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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
he put into the mouth of Agrippa II. 18 He repeated it in an address of his
own which, on the orders of Titus, at the climax of the siege of the shrine,
he delivered to the rebels who had sought refuge in the Temple. He cited
his own words as follows:
Be it granted that it was noble to fight for freedom, they should
have done so at first; but, after having once succumbed and submitted
for so long, to seek then to shake the yoke was the part of
men madly courting death, not of lovers of liberty. To scorn meaner
masters might, indeed, be legitimate, but not those to whom the
universe was subject. 19
He writes about the Jewish War not only as a pragmatic observer, but also
as a Jewish nobleman seeking to justify his actions. Although research has
shown that the reliability of his reporting has not been seriously compromised
by this, 20 his own experience comes through in at least one respect, in
that his account of the violent discharging of the accumulation of protest
within Jewish society is no detached and considered record, but rather one of
his own prejudices.
This is easily discernible in Josephus’ terminology. In a sort of schematic
uniformity, he characterises the members of all groups that caused trouble
in Judaea before and during the War as leistai. 21 Scholars recognise only too
well the many and various constituencies, motivations, goals and actions
that lie behind Josephus’ leistai, and the difficulties that are involved in
attempting to distinguish between these ‘robber bands’ along such lines
which result from Josephus’ reducing them to a single expression. One may
say that so many misunderstandings about Zealots and Sicarii must have
arisen precisely because Josephus’ accounts of these people are so similar in
tone that they blot out the main differences between them. 22 The same
schematic process by which Josephus, through his use of language, creates
a unity of ‘bandits’ from the diversity of groups, movements and aims, is
the one used by Horsley to explain this ‘single’ bandit movement as social
banditry. 23
The first objection to such a procedure has already been raised: Josephus’
reporting, which provides no authentic glimpse of the ‘heroes’ of the peasantry
of Judaea. A further objection is that only a small proportion of the
leistai were peasants. Alongside rural workers, people from all levels of society
– up to the aristocratic priestly families – participated in the insurgency
movement. The social complexity of the Jewish rebel groups is at variance
with the peasant environment required for social banditry. Such social
complexity – and this is a third objection – demanded a similar complexity
of objectives: small farmers seeking to protest against great landowners over
excessive indebtedness; various groups seeking to protest against the priestly
aristocracy or against Roman provincial government, or against the two
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