Erich S. Gruen

The origins of the Achaean War

The Achaean war against Rome in 146 continues to provoke befuddlement and perplexity. Few problems in antiquity have proved so intractable to solution. The event was of major import: the last futile outburst of Greek resistance to Roman power, calling forth a new era, an enforced reorganisation of Greece and its subjugation, for all practical purposes, to the Roman governor of Macedon. Greek independence was thereafter chimerical. Yet the origins and motivations for that fateful struggle remain as puzzling as ever. Understandably so. A half century earlier, the Achaean League had thrown off allegiance to Macedon and opted for collaboration with Rome. A formal alliance followed in subsequent years. Relations between the two powers were sometimes rocky, but never issued in overt conflict during that half-century. In the three great eastern wars of the second century, against Philip V, Antiochus III, and Perseus, Rome and Achaea were on the same side. Yet in 146, when Romes military might should have been incontestable, the Achaeans engaged her in a suicidal and ruinous war that brought the dissolution of the old League and the overlordship of Rome. Small wonder that the episode causes bafflement.

The use and abuse of the exodus story

The Exodus was a defining moment, perhaps the defining moment in ancient Israelite tradition. As the legend has it, the Israelites escape from Egypt under the leadership of Moses shook off the yoke of Egyptian oppression and gave them the impetus for articulating principles and values, surmounting an arduous journey through the wilderness, and shaping their identity as a people and a culture. The day of their release from the tyranny of Pharaonic Egypt, so the Lord declared in the Book of Exodus, would thereafter be commemorated in an annual festival, among the most sacred on the calendar, the ceremony of Passover.1 The Exodus generated high drama, an unforgettable tale in the Bible, perhaps the single most familiar one to Jew and Gentile alike. As inspiration to subsequent generations of Jews and their admirers, its power is manifest. But what of the villains of the piece? They, or rather their presumed descendants, would not have found this story very entertaining. Indeed, we might imagine, they would have reason to feel maligned and defamed. The heartless Pharaohs, the hostile Egyptian populace, and the royal army as an agent of evil hardly supplied models for imitation. And the tale could bring little satisfaction to the indigenous dwellers in the land of the Nile. The spread of the story should only have aggravated matters. Jewish soldiers and Jewish settlers in Egypt occasionally appear on record in the centuries that followed the supposed time of the Exodus, most notably in the garrison at Elephantine.2 But the principal wave of Jewish reentry into Egypt appears to have come at the end of the Persian period and in the early years of the Hellenistic age.3 The Exodus story could have seeped into Egyptian consciousness in the course of this era, thus to stir reaction and response. Indeed, echoes of a very different variety of the tale emerge in the literature produced by pagan authors in Egypt. In assorted versions, Jews appear as villains rather than victims,