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Category: Ancient Rome

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Ancient Rome Eduardo Velasco Josephus Judea v. Rome Julius Caesar Library of Alexandria

Apocalypse for whites • X

by Evropa Soberana

 

The Jews in the Roman Empire
Around 55 BCE the Republic, too large and militarized, was calling for a new form of government. And it was de facto governed by the so-called Triumvirate: an alliance of three great military commanders: Marcus Licinius Crassus—bust above: the one who crushed the Spartacus revolt in the year 74 BCE—, Pompey, the conqueror of Syria, and Julius Caesar, the conqueror of Gaul.
In 54 BCE, Crassus, then Roman governor of the province of Syria, while spending the winter in Judea decreed on the population a ‘war tax’ to finance his army, and also plundered the temple of Jerusalem, stealing its treasures (for value of ten thousand talents), causing a huge stir in the Jewish quarter. Crassus and the vast majority of his army would be massacred by the Parthians in the unfortunate Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE. [1]
Lucius Cassius Longinus, one of Crassus’ commanders who had managed to escape the Carrhae massacre with his 500 horsemen, returned to Syria to prepare for a counter-attack and re-establish the devalued Roman prestige in the province. After expelling the Parthians, Cassius had to face a rebellion of the Jewry, which had risen as soon as Jews learnt that the hated Crassus had been killed.
Cassius became an ally of Antipater and Hyrcanus II. After taking Tariquea, a Judean stronghold and execute one of the leaders of the rebellion who had ties with Aristobulus, Cassius captured 30,000 Jews. In the year 52 BCE he sold them as slaves in Rome.
This was the beginning of subversion within Rome itself, since these 30,000 Jews (later freed by Mark Antony and his descendants), dispersed throughout the Empire, would not cease henceforth to promote agitation against of the hated Roman authority. They would have an important role in the construction of the underground catacombs and synagogues, which were later the first preaching field of Christianity. Cassius would later be appointed governor of Syria.
In 49 BCE Crassus was killed and the Triumvirate broken. Civil war broke out between Pompey and Caesar: one of whom, inevitably, was to become the autocratic dictator of the entire empire. Hyrcanus II and Antipater decided to take sides with Caesar, who had Antipater as regent. Julius Caesar would soon take control of the situation, and Pompey was assassinated in Egypt by conspirators.
In 48 BCE, while the Roman and Ptolemaic fleets were engaged in a naval battle, an event was held to further tense the relations between Jews, Greeks and Egyptians: the burning of the library of Alexandria.
Of all the ethnic groups that were in the city, none could have anything against the library. The Greeks had founded it; the Egyptians had contributed much to it, and the Romans sincerely admired this Hellenistic legacy. The Jews, however, saw in the library an accumulation of ‘profane’ and ‘pagan’ wisdom, so that if there was a group suspected of the first burning of the library, logically it was the Jewish quarter, or the most orthodox and fundamentalists sectors. At least that’s what the inhabitants of Alexandria should have thought.
In 31 BCE, the year of a strong earthquake in Israel that killed thousands of people, Cleopatra and Mark Antony committed suicide after their fall from grace.
Flavius Josephus mentions, during the reign of Augustus, a judicial complaint in which 8,000 Jews supported one of the parties. These Jews were to be all adult males, and since a nuclear family used to be of four or five people, we may conclude that at the time of Augustus there were about 35,000 Jews in Rome.
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[1] Crassus, who committed a crass (hence the expression) blunder during the battle, was responsible for the massacre of 20,000 soldiers at the hands of the Parthians. Another 10,000 Roman soldiers were taken prisoners and sent to forced labour to what is now Afghanistan. Many ended up fighting, under Parthian control, against the Huns. We lose their trail onwards. Genetic analyses seem to indicate that this detachment, the famous ‘lost legion of Crassus’, ended in the current Chinese province of Liqian, where they are responsible for a greater frequency of ethnic European features in the native population.

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Ancient Rome Cicero Eduardo Velasco Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • IX

by Evropa Soberana

 
Cicero and the Jewish lobby
In 62-61 BCE, the proconsul Lucius Valerius Flaccus (son of the consul of the same name and brother of the consul Gaius Valerius Flaccus) confiscated the tribute of ‘sacred money’ that the Jews sent to the Temple of Jerusalem.
When this happened, the Jews of Rome raised the populace against Flaccus. The well-known Roman patriot Cicero defended Flaccus against the accuser Laelius (a tribune of the plebs who would later support Pompey against Julius Caesar) and referred to the Jews of Rome in a few sentences of 59 BCE, which were reflected in his In Defence of Flaccus, XVIII:

The next thing is that charge about the Jewish gold. And this, forsooth, is the reason why this cause is pleaded near the steps of Aurelius. It is on account of this charge, O Laelius, that this place and that mob has been selected by you. You know how numerous that crowd is, how great is its unanimity, and of what weight it is in the popular assemblies. I will speak in a low voice, just so as to let the judges hear me. For men are not wanting who would be glad to excite that people against me and against every eminent man; and I will not assist them and enable them to do so more easily. As gold, under pretence of being given to the Jews, was accustomed every year to be exported out of Italy and all the provinces to Jerusalem, Flaccus issued an edict establishing a law that…

From these phrases we can deduce that already in the 1st century BCE, the Jews had great political power in Rome itself, and that they had an important capacity for social mobilization against their political opponents, who lowered their voices out of fear: the pressure of the lobbies.

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Ancient Rome Eduardo Velasco Jerusalem Josephus Judaism Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • VIII

by Evropa Soberana

 
The conquest of Pompey
This section will deal with the first direct intervention of the Roman authority on Jewish soil.
In Israel, on the death of Alexander Jannaeus (king of the Hasmonean dynasty, descendant of the Maccabees) in 76 BCE, his wife Salome Alexandra reigned as his successor. Unlike her husband—who, as a good pro-Sadducee, had severely repressed the Pharisees—Salome got on well with the Pharisee faction. When she died, her two sons, Hyrcanus II (associated with the Pharisees and supported by the Arab sheikh Aretas of Petra) and Aristobulus II (supported by the Sadducees) fought for power.
In 63 BCE, both Hasmoneans sought support from the Roman leader Pompey, whose victorious legions were already in Damascus after having deposed the last Macedonian king of Syria (the Seleucid Antigonus III) and now proposed to conquer Phoenicia and Judea, perhaps to incorporate them into the new Roman province of Syria. Pompey, who received money from both factions, finally decided in favour of Hyrcanus II, perhaps because the Pharisees represented the majority of the popular mass of Judea. Aristobulus II, refusing to accept the general’s decision, entrenched himself in Jerusalem with his men.
The Romans, therefore, besieged the capital. Aristobulus II and his followers held out for three months, while the Sadducee priests, in the temple, prayed and offered sacrifices to Yahweh. Taking advantage of the fact that on the Shabbat the Jews did not fight, the Romans undermined the walls of Jerusalem, after which they quickly penetrated the city, capturing Aristobulus and killing 12,000 Jews.[1]
Pompey himself entered the Temple of Jerusalem, curious to see the god of the Jews. Accustomed to seeing numerous temples of many different peoples, and educated in the European mentality according to which a god was to be represented in human form to receive the cult of mortals, he blinked in perplexity when he saw no statue, no relief, no idol, no image… only a candelabrum, vessels, a table of gold, two thousand talents of ‘sacred money’, spices and mountains of Torah scrolls.[2]

Pompey the Great

Did they not have god? Were the Jews atheists? Did they worship nothing? Money? Gold? A simple book, as if the soul, the feelings and the will of a people depended on an inert roll of paper? The confusion of the general, according to Flavius Josephus, must have been capitalised. The Roman had come across an abstract god.
For the Jewish mentality, Pompey committed a sacrilege, for he penetrated the most sacred precinct of the Temple, which only the High Priest could see. In addition, the legionaries made a sacrifice to their banners, ‘polluting’ the area again.
After the fall of Jerusalem, all the territory conquered by the Hasmonean or Maccabean dynasty was annexed by the Roman Empire. Hyrcanus II remained like governor of a district of Rome under the title of ethnarch, dominating everything that Rome was not annexed: that is to say, the territories of Galilee and Judea, that in future would pay taxes to Rome but would retain their independence. Hyrcanus was also made a High Priest, but in practice the power of Judea went to Antipater of Idumea, as a reward for having helped the Romans. Pompey annexed to Rome the most Hellenised areas of the Jewish territory, while Hyrcanus remained as a governor of a district of Rome until his death.
From the ethnic and cultural point of view, the Roman conquest foreshadowed new and profound changes in that area of conflict that is Near East. First of all, to the Jewish, Syrian, Arab and Greek ethnic strata a Roman aristocracy occupying a military character was going to be added.
For the Greeks, this was a source of joy: the decline of the Seleucid Empire had left them aside, and they also had Rome literally in their pocket since the Romans felt a deep and sincere admiration for the Hellenistic culture, not to mention that many of their rulers had a Greek education that predisposed them to be especially lenient with the Macedonian colonies.
Moreover, in Alexandria, it was to be expected that, in view of the disturbances with Jewry, the Romans would seize from the Jews the rights that Alexander the Great had granted them, thereby ceasing to be citizens on an equal footing with the Greeks, and the influence they exerted through trade and the accumulation of money would be uprooted.
For these reasons, it is not surprising that the Decapolis (set of Hellenised cities in the desert borders that also retained much autonomy, among which was Philadelphia, the current capital of Jordan, Amman), surrounded by Syrian tribes, Jews and Arabs—considered barbarians—received the Romans with open arms and began to count the years since the conquest of Pompey.
 
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[1] The figures of the dead given throughout the text come from the writings of Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews, as well as of Cassius Dio’s History of Rome. Most likely they are inflated to magnify the importance of events, something common in history.
[2] According to the Alexandrian authors (rabid anti-Semites who believed that the Jews performed human sacrifices), Pompey freed in the temple a Greek prisoner who was about to be sacrificed to Jehovah.

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Ancient Rome Cicero Eduardo Velasco Horace Judaism Judea v. Rome Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • V

by Evropa Soberana

 
Roman anti-Semitism: a spiritual conflict
What happened after the arrival of Roman troops in Judea was a spiritual confrontation unprecedented in the history of mankind. Four million Jews were now going to share borders with the other 65 million subjects of the Roman Empire.
It is impossible to write an article on this subject without mentioning the profoundly anti-Jewish quotes written by great Roman authors of the time. In them a true conflict is perceived between two systems of values exactly opposite each other. The clash between Roman rigidity and the dogmatism of the desert caused in Rome a genuine movement of rejection of Judaism. Although anti-Semitism goes back to the very origins of Jewry, the Romans, heirs of the Greeks and of a superior military discipline, were undoubtedly, until then, the ones who showed the greatest hostility towards the Jews.
Cicero (106-43 BCE), as we shall see later, condemns hostile Jewry considering that their mentality of skulduggery and cowardice is incompatible with the altruistic mentality of the best in Rome.

Horace (65-8 BCE), in Book I of his Satires mocks the Sabbath or Sabbatic rest, while Petronius (dies in 66 CE) in his Satyricon ridicules the circumcision.
Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) in his Natural History speaks about ‘Jewish impiety’, and refers to ‘the Jews, well known for their contempt for the gods’.
Seneca (4-65 CE) called Jewry ‘the most evil nation, whose waste of a seventh of life [he refers to Shabbat] goes against the utility of it… These most perverse people have come to extend their customs into the whole world; the defeated have given laws to the victors’.
Quintilian (30-100 CE) says in his Institutio Oratoria that the Jews are a derision for the rest of men, and that their religion is the embodiment of superstition.
Martial (40-105), in his Epigrams, sees the Jews as followers of a cult whose true nature is secret to hide it from the rest of the world, and he attacks circumcision, the Shabbat (or Saturday: that is, doing nothing on the seventh day of the week, which gave them lazy press), and their abstinence from pork.
Tacitus (56-120), the famous historian who praised the Germans, also spoke about the Jews but in very different terms. He says that they descend from lepers expelled from Egypt, and that under the Assyrians, the Medes and Persians, they were the most despised and humiliated people. Among the terms with which Tacitus qualifies Jewry we have ‘perverse, abominable, cruel, superstitious, alien to any law of religion, evil and filthy’ among many others:

The Jewish customs are sad, dirty, vile and abominable, and if they have survived it is thanks to their perversity. Of all enslaved peoples, Jews are the most despicable and disgusting.
For the Jews, everything that is sacred to us is despicable, and what is repugnant to us is lawful.
The Jews reveal a stubborn bond with one another, which contrasts with their hatred for the rest of humanity… Among them, nothing is lawful. Those who embrace their religion practice the same thing, and the first thing they are taught is to despise the gods [History, chapters 4 and 5].

Juvenal (55-130), in his Satires, criticizes the Jews for the Sabbath, for not worshiping images, for circumcising themselves, for not eating pork, for being scrupulous with their laws while despising those of Rome, and that they only reveal the ‘initiates’ the true nature of Judaism. In addition, he blames Orientals in general and Jewry in particular for the degeneration of the environment in Rome itself.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180) passed through Judea on his trip to Egypt, being surprised by the ways of the local Jewish population. He will say, ‘I find this people worse than the Marcomanni, the Quadics and the Sarmatians (Rerum Gestarum Libri by Ammianus Marcellinus).
These quotes summarise how the Romans, an Indo-European martial, virile and disciplined people, saw the Jewish quarter. It can be said that, until the triumph of the Romans, no people had been so aware of the challenge posed by Judaism.
All these quotes point to a stubborn ideological as well as military confrontation, in which both Rome and Judea were going to think a lot for a final solution: a conflict that would influence History in a huge way and, therefore, cannot be ignored under any pretext. This article tries to give an idea of what the old clash of the East against the West meant.

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Ancient Rome Eduardo Velasco Indo-European heritage Judea v. Rome Real men

Apocalypse for whites • III

by Evropa Soberana

 
Rome
It is incredible the amount of adulterations and trash poured on the history of Rome and the biography of her emperors, but not so much if we think that the Roman Empire faced directly what would later be two very powerful forces: Judaism and Christianity. Rome represented for centuries—as the Macedonians had represented before her—the armed and conquering incarnation of the European will and the vehicle of Indo-European blood in the Near East: in the cradle of the Semitic world, of Judaism, the Neolithic and matriarchy.
In The Anabasis of Alexander Arrian tells us how, being Alexander the Great in Babylon, he received embassies from countless kingdoms of the known world. One of those embassies came from Rome, which at that time was a humble republic headed by a council of elderly patricians, called senators. Alexander saw the customs and behaviour of the Roman ambassadors and, without hesitation, predicted that if his people continued to be faithful to that sober and upright lifestyle, Rome would become a very powerful city.
Before dying, Alexander left in his will that an immense fleet was to be built for, someday in the future, to face the Carthaginian threat which began to take shape on the horizon. Rome, as heir of the Alexandrian mission, also inherited the geopolitical task of wiping out the Carthaginians: a people of Phoenician origin (current Syria, Lebanon and Israel) that had settled in what is now Tunisia. Rome destroyed Carthage in the year 146 BCE, but strong sequels and bad memories remained from that confrontation of the West vs. East, and it would never be the same again.
What struck Alexander about the Roman ambassadors? What made him distinguish them at once from the rest of the ambassadors? That the Romans were an extremely traditional and militarized people, whose life danced to the rhythm of a severe religious ritualism and a disciplined austerity. The Roman religion and Roman customs were present in absolutely every moment of the citizen’s life.
The world, before the eyes of a Roman, was a magical and holy place where the ancient gods, the Numens, the Manes, the Lares, the Penates, the geniuses and infinity of folk spirits, campaigned at ease influencing the lives of the mortals even in their most daily ups and downs (the Civitas Dei of St Augustine, despite attacking the Roman religion, provides valuable information about its complexity).
When the child was born, there was a phrase to invoke a Numen. When the child cried in the crib, another was invoked. It was also prayed for when the child learned to walk, when he came running, when he ran away; when, being a man, he received his baptism of arms, for his wedding, before entering combat, when he fell wounded, by triumphing over the enemy, by returning home victorious, by getting sick, by giving birth to his first child; before eating, before drinking, when sowing the fields…
One Numen was responsible for growing the golden harvests, another Numen (in this case a Numen of Jupiter) precipitated the rain of the sky, another was busy making the grass ripple with the wind; another, in time immemorial, turned the beard of a male family lineage red… All the qualities, all things and all the events, according to the Roman mentality, showed the trace of the creative intervention of the blessed forces of the world, the spirits of the rivers, of the trees, of the forests, of the mountains, of the houses, of the fields…
The families venerated the pater familias and the ancestor of the clan, while every male prided himself on having virtus: a divine quality associated with military prowess, training and combative spirit, and that only young men could possess. Only the flesh of animals sacrificed to the gods were eaten in rituals of uncompromising liturgy; and in religious ceremonies, the simple stammering of a priest was more than enough to invalidate a consecration or have to begin it again.

The Roman spirit, represented above by Vesta with two torches, equivalent to the Hellenic Hestia, was a virginal goddess associated with the hearth and fire, which symbolized the centre of the house, around which the family was grouped.
Her priestesses, the Vestals, were virgin girls who, in the interior of their circular temple, watched to see that the sacred fire never went out. There was a law according to which, if a person condemned to death crossed the street with a Vestal, he was acquitted. When some of them failed in their duties they were flogged, and if any transgressed the vow of virginity, they were buried alive. That is just an example of the immense religious seriousness that reigned in the origins of Rome, far removed from the famous ‘decadence of the empire’.
Despite the subsequent influence that Greece had on them, the seriousness with which the Romans took ritualism and folklore was so extreme, and their patriotism so incredible, that we may seriously think that fidelity (what they called the pietas: the fulfilment of duty to the gods in everyday tasks) they professed to the customs and ancestral traditions, was the secret of their immense success as a people. The Romans developed advanced technology and, because of the discipline of their soldiers, the ability of their commanders and a superior way of ‘doing things’ conquered the entire Mediterranean, shielding southern Europe.
If we had to give more examples of peoples in which fidelity to traditions was taken with the extreme gravitas with which it was taken in Rome, only three would be found: two of them are Vedic India and Han China.
The other is the Jewish people.

Categories
Ancient Rome Cicero Eduardo Velasco Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • II

by Evropa Soberana

 
Chapter 1
Geopolitical, anthropological and ethnic context
The Near East or the Levant—what today are Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt—has been a very important geostrategic zone of confrontations between the Europe of the forests, the snows, the rivers and the mists, and the deep East of the dry, jealous, sterile and inhospitable spirit of the desert. In this area there have been, from time immemorial, ebbs and flows from both Europe and Asia and Africa, and crystallized in the appearance of the Neolithic and the first civilizations of the world.
Paraphrasing Nietzsche, we would say, ‘if you stare at the desert for a long time, the desert will also stare at you’. If there is a natural selection environment radically different from that of the glaciations, it is undoubtedly the desert: monotonous and infinite environment like the laments of the songs now preached from the minarets of the mosques. Immersed in this type of landscape for a long time, it is easy for a man to have visions and see illusions and distorted reflections; to listen voices that, according to oriental folklore, come from evil spirits and, finally, to lose one’s way and sink into despair and madness, and let your mind take a journey into darkness, from which it will never return.

The deserts are the places where the total absence of the fecundating power of heaven—represented by rain and lightning, and by typically European gods such as Zeus or Jupiter—has propitiated the triumph of the Earth, and therefore the death of Nature and the levelling, the devastation, the equalization of the horizons and the lack of permanence of the same floor that is stepped on. It is totally imprudent to think that all these elements do not leave a deep mark on the idiosyncrasy and collective imagination of a people.
The subject that we treat is revealed as a confrontation that, in last instance, is reduced to an evolutionary insurrection of the East not to disappear in an unequal competition with the European human varieties. In 56 BCE, in a speech entitled De Provinciis Consularibus given in the Senate of Rome, Cicero himself describes the Jews, along with the Syrians as a ‘race born to be a slave’.
Syrians and Jews were ethnic communities in which the Armenid race was strongly represented, and which are encompassed as Semitic cultures. The Semitic waves constituted, for millennia, a source of pain, malaise, violence and tragedy for Europe, from the Carthaginians to the Ottomans. The present book will deal particularly with the Jews, without forgetting other groups that, like the Arabs, Persians and Syrians, made common cause with them on many occasions, including during the rise of Christianity.
Although today they try to unload Europe with an unreal multiculturalism, the daily and historical reality is that the coexistence between different races has only two results: third-worldization and/or balkanization: ethnic conflicts and territorial ruptures. What we are going to see in this book, of course, has nothing of multi-cult and nothing of ‘peaceful coexistence’, since for centuries and centuries the coexistence between Greeks and Jews was marked by great waves of bloody violence. It did not work.
Far, therefore, from the politically correct fantasy of the ‘coexistence of cultures’, we will investigate the beginning of a series of ethnic cleansings throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, which would culminate in the low Roman Empire with eradication, in North Africa and in the Near East, of the Greek and Roman communities and of most of the classical legacy at the hands of the East.

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Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Cicero Eduardo Velasco Indo-European heritage Israel / Palestine Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • I

by Evropa Soberana

 
Below, abridged translation from the first chapter of Roma contra Judea, Judea contra Roma, authored by the Spanish blogger Evropa Soberana:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
‘The Jews have long been in rebellion not only against Rome, but against all humanity’.

—Euphrates the Stoic

‘The Jews belong to a dark and repulsive force. I know how numerous this clique is, how they remain united and what power they exert through their unions. They are a nation of liars and deceivers’.

— Cicero

I

Foreword
The purpose of this book is to give an idea of what happened to the Ancient World, of how Europe fell into the Middle Ages and, especially, to what extent what happened in Rome 1,600 years ago is exactly what is happening in our days throughout the West, but magnified a thousand times by globalization, technology and, above all, the deputation of psycho-sociological and propagandistic knowledge by the System.
What is dealt with in this book is the story of a tragedy, of an apocalypse. It is the end not only of the Roman Empire and all its achievements, but also of the survival of the Egyptian, Persian and Greek teachings in Europe in a bloodthirsty process: premonition of the future destruction of Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic heritages, always accompanied by their respective genocides.
This process had a markedly ethnic character: it was the rebellion of Christianized slaves (from Asia Minor and North Africa) against Indo-European paganism, which represented the ancestral customs and traditions of the Roman and Hellenic aristocracies—decadent, minoritarian and softened in comparison with an overwhelmingly numerous, brutalized people who cordially detested the distant pride of their lords.
In the third chapter, ‘Christianity and the fall of the Roman Empire’, we will see processes that marked the first development of Christianity: that strange synthesis between Jewish and Greco-decadent mentality that, from the East, devoured the classical world to the bone, undermining Roman institutions and the Roman mentality to the point of propitiating its total collapse.
However, we will begin by focusing on the Eastern Roman provinces, especially Judea, which was snatched by Rome to the heirs of Alexander the Great. How were the relations between Greeks and Jews? What role did the Romans play in Asia Minor and in the management of the Jewish problem? What are the true roots of Israel and the current instability in the Near East?
It will be worthwhile to expand on the subject to familiarise oneself with the foundations of what is today the greatest geopolitical conflict on the planet: the State of Israel. We will also see the impossibility, in the long term, of the coexistence between two radically different cultures—in this case, the Greco-Roman and the Jewish.
For now, the Romans will meet a people who take the tradition with the same seriousness as them, but replacing that Olympic, artistic, athletic and aristocratic touch with a spark of fanaticism and dogmatism, and changing the Roman patriotism for a kind of pact sealed behind the backs of the rest of humanity. A people, above all, with a fiercely rooted sense of identity—in fact, much more than any other people—and who also considered themselves to be no less than the ‘chosen people’…
 

Index

First part
Geopolitical, anthropological and ethnic context
Rome
Judea
Roman anti-Semitism: a spiritual conflict
The Hellenistic legacy
Greek anti-Semitism
The conquest of Pompey
Herod the Great
About Jesus Christ and the birth of Christianity
Caligula
Claudius and Nero
Second part
First Jewish-Roman War: the Great Jewish Revolt of 66-73 CE
Ethnic disturbances in Egypt
Siege and fall of Jerusalem: the destruction of the Second Temple
Fall of Masada
Consequences of the Great Jewish Revolt
Second Jewish-Roman War: the revolt of Kitos of 115-117 CE
Third Jewish-Roman War: the revolt of Bar Kokhba of 132-135 CE
Consequences of the Palestine revolt
Some conclusions
Nietzsche on the conflict Rome vs. Judea
Third part
Let’s have a look at the situation
‘The Jewish sect’ appears
The Nero case as an example of historical distortion
Destruction of Jerusalem: Christianity takes hold outside Judea
Christians stops being persecuted
At the top of the pyramid there are only slaves: Anti-pagan genocide
The Emperor Julian as the last Roman breath
The Anti-pagan genocide continues with more virulence
The martyrdom of Hypatia as an example of Christian terrorism
In conclusion
Nietzsche on Christianity
Nietzschean version of the Sermon on the Mount

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 43

Below, abridged translation from the first
volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte
des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity)

A marble bust of Valens

 
Trembling and gnashing of teeth under the Arian Valens
Valentinian’s brother, Valens (364-378), was the last emperor who officially supported Arianism. He acted against the sects and other deviations, even against the semi-Arians who then, in order to thrive, made a shameful abjuration in Rome.
The Catholics were very harshly persecuted during the last years of the regime of this emperor, which met resistance and made even the exiled be considered martyrs. Among these were the bishops Athanasius of Alexandria, Meletius of Antioch, Pelagius of Laodicea, Eusebius of Samosata, Barses of Edessa and many others. Some Catholics were drowned in Antioch, and there were also martyrs in Constantinople. It is even said that in the year of the Lord 370, Valens sent secret letters to his prefect Modesto, arranging that eighty Catholic bishops and priests be led with deceit aboard a ship, which was burned with all its passengers on the high seas; it is also said that whole hosts of ‘true faith supporters’ were thrown into the Orontes.
‘A persecution has fallen upon us, my venerable brothers, the most bitter of all’, lamented, in 376, Basil, doctor of the Church, in a letter to the bishops of Italy and Gaul (although he personally had not been molested). Houses of prayer were closed, the service of the altars abandoned, the bishops imprisoned under any false pretext, and sent at night to exile and death. ‘It is well known’, continues Basil, ‘although we have preferred to silence it’, the desertion of priests and deacons, the dispersion of the clergy; in a word, ‘the mouth of the believers has been closed, while the blasphemous languages are loose and dare everything’.
Valens was so afraid of witchcraft that he punished it with the death penalty from the first year of his term. For this reason, he continued the persecution begun by Constantine against the followers of black magic, the clairvoyants, the interpreters of dreams, since the winter of 371 and for two years ‘like a beast in the amphitheatre; his fury was so great that he seemed to regret not being able to prolong the martyrdom of his victims after death’ (Amianus).
In the year 368, a senator lost his head because a lady with whom he was in relationships felt the victim of an enchantment. Prosecutor Marino suffered the death penalty because he had procured the hand of a certain Hispanila with magical arts. The coachman Athanasius died burned for exercising the arts of black magic.
Fear spread throughout the East; thousands were detained, tortured, liquidated, including high public officials and wise philosophers. Participants or simple witnesses were burned alive, strangled, beheaded, as in Ephesus, despite being ill, the philosopher Maximus, who had been friend and preceptor of Julian. Their property was confiscated, they were extorted with heavy fines; it was enough a reckless word, or have dared to make a scallop.
The demagoguery burned entire libraries, claiming that they were ‘magic books’. And since the machinery of justice was still too slow for Valens, beheadings and bonfires dispensed with judicial formalities; at the same time, he considered himself a merciful sovereign, like his brother Valentinian, as well as a faithful Christian, a good husband and a chaste man. No one denies that the ‘purity of manners’ prevailed in his court. An executioner who led to the execution of a naked adulteress was also burned alive in punishment for such shamelessness.
Procopius, forty years old and a relative of Julian, rose up in Constantinople, mainly with the support of the pagans. Valens had him beheaded without delay on May 27, 366 AD. Valens ‘lost all sense of the measure’ (Nagí). He persecuted even the women of the insurgents, burned countless books and continued to enrich himself along with his executioners. All this happened in the middle of almost a decade of conflicts with the Persians.
In the year 367, the emperor also began a campaign against the Ostrogoths, who had helped Procopius. The operations ran between peat bogs and swamps, and although a price was placed on the heads of the Goths, the war ended without success in 369. On August 9, 378, in Adrianople, Valens lost the battle and life.
We have seen, then, how that formidable empire was ruled by the first Christian majesties: Constantine, his sons, and the emperors Jovian, Valentinian I, Valens. Did they behave in a more benign, more humanitarian, more peaceful way than their predecessors, or Julian the Apostate?
Along with the constant massacres inside the empire, at the borders, in enemy territory, the eternal clerical quarrels intervened. The internal politics of the 4th century was determined by the struggle between the two main confessions, the Arians and the Orthodox. At the crucial point was Athanasius of Alexandria, the most prominent bishop straddling between Constantine and Valens and one of the most nefarious of all times, whose imprint would be noted in the days to come.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Emperor Julian Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Libanius

Kriminalgeschichte, 39

 

Emperor Julian

(Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus)
Caesar: 6 November 355 – February 360
Augustus: February 360 – 3 November 361
Sole Augustus: 3 November 361 – 26 June 363


 
The pagan reaction under Julian
Like his brother Gallus, Julian was also spared from the killing of relatives, although as a member of the imperial dynasty he was kept closely guarded: first in a magnificent estate of Nicomedia, which had been owned by his mother (Basilina, deceased shortly after the birth of Julian), and then in the lonely fortress of Macellum, located in the heart of Anatolia, where his older brother was also imprisoned. The distrustful emperor wove a dense network of spies around both princes, to transmit him each and every one of their words.
They lived ‘like prisoners in that Persian castle’ (Julian), practically arrested and surely threatened with death. In Nicomedia, Julian was given a preceptor, Bishop Eusebius, a relative of Basilina, ecclesiastic and man of the world already known at the time, who, following the custom of Oriental prelates, used to dye his nails with cinnabar and his hair with henna. He was instructed to educate the child severely in the Christian religion; to prevent him from contacting the population, and to ‘never talk about the tragic end of his family’, although at seven Julian was very aware of it and this caused frequent crying spells and terrible nightmares.
In Macellum, where he was confined for seven years with scarcely any other company than that of his slaves, he had as his educator the Arian Jorge of Cappadocia, who was in charge of training him for the priesthood. But then Julian was able to leave the place and settled in Constantinople, where he lived the disputes between Arians and Orthodox and knew the real life of that world of violent riots and fiery mutual excommunications. Towards the end of 351, when Julian was twenty years old, Constantius ordered him to continue his studies in Nicomedia. Julian visited Pergamum, Ephesus and Athens, where he had notable teachers who won him for paganism.
Appointed caesar in 355 by Constantius, and proclaimed augustus by the army in Paris in 360, the same sovereign, who had no offspring, at the time of death appointed Julian as successor… when the two opposing armies marched to the encounter of the other. An ephemeral restoration of polytheistic traditions took place, with the establishment of a Hellenistic ‘state religion’, whose organization followed in many respects the pattern of Christian canons.
Julian tried to replace the cross and the nefarious dualism of Christians by a formula composed of certain streams of Hellenistic philosophy and a ‘solar pantheism’. Without neglecting the other gods of the pagan pantheon, he had a temple built for the Sun god—probably identified with Mithra—in the imperial palace; on numerous occasions he proclaimed his veneration for the basileus Helios, the Sun king, which was already a bi-millennial tradition:

Since my childhood, I was inspired by an invincible longing for the rays of the God, who have always captivated my soul, in such a way that I constantly wanted to contemplate it and even at night, when I was in the country, I forgot everything to admire the beauty of starry heaven…

Today we have become accustomed to interpreting Julian’s reaction as a nostalgic movement, a romantic anachronism or the absurd attempt to turn the hands of the clock backwards. But why do we interpret it that way? Was he refuted, or could he be, instead of being drowned in blood? What is certain and undeniable is that Emperor Julian (from 361 to 363), called ‘the Apostate’ by the Christians, was far superior to his Christian predecessors in character, morality and spirituality.
Trained in philosophy and literature, not only was he ‘the first truly cultured emperor for more than a century’ (Brown), but also deserved ‘a prominent place among writers of the time in the Greek language’ (Stein), and he knew to surround himself with the best thinkers of his time. Julian was zealous in the fulfilment of his duty and enemy of all gentleness, since he never had mistresses or ephebes, never got drunk; the emperor went to work since dawn. He tried to rationalise the bureaucracy and place intellectuals in top government and administrative positions.
Julian abolished the splendours of the court, the possession of eunuchs and jesters, and the whole system of flatterers, parasites, spies and whistleblowers who were fired by the thousands. He reduced the service, reduced the taxes by a fifth, acted with severity against the unfaithful collectors and sanitized the state mail. He also abolished the labarum, that is, the banner of the army with the anagram of Christ, and tried to resurrect ancient cults, festivals and the Paideia: classical education. He ordered the return of the old temples or the reconstruction of those that had been destroyed, and even the return of the statues and other sacred ornaments that adorned the gardens of the individuals who had appropriated them.
But he did not ban Christianity; on the contrary, he allowed the return of the exiled clerics, which only served to foment new conspiracies and tumults.
The Donatists of Africa, while praising the emperor as a paragon of justice, disinfected their newly recovered churches by scrubbing them up and down with sea water, sanded the wood of the altars and the plaster of the walls, regained the influence lost under Constans and Constantius II, and prepared to enjoy their revenge. The Catholics were converted by force, their churches expropriated, their books burned, their chalices and monstrances thrown by the windows and the hosts thrown to the dogs; some abused clerics died. Up to 391, the Donatists continued to have high status, at least in Numidia and Mauritania.
It is true that Julian, as a supporter of polytheism, criticized the Old Testament and its monotheistic rigours, as well as the arrogance of the supposed chosen people, but he granted Yahweh a rank equal to that of the other gods and even admitted that the God worshiped by the Jews was ‘the best and most powerful of all’. A Jewish delegation that visited him in Antioch in July 362, obtained the authorization to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem and the promise of new territories, in a kind of anticipation of the current ‘Zionism’, which motivated the jubilation of the diaspora. The reconstruction of the temple was initiated with great eagerness the following spring, while Julian undertook his campaign in Persia, but towards the end of May a fire, judged ‘providential’ by the Christians, as well as the death of Julian, meant the end of the works forever.
Julian was always in favour of tolerance, even towards Christians. If his dispositions regarding the ‘Galileans’, he said on one occasion, were benign and humanitarian, they should reciprocate by not bothering anyone, nor trying to impose assistance on their churches. In a letter to the citizens of Bosra, he wrote:

To convince and to teach men, it is necessary to use reason and not blows, threats or corporal punishment. I will not tire of repeating it: if you are sincere supporters of the true religion, you will refrain from bothering, attacking or offending the community of the Galileans, who are more worthy of pity than hatred, since they are wrong in matters of such power and transcendence.

Now, and although Julian was a supporter of tolerance… he could not avoid the use of violence against the violent, the Christians who were dedicated to desecrating and even destroying the newly rebuilt temples in Syria and Asia Minor, as well as statues. His legislation in the matter of education provoked many hatreds, inasmuch as he forbade Christians to study Greek literature (saying ‘let them stay in their churches interpreting their Matthew and Luke’). He also demanded the return of the columns and capital stolen from the temples by the Christians to adorn their ‘houses of God’.

If the Galileans want to have decoration in their temples, congratulations, but not with the materials belonging to other places of worship.

Libanius tells how the ships and chariots that returned their columns to the sacked gods could be seen everywhere. On October 22, 362, the Christians set fire to the temple of Apollo in Daphne, which had been restored by the sovereign, and destroyed the famous statue. In retaliation, Julian had the Basilica of Antioch and other churches consecrated to various martyrs razed. (Incidentally, Christians said that the temple had been struck by lightning but according to Libanius, there were no storm clouds on the night of the fire.)
In Damascus, Gaza, Ashkelon, Alexandria and other places the Christian basilicas burned, sometimes with the collaboration of the Jews; some believers were tortured or killed, including Bishop Marcus de Arethusa, so he entered the payroll of the martyrs. But, in general lines, ‘more offended had been the rights of the pagans’ (Schuitze), and in any case said pogrom was no more than a reaction to the excesses of the Christians, their abuses and their diatribes against paganism.
Throughout the empire, from Arabia and Syria, through Numidia, and even the Italian Alps, Julian was celebrated as a ‘benefactor of the state’, ‘undoing past wrongs’, ‘restorer of temples and the empire of freedom’, ‘magnanimous inspirer of the edicts of tolerance’. Even one of Julian’s main intellectual detractors, Gregory of Nazianzus, confessed that his ears ached from hearing so much praise from his liberal regime, according to Ernst Stein, ‘one of the healthiest the Roman Empire ever had’.
During the campaign in Persia, initiated by the emperor from Antioch (which was the main base of operations of the Romans against the Persians), on March 5, 363, a favourable occasion was presented. Julian, who was not wearing a breastplate, fell north of Ctesiphon, on the banks of the Tigris. Why was he unarmed? Was he wounded by an enemy spear or, as some claim, from his own ranks? Nobody knew.
Libanius, who was friend of Julian, assures that the author was a man ‘who refused to render cult to the Gods’. And even a Christian historian claims that Julian died at midnight on June 26, 363, when he was thirty-two years old and had governed for twenty months, victim of an assassin in the pay of the Christians…, a hero without blemish, naturally, who ‘perpetrated this audacious action in defence of God and religion’.
The Persians argued that he could not be one of their own, because they were out of range when the emperor was wounded in the midst of his troops. ‘Only one thing is certain’, Benoist-Méchin wrote, ‘and it is that he was not a Persian’, although he does not provide any definitive proof. ‘Be that as it may’, wrote Theodoret, father of the Church, ‘was he man or angel who wielded the sword, the truth is that he acted as the servant of the divine will’.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Constantine Emperor Julian Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 34

Below, abridged translation from the first
volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte
des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity)

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Chapter 7: The Christian Sons of
Constantine and His Successors

‘Since Constantine, the emperors were much more devoted Christians than they had ever been as pagans’.

— Frank Thiess

‘During the 4th and 5th centuries, the alliance between Christianity and the Imperium Romanum provided the inhabitants of the empire… an entirely new image of the world’.

— Denys Hay

 
Everything seemed very promising: a new idea of the world, the Imperium as a Christian institution oriented towards peace, the emperors turned into zealous Christians…
Statue of Emperor Constantine II.
Indeed, the sons of Constantine, Constantine II, Constantius II and Constans, along with the father, were compared by Eusebius with the Trinity. Almost since they began to walk, they were accompanied by experienced prefects, dressed in purple, in the ranks of the army. They were barely fifteen, twelve, eleven years old, and they took part in campaigns on remote fronts. Good Christians and intrepid soldiers: an ideal combination advocated for centuries by a religion of peace that has never brought peace anywhere.
 
The first Christian dynasty founded on family extermination
The imperial father did the pioneering work. Scarcely had he died and Constantius II, who considered himself an envoy of God and ‘bishop of bishops’, and once even practiced sexual continence, began in August 337 the extermination of almost all the male members of the imperial house in Constantinople: his uncle Dalmatius, half brother of Constantine who had lived many years surrounded by spies, and the father of Emperor Julian, Julius Constance, very hated by the Empress St. Elena, amen of six cousins and other badly seen courtesan personalities. Among these, the almost omnipotent Ablabius, prefect of the praetorians, whose daughter Olympias was promised as a child to Constantine. (Later, Constantius married her to the king of the Armenians, Arsaces III, and she was killed by the former wife of the sovereign with the complicity of a priest who mixed poison in the wine of mass.)
Christian mercy only respected Julian, who was five years old (he would be assassinated during a campaign against the Persians); his stepbrother Gallus was also saved because he was so sick that he seemed lost anyway (he would die in Istria in 354).
Constantius was a Christian, so were most of his obedient assassins, soldiers of his guard; Julian deduced from all this that ‘there is no beast as dangerous to man as Christians are to their fellow-believers’.
And just as no man in the Church had criticised the murders of relatives perpetrated by Constantine, no one censured those of the devotee Constantius, ‘one of the most notorious Christian princes of the century’ (Aland). Eusebius alludes to the ‘inspiration from above’ to justify the carnage. In Constantius one could contemplate a revived Constantine, the bishop wrote, and he was not mistaken. The praises dedicated to the multiple parricide and bellicose Constantius are almost as dithyrambic as those deserved by the military leader and exterminator of relatives, Constantine.
Paradigm of the cruelty according to Amianus, Constantius did not take long in sending a message to the bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, the preceptor of Julian, asking him never to speak with him about the destinies of his family.
And six years later, Julian and Gallus were imprisoned in Macellum, a sinister fortress hidden between mountains— ‘without authorizing anyone to approach us, without studies worthy of such a name, without conversations, although we were surrounded by a splendid service’, remembers Julian. A secret agent of the emperor suggested Gallus, the first-born, that Constantius was not guilty of the death of his father, and that the extermination of his family had been an uncontrolled act of the soldiery.