Florus on the Jews

Publius Annuis Florus was a minor Roman historian and a friend of the Emperor Hadrian who wrote four works that we know of: one of which mentions the jews in passing. This mention occurs in his best-known work 'Epitome of Roman History', which is a series of short historical sketches of important junctures (mainly wars and rebellions) in Roman history until the death and deification of the Emperor Augustus. From what little we know of Florus: the main source of his work was Livy's 'Books on the Foundation of the City', which we know better today as 'The Early History of Rome'.

Florus mentions the jews specifically in his history and makes quite an acerbic comment about them.

To wit:

'Furthermore, turning his army southwards, he [Pompey] passed through the Lebanon in Syria and through Damascus, and bore the Roman standards though the famous scented groves and woods of frankincense and balm. He found the Arabs ready to carry out any orders which he might give. The Jews attempted to defend Jerusalem; but this also he entered and saw the great secret of that impious nation laid open to view, the heavens beneath a golden vine. Being appointed arbitrator between the two brothers who were disputing the throne, he decided in favour of Hyrancus and threw Aristobulus into prison, because he was seeking to restore his power.' (1)

We can in the above passage that Florus' mention of the jews stands out quite clearly from his mention of the other peoples of the Middle East when he clearly states that in the Arabs were a cooperative and otherwise civilized people who quickly recognised the new political reality seeking to work with - rather than pointlessly resist - the power of Rome. The jews by contrast pig-headedly refused to recognise the new political reality and tried to fight a war against the global superpower that was Rome.

The origin of this pig-headedness Florus clearly locates in the jewish religion in so far in that their view the jews were the chosen people who were divinely ordained to rule over the world and for whom bending the knee to non-jews was the ultimate admission of inferiority. For pious jews therefore to fight with Rome was a kind of holy war against heathens and idolaters who were lesser beings than the chosen nation of Yahweh. The fact they were near certain to lose a war with Rome apparently never occurred to them presumably on the logic that Yahweh would intervene on their behalf as he had done in the legends of the Torah.

However, Yahweh was to send no Messiah to aid the jews and the lack of celestial reinforcements was even more evident: even so the jews pointlessly fought on until Pompey the Great took the city of Jerusalem. When Pompey entered the Temple of Solomon as Antiochus Epiphanes has done decades before he found - to his evident horror as Florus implies - that the jews worshipped - to his mind - quite literally nothing (i.e., they were atheists in Graeco-Roman eyes).

The 'Golden Ass' mentioned by Poseidonius had disappeared - as this was now the time of dominance by Yahweh purists as opposed to the old-fashion semi-polytheistic priesthood - and nothing had been put in its place. Instead there was just a blank space: this is what Florus means when he calls the jews 'impious' in so far as they worship quite literally nothing (and hence impious because they make a mockery of all existing religious rituals). They have no god, they do not sacrifice to him, they instead use a former temple to worship the thin air and suggest that because they say so: an almighty god exists.

We can also see this thought in Juvenal who rightly berates the jews because they 'worship nothing but the clouds' (2) and in Dio Cassius who states that the jews 'never had any statue of their god even in Jerusalem itself' and weirdly believe their god 'to be unnameable and invisible'. (3)

In essence then Florus is calling the jews the most absurd of all nations in that they are irreligious to an ancient polytheistic perspective and that in spite of this irreligious nature - which would logically make them pragmatists and relativists - the jews persist on fighting fanatically for their belief in nothing but air (i.e., they are religious zealots not realists).

Thus we can see that Florus is actually suggesting that the jews are not brave warriors, freedom fights or even very bright, but rather are a people who have no philosophy, no religion and even less common sense. Or put in typically Roman language: the jews are - much as Tacitus earlier described them - (4) the epitome of the uncivilised barbarian and everything that was bad in the world.

In essence then to Florus the jews are the stupidest of all men who - like Cervantes' Don Quixote or Voltaire's Candide - think they are in fact the best!

References

(1) Florus Epit. 1:40.29-30

(2) Juv. 14

(3) Cassius Dio 37:17.3

(4) Tac. Hist. 5:3-8