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LEISTAI IN JUDAEA
leistes is to be presented bearing the traits of the conventional usurper. The
deserter, Maternus, dealt with in a later chapter, was similarly driven by the
desire to perform a great deed, even if it killed him. 112 So Simon started by
promising slaves freedom and freemen prizes, and thus quickly had many
recruits on his books. That this claim is a stock theme has already been
pointed out through comparable references in Tacitus. The development of
his ‘band’ is set, stereotypically, in a ‘bandit friendly’ mountainous region.
There, one might say as training exercises, he first fell upon and sacked
villages. As time went on, his gang grew ever stronger, and finally he
ventured to leave the highlands and attack the larger towns of the plain. All
this is just literary convention. Tales of the rise of bandit gangs always
sound like this when the narrator has no precise idea of how things started
or has no spectacular events to report. In Herodian’s account of Maternus,
the corresponding passage is just the same. 113 Such circumstances occasioned
the insertion of a pre-prepared fictional piece, describing how, in line with
common experience, a gang of bandits came into being and grew until it
reached a size at which it was able to exercise its own political power.
Anyway, in the meantime, Simon gained a strong position, becoming a
local focus of political power. He no longer attracted just runaway slaves and
down-and-outs, but also honest citizens who turned to him for protection
and treated him like their king. 114 The bandit gang became a state within a
state: morally, thanks to the subordination of its members to the rule of the
‘king’; and practically, as a result of the sheer conventionality of its operation.
At any event, this is how Josephus describes Simon bar Giora’s rise to
power. O. Michel deduces from his tendentious account that Simon, as
leader of the revolt in southern Palestine, assumed a position similar to that
won by John of Gischala in the north of the country. 115 That this assessment
is probably correct can be seen from how Titus treated Simon, sending him,
like John of Gischala, as a prisoner-of-war to Rome. However, unlike John,
Simon had to accompany the triumphator through the streets of Rome as a
vanquished foe. 116 To judge from this, as far as Rome was concerned Simon
was more important than John. With respect to what Josephus has to say
about Simon bar Giora, this suggests that here, too, we do not have an
aristocrat talking about a common bandit, but about his social equal.
Let us return to the story of Simon. According to Josephus, his ultimate
goal was mastery of Jerusalem. The Zealots of the region, fearing his expansion,
opposed him by force of arms, but he overcame them. He then took
control of Idumaea. 117 For the moment, his power had peaked. The Zealots,
unable to shake him by military means, took his wife hostage, but he forced
her release with terror attacks targeted on Jerusalem. 118 In these atrocities
Simon demonstrated particular cold-bloodedness. Like a wounded animal,
says Josephus, mad with anger he seized on all he came across, old or young,
armed or without weapons, and tortured them to death or hacked off their
hands and sent them back to Jerusalem. The word that Josephus employs
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