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7. TO RULE THE WORLD

Pontius Pilate's career in Judea illustrates the success and the dilemma of Roman provincial administration in the early imperial age. In the Rome of the Republic, the provinces had been governed by Senators elected (by the Senate itself) to one year terms; the Senator/governor's incentive was to loot as much as possible from the provincial candy-store before the term was up. At the end of the Republican age, Rome's reformed, fully professional army brought huge new territories, from Syria (including Judea) to Gaul, under Roman control. Augustus prevented the institutionalized looting of these new conquests by organizing many of them as imperial provinces under his direct control; those under senatorial governance were made subject to his overriding power of imperium. The rise of the equestrian order under Augustus and Tiberius was partly in response to the need for a class of qualified professional administrators for this new imperial system. In many ways Pilate and his equestrian patron Sejanus represented "the best and the brightest" of their time, a new meritocracy called to govern a new empire.

Virgil captured the guiding ethos of this new empire in his famous lines from the sixth book of the Aeneid: "Roman, remember, these are your arts, to rule the world, to impose peace, to spare the defeated and crush the proud." Those provincials willing to accept Roman dominion -- and the taxation that went with it -- were offered the velvet glove: Complete freedom of religion, except when religion advocated rebellion; the preservation wherever possible of local governments; in many cases, Roman citizen rights; the general prosperity the pax Romana encouraged. Those provincials who resisted got the iron fist of the imperial legions.

Judea was in many ways an exemplar of the velvet glove approach. The Romans had left the entire Jewish Temple apparatus and its associated civil administration intact, superimposing on it Roman taxes and a Roman governor who maintained civil order and judged civil and criminal matters involving non-Jews or Jews who were Roman citizens (the apostle Paul was an example of the latter). But Judea had also experienced the brutal suppression of the 4 B.C. uprising, when the Roman governor of Syria, Quinctilius Varus, had burned entire cities, sold most of their inhabitants sold into slavery, and crucified thousands.

Tiberius Caesar clearly preferred the velvet glove. He seemed actually to take seriously the responsibility of ruling most of the world, deliberating his decisions at such length that he maddened his contemporaries; possibly it was these pressures that caused him to retire to Capri in 26 B.C. and turn over so much of his day-to-day authority to Sejanus. Tacitus wrote of Tiberius: He "was happier to have established peace by prudent negotiation than by victory in battle.... Nothing made him so uneasy as the fear that a treaty might be disturbed."

Undoubtedly Tiberius' anger at Pilate over the shields incident reflected the fear of just such a disturbance. A relentless scrutinizer of the bottom line, Tiberius had every reason to be pleased with the status quo in Judea. His costs there were minimal: A contingent of 3000 auxiliaries, whose wages were only a third of their legionary counterparts; a governor who could add to his staff only with Tiberius' approval (the governor of an Imperial province did not have the independent power to delegate authority). As long as Tiberius could maintain peace and collect the taxes with this bare-bones operation, the return on his investment was staggering. For an annual outlay that was probably well below 2 million sesterces, the public treasury received annual revenues of about 30 million sesterces -- about one fourth of Rome's entire military budget.

Apparently Tiberius' chief advisor, Lucius Aelius Sejanus, believed that these profits came at the risk of undermining Roman prestige. Philo credits Sejanus with a systematic anti-Semitic policy (Flaccus 1, Gaius 159-160). Sejanus' "slander," Philo says, was responsible for Tiberius' decision to banish the Jews from Rome in 19 C.E. The pretext for this act, according to Josephus (Ant 18.81-84), was the duping by a Jewish confidence artist of a single Roman matron of high rank, who had converted to Judaism; the con man had embezzled money and gifts she gave him to send to the Temple in Jerusalem. Sejanus may have resented not only the burgeoning Jewish community in Rome, but also the social phenomenon illustrated in Josephus' story of the duped proselyte -- the growing influence of the Jewish religion and culture throughout the Mediterranean.

Many of Pilate's provocations in Judea were symbolic acts that appear part of a concerted if often subtle "culture war." So we have the affair of the standards; Pilate also minted coins with pagan symbols. The coins struck by Pilate's predecessor, Valerius Gratus, all feature vegetable designs acceptable to Jewish law regarding images -- palm branches, wheat ears, and vine leaves. Pilate substituted a ladle and augur's wand used in Roman religious rites, a pointed and deliberate affront to Jewish religious sensibilities. Whether this cultural campaign was at Sejanus' urging or on Pilate's own initiative, it was sufficiently contrary to Tiberius' Judean policy to inspire his anger.

Our historical sources thus have Pilate, a tough, inflexible, often devious provincial official, generally agreeing with Sejanus' tough, underhanded policy toward the Jews. But is it reasonable to proceed from there to Pilate's involvement in a coup against Caesar?

Next: A VERY DANGEROUS CONSPIRACY

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