Before the Romans came, commerce in Judea, Samaria, and Idumaea was limited to what freight could be loaded onto a two-wheel oxcart or laded within a pair of panniers on the back of a camel or an ass—and to those goods that could be shipped without spoiling. Such perishables as fruits and vegetables and even certain wines and oils could be taken to market only locally, lest they waste upon the way.
Then the Romans built their roads. At once the use of heavy freight wagons became practicable. Of a sudden one encountered these everywhere, not drawn as before across muck and mire at the dreary pace of oxen, but instead rolling in high form pulled by teams of mules or horses along the newly engineered thoroughfares. Vehicles with iron-rimmed wheels could make not five or six miles a day, as the old caravans, but fifteen and even twenty.
Roman roads were, before all, military highways. Their first customers were the legions. Conquest and the suppression of unrest were these arteries’ reason for being. A full legion of fifty-four hundred men, including cavalry and baggage train, could march from Jerusalem to Jericho in less than a day and from Damascus to Gaza in little over a week.
The Romans dug wells, not randomly across the wilderness (and a day’s trek apart) as the Bedouin and the Nabatean Arabs had done for centuries, but in a surveyor’s line, one every ten miles, to parallel the new highways. Roman engineers bridged dry riverbeds with spans of stone, making them passable even in the rainy months and rendering any rebel hideout vulnerable to the legions’ onslaught. The Romans built cisterns to capture the winter rains. They constructed forts with magazines of supplies, weapons, and armaments. They bound the land with strongholds and arteries of military transport as a jailer binds a prisoner with manacles and chains.
Then there was Roman administration. To her armies of foot and horse were appended battalions of clerks and functionaries. Roman auditors and magistrates brought order and organization to such affairs as the collection of taxes, the compilation of censuses, and the administration of justice that had resided heretofore in the hands of local princes, religious officials, and outright desperadoes and bandits.
The Romans possessed might beyond measure. They held wealth and skill and knowledge of science and the arts. But before all these they owned order.
In the year of our youth David’s birth, a detachment of legionaries was surrounded by Jewish rebels on a waterless crest south of the Jerusalem-Shechem highway. The Zealots held the high ground and were pounding the sons of Rome with salvos of sling bullets and even ten-pound stones hurled by field catapults. The Roman commander dispatched a party of a dozen to break out, fetch water, and return.
They did.
By what means, one might inquire, had this city on the Tiber brought the wide world into subjection? Here is how:
A Roman is given orders and he obeys them.
A rebel party, had it been dispatched from such position of encirclement as that in which the legionaries found themselves, would never have returned. They would have saved themselves.
Such, then, were the alterations that Roman conquest had wrought upon the landscape of Syria and Judea.
But the most revolutionary reordering was neither hewn from stone nor enforced by the sword. It was this:
Mail.
The daily post.
Before the Romans came, the Israelite in Bethlehem or the Syrian in Palmyra lived out his days dissevered from, and in fact in ignorance of, the wider world. His universe ended at the town gate or the communal well. Could he trade? Study? Venture abroad? How, when he could know no more of the world than he could see from his doorstep or make plans for the morrow no farther than the distance he could tramp today?
Rome brought the mail, and the mail brought the world.
At once one knew, even the meanest and most impoverished rustic of the region, not only of Athens and Alexandria, but could send forth missives to such places and, miraculously, hear back from them. The vintner could market his produce beyond the sea, the artisan and the smith purvey their wares wherever Roman roads and Roman couriers could reach.
Rome’s motives of course were entirely self-interested. The conquerors believed their highways and waterways and the trade and postal communications that sped along them would bind their subject peoples in such shackles of order and dependence upon their overlords as would render these submissive, compliant, and incapable of rebellion. Yet, as with any world-altering innovation, consequences unintended and unforeseen soon ascended to the fore.
The mail itself, it transpired (or, more accurately, the practicability of the empire-wide transmission of new and seditious ideas), would produce the gravest threat to imperial hegemony, not only in Judea and the East but across the entire compass of Roman dominion. And this peril would proceed neither from hosts nor armies but from the pen of a single man—Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul the Apostle—who, to compound the irony, had himself been among the foremost practitioners of Roman tyranny and oppression.
But let us return for the moment to the bandits on the summit . . . and to the wagon train mounting the grade in the morning, undefended by our man-at-arms, toward its fated and fateful confrontation.
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A CLASH AT THE NARROWS
DAVID AND HIS FRIENDS HAD climbed to the summit well before dawn. Like theatergoers searching out the choicest seats, they settled upon a rock shelf overlooking the likeliest site of conflict. This was a neck of the summit pass. The pass itself extended between stony slopes for a distance of several hundred yards.
This choke point, called by locals the Narrows, sat at the southern end, the extremity that led down toward Jerusalem.
There the bandits waited. Their numbers had become twelve. Four held horses in a reserve position about fifty feet up the eastern slope. Another six lined the western flank of the pass, hard by the road and about twenty paces above it. They were cooking flatbread loaves for breakfast, with wine and olive oil. The brigands were armed, each after his fashion, with the Damascene-style saber, the shepherd’s bow, and the double-headed Syrian lance. Two squatted on their haunches in the roadway itself, laughing over some remark. None betrayed fear or apprehension.
This was a day’s work to them.
The boys, David and his friends, recognized by sight several of the brigands. These were goatherds and orchard men of the region, recruited and remunerated on an occasional basis by local villains—hardened cases who had rowed in the galleys or served time in Roman or Jewish prisons.
Now came the wagon train.
The column ascended with such plodding exertion, from the steepness of the grade (and no doubt the dread of what awaited it upon the summit), that the turn of the freight wagons’ wheels and the stamping of its draft animals’ hooves raised dust barely to the teamsters’ ankles. Behind and between the wagons shambled the foot travelers, trekkers, and pilgrims. Before the train and flanking it on both sides scampered another dozen onlookers, children and youths of the nearby villages.
The pair of bandits hunkering on their haunches now stood up. At a sign from one of the flatbread brigands, they advanced several steps toward the approaching train and took up a position blocking the roadway. Three of their upslope fellows likewise descended, though keeping a few feet above the Narrows and to the side. None yet drew their weapons.
The first freight wagon and its two immediate successors crested the grade and advanced onto the flat stretch of the pass at the summit. The wagoneers did not sit on their benches but strode afoot, each at the head of his team and drawing its leader by a halter, upon the left.