Like Joseph, these priests would have been Pharisees. To possess the right to have their appeals heard by Caesar, they might also have held Roman citizenship, which, for Jewish priests, was unusual. No classical text or inscription records this possibility, but some priests at Jerusalem might have been granted Roman citizenship during the reign of Caligula or that of Claudius. A vast number of foreigners are known to have been granted Roman citizenship during Claudius’ reign in particular, via his wife Messalina, who took so many bribes for arranging the grants of citizenship that a joke went around Rome that it was possible to buy citizenship for just a handful of broken glass.
Claudius had been raised at the Palatium at Rome in the company of the Jew Marcus Julius Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great. Agrippa, given a small tetrarchy by Caligula, had been at Rome at the time of Caligula’s assassination and had been instrumental in Claudius’ accession to the vacant throne. Claudius, in his gratitude, had crowned his friend, who became King Herod Agrippa I of Judea. To Agrippa had fallen charge of the Temple at Jerusalem and the appointment of the high priest. Under Agrippa’s authority, the Great Sanhedrin, the seventy-member Jewish religious ruling council of priests at Jerusalem, was summoned. It is conceivable that Caligula or Claudius also granted Roman citizenship to priests who were at Jerusalem and were nominated by Agrippa, perhaps those who fulfilled their duties particularly zealously. Agrippa died of a heart attack in AD 44. Perhaps the custom of granting Roman citizenship to Jewish priests had died with him.
Another Jew had been dispatched to Rome by Felix’s successor in AD 59, also to have his appeal heard by Nero. This was a Jew who certainly held Roman citizenship and who had also been a priest and a Pharisee. His Jewish name was Saul of Tarsus; his Roman name, Paulus. This was Saint Paul the Apostle. Paul’s Roman citizenship has never been questioned by historians or theologians. But no one has ever been able to explain how Paul came by that citizenship. Some scholars suggest that Paul’s father held Roman citizenship; others that the entire population of the city of Tarsus, Paul’s birthplace, might have been granted Roman citizenship. No evidence exists to support either theory. It is just as credible that Paul was granted Roman citizenship at the behest of Herod Agrippa I, ironically for his zealous hunting down of Christians. “Beyond measure I persecuted the church of God,” Paul himself wrote, “and wasted it.”
2
It is likely that Joseph knew Paul, or knew of him. Saul, as he was then called, had trained as a Pharisee at Jerusalem under the renowned Jewish teacher Gamaliel I. When Joseph was a child, Paul had been a hard-line Pharisee at Jerusalem who led the persecution of Christians, during the late AD 30s and, possibly, into the early AD 40s, during the short reign of Caligula and at the beginning of Claudius’ reign. It is entirely possible that Paul’s grant of Roman citizenship came then, via King Agrippa, in the circumstances mentioned above. Only after this had Paul literally seen the light on the road to Damascus and become a follower of Christ.
In AD 59, Paul was sent to Rome in chains and under legionary guard. En route, the ship carrying the apostle and 275 other passengers had been caught in a massive storm in the Eastern Mediterranean and dashed on Malta’s rocky shore. All aboard had survived, and the Roman centurion in charge of Paul’s escort, Julius, had procured passage for prisoner and escort aboard another ship the following spring. Paul had arrived at Rome that spring of AD 60 and was handed over to the Praetorians.
Centurion Julius had put in a good word for Paul, and Praetorian Prefect Burrus, then in his second-last year of office, and of life, had ordered house arrest for the duration of Paul’s long appeal process. Paul was able to rent accommodation in Rome; Christian tradition puts the house on the Triumphal Way, on a site where Nero would soon build a vast pond, the
stagnum Neronis
, and where the Colosseum would rise within another two decades. There, with a Praetorian soldier on his door, and wearing a chain, Paul waited for his case to be heard by Nero, or by the urban praetor, who was deputized to act for the emperor on occasion. According to the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles, Paul remained at Rome for two years. Theologians believe that Paul’s case was ultimately dismissed and that in AD 62 he resumed his travels.
On his way to Jerusalem in AD 57, Paul had written to the Christians at Rome: “When I take my journey into Spain, I will come to you. For I trust to see you in my journey, and to be brought on my journey thitherward by you.”
3
His arrest shortly after at Jerusalem put paid to that plan, but it is suggested that once Paul was released from custody in AD 62, he continued on to Spain as originally intended. The tradition in Spain is that Paul indeed founded the Spanish Church about this time, at Tarraco on the east coast. The late-first-century Epistle of Clement Romanus says, “he came to the borders of the West,” which some interpret as confirming that Paul did reach Spain. Theodoret of Cyrrhus claimed in the fifth century that Paul preached in islands, which some have taken to mean Britain, others, Spain’s Balearic Isles.
4
During his two years of house arrest at Rome, Paul had communed with the small Christian community in the city and addressed representatives of the much larger Jewish community, Jews having flooded back once Nero had become emperor and tolerated their presence at Rome. Paul strove to increase the scope of the Christian congregation at the capital, preaching “those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him.”
5
In a Pauline letter, 1 Corinthians, written from Rome during this period, Paul referred to Christians in Caesar’s household. A Christian tradition holds that one was Torpes, “an officer of prime note in Nero’s palace,” while Dio Chrysostom claimed that Nero’s cup-bearer and one of his concubines were also converts.
6
One tradition holds that this concubine was the emperor’s mistress Acte. “This Acte,” wrote Cassius Dio, “had been bought as a slave in Asia, but winning the affections of Nero, was adopted into the family of Attalus, and the emperor loved her much more than he did his wife Octavia.”
7
Nero had at one time thought about making Acte his wife, and her adoption by a Roman family was intended to make her more acceptable marriage material, but Nero’s mother, Agrippina the Younger, put her foot down and refused to permit any such union. Acte would remain loyal to Nero for the rest of his life. The story of her conversion to Christianity seems to stem from a more recent source, the nineteenth-century novel
Quo Vadis
. Whether or not Paul did convert Torpe, Acte, and the cup-bearer to Christianity, Acts reveals that Paul was less successful in converting the Jews of Rome.
When Joseph had traveled to Rome from Judea in AD 63, he too had survived a shipwreck; his overloaded vessel went down in the Adriatic at night. More than five hundred passengers and crew had drowned around him in the darkness. When dawn broke next day, Joseph was one of just eighty plucked from the water by another merchant ship. Joseph had come ashore when this merchantman docked at Puteoli on the bay of Naples, then Italy’s largest commercial port. He quickly made contact with the local Jewish community, which put him in touch with a Jewish stage actor named Aliturius, who was, to Joseph’s good fortune, “much beloved by Nero.”
8
Through the good offices of Aliturius, Joseph would eventually receive an introduction to Nero’s wife, the empress Poppaea Sabina.
Poppaea, a noted beauty who reputedly bathed in asses’ milk, came from a noble bloodline including consuls and triumphant generals; although her father, a quaestor, had been executed by Tiberius as an adherent of Sejanus, and her mother had been punished for adultery. Poppaea, who was several years older than Nero, had been married twice before. Her first husband was Rufius Crispinus, an Equestrian, while the second had been Nero’s best friend, Marcus Salvius Otho.
According to historian Plutarch, Poppaea had been seduced by Otho when she was still married to Crispinus, and Otho had convinced her to divorce Crispinus and marry him, after which he had offered to share her with Nero to further win Nero’s favor.
9
Tacitus told a slightly different story: Poppaea, attracted by his “youth and fashionable elegance” and by his closeness to the boy emperor, had seduced Otho, then divorced Crispinus and married him. But, said Tacitus, her sights were on Nero, and she convinced Otho to allow Nero to share her bed, to add to his own influence with the emperor.
10
There is a third version: According to Suetonius, Nero fell for Poppaea when she was married to Crispinus, and the emperor entrusted Otho with the task of marrying Poppaea for the time being, until Nero could rid himself of his wife Octavia and overbearing mother Agrippina, who was determined that Nero and Octavia would produce an heir with pure Julian blood. All three, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Suetonius, agreed that Otho had fallen in love with Poppaea and soon began to begrudge sharing her. “He not only enjoyed Poppaea, but developed such a deep passion for her that he would not tolerate even Nero as a rival,” said Suetonius. “We have every reason to believe the story that he rebuffed, first, the messengers sent by Nero to fetch Poppaea, and then Nero himself, who was left on the wrong side of the bedroom door, alternately threatening and pleading for the lady.”
11
According to Plutarch, Poppaea had enjoyed making both men jealous and even excluded Nero from her bedroom from time to time even when Otho was not around, to maintain his enthusiasm for her.
12
Tacitus said that she also wanted Nero to dispense with Acte, to whom he was extremely attached, deriding the relationship between emperor and former slave, as “low and degrading.”
13
When Otho refused to continue sharing Poppaea and tried to keep her all to himself, Nero first cut him from his circle of intimates and then appointed him governor of the province of Lusitania, modern-day Portugal, well away from Rome. When, in AD 58, Otho set off to take up his appointment, his wife remained at Rome, to warm the emperor’s bed. Otho had remained in Lusitania ever since, showing himself a capable governor.
For several subsequent years, Poppaea had been Nero’s mistress, until she convinced him to divorce Octavia (whom he had married at the age of sixteen) for her inability to give him an heir. Divorce for Romans was an easy matter, with either party able to declare the marriage terminated, without formalities. Poppaea had divorced Otho, and just sixteen days after Nero divorced Octavia, he and Poppaea were married. It was not long before the new empress was able to orchestrate, with the help of Tigellinus, the accusations of adulterous behavior that led to young Octavia’s execution.
Poppaea had promised Nero that she would bear him an heir, and sure enough, she was soon pregnant with his child. Early in AD 63, at Antium, where Nero himself had been born, Poppaea gave birth to a daughter, Claudia Augusta. Nero was ecstatic and seemed not to mind that Poppaea had failed to give him a son. Almost every senator flocked to Antium to congratulate Nero on the birth, and the Senate had decreed numerous celebrations and commemorations. Four months later, baby Claudia Augusta was dead, from illness, and Nero was devastated.
Charming, witty, and politically astute, never allowing her heart to rule her head, Poppaea was, according to Joseph, a deeply religious woman who looked favorably on Jews. She soon took a liking to the personable, bearded young priest from Jerusalem. For his part, Joseph kept from the empress the real purpose of his trip to Italy. He set about building a rapport with her during social occasions and, over time, would receive numerous gifts from her. At the appropriate moment, he would seek a favor, asking that she intercede with Nero on behalf of the Jewish priests awaiting their appeals, and procure their liberty.
For now, supported financially from Judea, Joseph continued to rent accommodations at Rome, mixing with the Jews of the capital, biding his time, and building his relationship with Nero’s clever, domineering wife.
X
THE LAKE BANQUET
J
une 7. The days were lengthening, the sun strengthening; summer was just weeks away.
Nero, like his great-uncle Caligula before him, had developed a fascination with all things Egyptian. He had investigated the religion of the Egyptians and, for a time following the murder of his mother, had embraced the worship of the Egyptian mother goddess Isis and her consort Sarapis, even integrating feast days of the cult of Isis into the official Roman religious calendar. He longed to visit Egypt, and after terminating his trip to Achaia at Beneventum and returning to the capital, he had spent much time over the remaining weeks and months of the spring back at Rome “dwelling in his secret imaginations on the provinces of the East, especially Egypt,” according to Tacitus.
1
Germanicus Caesar, grandfather of Nero and father of Caligula, had been equally fascinated with Egypt. When Roman commander in chief in the East, he had traveled up the Nile as an unescorted tourist on a private visit to the ruins from the age of the pharaohs, using a local priest as his guide.