School of War - Ep 224: Barry Strauss on Ancient Rome’s Wars with Israel

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

Barry Strauss, Corliss Page Dean Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World's Mightiest Empire, joins the show to discuss the long, fractious, often violent relationship between Ancient Rome and her Jewish subjects.  ▪️ Times     •      01:11 Introduction     •      01:37 Rome and Parthia     •      07:50 Judea         •      12:07 Roman control      •      17:58 Jewish warfighting            •      20:20 Herod          •      26:03 The Great Revolt     •      31:06 Enter Parthia     •      33:23 The Temple        •      35:01 70 years      •      40:24 Driven out      •      42:02 Parallels with today     •      44:33 Donald Kagan Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Today, the great historian Barry Strauss on the ancient wars between the Jews and the Romans and what those wars have to teach us now. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in him. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in grand. There's a fight on the beaches.

There's a fight on the landing ground. and you'll fight in the fields and in the streets, which will never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War.

I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Barry Strauss, he's senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Bryce and Edith Beaumar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell. And he's the author of many books, most recently, Jews versus Rome, two centuries of rebellion against the world's mightiest empire. Barry Strauss, welcome back. Thank you. It's great to be here.

So maybe we could start by actually stepping back a bit from Jews in the Jewish state and talking a bit about the imperial context in which, as you put it right at the start of your book, the Jews find themselves trapped in the middle of. So Rome and Parthia and the broader imperial politics of the first. century BC into 80. What's what's the broader picture? Sure. So there are really only two empires left in in the in the in the western, in the ancient world in the west in this period. One is the Roman Empire and the other is the Parthian Empire. Parthia is an Iranian Empire. And there are other, I guess there is one other state and that is, you know, if we go back

early enough, we have an independent Judea and we have a more importantly an independent in Egypt, which is something of a Roman protectorate. It survives on Rome's indulgence. But Roman Parthia are the two titans. And in, golly, I'm always getting this wrong, either 54 or 53, the Romans attempted to invade. The Romans did invade Parthia. They crossed the Euphrates River in Syria. And they fought the Parthians at a place called Kare, now in Turkey, nowadays. and were roundly defeated by the Parthians. Krasis was the Roman general who's defeated and killed by the Parthians. And the Romans are eager for revenge, but they don't get it, not for a very long time.

And Parthia is the great white whale of the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar was about to head eastward to reinvade Parthia when he was assassinated on the aides of March. Mark Antony re-invades Parthia and is also defeated quite badly in, I think, the year 36 BC. The Parthians invade the Roman Empire just before that in the year 40. They take Syria, Judea, and part of Asia Minor, and then they are defeated by the Romans. So back and forth on the frontier, the Euphrates River is basically the frontier between these empires, and they face each other warily in the, in what from the Roman point of view is the

Eastern Mediterranean. This may be kind of a stupid question, but, you know, what, how do the Romans understand their desire to defeat the Parthians? Is this sort of just natural progression of control? They're the next enemy in the queue. They're the only enemy remaining, or it's going to be profitable because we're going to, we're going to control newly productive lands, and somehow the distance won't matter as much because it'll, the economics will still work out, or are there ideological dimensions to it, or just help us understand the drive? Or is it threats? The Parthians are threatening us. Well, there is an ideological dimension all of the above. I mean, the Romans have this habit, an ingrain habit from their earliest days fighting in the cockpit of Italy,

which really was a cockpit of different nations, different ethnic groups, different people, fighting each other to survive. The Romans see any threat on the horizon. no matter how unlikely as a threat that needs to be dealt with. That's one thing. For another thing, since the very beginning, men made their careers in Rome by conquering foreign lands, increasing the holdings of the Roman people, and bringing back wealth. So that's very important for the Romans. Under Augustus, we're not far off from Augustus in this period,

the official ideology, as stated by Virgil in the Inniad, is Imperium Sinafina. empire without end. This is what the Romans want. And they see no boundaries to their ruled, the area that they rule, which is what Imperium means. So as you say, Parthia is just the next in the queue. It's out there. It exists.

To that very reason it's a threat, it's also very, very wealthy. And there's conquests and there are conquests. So the Romans famously are defeated in Germany and they lose most of Germany. they're willing to do that because frankly, Germany doesn't offer very much that the Romans want. It's rich in manpower and forests and bogs. They can get the manpower without conquering it. They don't really want the forests or the bogs. Likewise, they try to conquer Scotland.

They fail. They try again and again. But it's not all that important. It doesn't have that many resources. Parthia is a different story. It's quite wealthy. I mean, there's a lot that's worth controlling, not least the trade routes to the east, which are extremely lucrative. So there are all sorts of reasons why the Romans might want to conquer Parthia.

Also, Alexander the Great conquered. The Parthia's predecessor, the Persian Empire, the Romans idolize Alexander, and so they too might think of this as an area they want to conquer. So there are lots of reasons. Plus, the Parthians are a threat to the areas that they're. the Romans have already conquered in the near East, Asia Minor, Syria, in this period, they conquered Judea, and then eventually Egypt, they conquer that as well. It is striking just to make an extremely oversimplified, reductive observation for all that changes how much stays the same. I mean, you have a Roman-reed Western power, uncomfortable with Iranian

regional hegemony, and caught in the middle is a Jewish state with its own interests, and complicated calculations to make. I mean, obviously, I'm aware of all the ways in which what I just said can be picked apart, but it's striking that some of the logic still holds thousands of years later. I thoroughly agree. It's one of the reasons I wanted to write this book because I looked at this situation and realized, although there have been many wonderful scholarly accounts written of it, and it was a bit of hubris for me to try another one,

I think that one of the things that deserved more attention was this very, this geostrategic, the geostrategic, the fact that Judea, ancient Israel, was between a Western empire and an Iranian empire, and it had to make its way. Well, let's talk about Judea then. So what is the nature of the Judean state at this point? It's politics. It's, I mean, I guess we're talking about the moment as it comes under Roman subjugations, so everything kind of changes very dramatically. Maybe talk about that. What happened? Sure. So in the second century, BC or B.C.E, the Jews, managed to win their independence by an uprising. It starts as a guerrilla uprising and eventually

it leads to formal armies under the Maccabee brothers originally. And they're fighting not Rome, rather they're fighting the Salukid Macedonian, Greco-Syrian Empire to the North, or kingdom, I should say, which is now on the skids. Its greatest days are behind it. It's tangled with Rome and lost, and their ruler unwisely provokes Jews on a religious issue, trying to take over the temple. Working, I must say, with a faction in Judea that wanted, that eagerly accepted Hellenization, westernization, if you will, it wanted to become Greek, it wanted to become pagan, but the majority of people, and a strong group of people, were opposed to that. They wanted to support, continue their heritage, their religious heritage. And they said,

succeed in defeating the Salukets. Ironically, they have an alliance with Rome at the time, and the Romans are happily to see the Jews forge their own state and their independence from Syria. But the Romans eventually extend their realm, their empire further in the east, and they conquer Syria in the year 63 BC. And there is Judea, which looks like a fruit ripe for the pickin, just south of the border. To make things worse, the ruling dynasty is split between two claimants to the throne, and they each go to the Romans. They send an embassy to the Roman general, Pompey the Great, who's sitting in Syria, and they say, please intervene on our side. In addition to that, there is a third Jewish group of, we might say notables in secular and religious figures

who are opposed to any king. They think this dynasty is illegitimate. legitimate for all sorts of reasons. And they say to the Romans, please intervene and put us in charge, you know, under your supervision. Well, Pompey chooses the weaker of the two claimants to the throne as he sees it. He does invade Judea and makes it now a Roman dependency. It's not a province. He takes part of the territorial way because Judea is divided between Jews, mostly speak Aramaic, and between a Greco-Syrian people who speak Greek and Aramaic, the Jews are largely in the countryside. One exception is Jerusalem, their capital. The Greek-Greco-Syrians are mostly in the cities.

They're also small groups of Arabs in Judea. And in the south, there is a people called the Idemians descended from the ancient Edomites, from what is now Jordan. and they have converted to Judaism at this point. There's lots of ethnic conflict going on, and Pompey takes some of the territory away from Judea and makes these Greek cities independent of what's left of Judea. I think it was Edward Lopach's book on Roman Grand Strategy, where I first felt like I had some grasp of the sort of client-state politics

and the way sort of structurally they worked. And it was a great, I mean, for other. reasons too, but it was a very helpful book to me for that reason. You obviously address it in your book as well, but the nature of Roman control in a place like Judea, which you sort of started to illustrate with your last answer, you know, it's not a lot of these places, generally speaking to this period of the Republican and then the empire, it's not annexation. It's these very complicated politics where there are local power structures that are backstopping guaranteed by the Romans, but then the local population, there may be other systems of legitimacy at work locally,

and it's this very complicated, delicate, diplomatic, political performance, really. I was struck by the complexity of it and the ability of the Romans to manage so many different complex relationships, which they, then Judea proves to be one of the most challenging of them. Yes, yes. You know, the Roman society is based on a series of hierarchical relationships between patrons and clients. it's often been said. And that allowed the Romans, it helped the Romans when they conquered other peoples to reproduce these relationships. They were somewhat informal. Rather than talking about patrons and clients, the Romans talked about friends. It really is like something out of the

godfather. The mafia is about to say the mafia works the same way. Yes, the mafia works exactly the same way. Or, you know, in the famous moment in the Sopranos, when there is an Orthodox Jew who's caught up with the mafia. And he says to Tony Soprano, you know, the Jews fought the Romans, and we lost, but the Jews are still here. And I ask you, where are the Romans today? And Tony says, you're looking at them. Yeah, yeah. So Judean culture, politics, religion say, you know, they have distinctive characteristics at this point, unlike obviously the long period of Jewish exile that's to follow or diaspora it's follow. And the temples, really, at the center of it. And the temples at the center of a lot of the incidents that both precede the period your book really covers, and then a lot of the incidents

that your book focuses on. What is temple religion? How does it function? How did this era of Judaism actually work? So as one of the scholars of this period says, there are three pillars to the Jewish religion in this period, the temple, the Torah, and the belief in God. And I think that's quite right. The temple is tremendously important. It is considered to be the house of God. And if you're religious, you believe that this is the palace. This is the place where the government of Judea comes from, from the house of God in the temple on the hill in Jerusalem. And Jews are expected to go to the temple, to make sacrifices at the temple. There's three pilgrimage festivals a year, which they're expected to go there. But the temple is also the place where if you have sinned,

you will go and make amends by making a sacrifice. If you are well, it will be a very large sacrifice. If you are poor, it can be a dove, a pigeon as your sacrifice. But it is, Judea is in some sense, and originally was a temple state. And so the temple, the geography is key. The land is thought to be holy. There is no substitute for it. And yet, and yet, and yet, Judea is greatly divided among arguing Jews. Another thing that hasn't changed in history, the Jews, The Jews are arguing with each other. There are different sects and different groups. The temple is dominated by the priests who are a caste and tend to be wealthy.

There is a split-off, a split-away group called the Essines. These are people who consider the temple to be illegitimate, the priesthood to be illegitimate in the second century, BC. And they have gone off to various places, most famously to a place in the Judean Desert, Qumran, where they run a monastic community and where remarkably their documents survived. They were hidden in the cave at the time of the Great Revolt, and they were discovered beginning in the 1940s, and they've revolutionized our knowledge of what's going on in this period. But there's also a third group, the Pharisees, and these are closer to ordinary people. They're popular teachers.

Some of them are priests. Some of them are associated with the temple, but many of them are not. and they're found all over Judea. So it's a place with a lot of ferment, a lot of division. I should also say there are those who welcome the Romans, who want to collaborate with the Romans for one reason or another, and who embrace Greek culture for one reason and another. It's a little confusing.

The Romans, of course, spoke Latin. But the dominant culture of the Eastern Mediterranean was Greek-speaking. The Romans themselves probably would have spoken Greek to communicate with many of the inhabitants of the area. And so there were also some Jews who embraced Greek culture in this period. It's a very complicated place. And this will take us into the multiple periods of revolt that then characterize the backbone of the story you're telling. Right.

All of these experiences leading up to this hinge point in history of the Jewish state either surviving or, for that matter, not surviving and there being periods of exile. What is the, for lack of a better way of putting it, what is the strategic culture of Jews or these Jewish states? sex at the time. I mean, how do they think about fighting? How do they think about war? My understanding is it's principally a land, despite being so close, you know, in parts adjacent to the sea, it's largely a land-oriented strategic culture. But say more about that if you could, or how do these guys think about war? Yeah, that's a really good question. Well, I think that for one thing, they are very impressed by the Maccabees, what some have called the Maccabee and myth. And the fact that a beginning as a guerrilla movement managed to defeat the solution.

Lucod Empire and win independence for the Jews, for a Jewish state for the first time in centuries. I think they are well aware of what's going on in the world, partly because, largely because of the Jewish diaspora. So already in this period, Alexandria, Egypt is the largest Jewish city in the world. And they're Jews living in the Roman Empire, mostly in the East, but also in Rome and Italy itself. There's a Jewish community in Rome. on top of that, there's a very large Jewish community in the Parthian Empire, the center of which

is southern Mesopotamia, what the Jews called Babylon, the area around Baghdad, modern Baghdad to the north Baghdad, a little bit around Baghdad, large Jewish communities there, and also a Jewish community develops in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan, which eventually is ruled by a dynasty that converts to Judaism. And the border is porous. It is not a closed border. There are traders going across it all the time, trade from the east, part of the so-called Silk Road. But there are also scholars, sages, pilgrims coming from the east and coming to Judea

and some from Judea going to the east. So strategically, they're very, very well aware of what's going on and the existence of these different empire. the Jews have been around for a long time by this period. We got our earliest reference to Israel in an Egyptian inscription from the end of the 13th century BCE. And of course they have fought these different empires. They've lost to them. They've gone into exile, so-called famous Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE.

So they're well aware of the different empires and the need to deal with them, to negotiate with them. to charm them, to try to manipulate them, they see all this. As far as military, I think their culture is largely one of irregular warfare, light-armed soldiers. They are not used to fighting with the kind of artillery that the Romans have. They're not used to carrying on sieges in the way the Romans would. They did have a more formal land army under the Maccabeean dynasty, the Hasmanian dynasty. but they no longer have that. I should say the other thing that they have is there are Jews who've been mercenaries

and soldiers both in Ptolemaic Egypt and in Salucid Syria and in the Parthian Empire, and some of them settle in Judea, King Herod, who we haven't quite gotten up to yet, but he settles some of them in Judea. So there is a certain amount of military expertise running around. Well, let's talk about Herod then since you raised him. We're now into the period of Roman rule. Herod obviously needs the Romans to rule. Tell us about his career and the troubles that began under his career.

Yeah. So Herod comes from a family. He's descended from converts. I believe it was grandfather who converted Judaism. His family was these Idemians who came from what is now the southern part of Israel. They converted to Judaism. They were serious about Judaism. but they also had wider horizons.

Herod marries an Arab princess. He marries an Arab woman. And Herod's father had been of one of Julius Caesar's strong supporters and helped Caesar when Caesar was in a tight spot in Egypt and helped Caesar to prevail. And the family's used to dealing with the Romans. So as I said in the year 40, the Parthians invade Judea and conquer it. They kick out the Roman king and put in a pro-Parthian king. And it's Herod who escapes, he makes his way to Rome, and he gets the Romans to declare him as the true king of Judea. He's very tight with Mark Antony in particular.

He goes back to Judea, and with the help of a Roman army, this difficult struggle last three years, he conquers Judea and makes himself a king. The thing that's amazing about Herod is that he has this vision that he's going to survive as Rome's most loyal client state, most loyal vassal kingdom. He supports Anthony at first. When Anthony is defeated at the Battle of Actium, Herod very easily and gracefully switches to Octavian and convinces Octavian that Octavian, you really want me as your man in the East. And he's as good as his word. He builds up an army. He is a very loyal Roman client supplying Rome with, well, he doesn't have to pay taxes, but he supplies Rome with various goodies. and he builds Judea, and he turns it into a Greco-Roman Jewish state.

So on the one hand, he builds new cities. He builds a magnificent new port with an artificial harbor called Caesarea by the sea, Caesar City by the Sea, and it is crowned by a temple of Augustus. Also in Samaria, near the modern city of Nablus, he builds a city which he calls Augustus city, Sabaste in Greek, which means Augustus. That too has a temple of Augustus. And then finally, in the north, on the road to Damascus, he builds a really splendid temple to Augustus as well. In addition, there are amphitheaters, there are gladiatorial games. There are quadrenial games in honor of the victory at Actium. All of this. And Herod, whose name is Greek, comes from the word

hero. He has Greek intellectuals at his court. He becomes the world's greatest patron of the Olympic Games. And he actually attends one of the Olympic Games. And he helps Augustus to build a new city, victory city, Nicopolis, at the side of the Battle of Actium in the east. So where's the Jewish part? The Jewish part is that Herod also rebuilds the temple in Jerusalem. He makes the temple more splendid than it had ever been. They'd been the first temple. They've been the second temple. They've been the second Temple, and now there is the rebuilt Second Temple, a really monumental work of urban planning and architecture. He builds up the platform that you can still see large parts of this platform in Jerusalem. Today, it's where the Second Temple stood and where eventually the Dome of

the Rock would stand as it does today. I had the complicated pleasure of seeing some Iranian proxy rockets intercepted in mid-air roughly over where he says, Zaria by the sea would be last fall, actually. There's a further illustration that not much has changed. Not much has changed, no. So Herod, obviously, you know, he consolidates power, but, you know, sort of the beginning of the revolts to which you, you know, you've made reference to, sort of starts under his period, right?

And I said a lot of the fortresses that become, you know, it's like Masada, these places that become famous as places of resistance to Rome the next century. he's originally constructed right as ways of consolidating Herod's control and sort of of Roman clients take control. Yeah. You know, he knows very well that he's very unpopular with his Jewish subjects. And so he creates these fortresses in Judea that he can use to send armies out if needed, but also as a place of refuge, the last place of last resort, if he has to go there.

He's a wise, it's a very wise ruler, very wise statesman. He makes himself indispensable to Augustus, who, sends his right-hand man Agrippa to visit Judea, and Herod would dearly have liked to create a pagan corner of the temple for Augustus, but he knows he can't get away with that. Instead, he has the temple make sacrifices on behalf of Augustus, on behalf of the emperor, and they're paid for by Augustus. They're subsidized by the Romans. So his strategy is very clear, make Judea a very loyal Roman client state. Keep the lid on rebellion because they're already has. been uprisings against the Romans and then continue the dynasty.

I mostly know this period from Robert Graves' is I, Claudius and Claudius the God. And they're very good BBC television of these things. Right. Yes, it's Herod Agrippa is the main character. Herod Agrippa, yes. It's absolutely classic BBC production. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so despite plenty of turmoil, Herod does kind of keep things locked down.

But by the middle of the next century, we come upon the so-called Great revolt. This is if people think of Jewish warfare against the Romans or vice versa, this is probably what they're thinking of. How do things go so dramatically off the rails? How do we get to the Great Revolution? Let me try to make a long story short. First of all, Herod baches the succession. He kills his most competent sons because he suspects them probably correctly of wanting to kill him and take over. And so he leaves the kingdom divided among three sons. And the one who gets the lion's share proves to be quite incompetent. And eventually, August, there's a rebellion at Herod's death that the Romans put down.

And then Augustus loses his patience with this guy and kicks him out after 10 years, sends him to exile in the south of France. Not too shabby. But now they decide to make Judea a Roman province and to tax it, starting which, to begin the taxation, you need to have a census. This is the census in the New Testament. that the chronology of the New Testament is wrong, but there is the census and it's very unpopular.

There's another mini-revolute, which the Romans put down. And Judea is now a Roman province, and there's lots of discontent. There are various people who are pretenders to the throne, some of whom, it seems, we're not 100% sure, present themselves as messiahs. Some of them want to have armed rebellion. Some of them want to have spiritual rebellion.

This is, of course, most famously, period of Jesus of Nazareth and who does not want to have an armed rebellion. He wants to have a spiritual rebellion. And so there's constant turmoil in Judea. Herod Agrippa, who you mentioned earlier, who is educated in Rome, Herod sent some of his family to be educated in Rome, and who is the kingmaker when Claudius becomes the emperor. Claudius rewards him by making him king of Judea again And for a short period, between 41 and 44 AD, CE, he rules Judea, and then he dies suddenly, possibly through poison. Unclear. Many rumors of poison.

And now the Romans take over the place again, and they make it a Roman province. And the Romans do not send the 18 governors to Judea. They're not sending senators. They're sending the second order, highest order in Roman society, the knights. the equestrians, and they see Judea as best a stepping stone to a more important position, and at worst, a place to squeeze for the money until the pip squeak. The temple is rich. Jews pay taxes to the temple, and many non-Jews, many Gentiles give tribute to the temple as well.

It is probably the most impressive shrine in the entire Roman world. Harriet had stopped at nothing, stopped at no expense to make a magnificent structure which does. It's not just a temple, but it's surrounded by porticoes, stowa's, all sorts of buildings. It's a complex. It's huge. So eventually, you know, there are, again, the Jews are divided. There's one group of Jews that arises in the 50s of the first century.

They're terrorists. They're given the nickname Sakarii, daggers. men. Sacario is a hit man in Italian or Spanish nowadays, and they killed civilians, other Jews. They killed other Jews who they thought were too cozy with the Romans. There's also a group of priests who call, called themselves zealots. This comes from a man named Pincus in the Book of Numbers, who is so zealous in his support of the religion of Israel that he kills someone who he thinks as violated the law of God. So these young priests see themselves as zealous, and they're particularly young.

Their fathers had all supported the Romans. They're opposed to it. Enter Nero, the Roman emperor, rightly the infamous Roman emperor, who decides that he wants to use Judea as a bank. And his governor, equestrian ruler a man named Flores, is helping himself to money. And when there are protests, he unleashes the army on civil. in Jerusalem, in a massacre. This is the signal for the malcontents of whom there are several groups now to rise up. And so in the year 66, they do. And they stop the sacrifices on behalf of

the emperor. And eventually they massacre the garrison of Jerusalem. These are not legionaries. They're auxiliaries in the Roman army. Most of them are Samaritans, another different ethnic group in Shadea. And this is a signal for Rome, for the war to start. And so it does. What is the level of attention or effort paid by these revolting, uprising, Jewish groups, to secure Parthian support? Yeah.

It seems without that, what are we doing here? I mean, this is, we might be noble, but one way or the other, likely to be short-lived without bringing in the Parthians. Yeah. Well, this is all important. We are dependent on Josephus, one of the most interesting but not the most trustworthy historians

from the ancient world. He was a Jew who started out being a go-between to Rome, and then he joined the rebels, and he was a general in Galilee, and then he is defeated, sees the light, and goes over to the Romans,

eventually spends the rest of his life in Rome, where he writes a series of books about Jewish history, most famously the Jewish War. He tells us that the rebels were trying to get help from Parthia, but he doesn't give us any details. And I'd love dearly to know more details of what was going on. The rebels do get help from one of the vassal kingdoms of the Parthian world.

The kingdom of Adia being essentially what is today Iraqi Kurdistan. As they mentioned, the ruling dynasty had converted to Judaism, and they sent their sons to Jerusalem to be educated. those sons, those members of the dynasty, along with my guess is several hundred other Adiabinians, though we don't know that number, support the revolt. But the Parthians do not send any significant aid to the rebels. In fact, at one point, they offered to send 40,000 horsemen to help the Romans. The Romans say, thanks, but no thanks.

We don't want you getting involved in our part of the empire. My guess is that the Parthians, like today's Iranians, are happy to fight to the last man of their allies and their proxies. The Parthians are happy to fight to the last Jew, just as the Iranians are happy to fight to the last Arabs. But they do not want themselves to get involved. And so it does not go well for the Jews. Who, by the way, also do just about everything wrong. If you want to have a revolt against the Romans, they do not come. carried out properly. And this time things really, well, I was about to say they really do come to an end.

Of course, they don't in the long run. But in the shorter run for the Judean state, they do. What is, I mean, is the destruction of the temple, is that kind of baked from the start in terms of the Roman horror at the uprising? Or is that something that develops later in the conduct of the fighting as a goal? Well, that's a really interesting question. I mean, if the rebels, if you want to have a scenario for how the revolt could have made sense without Parthia. If the rebels had said, look, we did this because we were oppressed by the governor, especially when Nero is forced to abdicate and commit suicide, they could say, it was that bad guy, Nero, but we love you, Romans. We want to surrender. Let's become friends again. Just send us better governors and all will be

okay. Maybe that could have work. That is possible. However, the Romans in the end, I think, probably would have gone for the temple because they recognized quite rightly that this was the center of resistance. Just as Alexander the Great destroyed the palaces and shrines at Persepolis, so the Romans probably certainly would have made the walls of Jerusalem come down. They might have let the temple survive because the Romans did have respect for traditional gods and ancestral gods. And so they might have let the temple survive then. But once the Jews allowed the Romans to lay siege to Jerusalem and fought to the death. They fought, you know, tooth and nail against the Romans. Then I'm afraid it was baked in that the temple, temple would go. So one of the

really interesting things about your book is for, for me, and I suspect for probably many listeners, we've just reached the end of the story of Roman and organized Jewish warfare, resistance, call it what you want. But you cover an additional revolt. I'm going to let you pronounce the name of it, so I don't fully embarrass myself. Actually, two. additional revolts. Right. So this diaspora period of, of conflict. Speak to that, please. Sure. It's tremendously important. It's often forgotten. It took place in between 116 and 117 AD. It's centered in Egypt, Libya, and Cyprus rather than in Judea. They're big, big Jewish populations in all those areas. What's it all about? Well, the Romans have invaded Parthia. And in fact, they conquer

in Mesopotamia, they conquer Iraq all the way to the Persian Gulf. And the Parthians, I think, can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure, are whispering to the Jews, why don't you revolt? This is a great time to revolt. Why would they want to revolt against the Romans? A, after the great revolt, the Jewish war, the Romans imposed a humiliating tax on every Jewish man, woman, and child in the Roman empire, whether they supported the rebels or not. B, the Torah would teach the Jews that after the Babylonian captivity, they were allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple within 70 years. It doesn't look like it's going to happen under the Romans. And they want to go back. They want to rebuild the temple. They really believe in this. And they think this is their moment. By the way,

when the Romans invade Mesopotamia, a popular uprising goes against them. And one of the key players in the popular uprising is the Jewish population of the Parthian Empire. So I think, think that's what the diaspora revolt is all about. Very threatening to the Romans because the Romans dependent on Egypt for their grain supply. And so the Roman Emperor Trajan diverts an army from Mesopotamia and sends it to Egypt to put down the revolt. Unfortunately for the rebels, it is 100% successful. It destroys the rebellion and wipes out the Jewish population of Alexandria, which is quite important historically that this happens. And they send the general who suppresses the Jewish rebels in Mesopotamia and wipes some of them out, they then,

for good measures, send them to Judea to become the new governor to suppress any revolt there. So after all this, the Roman attempt to conquer Mesopotamia fails in the end. The Romans are driven out. It's a huge Parthian victory. The Roman Emperor Trajan conveniently dies, and his successor, Hadrian, was opposed to this war in the first place. He's going to pull out the Romans from this part of the Near East. but he hasn't forgotten how the Parthians have humiliated the Romans and how the Jews have betrayed

the Romans in this uprising while the Romans were in Mesopotamia. This, of course, is from the Roman point of view. The Jews saw it from a very different position. And so he decides he wants to show that Rome is still a player in this part of the world. And so he decides he's going to rebuild Jerusalem, which was left in ruins after the Great Revolt. But he's going to rebuild it not as a Jewish city, but as a pagan city. He modestly names it after himself and after his patron god, Jupiter of the Capitoline Hill. His family name is Eilius.

So he renames the city Eilecaptolina. And from the very word go when he becomes emperor, he starts the plans in motion to rebuild Jerusalem. Well, this is a signal to the Jews. The temple is not going to be rebuilt. It's going to be a pagan city. And what are you going to do about it? and they decide that they're going to rebel again. Rome's been defeated by the Parthians.

This guy, Hadrian, who thinks he's a peacnik, is in charge. Maybe this is the moment. And so now this third revolt called the Barcorphe revolt, which means the son of a star. That's not his real name. His real name seems to be Barr or Ben Kosovo. Kosovo is either a place or a person, we don't know. But his nom de guerre,

normally is known as, is the son of the star. And the reason is that in the Torah, the Messiah is compared to a star arising out of Israel. And so in some sense, this guy also portrays himself as the Messiah. It being understood that the Messiah for the Jews was less a divine figure than a human one who would redeem Israel and restore it to its glory. This revolt, very different than the first revolt, because this time they actually have a sensible strategy. This is going to be an irregular, irregular warfare. They build underground shelters, lots of them, maybe hundreds of them, all over Judea.

It's centered in Judea, so the heart of the country, not clear if it takes part in any other part of country as well. If it does, it's a pretty minor way. And after Hadrian comes to Judea in the year 130 and what's the word, inaugurates the city, the new city of where Jerusalem was formally. and he leaves, that's when they rise up in revolt, and they shock the Romans, who as usual, don't see these revolts coming because the Romans don't have a very high opinion of the provincials by and large. And now the Romans have real trouble in putting down this rebellion. But the conclusion here, which obviously is not a successful one for the Jews, you write, you know, this is the rebellion, the outcome of which does more to shape the destiny

of the Jewish people than any other war. And that's because it finally locks in that the temple is not coming back. Or what is the... Partly that the temple's not coming back, partly because it mostly dried, it mostly, after the Great Revolt, there still was a very large Jewish population there. After this, the Jews are mostly driven out, wiped out in Judea. There's only small Jewish presence in Judea. What's left of the Jews is in Gallup.

and the Golan, where they survive by the skin of their teeth. It's an iffy thing, whether they're going to survive as a people, and they do. But it's quite iffy. And also, Hadrian says, okay, enough of this calling this country Judea, the land of the Jews, the Judeans, we've always gotten along with the Greek speakers in this country. And they call themselves after the Philistines, who were a people who lived on the coast there, we're renaming this place, Syria, Palestina. And that, of course, is where the name Palestine comes from,

although the Greeks there would have called it Palestine even earlier. But Hadrian signals, we're done with the Jews. This is not their homeland anymore. You know, good luck to them. So it really is quite significant, quite important. So having spent the last several years, especially, though, you know, obviously much of your career on and off, thinking about this period, you and I both alluded to sort of geopolitical echoes that we hear. Can you, can you put a little bit

more substance of that? What, having, having looked at this now in some detail, what do you take away from the, you know, century plus, well, two century really period that we've just discussed, two and a half century, that seems to you to really resonate today or has something to teach us about today? Lots of things. So first, as we said, Israel, Judea was and Israel is a small state between two great powers, between the West, the Americans today, the Romans in antiquity, and in the East, an Iranian state, Parthia, and modern Iran. But I would add one codosal to that. There is another great power in the East, and there always has been, and that is Turkey. I shouldn't say always has been, but for centuries there has been. That is the heir of the Ottoman Empire.

And as Iran's star goes down, if it does go down, the star of Turkey rises. And so Israel will find itself between two states, but it may be a different one than Iran. So we need to keep that in mind as well. The second thing is, I think there's a lesson here for the Palestinians in an odd way, and that is that a frontal attack on a much stronger power is not likely to succeed. So the Palestinian war on Israel is not likely to succeed, not in its present form. So it seems to me, that I don't think the Palestinians are going to win their war with Israel anytime soon, and I hope that Israel will thrive and flourish for the foreseeable future from now on. But there is room for the Palestinians.

They may take that away from this struggle. If they look at it in different terms, if they look at it in terms of surviving as a nation, but as one that lives in peace with its neighbors, then they can survive as well. the Jews survived by living in peace until that became unviable after the Holocaust and after some other things in the 19th century. And perhaps the Palestinians can take that lesson away as well. I wanted to close with a question that it takes us in a different direction. But I've long wanted to do a show devoted to Donald Kagan and his work. We don't have the time for a whole show right now, but you were a Kagan student.

He passed away, you know, a couple years ago, well, I guess almost, what, four years ago now. 2021, passed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, you know, I've profited from his, I mean, mostly his history of the Peloponnesian War, which was a wonderful book to read. And I learned a lot from the sort of watching the way his mind works. But I only met him in passing and briefly. What was it like to study with him, you know, say a few words, if you would, about his effect on your scholarship and his impact more broadly. Well, it was fantastic to study with him. He's certainly the biggest single intellectual influence on me, on my formation. You know, he was a larger than life figure. He was, to use an overused term, he was a Renaissance man. He was a fantastic teacher and a great scholar. He was also an academic administrator.

who knew universities inside and out. He was godfather to the conservative movement at Yale. I mean, of course, William Buckley was godfather of conservative movement at Yale. But at the time I was there in the 70s, he was an enormously important influence on Yale conservatives. He was an avatar of freedom of speech. He strongly defended freedom of speech at Yale. And later on, he would go on to become a prominent neo-conservative in American politics. But I should also say Don was a happy warrior.

He really was a happy warrior. He was a great lecturer and he was a consummate showman in class. But to me, one of the most impressive things about him is he was one of the best seminar teachers, if not the best seminar teacher, I've ever encountered. And the same man who would dominate the lectern in a Promethean manner would also hang back in seminar. Let the students run the seminar. That to me was remarkable that he could do that, and immensely successful seminar teacher. So just a man of many parts. If you had to recommend a place for curious listeners to start amongst Kagan's many books,

assuming they have an interest in ancient history and the kinds of things he was interested in, where would you recommend starting? Well, I love his the origin of war and the preservation of peace. It's a book not just about ancient history. It's about the Peloponnesian War, the Second Punic War. I think the First and Second World Wars and the Cuban Missile Crisis is a control case. That's a wonderful book, and it's based on a course that he taught on the origins of war, which was just a fantastic class.

I'd recommend that. Barry Strauss, author most recently of Jews v. Rome, two centuries of rebellion against the world's mightiest empire. Thank you so much for joining the show. It's been great. Thank you, Aaron. It's great for me, too. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.