Benghazi's vicious revolutions

Was the current area of revolt in Eastern Libya around Benghazi  famed for vicious liberation struggles even in the Roman era?

I've just had a call from an American who says I said it was. She heard me talking about On the Spartacus Road last year and says that this was exactly what I said.

Were there places where, as it were, vast pools of bad blood are never far from the surface of the soil?

I'm hesitant about the more general question. Thinking it might be true brings problems itself.

But Cyrene, as the Benghazi area was known in classical times, was certainly home to one of the wilder recorded revolts against the Romans.

The rebels in 115 AD were Jews, who had won themselves a terrifying reputation for rage and violence, not only tearing down Greek shrines to Apollo, Artemis and Hecate but killing with a viciousness that was extraordinary even to to the most hardened commentators.

They would “eat the flesh of their victims, make belts for themselves from their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood and wear their skins for clothing: many they sawed in two from the head downwards; others they gave to wild beasts; and still others they forced to fight as gladiators.”

These opponents of the Roman order were believed to roast their captives alive.

I quoted this in Spartacus Road because Appian, one of the fairer historians of the Spartacus slave war, was caught up in this Cyrene revolt in the Nile delta as a young man. He was the writer on Spartacus who best knew what it was like to be pursued by rebels of highly unreliable behaviour.

Some of those charges were probably anti-Jewish propaganda. We know them from Xiphilinus, who was working from books of Dio's history now lost, and was not known for love of Jewish causes.

But there was certainly something nasty then around Benghazi and there is no reason to think that Appian would have disbelieved the charges.

The Jewish rebels were said to have destroyed bath-houses and colonnades because they were Roman, and killed to the orders, so it was said, of a man they called their Messiah. For Greek and Roman settlers, ensconced in Cyrene since the Spartacus revolt itself ,this was a very nasty surprise.

Appian escaped and lived on to see how legionary power crushed the revolt, the most dangerous Jewish uprising in Roman history, and how the Senate taxed the survivors to restore the ruined temples.

He described how the once-threatening King of the Jews was turned into a theatrical effigy, a Guy Fawkes of the Estern mediterranean and made a regular and exemplary spectacle to discourage imitators.

This is the story to which my American caller was referring. Whether it has any relevance to the present troubles, I very much doubt. 

 

 

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

Some of the best writing of this year: Robert Fisk on Muammar Gaddafi, tyrant of Tripoli. Tuesday, 22 February 2011:

["So even the old, paranoid, crazed fox of Libya–the pallid, infantile, droop-cheeked dictator from Sirte, owner of his own female praetorian guard, author of the preposterous Green Book, who once announced he would ride to a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade on his white charger–is going to ground."]

When even Daffy Duck has to clear out, you know that the outlook for dictators is not good. Perhaps an "Estern mediterranean" "Fawkes"... "a regular and exemplary spectacle to discourage imitators."

However, the main point is: Was the ancient world as much of a fraud as the modern one? Since when do The New York Times and Washington Post take orders from the CIA? Except for Guardian revelations, we might still not know the truth about the CIA murderer in Pakistan.

As if there had been little reason to suspect it before. The orientation of The New York Times. ("The New CIA Times" does have a nice ring to it.) If you get any more calls from America, Sir Peter, you will know that it is under deep cover. To see if you will write up a smokescreen. Daffy Duck in peril. Please help. A plausible denial is in the mail.

[Bruce null Ross-Smith]

The social anthropologist Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard spent two and half years (1942-45) in Cyrenaica, to begin with as, by his own admission, a completely hopeless Governor, then as a liaison officer with the bedouin, travelling extensively by horse and camel to all points of the Cyrenaican compass. Out of this came his 1949 study, 'The Sanusi of Cyrenaica', which ends with this sentence : "Amid the roar of planes and guns the Bedouin learnt to see themselves more clearly as a single people, the Sanusi of Cyrenaica, in a wider world, and came to be regarded as such by those engaged in the struggle." Evans-Pritchard's poetic and romantic vision was of course never to be realized, either in Cyrenaica or in the rest of Libya. And now? La question s'impose ....

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[Candadai Tirumalai]

Here are some assorted thoughts about Romans and Jews.
The Romans did not put down any kind of religious observance, however wild, though Juvenal denounced the gelded priests of Cybele. But, with their many gods, they had extraordinary difficulty accepting monotheism (in its practical manifestation), regarding it as "the Jewish superstition." They destroyed the Temple (more than one) in Jerusalem, very likely for religious as well as political reasons.
Philo, a thoroughy Hellenized Jew, took the view that classical monotheism in its philosphical form (he was thinking of Plato and Aristotle rather than of the Romans), admirable as it was, had been anticipated by Moses.

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