Category: Vespasian and Titus

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How Yahweh conquered Rome, 4

by Laurent Guyénot

 

The foundation of the Roman church under the Flavian dynasty

In 70, newly proclaimed emperor Vespasian and his son Titus brought to Rome about 97,000 Jewish captives (Josephus, Jewish War vi, 9), as well as members of the Jewish nobility rewarded for their support in the war in Judea—Josephus being the most famous of them.

Soon after, as Josephus started working on his Antiquities of the Jews in 20 volumes, we are told that the Gospels were written.[11]

In the same period, according to standard Church history, we already have in Rome a Christian church, headed by a certain Clement of Rome (88-99). Clement must have been an educated Jew like Josephus, because his only genuine epistle is characterized by numerous Hebraisms, abundant references to the Old Testament, and a Levitical mindset. An ancient and credible tradition makes him a freedman of consul Titus Flavius Clemens, a cousin of the Flavian emperors. We learn from Cassius Dio that Flavius Clemens was executed by Domitian, brother and successor of Titus, for ‘atheism’ and ‘deviation toward Judaic customs.’ His wife Flavia Domitilla was banished to the island of Pandateria (Ventotene). Over time, Flavius Clemens came to be regarded as a Christian martyr, and this gave rise to the idea of Domitian’s persecution of Christians. But historians now dismiss this notion (there is no clearly attested persecution of Christians prior to the middle of the third century),[12] and assume that Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla were simply accused of Judaizing, and the former perhaps of circumcising himself.[13] One of Domitian’s assassins in 96 was a steward of Domitilla named Stephanus, which may suggests a Jewish vengeance.

The attitude of the Flavians towards the Jews was apparently twofold. On the one hand, they seemed determined to do away with the Jewish religion, which they saw, correctly, as the source of Jewish separatism. Not content with having destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, Vespasian also ordered the destruction of the one in Leontopolis, Egypt. In general, the Romans used to integrate the vanquished gods with a ceremony of evocatio deorum, by which the god was granted a sanctuary in Rome. But the god Yahweh was considered inassimilable, which is why his objects of worship were treated as mere booty, according to Emily Schmidt: ‘The treatment of the Jewish god can be seen as an inversion of the typical Roman treatment of or attitude towards foreign gods, perhaps as an anti-evocatio.’[14]

On the other hand, Josephus’ biography shows that Vespasian and Titus were not just merciful, but even grateful to the Jews who had rallied to them in Judea. There is no contradiction between those two aspects of the Flavians’ Jewish policy: they repressed Jewish separatism and forbade Jewish proselytizing but encouraged Jewish assimilation. Assimilationist Jews abandoned circumcision and had no objection to the syncretic assimilation of Yahweh with Zeus or Jupiter. The same basic twofold policy was followed by the Flavians’ successors Trajan (98-117) and Hadrian (117-138).[15]

From these basic facts, and keeping in mind the pattern set by Ezra’s priestly circle in Babylon, it is not difficult to imagine what was going on in Rome in the first century. The theory I’m going to discuss now goes like this. The cornerstone of the Roman Catholic Church was first laid by a secret brotherhood of priestly Jews, who had been brought to Rome by Vespasian and Titus in the aftermath of the Jewish War that destroyed their Temple in 70 AD. Some had gained Vespasian’s favor and protection by handing him the fabulous Temple treasure that made possible his ascension to the imperial throne. Flavius Josephus, who had defected to the Romans in Galilee and was rewarded beyond measure by Vespasian, may have been an influential member of that Jewish circle. Those powerful, wealthy and self-conscious Jews, using assimilation for dissimulation, had the motive, the means and the opportunity to fabricate the syncretic religion that could serve as their Trojan horse.

I borrow this theory from Flavio Barbiero’s book The Secret Society of Moses: The Mosaic Bloodline and a Conspiracy Spanning Three Millennia (2010). The author is not a trained historian, but a scientist with a sharp inquisitive and logical mind combined with a great imagination and a taste for sweeping theories. There is a great deal of speculation in the grand story he unfolds, from Moses to modern times, but it is insightful and consistent. At least it is a good starting point for trying to answer the question of how the Jews created Christianity.

According to that thesis, these priestly Jews brought to Rome by Vespasian and Titus had come to terms with the ruin of their nation and Temple, but they had not given up on their biblical program of Jewish supremacy; they simply reinterpreted it from their new vantage point inside the Empire’s capital. Still jealous of their birth and strictly endogamous, they retained and passed on to their progeny a sense of mission to pave for Israel a new road towards its destiny. Can we not even assume that, under their apparent loyalty to the Emperor, they shared the same hatred of Rome that inspired first-century Jewish texts like the Apocalypses of Ezra and of Baruch?

In Ezra, the roar of the Lion of Judah makes the Roman eagle bursts into flame, and a reunited and free Israel is gathered in Palestine. In Baruch, the Messiah routs and destroys the Roman armies, then brings the Roman emperor in chains to Mount Zion and puts him to death.[16] The same hatred of Rome permeates the Book of Revelation, where Rome, under the thin veil of Babylon, is called the Great Harlot, whose flesh will be consumed by God’s wrath, to make way for a brand new Jerusalem.
 

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Editor’s note: Already from Nietzsche’s texts it was clear that the author of the Book of Revelation was a Jew who hated Rome in a hellish way. If there is one overtly anti-Roman text in the New Testament it is the one attributed to the Jew John of Patmos (not to be confused with John the Evangelist, let alone the fictional figure of John the Apostle).

It was a book written after the destruction of Jerusalem. No wonder the Jew John of Patmos dreamed of a ‘New Jerusalem’ in the final book of the Bible!

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Let us consider, as a working hypothesis, that these Jewish priests had a plan. They adopted the network strategy that had allowed their distant ancestors to infiltrate the Persian court and thereby regain their lost power under the patronage of Ezra. Their goal, according to Flavio Barbiero, was ‘taking possession of the newborn Christian religion and transforming it into a solid power basis for the priestly family’ (p. 146). There existed already a cult of Christ, attested by Paul’s epistles written in the 50s, but the Gospels gave it a completely different orientation in the decades following the destruction of the Temple. The Law-abiding Peter, presented as the head of the Jerusalem Church by the Gospel of Matthew, was made the founder of the Roman papacy in the literature attributed to Clement of Rome, thus establishing a spiritual bond between Rome and Jerusalem.

To get a better understanding of the Jewish community that elaborated these traditions, we must take a closer look at the first Jewish war. In 67, emperor Nero sent his army commander Vespasian to crush the rebellion of the priestly Sadducees who had defied Roman power by banning from the Temple the daily sacrifices offered in the name and at the expense of the Emperor. When, after Nero’s death, Vespasian was declared emperor in December 69, his son Titus was left in Judea to finish putting down the rebellion.

In Book vi of Josephus’ Jewish War we learn that, from the early stage of Titus’ siege of Jerusalem, many Jews went over to the Romans, including ‘heads of the priestly families.’ Titus ‘not only received these men very kindly in other respects, but […] told them, that when he was gotten clear of this war, he would restore each of them to their possessions again.’ Until the last days of the siege, Josephus informs us, some priests obtained safe conduct under the condition that they handed to Titus some of the Temple’s wealth.

One, named Jesus, delivered ‘two candlesticks similar to those that were deposited in the Temple, some tables, some drinking chalices and cups, all of solid gold. He also handed over the curtains [those that were torn as Jesus expired according to Matthew 27:51], the robes of the high priest, with the precious stones and many other objects used for sacrifices.’ Another, named Phineas, introduced by Josephus as ‘the guardian of the Temple treasure,’ handed over ‘the priests’ tunics and belts, a large quantity of purple and scarlet cloth […] and a large quantity of the sacred ornaments, thanks to which, even if he was a prisoner of war, he obtained the amnesty reserved for deserters.’

Those priests obviously bargained their lives and their freedom with parts of the Temple treasure. The Temple was not just a religious sanctuary, it was, in a real sense, a central bank and a giant vault, harboring enormous quantities of gold, silver, and precious artifacts financed by tithes from around the world. One of the purposes of the Temple, we could say, was to satisfy Yahweh’s greed: ‘I shall fill this Temple with glory, says Yahweh Sabaoth. Mine is the silver, mine the gold!’ (Haggai 2:7).[17] According to the Copper Scroll found near the Dead Sea in 1952, the Temple treasure, amounting to tons of gold, silver, and precious items, had been hidden during the siege in 64 locations.[18] So it is logical to assume, as Barbiero does, that Titus and Vespasian were only able to get their hands on it with the help of high-ranking priests.

This huge booty, of which the symbolic centerpiece was the enormous menorah depicted on the Arch of Titus (opening picture), certainly helped Vespasian to earn the acclamation of his troops as emperor, and then to convince the Senate. The construction of the Coliseum, between 70 and 80, was entirely financed by this booty.

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[11] The earliest gospel, the Gospel of Mark, is commonly dated in the late 60s, but that date is much too early, especially since it mentions the destruction of the Temple.

[12] Tacitus wrote in the Annals (xv, 44) that Nero accused Christians of starting the great fire of Rome in 64, and had many of them ‘thrown to the beasts, crucified, and burned alive.’ But this is the only attestation of that story, and some modern scholars have cast doubt on its credibility. Richard Carrier sees it as a later Christian interpolation, and Brent Shaw argues that Nero’s persecution is a myth. There is one other mention of persecution against Christians before the third century, in a letter written to Trajan by Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia (north of Asia Minor). But this letter is of dubious authenticity as well, belonging to a book of 121 letters found in the 16th century, copied, and lost again.

[13] Paul Mattei, Le Christianisme antique: De Jésus à Constantin, Armand Colin, 2011, p. 119.

[14] Emily A. Schmidt, ‘The Flavian Triumph and the Arch of Titus: The Jewish God in Flavian Rome,’ UC Santa Barbara: Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group, 2010.

[15] Trajan is said to have had a pro-Jewish wife, Pompeia Plotina, and he once sentenced to death a Greek dignitary named Hermaiskos for having complained that the emperor’s entourage was ‘full of impious Jews.’ (Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt – From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 193-196). But Hadrian is credited for having banned circumcision, and, when faced in 132 with a new anti-Roman Jewish uprising in Judea, led by Simon bar Kokhba, he destroyed Jerusalem once more, converted it into a Greek city named Aelia Capitolina, and forbade Jews to enter it.

[16] Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Essential Books, 1957, p. 4.

[17] According to 1Kings 10:14, the amount of gold hoarded each year into Salomon’s temple was ‘666 talents of gold’ (1 talent = 30kg). Salomon’s treasure may be legendary, but it illustrates what the Jerusalem Temple still meant for the priests of the first century AD.

[18] Because the Copper Scroll is part of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, which have been wrongly assigned an Essenian origin for decades, its content was long considered fictional. The revision of this misguided theory, pioneered by Norman Golb in Who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls?: The search for the secret of Qumran, Scribner, 1995, has corrected that bias.

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The Jesus Hoax, 4

 
CHAPTER 4: ONE AGAINST ALL

If the Jews are chosen by God, then everyone else is, of necessity, not chosen. If Jews are first class humans in the eyes of God, everyone else is second-class at best. And indeed, Jews do view themselves as distinct, special, and superior to others. As Exodus states, “We are distinct from all other people that are upon the face of the earth” (33:16). Similarly, the Hebrew tribe is “a people dwelling alone, and not reckoning itself among the nations” (Numbers 23:9).

Moses adds that “you shall rule over many nations” (15:6)… you shall eat the wealth of the nations” (61:5-6).

Clearly, when other people began to encounter these ideas and the attitudes that derived from them, one would expect a backlash. And there was. Hence we find a consistent thread of opinions from non-Jewish observers, for centuries, who are repelled by such arrogance…

The earliest direct references come from Aristotle’s star pupil Theophrastus. He had a concern about one of their customs: “the Syrians, of whom the Jews (Ioudaioi) constitute a part, also now sacrifice live victims… They were the first to institute sacrifices both of other living beings and of themselves”. The Greeks, he added, would have “recoiled from the entire business.” The victims—animal and human —were not eaten, but burnt as “whole offerings” to their God, and were “quickly destroyed.” The philosopher was clearly repelled by this Jewish tradition.

Egyptian high priest Manetho (ca. 250 BC) tells of a group of “lepers and other polluted persons,” 80,000 in number, who were exiled from Egypt and found residence in Judea… When in power they treated the natives “impiously and savagely,” “setting towns and villages on fire, pillaging the temples and mutilating images of the gods without restraint,” and roasting the animals held sacred by the locals. This is a very different version than we read in the Jewish Bible…

The decline of the Seleucids coincided with Roman ascent. Rome was still technically a republic in the second century BC, but its power and influence were rapidly growing. Jews were attracted to the seat of power, and travelled to Rome in significant numbers. As before, they grew to be hated. By 139 BC, the Roman praetor Hispalus found it necessary to expel them from the city: “The same Hispalus banished the Jews from Rome, who were attempting to hand over their own rites to the Romans, and he cast down their private alters from public places”. In even this short passage, one senses a Roman Jewry who were disproportionately prominent, obtrusive, even ‘pushy.’

Perhaps in part because of this incident, and in light of the Maccabean revolt some 30 years earlier, the Seleucid king Antiochus VII Sidetes was advised in 134 BC to exterminate the Jews… Apollonius Molon wrote the first book to explicitly confront the Hebrew tribe, Against the Jews.

The rhetoric is clearly heating up. In 63 BC, as we know, Roman general Pompey took Palestine. In the year 59 BC Cicero gave a speech, now titled Pro Flacco. The Jewish religion is “at variance with the glory of our empire, the dignity of our name, the customs of our ancestors.” That the gods stand opposed to this tribe “is shown by the fact that it has been conquered, let out for taxes, made a slave.”

Ten years later Diodorus Siculus wrote his Historical Library. Among other things, it again recounts the Exodus: “The refugees had occupied the territory round about Jerusalem, and having organized the nation of Jews had made their hatred of mankind into a tradition” (34, 1).

Here, though, it is Antiochus Epiphanes, not his successor Sidetes, that was urged “to wipe out completely the race of Jews, since they alone of all nations avoided dealings with any other people and looked upon all men as their enemies”.

The great lyric poet Horace wrote his Satires in 35 BC, exploring Epicurean philosophy and the meaning of happiness. At one point, though, he makes a passing comment on the apparently notorious proselytizing ability of the Roman Jews—in particular their tenaciousness in winning over others. Horace is in the midst of attempting to persuade the reader of his point of view: “and if you do not wish to yield, then a great band of poets will come to my aid, and, just like the Jews, we will compel you to concede to our crowd” (I.4.143). Their power must have been legendary, or he would not have made such an allusion.

The last commentator of the pre-Christian era was Lysimachus. Writing circa 20 BC, he offers another variation on the Exodus story. The exiled ones, led by Moses, were instructed to “show goodwill to no man,” to offer “the worst advice” to others, and to overthrow any temples or sanctuaries they might come upon. Arriving in Judea, “they maltreated the population, and plundered and set fire to the local temples.” They then built a town called Hierosolyma (Jerusalem), and referred to themselves as Hierosolymites.

The charge of misanthropy, or hatred of mankind, is significant and merits further discussion, especially in light of the Christian story.

 

Romans of the Christian Era

Emperor Tiberius expelled them in the year 19 AD. The expulsion did not succeed. Eleven years later, as we recall from chapter two, Sejanus found reason to oppose them again.

Anti-Jewish actions continued. In 49, Claudius once again had to expel them. In a fascinating line from Suetonius circa the year 120, we find mention of one ‘Chrestus’ (Latin: Chresto) as the leader of the rabble; this would be perhaps the fourth non-Jewish references to Jesus. “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome”. This is an important observation that, even at that late date, the Romans still identified Christianity with the Jews.

Despite all this, the beleaguered tribe still earned no sympathy. The great philosopher Seneca commented on them in his work On Superstition, circa 60. He was appalled not only by their ‘superstitious’ religious beliefs, but more pragmatically with their astonishing influence in Rome and around the known world, despite repeated pogroms and banishments. Seneca adds: “The customs of this accursed race (sceleratissima gens) have gained such influence that they are now received throughout all the world. The vanquished have given laws to their victors.”

Seneca is clearly indignant at their reach. Then came the historic Jewish revolt in Judea, during the years 66 to 70. The Romans were surely gratified; to their mind, the Jews received their just deserts.

In besieging Jerusalem, and consequently the mighty Jewish temple, Titus had the Jews trapped. There was thought of sparing the temple, but Titus opposed this option. For him, “the destruction of this temple was a prime necessity in order to wipe out more completely the religion of the Jews and the Christians.” These two religions, “although hostile to each other, nevertheless sprang from the same sources; the Christians had grown out of the Jews: if the root were destroyed, the stock would easily perish”. The passage closes by noting that 600,000 Jews were killed in the war.

The third and final Jewish uprising occurred just a few years later, in 132. The reasons for this were many, but two stand out: the construction of a Roman city on the ruins of Jerusalem, and Emperor Hadrian’s banning of circumcision: “At this time the Jews began war, because they were forbidden to practice genital mutilation (mutilare genitalia)”. Dio describes the conflict in detail. “Jews everywhere were showing signs of hostility to the Romans, partly by secret and partly overt acts”. They were able to bribe others to join in the uprising: “many outside nations, too, were joining them through eagerness for gain, and the whole earth, one might almost say, was being stirred up over the matter.” For those today who argue that Jews were perennially the cause of wars, this would provide some early evidence. Hadrian sent one of his best generals, Severus, to put down the insurgency. Through a slow war of attrition, “he was able to crush, exhaust, and exterminate them. Very few of them in fact survived.”

Finally we have Celsus, a Greek philosopher who composed a text, The True Word, sometime around 178. The piece is striking as an extended and scathing critique of the increasingly prominent Christian sect.

 

Conclusions

So what can we conclude from this brief overview of some 600 years of the ancient world? To say that the Jews were disliked is an understatement. The critiques come from all around the Mediterranean region, and from a wide variety of cultural perspectives. And they are uniformly negative. I note here that it’s not a case of ‘cherry-picking’ the worst comments and ignoring the good ones. The remarks are all negative; there simply are no positive opinions on the Jews or early Christians. A reasonable conclusion is that there is something about the Jewish culture that inspires disgust and hatred.

In any case, it’s clear that the Jews had few if any friends in the ancient world. Their religion instructed them to despise others (Gentiles), and others in turn despised them. But the originating source was the Jews themselves: their religion, their worldview, their values. They were willing to use and exploit non-Jews for their own ends. They were willing to kill, and to die.

This situation feeds directly into the circumstances of the Roman occupation and Paul’s reaction. The preceding analysis suggests that Paul was interested in nothing other than saving ‘Israel,’ the Jewish people. We have seen a few textual clues indicating that he was willing even to commit murder in order to further his ends. Surely he hated the Romans with a vengeance, and yet he also could see the futility of confronting them directly.

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Apocalypse for whites • XX

by Evropa Soberana

 
Consequences of the Great Jewish Revolt
In the year 73, after seven long years of an incredibly bloodthirsty war against the greatest military power on the planet, Judea as a whole was devastated; Jerusalem reduced to ashen ruins, and the Temple completely destroyed, except for a wall that remained standing, the Mur des Lamentations. Judea became a separate province, and the Legio X Fretensis permanently camped in the Jewish capital.
Once more: according to ancient sources, 1,100,000 Jews died during the siege and during the legions’ invasion, and another 97,000, including the leaders Simon Bar Giora and John of Giscala, were captured and sold as slaves throughout the Roman Empire. The vestiges of independence and political unity of the Jewish quarter were pulverized, and the Jews became again a people without a country.
Once re-conquered the whole province of Judea, Rome coined commemorative coins on which appeared the profile of Emperor Vespasian and, on the other side, the inscription IVDEA CAPTA (conquered Judea), under which Judea was represented by a crying woman.

The Jewish rebellion was condemned as a kamikaze action from the beginning. Simply, the Roman Empire was a force too irresistible, and only the fundamentalist fanaticism, preached by minority social sectors, could drag Jewry to fight until the end in a way so tenacious with an enemy that was the bearer of an infinitely superior culture and, above all, of a better and more effective way of acting in the world. Will and faith may move mountains. In this case however the Jews did not achieve miracles but the destruction of their holy land and the hardening of the Roman occupation.
The date of the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70 signals the beginning of the so-called Galut or Diaspora: the dispersion of the Jews throughout the world. In reality, the Jews were already more numerous outside Judea than in Judea—the largest Jewish population in the world was in Alexandria—, but the destruction of their capital decapitated the Judaic centralism and further fostered this diaspora process, favouring autonomous developments; the typical stateless feeling, and the rise of that characteristic cosmopolitanism.
Vespasian had the Jews of Judea scattered throughout Italy, Greece and, above all, North Africa and Asia Minor, believing that this was the end of the Jewish danger to the Empire.
Upon returning to Rome, the triumphant Titus solemnly rejected the crown of laurels of victory offered by the Roman people, claiming that he fulfilled the divine will and that ‘there is no merit in defeating a people that has been abandoned by their own god’. Shortly afterwards the Romans erected an arc of triumph, under which no Jew—at least no traditionalist Jew—still passes today. The arch of Titus, erected in Rome to commemorate the capture of Jerusalem, shows the Roman legionaries transporting the fruits of the looting of the temple, highlighting the giant menorah.

This is a key moment in Jewish history. The Jews saw how their achievements were crushed by a proud European empire, how their relics were trampled by Roman sandals and how their sacrosanct Temple was burned by flames. To see it destroyed was a huge shock in the collective psychology of Jewry, filling the Jews with resentment and desires for revenge against what they knew of Europe: the Greek and Roman communities.
Rome might have easily been able to exterminate all the Jews of Judea if she had wanted, but Rome did not, as it seemed that the Jewish power was finished. The Jews had been traumatized, and their tribal pride shattered. But, far from neutralising them, this psychological shock on their collective unconscious fed them cruel desires for revenge.

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Apocalypse for whites • XIX

by Evropa Soberana

 
Fall of Masada
In the spring of 71, assured Jerusalem, Titus marches to Rome, leaving the Legio X Fretensis, commanded by the new governor of Judea, Lucius Flavius Silva, in charge of giving the coup de grace to the Jewish resistance.
The last bastion of the entire rebellion was the fortified city of Masada, which had been erected by the Maccabees in a strategic area. Herod had improved it in his attempt to keep the Jewry happy, but when he died, Masada’s trade declined and became uninhabited. But after the war it housed what remained of the hard Zionist core: the Zealots and the Sicarii led by Eleazar ben Ya’ir.
In the year 72, Lucius Flavius Silva was at the foot of Masada. When, after a painful siege, the Romans entered the fortress the following year, they discovered that the 953 defenders had committed suicide.

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Apocalypse for whites • XVIII

by Evropa Soberana

 
Siege and fall of Jerusalem: the destruction of the Second Temple
That same year, 68, Nero was killed in Rome and a civil war broke out. The whole Roman Empire was in check. On the one hand, the numerous Jewish masses, in full boiling mode, challenged the Roman power in Judea and on the other, they did it in the bosom of Rome itself. If the Roman power in the East faltered, the Parthians would have been able to take advantage quickly to conquer Asia Minor and fortify themselves in the area, which would have been a huge catastrophe for Rome.
The government was staggering gently, but Vespasian returned to Rome and fought against Vitellius, who claimed to be Nero’s successor. After defeating the fat Vitellius, Vespasian was named emperor and entrusted his 26-year-old son Titus with the military operations of repression and the siege of the Jewish capital.
Titus surrounded Jerusalem with the four legions, cutting off supplies of water and food. Also, he increased the pressures on the needs of the city by allowing the pilgrims to enter to celebrate the Passover and then preventing them from leaving.

Statue of Titus modelled after the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, 79-81 CE, Vatican Museum. As can be seen, an anti-Hellenist Pope ordered
this and many other Greco-Roman statues to be ‘castrated’
centuries after they were sculpted.

In besieged Jerusalem with famine and epidemics, thousands and thousands of lives were claimed. The Jews who constituted the hard core of the rebellion—the Zealots and the Sicarii—threw down the wall the pacifists or the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ suspected of not communing with the Zionist cause, or of seeking an understanding with Rome to obtain favourable conditions for their people. According to some passages of the very Talmud, the Sicarii and Zealots (leaders such as Menahem ben Ya’ir, Eleazar ben Ya’ir, and Simon Bar Giora) came to commit atrocities against the Jewish civilian population, even preventing them from receiving food, to force them to be obedient and commit to the cause.
The defenders that constituted the active element of the resistance must have been about 60,000 men. They were divided into: the Zealots under the command of Eleazar ben Simon who occupied the Antonia Fortress and the Temple; the Sicarii under the command of Bar Giora, centered in the high city; and the Idumeans and others under John of Giscala. There was an obvious rivalry between the combatant factions, which erupted from time to time in open fighting. The population of the fortified Jerusalem exceeded three million people, of whom most were willing to fight, hoping that their god would lend a hand against the infidels.
While the Romans attacked again and again the fortifications with immense casualties on their part, the Zealots occasionally left the ramparts to make raids in which they managed to assassinate unsuspecting Roman soldiers.
After one of these actions, Titus, using very clear tactics of intimidation, made deploy at the foot of the city his entire army with the aim of intimidating the besieged, and appealed to Josephus, who yelled at the beleaguered a quite reasonable speech. Apparently, for the ears of the Jews dominated by their superstitions and surely awaiting any moment for an intervention of Yahweh, Josephus only managed to get them angrier and was shot with an arrow that wounded his arm.
Josephus descended from a long Sadduceean priestly line related to the Hasmonean dynasty of pre-Roman times. During the Great Jewish Revolt, the Sanhedrin made him governor of Galilee. After defending the Yodfat fortress for three weeks, he surrendered to the Romans who killed almost all of his men. Josephus, who was hid in a cistern with another Jew, was saved by demonstrating his great training and intelligence, and predicting to the general his future appointment as emperor of Rome. Later, he would accompany Titus and the Romans who used him to try to negotiate with the Sanhedrin.
After this, the Jews launched another sudden raid in which they almost succeeded in capturing Titus himself. The Romans were trained for frontal clashes with enemy armies; they were unaccustomed to the dirty fight of guerrilla warfare, in which the chivalry of combat is totally nullified. In May of 70 the Romans opened with their battering rams a breach in the third wall of Jerusalem, after which they also broke the second wall and penetrated like a swarm of wasps into the city.
Titus’s intention was to go to the Antonia Fortress, which was next to the Temple: a vital strategic point of the Jewish defence. But as soon as the Roman troops surpassed the second wall, they were engaged in violent street fighting against the Zealots and the civil population mobilized by them, and despite losing thousands of men to the superiority of legionary training in body to body combat they continued to attack, until they were ordered to retreat to the Temple to avoid useless casualties.
Josephus tried, once again unsuccessfully, to negotiate with the besieged authorities to prevent the bloodbath from continuing to grow. The Antonia Fortress had been built by Herod in honour of Mark Antony, who had supported him. The legions of Titus, faced with a building built with Roman efficiency, had to overcome a thousand calamities to take it.
Several times the Romans tried to break or climb the walls of the fortress without success. Finally, they managed to take it in an undercover assault, during which a small Roman party silently assassinated the Zealot guards who were sleeping. The fortress was then filled with legionaries. Although Titus planned to use the fortress as a base to breach the walls of the Temple and take it, a Roman soldier (according to Josephus, the Romans were enraged against the Jews for their treacherous attacks) threw a torch that set the wall on fire.
The Second Temple was levelled, and to top it all for the Jewish quarter, the flames quickly spread to other residential areas of Jerusalem. When they saw their Temple being burned many Jews committed suicide, thinking that Yahweh had become angry with them, had abandoned them and was sending them to a kind of apocalypse.
At this time the legions quickly crushed the resistance, while some Jews escaped through underground tunnels, and others, the more fanatical ones, barricaded themselves in the high city and Herod’s citadel. After building siege towers, what remained of the combative element was massacred by Roman pilum and gladius, and the city came under effective Roman control on September 8.
 
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Editor’s note: Once again, if white nationalists were historically self-conscious (as Jews are), every year they would celebrate this date.

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Kriminalgeschichte, 6

Below, translated excerpts from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”)

 
The Jewish War (66-70)

The Zealots, a Jewish nationalist group originally constituted, undoubtedly, by a section of the Jerusalem clergy by the year 6, instigated that war as a reaction to the power of the Roman occupier. Despite the existence of notable differences between Zealots and Christians, many points of contact have also been observed. It is no coincidence that one of the apostles of Jesus, a certain Simon, is called in the Gospel of Luke “the Zealot” and in that of Matthew “the Canaanite”: which represents a simple transcription of the Aramaic qannai, “the exalted.”

Among the zealots, to whom current research attributes an important influence in the trajectory of Jesus, abounded apocalyptic rumours, as the oracle which said that, at that time, “one of his own would be king of the world.” Four lustrums before the outbreak of the Jewish war proper, they were already fighting against the Romans, but even more against certain antipatriot Jews.

Their enemies called them “Sicarius,” that means “those of the knife,” because they were armed with the “sica,” with which they stabbed on the back those who they did not like, especially some rich Jews who for reasons of interest agreed with the Romans. It is said (by Eusebius, Church historian) that one of their first victims had been “the high priest Jonathas.”

They committed their murders in full day and in the middle of the city; they took advantage of the festive days to be confused in the agglomerations, and stabbed their enemies with small daggers that were hidden under the tunics. When the victim fell, the murderers added to the commotion and exclamations of consternation, and thanks to this cold blood they were almost never discovered.

Josephus, who in the middle of the war changed sides and favoured the Romans, calls the zealots assassins and bandits, but he does not forget to mention that “they had many supporters, especially among the youth.”

In extremist circles the insurrection against Rome was publicly incited. They read preferably the two books of the Maccabees (whose definitive inclusion in the Sacred Scriptures, let us recall in passing, dates from the Council of Trent; that is, from the sixteenth century), to exalt themselves with those “heroic actions.” They hoped to be able to re-edit before the Romans, with the Lord’s help, the triumphs won against the Greeks. In this way the Bellum ludaicum (66-70) was finally produced: a bloody adventure in which the Romans were forced to throw them out militarily.

The revolt, so pleasing to the eyes of the Lord, led first by Eleazar ben Simon, the son of a priest as well as by Zechariah ben Phalec, then continued by John of Giscala, began at a well chosen time on a Sabbath with the slaughter of the few Roman guards on the Antonia tower in Jerusalem and the powerful fortifications of the royal palace. Before surrendering to the garrison, they promised that they would not kill anyone; then they only pardoned an officer who agreed to be circumcised. (Later Christians would also forgive the Jews who accepted conversion.)

In the Greek cities of the region, Damascus, Caesarea, Ashkelon, Scythopolis, Hippos and Gadara the Hellenes organized in turn a slaughter of Jews: 10,500 or 18,000 only in Damascus, according to an account. At the same time the insurgent Jews, stimulated by the ardour of their faith and by the great memories of the exploits of the Maccabees, were cleansing up all minorities in Judea.

The Romans began to march, first under the orders of the governor of Syria, Cestius Gallus. Nero then sent one of his best generals, the former mule dealer Titus Flavius Vespasianus, whose first military operations were extremely cautious. He found himself in a politically sensitive situation due to the death of Nero and the fall of Galba.

But by the summer of the year 68 they controlled almost all of Palestine; among other things, he ordered the burning of the hermitage of Qumran, on the shores of the Dead Sea, whose important library, which the monks had hidden shortly before in the mountain caves, was not discovered until the middle of the 20th century.

He also decimated the Samaritans, who had taken part in the Jewish insurrection. Cerealis made with 11,600 of them a hecatomb in Mount Gerizim. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, a city of “sad fame” according to Tacitus, to which Vespasian already had in siege, the children of God divided into two parties fought each other; they even came to form a third faction that fought against the other two in the Temple.

The Temple, with its surroundings, was a true fortress, turned into redoubt of the zealots… that continued celebrating the rites even under the siege! While the masses, deprived of provisions, starved to death, the Jews stabbed each other in street fights, or killed the prisoners in the dungeons, while continuing to make common cause against the Romans. These, for their part, also used to pass the prisoners by knife or crucified them. Vespasian had to leave for Rome, since his troops had proclaimed him emperor.

But two years later, in early September 70, his son Titus ended the insurrection with a bloodbath: previously, being in the Caesarean Palestine, in Berytus (Beirut) and elsewhere, he had ordered to throw thousands of imprisoned Jews to the circus beasts, or forced them to kill each other in duels, or burned them alive. The few survivors of Jerusalem, reduced to a single heap of ruins, were stabbed or sold as slaves.

The Temple burned to the foundations, with all its possessions treasured for six centuries, on the anniversary of the destruction of the first one. The struggle continued for several more years in several isolated fortresses, such as Herodion Hill, Machaerus and Masada, until the defenders committed suicide along with their wives and children.

In the year 71, the victor entered triumphantly in Rome, where still today can be seen the Arch of Titus in memory of the feat…

The massacre had cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Jerusalem was devastated as once were Carthage and Corinth, and the country incorporated into the dominions of the emperor. Overwhelming taxes were imposed on the vanquished, until the fifth of the first harvests, and to a greater calamity, the country suffered the plague of bandits. Religious life, on the other hand, and how could it be otherwise, flourished.

Neither in Palestine nor anywhere the Jew was forbidden to practice his religion: “For prudence they abstained from declaring war on the Jewish faith as such” (Mommsen). But there was still ahead a major defeat, a few decades later, as a result of the second attempt of a “last war of God.”

Categories
Antiochus IV Epiphanes Axiology Civil war History Jerusalem Old Testament Transvaluation of all values Vespasian and Titus

Antiochus

Greek effigy coin of
Antiochus IV Epiphanes

A couple of days ago I resuscitated the idea of adding here further excerpts from the monumental Criminal History of Christianity. Four years ago I purposely left those excerpts with a short entry because Deschner’s last sentence provided much food for thought: “If the stringent measures against the Jews by Antiochus IV had taken effect, it would not only have meant the end of Judaism, but also ‘would have prevented the rise of Christianity and Islam.’ Our imagination almost fails to conceive a world so different…”

It is a pity that the sources for understanding the revolt of the Maccabees are the Old Testament and Josephus: both Jewish sources. Even so, what happened 2183 years ago can be deduced from those texts.

Early in 167 BC, the Greek Hellenistic king Antiochus sent an army to Jerusalem. He did it on Saturday so the Jews could not carry weapons. Thus, the Hellenistic forces entered the Jewish city without finding opposition. The soldiers of Apollonius, the general of Antiochus, destroyed much of Jerusalem and set up camp on a hill from which the Temple was dominated. That hill would turn into a citadel: the stronghold of the white man in Jerusalem in the next quarter-century.

Antiochus then proceeded to act directly against the Jews. He ordered them to accept the Greek customs; to desecrate the Sabbath and the feasts, to build altars for the white man’s gods, and to immolate therein animals which the Jews considered impure. The decree of Antiochus ended with these words: “Whoever does not obey the orders of the king shall be put to death.”

The very Jewish law became the target of the decrees of Antiochus. “You could not observe the Sabbath, keep the country feasts, or even declare yourself a Jew.” The possession of the Scriptures was a capital offense, and members of a congregation who were caught secretly celebrating the Sabbath were burned alive. “Two women were denounced for having circumcised their children. They tied the children to their breasts, so they walked about the city and threw them down the wall. ”

On the occasion of the festival of Dionysius, orthodox Jews were forced to parade in the procession. In the middle of the drums and voices in honour of the Greek god of wine, they marched with wreaths of ivy, symbol of the foreign god. Later, the whole procession, under pain of death, was exhorted to eat pork.

The way the Jews first reacted was by writing the Book of Daniel. The authors deceived the Jerusalemites into believing it to be a remote text they had just unearthed. As literary criticism has revealed the Book of Daniel was a trick: a vaticinium ex eventu or foretelling after the event written during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. It is from that book that the phrase of the abomination of desolation, desolating sacrilege, became famous.

Just compare how pre-Christian Aryans dealt with Jerusalem’s Jews with the standing ovations for Prime Minister Netanyahu in the American Congress last year! It is a pity that memes like “white sharia” are becoming popular among some white nationalists while the purely Aryan meme that should become popular is Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” (see for example my post on Sweden I published today).

If nationalists transvalued Judaic values back to Aryan values, a new constellation of saints of the Ancient World would emerge. Not only the Judeo-Christian names would become gradually repudiated in the generations to come, they would even name their sons after Antiochus, Vercingetorix and Hermann.

Back in 2012 I asked in this blog, Why do we not celebrate the victory of Antiochus IV over the Jews, or Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem? The transvalued individual might well start calling the Hellenistic king as St Antiochus.

Categories
Ancient Rome Caesar Augustus Caligula Claudius Evropa Soberana (webzine) History Indo-European heritage Miscegenation Nero Non-white immigration Nordicism Patriarchy Plutarch Racial studies Real men Suetonius Tacitus Tiberius Trajan Vespasian and Titus

The face of Classical Europe (II)

Were the Romans blond and blue-eyed?

 

Translated from Evropa Soberana

 

Recently I was called names on VNN forum as a result of my criticism of anti-Nordicism in my previous post. Isn’t it ironic that the signature-legend of VNN’s admin states that the Jews must be exterminated while, at the same time, some of the forum’s senior members want to grant amnesty to the mudbloods in Europe?

Hopefully this abridged translation from the Spanish blogsite Evropa Soberana, which could be read together with the first installment about the phenotype of Greeks in Classical Europe, will throw more light on why anti-Nordicists are deluding themselves.



 

Were the Romans blond and blue-eyed?

The Latin malus [“bad”] (beside which I place mélas, Greek for “black”) might designate the common man as dark, especially black-haired (hic niger est), as the pre-Aryan settler of the Italian soil, notably distinguished from the new blond conqueror race by his color.

—Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

 
The Roman case is virtually identical to the Greek case. This YouTube clip contains the first minutes from the series Rome, where fighting between Gauls and Romans is recreated. The series had tremendous blunders, great nonsense, and several lies and BS in abundance. But the atmosphere was curious, as was the march of historical events, the legions in action, the splendor of the imperial palaces, the goings-on in the alleys of Rome, etc. One of the protagonists of the series was a centurion, the one with the whistle.

He was blond.

But how can you be so fascists so Nordicists, so Nazis so anti-Teresa-de-Calcutta, as Eurocentric and racists as these media? If you had a minimum of culture (like me) you should know that the Romans were of Mediterranean phenotype (like me)—and so on.

Things like these I have heard more times than you can imagine. And similar poppycock we continue to hear even by people who, by their admiration of Rome, obviously have read something written by these sober and tough soldiers who were the Romans, right?

In this article the testimonies from the handwriting of the real Romans are presented. Forget the movies and the illiterate pundits and let the sources explain us how Romans saw themselves.


The first Roman emperors as an example of patrician racial types

We will examine the phenotype of the first Roman emperors, who were representative of the race of patricians, the Roman nobilitas, i.e., the ruling aristocracy. What interests me is not so much to demonstrate the presence of Nordic blood in the upper Roman class (which is easy), but mainly to show that the Nordic blood in Rome was also inextricably linked to the notion of divinity and of noble descent. Some passages are originally in Greek. This is because Greek had great prestige as a cultured, poetic and philosophical language, and there were many Romans educated in that language.

• Augustus, the first Roman emperor, was “blond” (subflavum) according to Suetonius (De Vita Caesarum: Divus Augustus), and had “blue eyes” (glauci) according to Pliny (Naturalis Historia, XI, CXLIII):

roma-octavio

He had clear, bright eyes, in which he liked to have it thought that there was a kind of divine power, and it greatly pleased him, whenever he looked keenly at anyone, if he let his face fall as if before the radiance of the sun (Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum: Divus Augustus, LXXIX).

• Tiberius had “gray-blue” (caesii) eyes according to Pliny (Naturalis Historia, XI, CXLII).

• Caligula had a “blonde beard” (aurea barba) according to Suetonius (De Vita Caesarum: Caligula, LII).

• Claudius had “gray-white hair” (canitieque) according to Suetonius (De Vita Caesarum: Divus Claudius, XXX), and “gray eyes” (γλαυκόφθαλμος) according to Ioannes Malelas (Chronographia, X, CCXLVI).

• Nero was “blond or redhead” (subflavo); had “gray-blue eyes” (caesis) according to Suetonius (De Vita Caesarum: Nero, LI), and descended from a family named after their light pigmentation.

Of the Domitian family two branches have acquired distinction, the Calvini and the Ahenobarbi. The latter have as the founder of their race and the origin of their surname Lucius Domitius, to whom, as he was returning from the country, there once appeared twin youths of more than mortal majesty, so it is said, and bade him carry to the senate and people the news of a victory, which was as yet unknown. And as a token of their divinity it is said that they stroked his cheeks and turned his black beard to a ruddy hue, like that of bronze. This sign was perpetuated in his descendants, a great part of whom had red beards. (Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum: Nero, I.)

• Galba had gray-white (μιξοπόλιος) hair according to Malelas (Chronographia, X, CCLVIII) and blue eyes (caeruleis) according to Suetonius (De Vita Caesarum: Galba, XXI).

• Vitellius was “redhead” (πυρράκης) and had “gray” or “blue” eyes (γλαυκός) according to Malelas (Chronographia, X, CCLIX).

• Vespasian had “gray-white hair” (πολιός) and “wine-colored eyes” (οινοπαης τους οφθαλμούς), although it is unclear whether this refers to red wine (brown) or white wine (green) according to Malelas (Chronographia, X, CCLIX).

• Titus, according to Wilhelm Sieglin (1855-1935) in Die blonden Haare der indogermanischen Völker des Altertums, 109, was “blonde”.

• Domitian was “blond” (ξανθός) and had “gray or blue eyes” (γλαυκός) according Malelas (Chronographia, X, CCLXII).

• Nerva was “gray-haired” according to John V. Day (Indo-European Origins).

• Trajan had “golden hair” (caesaries) according to Sieglin (Die blonden Haare der indogermanischen Völker des Altertums, 109). But let us not forget that Trajan was not Roman but a Spanish with Celtic blood, and therefore we should not take this into account when trying to define the phenotype of the Roman patrician aristocracy.

• Adriano, from a noble Roman family established in Hispania, was “dark-haired” (κυανοχαιτα) according Sieglin (Die blonden Haare der indogermanischen Völker des Altertums, 112), and of “gray or blue eyes” (γλαυκόφθαλμος) according to Malelas (Chronographia XI, CCLXXVII).

Interestingly, despite being described as “dark-haired,” on his statue there are traces of gold paint on his hair and beard. Formerly, the statues were painted according to the colors of the original “model”. His facial features correspond to the Nordic type.

• Antoninus Pius had “gray-white hair” (πολιός) and eyes “the color of wine” (οινοπαης τους οφθαλμούς) according Malelas (Chronographia, XI, CCLXXX).

• Lucius Verus had “blond hair” (flaventium) according Sieglin (Die blonden Haare der indogermanischen Völker des Altertums, 110).

• Commodus had “blond hair” (ουλόξανθος) and “blue or gray eyes” (υπόγλαυκος) according Malelas (Chronographia, XII, CCLXXXIII).

Therefore, we find that:

• Of the 18 emperors from Augustus to Commodus, 9 had blond or red hair, 5 had gray or white hair, of 3 we have no way of knowing the hair color, and only one (Adriano) was described as dark-haired.

• Of the 18 emperors from Augustus to Commodus, 9 had blue or gray eyes, 2 had eyes of “the color of wine” (whatever that means, let us take it as brown), and of 7 we have no record as to the color of their eyes.

Many emperors came to power in their advanced years, with already gray or white hair. However, many were even so described with light eyes. If we had records of their appearance when they were young, it is likely that a significant proportion of them had light hair. Of the 9 Emperors with light hair, we know that at least 5 had clear eyes, and of the other 4 we know nothing about the color of their eyes. Of Tiberius, for example, we know nothing about his hair, maybe because he was bald when he came to power. And the same applies to Otto, who shaved his head and wore a wig. Nor do we know anything about the physical aspect of the “philosopher emperor” Marcus Aurelius, father of Commodus and a first-class sovereign. Many other emperors (as Julius Caesar), without being blond, were tall and had a very fair complexion, ruddy, or rosy.

From Commodus on I renounce to provide more emperor descriptions because:

1 – those individuals who began ascending to power were not of Roman origin, and therefore their phenotype cannot tell us anything about the genetic legacy of the nobilitas of Italian and patrician origin.

2 – miscegenation was already quite advanced; lineages of patrician origin having lost their meaning. At that time it was common that women of Roman high society should shave the manes of Germanic slaves to fix their blond-hair wigs.


The gods, the Italici, the patricians and the origins of Rome

Let us go back around 1200 BCE and transport ourselves to Italy. At that time, Central Europe was a buzzing propagating zone for the Indo-European stock. From what is now Germany, of a semi-barbarous proto-civilization of the iron age, flowed migrant groups in all directions. These waves were of the Celts, the Hellenes, the Illyrians and the Italici (also called italos or italiotas).

At that time, the Italici, probably with some confederate Illyrian groups as in the case of the Dorians, broke into Italy.

They were a people who, in contrast to the native inhabitants of Italy, were patriarchal rather than matriarchal; ruddy rather than swarthy; that cremated their dead instead of burying them; that brought with them a whole pantheon of gods and heroic warriors, spoke an Indo-European language, yielded a war cult and whose symbology was a lot more oriented to heavenly than earthly symbols.

Italici were the settlers of sites such as the Villanovan Culture. Subsequent “civilian” conflicts that feminist history has termed as “matriarchy vs. patriarchy,” and what is left in mythology regarding the heroic struggle of the Indo-Europeans against the native, telluric bodies (like snakes) actually refer to a spiritual confrontation triggered by the arrival of a small, aggressive and martial people that did not mix with the native population and struggled to dominate the area.

Under a rigid religious ritualism, on April 21, 753 BCE the heads of some Italic clans founded the city of Rome. For two centuries, Rome lived under the despotism and tyranny of the Etruscan kings, heads of a degenerate civilization that practiced sacrificial rituals, orgies, matriarchy, homosexuality, luxurious opulence, pedophilia, decadent entertainments, etc. The Etruscans came from Asia Minor, styling themselves as rasena (“chosen,” as the Jews) yet their legacy, which only represented the decline of something greater than themselves, meant that they were a doomed people.

The situation of the Roman tribute to Etruria lasted until, in 509 BCE, the Romans rose against the Etruscans and expelled the Etruscan king, Tarquinius Superbus, from the lands. Legends want to portray that this Italic insurrection—a “holy rebellion” against the pre-Indo-European; of patriarchy against matriarchy—was motivated by the rape of Lucretia, a beautiful and virtuous woman of Roman family at the hands of Sextus Tarquinius, son of the Etruscan king and raunchy as all his people, as opposed to the Puritan morality of the Latins.

Lucretia committed suicide by honor and, this being the straw that broke the camel of the Roman patience, the patriarchs began a rebellion against the Etruscans that led to the overthrowing of the Etruscan kings, the founding of the Roman Republic and the systematic eradication of almost all Etruscan memory. (Comparable only to the “genocide” and the complete destruction of Carthage, the mortal enemy of Rome, considered as the reincarnation of Etruscan and oriental spirit, whose fields were cast in salt so that nothing would grow there.)

decopianr

Recreation of Rome during the Republic. Pay attention to the shape of the boats, so reminiscent of the Scandinavian drakkar.

With the expulsion of the Etruscan power two praetors (later consuls) who held the vacuum of power were named. It was therefore founded the Roman Republic, marked by social struggles between patricians (nobles) and plebeians.

At that time, the original Populus Romanus was divided into 30 curiae (tribes or clans), whose origin was lost among the Italic peoples before the invasion. The curiae were headed by patres (parents) of the gens (family), that is, the founding fathers of the clan and of each family that composed it. Each gens or family was considered descendant of a genius or semi-divine patriarch, who was worshiped on the household as protector idol of the house and their descendants.

If we assimilate the fact that to the Romans a gens or family was a whole social, state, military and religious institution, we may understand the importance of the geniuses and patres as leaders of this small imperial cell, that corresponded to social, political and military leadership as well as leading positions in the characteristic Roman religious worship, where Jupiter is confused with the State, the patriarch, the Senate, the Legion and the family. No wonder, then, that they were regarded as semi-divine and of very high wisdom.

The patres were those who gave their name to the breed of the patricians, namely those belonging to the system of families and clans: the aristocracy, the first nobilitas, which differed from the plebs or plebeians—the people outside the Italic clans. At first, the male patricians were the only Roman citizens, the members of the Legion, the only ones who could be senators and enjoyed all the rights and duties traditionally associated with Roman citizenship.

Later, after the “universalization” and “cosmopolitanization” of Rome during the Empire, the patricians came to form an aristocracy over the other peoples of Italy, encompassed by the plebs. The patricians as social class, and among them the patres as heads of households, are probably the most exalted expression of patriarchy and patriotism itself of the Indo-European, in opposition to the narcotic matriarchy of the pre-Indo-European peoples of Europe, already decadents and altogether “civilized”.
 

♣

 
We now turn to the patricians and Roman gods from the point of view of the phenotype, after seeing the first Roman emperors, mostly patrician.

• Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138-78 BCE), Roman consul and dictator, of patrician descent, had blond hair, blue eyes and a ruddy complexion:

…for his golden head of hair gave him a singular appearance, and as for bravery, he was not ashamed to testify in his own behalf, after such great and noble deeds as he had performed. So much, then, regarding his attitude towards the divine powers. (Plutarch, De Vita: Sulla.)

What was the rest of his figure appears in his statues, but that fierce and unpleasant look of his blue eyes was still more terrible to stare at because the color of his face, being noted at intervals so ruddy and red mixed with his whiteness, and it is even said that he took his name from that, coming to be a nickname for the designated color. Thus, a teller of Athens taunted him with these lines: “If you knead a blackberry with flour, you have the portrait of Sulla.”

Marcus Porcius Cato the “Censor”, better known as Cato the Elder (234-149 BCE), the pronouncer of the famous saying Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam (“Furthermore, I think Carthage must be destroyed”) in every speech, had reddish hair according to Plutarch:

As for his outward appearance, he had reddish hair, and keen grey eyes, as the author of the well-known epigram ill-naturedly gives us to understand: “Red-haired, snapper and biter, his grey eyes flashing defiance, Porcius, come to the shades, back will be thrust by their Queen.” (Plutarch, Cato the Elder.)

• Poppaea Sabina (30-65 CE), the wife of Nero, famous for her beauty all over Rome, was very white and redhead.

We note that the Romans, like the Greeks, saw light pigmentation as a sign of the “divine” or “supernatural”. Some may interpret this that light pigmentation was rare among the Romans. But considering naming conventions, it is clear that the light features were quite common among the patricians. According to Karl Earlson:

Once they had reached a certain stage in their lives, the patricians earned their additional name (cognomina), which was often based on their physical appearance. The name Albus indicated light skin; Ravilla, gray eyes; Caesar, blue eyes; Flavius, blonde hair; Rufus, red hair; Longus, tall; Macer, a slender constitution. All these names were common among the patricians.

Thus, the Latin author Quintilian, in Institutio Oratoria (I, IV, XXV), notes that a man named Rufus or Longo has that name for his body characteristics: he is high or redhead. Plutarch (Coriolanus XI) states that two men, one redhead and one swarthy, could be distinguished because the first would be called Rufus and the second Niger. Aelius Spartianus, in Historia Augusta (II, IV), suggests that the Caesars earned their name from the fact that the founder of his gens had blue eyes (oculis caesiis). The lexicographer Sextus Pompeius Festus, in De verborum significatu (CCCLXXVI ff) states that the name Ravilia derives from “gray eyes” (ravis oculis), and the name Caesulla from blue eyes (oculis caesiis). Julius Paris, in De nominibus Epitome, VII, provides examples of names of women that, he says, have their origin in the pigmentation of those who held them: Rutila (red hair), Caesellia (blue eyes), Rodacilla (pink complexion), Murrula and Burra (red hair or ruddy complexion).

I have provided all these quotations to show that these names were not purely arbitrary but were, in fact, based on physical characteristics; and that these features were not uncommon among certain strata of Roman society.

Even where the patricians had almost disappeared, the Romans had memories of the old patres as the semi-divine beings who arrived to Italy, founded Rome, “Romanized” the peninsula and bequeathed the patriarchate to those lands, together with a strong mentality and a durable and effective political system that lasted for centuries. The ancient ancestors of the patricians were still considered in Rome as a common heritage to be proud of.

Karl Earlson summarizes how he follows Sieglin’s findings as to the pigmentation of the patricians and their identity as a breed:

Wilhelm Sieglin [in Die blonden Haare der indogermanischen Völker des Altertums, 1935] compiled the list of the Roman patricians whose names indicate light hair. He provided the following list: 7 Flavi, 20 Flaviani, 10 Fulvi, 121 Fulvii, 27 Rubrii, 26 Rufi, 24 Rufii, 36 Rufini, 45 Rutilii and 13 Ahenobarbi. This completely disrupts Sergi’s claim that: “The Romans also had their Flavi, indicating that people with fair complexion were rare and required a special name, but does not indicate that the Germanic type was considered aristocratic or dominant” (Sergi: 1901, 20). In fact, such people were not scarce.

Sieglin also determined that among the families Iulii, Licinii, Lucretii, Sergii and Virginii, the name Flavius was very common; Rufi was often seen among the families Antonii, Caecilii, Coelii, Cornelii, Geminii, Iunii, Licinii families (often also the Flavii), Minucii, Octavii, Pinarii, Pompei, Rutilii, Sempronii, Trebonii, Valgii and Vibii; Rufini was common among the gens Antonia, Cornelia, Iunia, Licinian, Trebonia and Vibia. Sieglin notes that this list could certainly be increased in the light of further research.

Besides all this, Sieglin also compiled a list of 63 blond or red-haired Romans. Many of these individuals were patricians. He also found references to 27 blond divinities (including Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Diana, etc.) and 10 blondes in heroic personalities.

Man makes the gods in their own image. These blond gods speak of the racial nature of the early Romans. (In the Aeneid, Virgil refers to Mercury, Lavinia, Turnus and Camilla as “golden-haired.”) His list of blonds includes Aeneas, the mythical ancestor of the Latins (also blond was his son Julo or Ascanius), Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome; Augustus, the first Roman emperor, and even Roma: which symbolized the city of Rome.

While most of Sieglin’s historical figures of light hair were patricians, most the 17 swarthy Romans in his references were commoners or freedmen.

On the disappearance of the patricians and the mestization of the original Romans

What happened to the patricians? They faded with time. In the numerous conspiracies and intrigues of the Empire, it was common that after the formation of two opposing parties and the victory of one over the other, the winner assassinated the head of the enemy party, his family and all the families related to him. (The strong destroy each other and the weak continue to live, as George Bernard Shaw maintained.) These calamities greatly decimated the patrician class. If we add the ongoing miscegenation in the majority of plebeian population, the immigration of slaves from Syria and the provinces of Asia Minor, Egypt and Africa, as well as the bleeding of the patrician stock over the battlefield, we may realize why the patricians did not last too long during the Empire, given the dysgenic situation. John V. Day wrote:

In a journal about the West and its future, it is fitting to end this article by briefly recounting the fate of the Roman upper class. Among Indo-European peoples, the Romans offer an especially useful example because they left masses of records, enabling later historians to determine what became of them. The evidence found in ancient texts implies that this class descended largely from Indo-Europeans who had a decidedly northern European physical type, although that isn’t something one reads in modern books about Roman history [emphasis added]. In Rome, though, the upper class was always a tiny minority. Instead of protecting its interests, it allowed itself to wither away. Consider a bleak statistic. We know of about fifty patrician clans in the fifth century B.C., but by the time of Caesar, in the later first century B.C., only fourteen of these had survived. The decay continued in imperial times. We know of the families of nearly four hundred Roman senators in A.D. sixty five, but, just one generation later, all trace of half of these families had vanished.

If we in the West want to avoid a similar fate, we must learn from Indo-European history. (*)

In the time of Julius Caesar we know 45 patricians, of which only one is represented by posterity when Hadrian rises to power. The Aemilsi, Fabii, Claudii. Manlii, Valerii and everyone else, except the Comelii have disappeared. Augustus and Claudius ascended 25 families to the Patriciate, and by the reign of Nerva all but 6 have disappeared. Of the families of nearly 400 senators registered under Nero in 65 CE, trace has been lost about half of them in times of Nerva. And the records are so complete that it can be assumed that these statistics represent quite accurately the disappearance of the male lineage of the families concerned. (Cf. Tenney Frank, “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire,” American Historical Review, Vol. XI, 1916).

Conclusion

Were the Romans, then, blond?

ancient_romanIt all depends on what you mean by “Romans”. The original Romans did not descend from the original inhabitants of the Italian soil, but of the Italici (italios or italiotas or as you please to call them) and probably also of Illyrian groups, namely, Indo-European invaders who entered Italy from the North, what is now southern Germany. These early invaders—from whom the Latins descended (considered the most influential and who eventually gave their language to the Empire), the Sabines (considered by Plutarch “a colony of the Lacedaemonians,” i.e., Spartans), the Umbrians, Samnites and all patrician clans that founded Rome and the Republic—were indeed mostly Nordic, and also formed the basis of the political and military elite of the Empire.

However, in the later Rome these groups formed an aristocratic minority ruling over a mob of pre-Indo-European origin and, later, even Semites and black slaves. This ended up in interbreeding between all these groups. Over time, the numbers of the dominant Nordic caste withered, and with them their strong patriarchal, sober and authoritative influence in favor of the dissolution of the Empire: expressed in its cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and proliferation of slaves.

The rest of the history of the post-Roman imperial splendor and their great men, we already know. It is set in a decadent agony, punctuated by binges, parties, orgies, wine snobbery, false sophistication, acrobats, gays, stupid fads, obesity, blond wigs made from hair stolen from Germanics, mongrels, pacifists, emboldened slaves, “liberated” women, Christian zealots and a corrupt bourgeois which reneged of their homeland.

The ghost of ancient Etruria, killed by the ancient Latin Patriarchs, had reborn. Before these decaying monsters, which had nothing to do with the demigod patricians or their rude peasants and patriotic soldiers, the Germanic “barbarian” was really an authentic, pure, hard, strong, noble, idealistic, simple and brave hero, in whose blood awaited the hidden forces of the Indo-European humanity, ready to give birth and germinate in the next millennia of European power.

In short, it has not been argued that all Romans were of Nordic type. It has been argued that the Nordic blood prevailed among the Italic invaders, the ancestors of the posterior dominant Roman aristocracy, the authentic Roman citizens, who imposed their ethos throughout the Empire and spread their spirit, marking the “Roman style” with a distinctly Nordic stamp.

“Are the Germanics a healthy and natural people that will overcome the decadence of the Romans?” —Tacitus, Germania.

_________________

See also a previous article about the subject of:

“Saying the truth about race throws even white nationalists into fits.”

(*) John V. Day, Ph.D., is the author of Indo-European Origins: The Anthropological Evidence (The Institute for the Study of Man, 2001).

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom New Testament Vespasian and Titus

The fallibility of the Gospels (8)

A chapter from Ian Wilson’s
Jesus: The Evidence

While some elements in the gospels are clumsily handled and suggest that their authors were far removed in time and distance from the events they are describing, others have a strikingly original and authentic ring. In some instances it is as if a second generation has heavily adulterated first-hand material. Support for such an idea exists, at least in the case of the Matthew gospel, in the form of a cryptic remark by the early Bishop Papias (c. 60-130 AD): ‘Matthew compiled the Sayings in the Aramaic language, and everyone translated them as well as he could.’

This has been interpreted as suggesting that all that Matthew might have done was make a collection, in his native Aramaic, of those sayings of Jesus that he had heard, a collection, perhaps in form at least, very like those discovered in the Nag Hammadi Thomas gospel. Someone else, perhaps several others, would then have translated them and adapted them for their own literary purposes. This might readily explain why the Matthew gospel bears his name without, at least in the form it has come down to us, ever having been written by him. The crunch question, though, is why this situation should have come about. Why should original eyewitness material, emanating from Jews who had actually spoken with Jesus and observed his doings, have been adulterated and effectively buried by what were probably Gentile writers of a later time?

The answer appears to lie in one event, the Jewish revolt of 66 AD, which had its culmination four years later in the sacking of Jerusalem, the burning of its Temple, and the widespread extermination and humiliation of the Jewish people.

As is historically well attested, in 70 AD the Roman general Titus returned in triumph to Rome, parading through the streets such Jewish treasures as the menorah (the huge seven-branched candelabrum of the Temple), and enacting tableaux demonstrating how he and his armies had overcome savage, ill-advised resistance from this renegade group of the Empire’s subjects, many of whom he had to crucify wholesale. At the height of the celebrations the captured Jewish leader, Simon bar Giora, was dragged to the Forum, abused and executed. In Titus’ honour Rome’s mints crashed out sestertii with the inscription JUDAEA CAPTA, and within a few years a magnificent triumphal arch was erected next to the Temple of Venus.

♣

Wilson’s chapter continues for a couple of more pages, but what I have quoted is enough to give an idea of what are modern studies on the New Testament.