RELIGION 193of toleration, enunciated by Julius Caesar, confi rmed by Augustus and
carried on by Claudius, was not a response to the antiquity of the Jewish
religion and the steadfastness with which it was clung to by its adherents,
though these were given due acknowledgement. It was from political
considerations that toleration was adopted and later abandoned in favour
of confrontation.
Toleration of the Jews had its origin in an approach to the Romans by
envoys of Judas Maccabee in 161 BC after Antiochus IV’s unprecedented
attack on the Jewish religion. The Romans were interested in embarrassing
and weakening Syria, and agreed to a declaration of friendship. In the
following century, the Jews lent valuable military assistance fi rst to Caesar
and subsequently to Octavian in the civil wars, moved by outrage at
Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem and violation of the Holy of Holies, and by
the diplomatic necessity of rallying to the victor of Actium. The outcome
was a series of offi cial edicts and letters to Greek cities in the East instructing
them to permit resident Jews to observe their traditional religion. These
documents were the fruit of brilliant diplomacy on the Jewish side, not
Roman initiative. In time, moreover, memories of Jewish favours to Rome’s
rulers grew dim and were replaced by a current perception, spiced with
prejudice, of the nuisance- value of Jews both in their homeland and abroad.
From the Roman point of view, the Jews proved themselves congenitally
incapable of either cooperating with the Roman provincial authorities
within their home territory, or coexisting peaceably with Greeks in the cities
of the eastern Mediterranean.
Continuity and change in the
offi cial religion
Did the Roman authorities in the period of the Principate show any interest
in appropriating foreign cults that were in principle compatible with their
own? How accessible was the state religion to foreign infl uences?
The Romans are often credited not only with a tolerance of foreign cults
in their local setting, but also a readiness to adopt them as their own. Yet
under the empire no new gods were given offi cial status as gods of the
Roman state before the emperor Caracalla secured the admission of the
Egyptian Isis and Serapis in the early third century.
Roman receptiveness to alien religions is a feature of the early and middle
Republic and of no other period.^13 The early Romans expanded their
Pantheon in two main ways: they ‘captured’ the tutelary deity of an enemy
state (typically by the ritual of evocatio ), or they ‘summoned’ a prestigious
foreign divinity (Asclepius, Magna Mater) to cope with a national emergency
(epidemic, invasion). The series of innovations came to a climax but also to
an end with the importation of the Great Mother of the gods, Cybele or