditor with Fergus Millar of the new Schürer.^6 Of all the chap-
ters in this volume, this is the most likely to give the reader a taste of what
it was like to be Fergus Millar’s student, to take lessons from him in how to
read an ancient text and in how to choose the more veridical version of the
course of events. In dealing with the trial of Jesus, ‘‘we must not proceed by
amalgamating data from all four gospels’’ nor, surprisingly, by weighing ar-
guments based on coherence and plausibility, but rather by choosing the one
that has the better grasp ‘‘on the realities of Palestine under Roman domi-
nation,’’ which in this case means the one that conforms ‘‘with the world as
. E. Schürer, G. Vermes, and F. Millar,The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus
Christ, ..–.., vols. I–III (Edinburgh, –).