Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Three days later the leaders of the Jews in Galilee assembled in Tiberias—that dazzling new city recently built on the shores of the Sea of Galilee by Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great—and there General Petronius laid before them his problem. Of course, Yigal and Naaman were not present, for in Makor they were not considered leaders of the Jews. Their place was taken by cautious Simeon, accompanied by Amram and other elders from Makor, but from surrounding villages did come several vigorous young men like Yigal, and all listened as the Roman general pleaded for understanding and compliance: “I am a soldier, and I am bound to obey the law of my emperor. If I break it and permit you to bar the statues from your land I will be executed. Then it will be Caesar Caligula himself who will make war on you, not I. He will not send water to your dying children. He will kill every Jew in Judaea.”

“He will have to,” one of the younger Jews answered, and the crowd shouted its approval.

“Are you ready to fight even Caesar?” Petronius asked.

“We shall die … all of us will die … before we allow his statues to enter.”

On and on the discussions went, and in spite of all Roman threats the Jews remained adamant. Petronius appealed to their self-interest: “Don’t you want to form a helpful part of this great empire?” He cited economics: “What kind of farmer allows his fields to lie idle in the sowing season?” He discussed theology: “Other nations in the empire accept Caligula as their god while in secret they honor their ancient deities. Can’t you do the same?” And because he was a man of honor, trained in the philosophies of Greece and on the field of battle, he sometimes betrayed his position by speaking as a humanist: “Would you force me to slay women and children—which I must do if you refuse any further?” And when he said this the Jews knew that he had already decided not to slaughter the multitude, even though he himself might not yet realize that he had reached this conclusion.

Each morning this worried gentleman—for Petronius was that in the most significant sense of the word—ate a light breakfast, stood on his palace balcony to study the glorious mountains that surrounded the Sea of Galilee, then went below to conduct his arguments with the stubborn Jews. At noon he ate lunch with his centurions and in the afternoon went on foot to the refreshing hot baths that made Tiberias such a pleasure, and in those bubbling mineral waters that welled up from some deep volcanic disturbance he would lie and try to forget the dilemma in which Caesar Caligula had placed him. He prayed that some miracle might occur to solve the problem for him: The overdue dagger of the assassin might find its way to the tyrant’s heart. In the hot baths Petronius muttered such prayers. But no solution came.

Finally at one meeting he shouted at the Jews, “For weeks you meet with me and don’t even have the grace to bring before me the man who started all this.” He dispatched Roman messengers to fetch Yigal from Makor, and when the young Jew reached Tiberias, Petronius took him to the hot baths, which an ordinary workman like Yigal could never otherwise have seen, and the Roman laughed when the young Jew refused to undress. “I’ve seen circumcisions before,” Petronius joked, and he persuaded Yigal to enter the bath; and there the two men talked with neither the panoply of glory nor the conceit of individual honor.

“Young man,” Petronius pleaded, “if you Jews obstruct me now, you will have to face Caesar Caligula later. He will be a hideous opponent. He will burn you alive as if you were men of straw. Or crucify you by dozens on every hill.”

“Then we shall die,” Yigal said.

The two men left the steaming waters and were attended by slaves, and when they were dressed again, Petronius said, “Please, consider what you are doing.”

“We can do nothing else,” Yigal replied.

“You damned Jews!” Petronius exploded, and with a mighty blow of his fist he knocked the frail workman to the floor. But as soon as he had done so he stooped and gathered the stunned Jew in his arms. “Forgive me,” he whispered. “These meetings are driving me mad.” He helped Yigal to his feet and brushed his garments. “Is there no hope of a settlement?” he pleaded.

In the marble dressing room of the Herodian baths Yigal replied, “You will have to kill every Jew in Galilee, after that Sebaste, and then Jerusalem.”

That evening Petronius assembled the negotiators at an inn near the lake—that marvelous body of water so deep in the earth, so crowded by mountains on each side, yet so sweet and marked by repose—and he said, “Jews of Galilee, your crops must be sown. No land of the Roman empire can lie idle in the sowing season. I am therefore sending you home to plant your fields.” The Jews greeted this with suspicion, for so far he had made no offer to withdraw the statues, and this could be a trick. Then the great general lowered his head and said in a whisper scarce heard above the waves of Galilee, “The statues I will take away. With the help of your god I shall try to persuade Caesar Caligula that he cannot override the will of his Jews in Galilee. Romans cannot murder an entire population.” He rose, straightened his battle dress and asked for his baton. Then, in full imperial dignity, he said, “If I fail, I perish. But I shall die gladly if by my action I save so many men of honor.” And he embraced Yigal.

That night he struck his camp in Tiberias, as if he could not bear to sleep again in that obstinate place. Bivouacking in the countryside like a general at war, he rose before dawn and marched back to Ptolemais, but as he came down the Damascus road and spotted the walled town of Makor nestling beneath its mountain, he stopped to study the zigzag gate and the white walls of the gymnasium, and against this background he visualized Yigal. “The most obdurate man I’ve ever confronted,” he growled.

And then a torment of humiliation possessed him, a full general of Rome repulsed by an olive worker, and he cried, “How did such a town defeat three Roman legions? I should put to death every Jew inside those walls and erect ten statues of Caligula to be worshiped by their ghosts.” Behind him he could hear the marching feet of the two legions retreating with him and in that burning moment he decided to turn them loose on the undefended town. “Centurions!” he shouted. “We’ll teach a gang of Jews to abandon their fields!”

But as the men marched forward he looked at the fields where women had begun to plow and their men to sow, and at the olive grove where work had been resumed, and in these fields of Makor he saw the type of sturdy peasant who had once made Rome strong: men and women who loved freedom, who worshiped their own god in their own obstinate way, who paid their taxes and fed the empire. For a moment he visualized his own farm in Istria and remembered the satisfaction he had known working its fields, and to his centurions he said quietly, “Proceed to Ptolemais.” It was in this manner that Makor through its reliance on the one God vanquished the full power of the Roman empire.

A man can read ten thousand pages of history and find only the corruption of power and the defeat of hope, but occasionally he will come upon an adventure like that of General Petronius, who, because he was at heart a Greek philosopher, refrained from destroying Makor and returned to the port city of Ptolemais, where he crated the statues of Caligula and marched his legions aboard ships for transportation back to Antioch. There he composed his report to Caesar Caligula: “Mighty God, Spirit of Power, Light of the World, in pursuit of Your august instructions I invaded Judaea on schedule, but at Ptolemais I found five hundred Jews offering themselves to be sacrificed rather than permit statues of the new god, Caligula, to enter their territories. At Tiberias, I consulted with the leaders of the district and satisfied myself that in order to place the god Caligula’s statue in the temple at Jerusalem, I would have to kill every Jew in the Galilee. For generations Your granary would lie barren. The name of Rome would be cursed forever. Unless You wish, August One, to kill on a scale not yet seen in our empire, I must beg You to withdraw your instructions to me. You must allow the Jews to worship as they have in the past.”