The Jews vs The Flavian Dynasty

0:00 A necromancer walks into a dark graveyard and comes to the grave of the Roman Emperor Titus. The man stretches out his hand and suddenly Emperor Titus returns to life and looks the man in the eyes. This is the beginning of a story given in multiple ancient Jewish religious texts. It's far from the only story in those texts about Emperor Titus who is viewed as one of the most cartoonishly evil men to ever live. A tyrant who literally had a personal vendetta against God. But if you were to go back in time and ask a Roman citizen alive during his reign what they thought about Emperor Titus, it's very likely that they would complain that he had too many Jews in his inner circle. And they would undoubtedly complain about the emperor's mysterious Jewish lover who was beginning to acquire more and more political power. So, how do we reconcile these two opposite versions of Emperor Titus? Well, in this video, we're going to be doing a complete deep dive into Titus's family, the Flavian dynasty, and

0:47 taking a look at their incredibly weird, complex, and toxic relationship with the Jewish people. As we go, each emperor I cover will be placed on my official Roman Emperor tier list from my last video in this series. I'm going to be talking about everything from obscure Jewish temples that were wiped from history, the Jewish anti-semite who became the second most powerful man in the Roman Empire, and of course, some really obscure religious lore. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy. Let's start off with our first emperor, the founder of the Flavian dynasty, Vespasian. Now, Vespasian is also a very big name in Jewish history. But while researching this video, I slowly start to learn that the historical Vespasian is very different from the sort of anti-Jewish character that he's often portrayed as. To understand why, let's go back to where we left off in my last video in this series. It's the reign of Emperor Nero, and the great Jewish revolt has just broken out. Emperor Nero picks one

1:33 of his best generals, a man named Vespasian to go crush the revolt. Now, Vespasian at this point is pushing 60, and he's kind of had enough of life in Rome. He has no patience to deal with Emperor Nero's insane shenanigans, and he almost had his career ended when he fell asleep during one of Nero's singing performances. Honestly, Nero was starting to get sick of him, and it was probably in his own best interest that he got sent away from Rome to deal with the rebellion in Judea. The Spasian decided to take his son Titus with him because nothing says father-son bonding time quite like brutally crushing up Jewish revolt. Now, I'm going to try to talk as little as possible about the tactical details of the Great Jewish Revolt because it's been covered in detail many times by channels much better than my own. If you want more details, just watch Sam Arino's Great Revolt series and Invictus Siege of Jerusalem video. In this video, I only want to talk about what's relevant to the Roman emperors. Now, before I go any further, we need to meet some of our

2:18 main characters. The lives and reigns of Vespasian and his son Titus were deeply influenced by three Jews. Understanding these three Jews is crucial to understanding the Flavian dynasty. They are Ysef Ben Matio, Princess Boniki, and Tiberius Alexander. I'm going to talk about Ysef first. If Vespasian and Titus want to take the capital, Jerusalem, they'd first need to take the hilly region in the north of Israel called the Galilee. But the Galilee would be a tough nut to crack for the Romans, mainly due to the battlefield genius of the Jewish commander in the Galilee, Ysef Ben Matial. Now, you may recall that I spoke about Ysef in my last video. He was a Jewish intellectual who had negotiated with Emperor Nero and gotten him to free many Jewish prisoners. Since the start of the Jewish revolt, Ysef had shed his robes for the armor of a soldier and was preparing the Galilee for the coming Roman invasion.

3:04 And sure enough, the Galilee campaign was hell for the Romans. Ysef had fortified many of the large towns, forcing the Romans to go town by town, all while being subjected to Jewish guerilla attacks. The whole campaign was reminiscent of the American island hopping campaign from World War II. Vespasian himself was nearly killed at the siege of GMA and was personally injured battling Jews at Yodfat, making him the first Roman emperor who had been personally injured while fighting Jews. Due to all this, one of the primary Roman objectives became to capture and kill Yseph, hoping that such an action would lead to a collapse of Jewish forces in the Galilee. Anyway, I want to note that Vespasian was brutal during the Galilee campaign. Conquered Jewish villages were often put to the torch and everyone in them was killed. The Sea of Galilee was said to have turned red from corpses after the Roman massacre at the coastal town of Terraa. But it's

3:49 important to know that such brutality doesn't necessarily come from a place of anti-Jewish hatred. The Romans tend to respond to their problems with actions that we would now probably consider genocide. Rebel against Rome, genocide. Refuse to pay taxes, genocide. Insult the emperor while he's visiting your city, believe it or not, straight to genocide. So, while it's true that Vespasian was crucifying Jews by the thousands during the Galley campaign, this behavior wasn't really out of the ordinary for the Roman Empire crushing a provincial revolt. So, what does a racially motivated war in Judea look like? Well, you're going to see in the next episode when we talk about Hadrien, and I can promise you it's not pretty, but this isn't a video about that. Anyway, Vespasian finally managed to corner the Jewish commander Ysef in the town of Yotvad. And after a brutal siege, the Romans took the city. Ysef and many other Jewish leaders hid from the Romans in a cave in the area. Inside

4:35 that cave, a disagreement broke out. Well, guys, we had a good fight. We tried, but we lost. I say we all go and surrender to the Romans. What the hell are you talking about, Ysef? Death before surrender. We all need to kill ourselves now. Uh, maybe you guys could kill yourselves, and I could go surrender. Nope. If you tried that, we'd kill you before you could even leave this cave. You know what? Uh, fair point. New idea. Let's make [clears throat] this organized. We're all going to stand in a circle and we're going to kill every third person until only one person is left and that person will kill himself. Oh, and I want to be the first stabber. All right, that sounds reasonable. Let's do it. >> A few moments later. >> Oh well. Would you look at that? By a complete and total coincidence that definitely wasn't calculated in my head beforehand, I am the only one left alive. Well, guess I better go surrender

5:21 to the Romans. To put it lightly, the Romans were surprised when their most wanted person randomly walked into their camp and angry Roman soldiers almost lynched him right there. But General Vespasian prevented that. Soldiers, you can't kill Ysef. We need him alive. Ah, so you must be Vespasian. And you want me alive? Well, this isn't too bad. Yeah. See, I need to keep you alive so I can send you to Emperor Nero in Rome as a prize. There you'll be paraded through the streets of Rome and humiliated before being brutally executed in front of the crowds. Oh. Um, can I go back to the cave? Ysef realized that if you want to get out of this with his life intact, he needed to come up with some [ __ ] quickly. And thankfully for him, he was an absolute world-class bullshitter. Yseph told Vespasian that he was actually a Jewish prophet who frequently received revelations from God. He gave some really shaky alleged prophecies of

6:07 his to prove this, including some ridiculous claims that he had accurately predicted the day that the city would fall. He then explained that the ancient Jewish prophecies spoke of a great emperor who would rise out of Judea and rule the world. He told Vespasian that he was this great emperor, not that fool Nero ruling back in Rome. Now, Vespasian didn't believe Ysef, but something about that idea of becoming emperor. Something about it resonated deep inside Vespasian, and he just couldn't get it out of his head. Instead of sending Yseph to be executed by Nero, Vespasian decided to keep him around as a slave in his entourage. Even when Vespasian arrived in the city of Cesaria, and all the Romans there were like, "Dude, you need to kill this Ysef guy." Vespasian still couldn't bring himself to do it. Ysef had planted a seed inside of his mind, and that seed would continue to grow. Now, it's at this point where I feel like I should address a very important fact. While they were fighting

6:52 each other, both the Jews and the Romans were having simultaneous multi-sided civil wars on the side. First, let's talk about the Jewish factions. First up, you had the Agrians. These were the loyalists of the Jewish king Herod Agria II, who I'm going to be portraying as Jaime Lannister for reasons that will become apparent later in the video. Now, by this point, Agria wasn't the king of Judea, and his actual kingdom was located in what's now Syria, but he was still sort of a der king of the Jews. And in particular, he helped to run a lot of the Jewish affairs in the city of Jerusalem. It's kind of similar how the modern king of Jordan is the custodian of Jerusalem's Islamic holy sites despite not actually ruling over Jerusalem. Anyway, King Agria opposed to rebellion against Rome since he saw it as futile and pointless. And when the war started, he supported the Romans. Therefore, the Agrian faction represented the pro- Roman Jews. And yes, pro Roman Jews were a thing. Then

7:39 you had the Judean Provisional Government, the Republican government that led the revolt who thought that the Agrippens weren't extreme enough. Then you had multiple Zealot factions including Alzar ben Shimon's temple zealots, John of Gaskcala's Galilean Zealots, and Shimon Bargiera's populace zealots. All of whom thought the guys who thought the Agrians weren't extreme enough weren't extreme enough. And then you had the Sakari who thought the guys who thought the guys who thought the guys who thought the Agrippens weren't extreme enough weren't extreme enough weren't themselves extreme enough. Make sense? Yeah. Montipython actually toned down the ridiculous of the situation when they made their famous People's Front of Judea joke. Anyway, things got even crazier after the Romans arrived at Jerusalem and besieged the city. Instead of uniting, the Jews only began to fight each other more. Jewish factions took some of the dumbest actions ever taken in military history. One Jewish faction burned the storehouses of the besieged

8:25 city in order to prevent enemy Jews from having grain. They literally incinerated years worth of food in a besieged city just as despite the guys living three blocks away. In addition, at one point, when one Jewish faction was losing, they literally called in a third group of people called the Idum to help them. The Ethians instead proceed to just sack the city of Jerusalem and kill Jews by the thousands. Now, can you imagine what the Romans were thinking watching all this unfold? Like, imagine you're besieing a city and the guys inside of the city burn all of their own food stores and then bring in a third army and have them sack the city for you. Vespasian deliberately didn't attack Jerusalem at all during this time. Instead, preferring to just wait outside the city doing nothing and watch the waring Jewish factions destroy themselves. But before you mock the Jews, the Romans weren't doing any better because they had a civil war of their own going on. Essentially, it was at this point that Emperor Nero committed suicide, or if

9:12 you're going to go according to Jewish sources, faked his death and converted to Judaism. With Nero gone, the Roman Empire descended into a chaotic multi-faction civil war called the year of the four emperors. This war saw three irrelevant emperors take the throne in quick succession. I'm not going to talk about them since they're completely irrelevant and their entire reigns focus on the Civil War, so they didn't have time for any sort of Jewish relations. The situation got so crazy that at one point Vespasian sent his son Titus to Rome to congratulate the new emperor, only for Titus to turn back halfway and come back to Judea when he heard that the emperor had already been killed and replaced by some other guy. Essentially, at this stage of the war, both the Jews and the Romans were way busier killing themselves than they were killing each other. With each new emperor in Rome being more incompetent than the last, the Roman troops started to grow restless, and many looked to the Harden General Vespasian and saw a figure who might be able to bring much neededed stability to the empire. Suddenly the

9:58 legions were chanting Vespasian's name and right on cue that crazy Jewish slave in the entourage started to seem a lot less crazy. Vespasian began to remember the prophecy that Yosesef Ben Matio had whispered to him back at camp. You will be ruler of the world. Now we know from multiple Roman sources like Sutonius and Tacitus that Vespasian was actually a pretty superstitious guy. He was a sucker for omens and divine signs and now he saw Ysef's prophecy coming to fruition. Although he was hesitant at first, he gave into the troops demands and decided to try to take the throne. There was one wild card that could make or break Vespasian's effort. That wild card was Egypt. Egypt was of tremendous importance to the Roman Empire. First off, multiple powerful Roman legions were stationed there. But more importantly, Egypt controlled both the crucial wheat and corn production economies, which were crucial for keeping Rome fed. Whoever controlled

10:44 Egypt essentially controlled the empire's bread basket. And it just so happened to be that at this time, Egypt was being ruled over by a Jewish guy. Let me explain. As I mentioned in my last video, there was an absolutely massive Jewish community in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. And as I mentioned in my last video, the most prominent member of that community was the legendary Jewish philosopher Pho. He's a guy almost got killed by Caligula, if you remember. Anyway, Pho's family was rich and powerful and was probably the most influential Jewish family aid from the Jewish royal family. But Pho had a nephew who didn't want anything to do with his family. That nephew's name was Tiberius Alexander. Tiberius Alexander was almost certainly born with a Jewish name, but it's been lost to history, likely because he wanted it that way. See, Tiberius didn't just drift away from his faith. He seems to have actively hated his Jewish ethnicity. He

11:30 was the ultimate Rou whose greatest desire was to rise in the ranks of the Roman Empire. Now, it was extremely difficult at this time for a Jewish guy to climb the ranks. But despite all the odds being against him, Tiberius successfully rose in power and became one of the most powerful magistrates in the empire. During the reign of Emperor Claudius, Tiberius Alexander was appointed to be the governor of Judea, becoming the first and only Jew to hold the title. Now, being a Jew who hated Judaism, ruling over Judea, there was a lot of potential for something to go wrong. But somehow, his tenure as governor seems to have been relatively uneventful, and he was able to successfully keep the peace somehow. But for Tiberius, Judea was just a stepping stone. And before long, he was appointed governor of Egypt. A far more impressive title. It was while he was governor of Egypt that the Jewish revolt broke out. Despite occurring in Judea, the revolt triggered ethnic violence and riots in

12:15 Alexandria between the city's Jewish and Greek populations. The Jews probably expected their Jewish governor to take their side. But Tiberius did the opposite. Instead of helping the Jews, Tiberius committed what was most likely the only anti-Jewish program in history that was led by a Jewish guy. He ordered two entire Roman legions to march into the Jewish ghetto in Alexandria and massacre the inhabitants, burn down the homes, and steal their belongings. It was written that, and I quote, "No mercy was shown to the infant and no regard to the aged, but they went down in to slaughter the persons of every age, till all the place was overflowed with blood, and 50,000 of them laid dead upon heaps." 50,000. Anyway, why am I even talking about Tiberius Alexander? Well, when General Vespasian laid a claim to the Roman throne, he wasn't yet supported by most of the Roman legions. But that all changed when the governor

13:01 of Egypt, Tiberius Alexander, threw his support behind Vespasian and made his legion swear loyalty to him. Not only was Tiberius Alexander the first provincial governor to support Vespasian, but he was arguably the most powerful governor in the Roman Empire, as well as being the one who controlled the Roman grain supply. Once Tiberius had made his move, most of the other governors and legions followed his lead. And suddenly, the odds were in Vespasian's favor. In case you don't understand just how important Tiberius was to Vespasian's rise of power, when later Roman historians wrote about the day Vespasian had become emperor, they didn't write about the day he actually took power in Rome, but rather the day that Tiberius had proclaimed him emperor. So, similar to how the Jewish king Agria the first had been the kingmaker who had brought Emperor Claudius to power, a Jewish man once again played the crucial role in the rise of a Roman emperor. But there's one very important question that still needs answering. What caused Tiberius to throw

13:47 his support behind Vespasian? While historians will endlessly debate this question, I want to talk about one very interesting theory. That Tiberius Alexander was actually just a pawn in a larger plot to put a Jewish person on the Roman throne. And this is where we get to the third Jewish person who was very important to the Flavian dynasty, Princess Baroni. Now, while Vespasian was battling his way to Jerusalem and being injured, his son Titus, who was accompanying him in Judea, had started dating the Jewish princess Baroni. Now, a lot of you might be surprised that someone like Titus was dating a Jewish girl, but this was actually a thing that happened. Now, we're going to talk a lot more about Baroni in the Titus section of this video, but what you need to know for now is that she was both ambitious and politically savvy. When Rome descended into civil war, she realized something. If Vespasian would become emperor, then when he died, the throne would pass to his son Titus. Then if she had a child

14:34 with Titus, that child who would be Jewish according to Jewish law would become the next Roman emperor after him. This was her chance to put her future son on the Roman throne. But how could she make Vespasian emperor? Well, she knew a guy. You see, Tiberius Alexander was actually Boniki's brother-in-law. We know from the Roman historian Tacitus that Boniki actually helped organize Vespasian's rise to power. And it's likely the way she did this was by convincing her powerful brother-in-law to support him. Anyway, with his path to power now clear, Vespasian decided to reward the slave who had prophesized everything that had happened. Vespasian visited Ysef Ben Mattowo and officially freed him from slavery. But that wasn't all. Vespasian officially brought Ysef into his family, the Flavian dynasty, and gave him a new name, Titus Flavius

15:20 Josephus. If you've heard of him, it's probably by that name, Josephus. While the idea of just bring a guy into your family might sound weird to us modern listeners, in ancient Rome, family relations were very weird and somewhat flexible. In ancient Rome, it was fully normal for fully adult men to adopt other fully adult men and bring them into their families. Honestly, in my opinion, that's a really cool tradition that we need to bring back. Anyway, while Vespasian never fully adopted Josephus, he did allow him to take the Flavian family name, significantly upgrading his status from a slave to a nobleman. But there's one more aspect of Vespasian's rise to power that I want to talk about before we move on to his reign. The Jewish religious perspective on his rise. And to understand that, we need to discuss a story given in the Talmud. The meeting between Vespasian and Rabbi Yanan Benzakai. According to the story, Rabbi Yanan Benzakai was the

16:05 most prominent religious leader in Jerusalem, and he wanted to leave the city and negotiate with the Romans. Yet the zealot rebels who controlled the city gates refused to let anyone leave the city. So Rabbi Yokohanan pretended to be a corpse and was taken out of the city in a coffin count of Monte Crystal style. He came to the tent of General Vespasian and said to him, "Greetings, oh great emperor." Vespasian just looked at him and said, "You know what? You deserve two death penalties. One because you called me an emperor when I'm just a general. And another because if I'm really the emperor, why don't you come to me and greet me until now?" I mean, by the way, can we talk about how dumb that sentence is? Like Rabbi would only ever be liable for one death penalty since only one of the two contestions could be true at the same time. But clearly Vespasian never took a logic class. Anyway, Rabbi Yokan calmly answers and says that Vespasian really is the rightful emperor. And the only reason he hadn't come to greet him until

16:51 now was because the rebels in the city hadn't permitted him to do so. Anyway, not long after this, Vespasian gets the news that the troops have proclaimed him emperor. And suddenly he believes that Rabbi Yanan is a prophet who fortold his rise. Anyway, then we get this really weird and random part of the story where the good news of becoming emperor makes Vispasian's feet grow really fat and he can't remove his shoe. And then he and Rabioan have to figure out a way to make his feet shrink. It's the most random part ever and has zero plot relevance and it's never brought up again. I'm pretty sure they just let Quentyn Tarantino write a part of the Talmud. Anyway, once Vespasian's really weird foot issue has been dealt with, the general sits down to actually have a conversation with Rabbi Yohanan. In an uncharacteristically positive portrayal for a Jewish source, the tomud says that Vespasian explains to Yanan that he doesn't actually want to destroy Jerusalem, but feels like he has to because of the extremist rebels hiding

17:36 in the city. He compares it to a barrel of honey with a snake wrapped around it, explaining that if you want to kill the snake, you need to break the barrel. Vespasian then explains that he's going to be heading to Rome to stake his claim as emperor. But before he goes, he offers Rabbi Yohan a boon as a reward for accurately predicting his rise to the throne. Yohanan asks for three things. First, he asked the Romans to spare the coastal city of Yavna, which he planned to turn into a Jewish religious and spiritual center after the war. The second thing that Yohan asked for was for the Romans to spare the great rabbi Rabban Gamiel II and his family. This was because Gamiel claimed descent from the dynasty of King David. And Yohan was afraid that the Romans might try to kill the potential Davidic claimments to the Jewish throne after the war. In Judaism, it is prophesized that the Messiah will be a member of the Davidic dynasty. By protecting the Davidic line, Rabbi Yanan was

18:23 guaranteeing that there would be a way for the Messiah to be born in the future. His third request had to do with a Jewish sage called Rabbi Sado. It was said that many years before, Rabbi Sado had received a vision that Jerusalem would be destroyed. In an attempt to save off that outcome, he spent the next 40 years fasting and praying to God to have mercy. In order not to die from the multi-year fasts, he would take dates, suck the juices out of them, and then leave the rest of the date. That sounds disgusting. It's because it is. And the Talmud even mentioned that a woman just straight up died after accidentally eating one of the so-called discarded dates of Rabbi Sadok. And by the way, I feel like we kind of need to address the elephant in the room. Was there something wrong with this guy's fasting? Like he spends 40 years fasting for Jerusalem to not be destroyed. In the end, spoiler alert, it's destroyed in the most brutal way possible. Like clearly this guy was not doing something

19:09 right. Maybe on one of the days he accidentally fell in a schwarma with extra tahini, a slice of apple, and about 3 lers of water accidentally fell into his mouth. Anyway, bottom line was by this point, Rabbi Sadok was pretty much an emaciated living skeleton. So, as the final of his three wishes, Rabbi Yanan asked Vespasian to send Roman doctors to treat Sadok and save his life. So, that's the story of Rabbi Yanan's fateful meeting with Vespasian. It's pretty well summarized by this illustration that I found online. Here you can see the two characters, the messenger from Rome coming to save the emperor's died, the snake around the honey barrel, and even Vespasian's disgusting ass foot mutation thing. Also, I don't know why, but for some reason, the illustration style here really gives me political cartoon vibes. Anyway, as I mentioned in my last video, many of the stories given in the Talmud fall into a category called the Gata, with some of these being seen even by

19:54 religious Jews more as allegorical legends rather than literal history. Therefore, it might surprise you to learn that most modern scholars agree that the meeting between Rabbi Yanan Benzakai and Vespasian was actually a real historical event, even if some of the details of the story may be legendary. There are a few arguments for this, but the most prominent of which is simply that we know as a fact that after the fall of Jerusalem, Rabbi Okinan really did go on to found a new Jewish spiritual center at the Academy of Yav. By that point, the Romans had fully reasserted control in Judea, and it would have been impossible to establish a new Jewish spiritual center without explicit permission from the Roman authorities. It also makes sense for Vespasian to have allowed and even supported the founding of the Yavnet Academy in order to create a Jewish moderate counterbalance to the temple cult in Jerusalem, which by this point was controlled by fervently anti-Roman zealots. We have some other evidence as well that points to the story being

20:40 historical. We have contemporary accounts of the Romans treating certain Jewish defectors who left Jerusalem fairly and giving them land in other parts of the country. We also know the Romans likely eventually did do some sort of purge against the potential heirs of the Davidic dynasty. Yet despite that, Raban Gumiel II and his family were never harmed. However, in my opinion, the biggest proof of the story's authenticity is the simple fact that Vespasian is portrayed as a reasonable man who helped the Jews by a source that by all means has every reason to portray him and all the Romans negatively. But there's one big aspect of the story that doesn't sit well. And I'm sure you've noticed it already, and that's the extreme similarity to the story of Josephus. In both of them, a Jewish man escapes the extremist rebels, goes before Vespasian, and escapes execution by giving a prophecy about Vespasian's rise to power. And both of them, Vespasian rewards them generously

21:26 once the prophecy comes true. So, how do we resolve this issue? Well, there are two possible resolutions. The first is that the prophecy narrative really was copied from the story of Josephus and added to the historical account later on. But the second option is that the story of Rabio Khan's prophecy really did happen. We know from Roman sources that multiple seers and alleged prophets aside from Josephus told Vespasian that he would become emperor. So there's no reason that Rabbi Yanan couldn't simply have been one of those seers. In addition, by the time they would have met, it was pretty obvious that Vespasian would become emperor. So with that context, it's not even such an impressive prophecy. Anyway, in short, through the prophecies of Josephus and Yokohan Benzakai, the political scheming of Boniki and the military might of Tiberius Alexander, Vpasian's path to the throne was clear, and he set off to Rome to claim it. He left his son Titus

22:12 to finish the siege of Jerusalem and crush the Jewish revolt once and for all. He left Josephus with Titus that he could serve as an adviser and a translator during the siege. Anyway, I'm going to skip over the entire siege of Jerusalem since we'll go more into detail into it in the Titus section. All you need to know for now is that Titus completely destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the third temple. So now, like 20 minutes into this video, let's finally talk about the reign of Emperor Vespasian. Vespasian began his reign with a bang, organizing a grand triumph to show off all the cool treasure that he had taken from the temple in Judea. The massive amounts of Judean riches and the manpower of newly imported Jewish slaves allowed Vespasian to construct an extremely ambitious monument, the Flavian Amphitheater, better known as the Colosseum, which was likely built by many of the Jewish slaves who were now in Rome. In order to make his victory known to all Romans, Vespasian ordered a

22:59 new series of coins to be minted. These coins show a Jewish woman crying over the destruction of Judea under a date tree. as a Roman soldier stands over her. On the coins are the words Judea capta, which roughly translates to Judea is a captive. Yeah, the Romans did not mess around. They really thought, you know what would go really hard on our currency? A crying Jewish woman. And fun fact, in 1948 when the modern state of Israel was founded, they minted a special edition metal that deliberately mimicked Vespasian's design. But this time, the scene is transformed. The date palm is still there, but the Roman soldier is gone. In this place is a man planting a tree and the woman is no longer sitting in the dust. Instead, she's standing tall and holding a child. The land inscription was changed from Judea's captured to Judea's liberated. Anyway, back to ancient Rome. Once all

23:45 that was done with, Vespasian still needed a way to record his great victory, and he knew just the guy to do it. Vespasian went to the former Jewish general, Josephus, who had returned from Judea with Titus and was now living in Rome as a Flavian nobleman, and told him that there would be no one more worthy to write the history of the Great Jewish War than him. Josephus, who had probably never imagined that this is where his life would take him, accepted and wrote his masterpiece, The Jewish War. The book is extremely detailed. So detailed, in fact, that because of it, we know more about the Great Jewish Revolt than about any other war from this time period. While the book was obviously written as a piece of prospian propaganda, it's surprisingly critical toward the Roman side. The book is mostly accurate. Although, everyone once in a while, Josephus will throw in something like Titus discovering a secret magical river that keeps a Jewish Sabbath, and then you'll remember the

24:30 book was written by a guy who only stayed alive because of how good he was at making up [ __ ] on the fly. But honestly, it still holds up today if you want to read it. This whole thing is actually hilarious when you think about it. Like, imagine if during World War II, Dwight Eisenhower captured Irwin Raml and then adopted Raml as a member of his family, making him win Eisenhower. Then imagine if he tasked Irwin Eisenhower with writing the official United States history of World War II. Anyway, one thing that's pretty surprising about Vespasian's reign was his attitude toward Judaism. Now, I've heard a lot of people online say things like the Roman Empire was super religiously tolerant, but that's not really so true if you look at the history. Both the Roman Republic and Empire didn't hesitate to ban sects and cults that they'd found threatening. Someone alive at the time of the Jewish revolt probably would have expected the emperor to respond by banning Judaism.

25:16 But Vespasian did the opposite. Not only did he allow Jews in the empire to continue following their religion, but he deliberately kept Judaism status as a protected religion of the Roman Empire, which had been in place since the time of Julius Caesar. And that brings me to a very important thing that Vespasian didn't do. Roman conquerors would often take a special title based on the name of the people that they had defeated. Trajan defeated the Parththeians, so he was called Parthus. Claudius II defeated the Goths, so he was called Gothicus. Aelion defeated everyone, so he was called everything. Yet, despite all that, Vespasian never took the title Judeaicus, defeater of the Jews. There are two opposing theories as to why he refused to take the title. The first is that it was actually a deliberate attempt by Vespasian to maintain good relations with the Jewish diaspora. There were many Jews living in places like Rome, and Vespasian wanted to make

26:03 it clear to them that he didn't hold them responsible for the revolt in Judea, and that their lives wouldn't change because of it. Therefore, introducing himself as Juice layer 3000 would probably have sent the wrong message. The second theory is pretty much the opposite of the first one. Due to the way the Latin language works, the title Vespasian Judeicus might have sounded like he was calling himself Vespasian the Jew, which was something he seriously wanted to avoid. The last thing he needed was to end up with a ridiculous nickname like that one emperor who got proclaimed supreme Redditor. And no, I'm not making that up. Google it. Anyway, I mentioned the lives of diaspora Jews didn't change much under Vespasian, but there's one very major exception. For hundreds of years, every Jew in the world would pay a special tax called the temple tax, which would fund the service of the holy temple in Jerusalem. After all, all those sacrifices weren't free. Now there was no more temple. The question arose,

26:49 what happens to the temple tax? So to understand what happens next, you need to understand that according to the very weird Roman syncric pagan theology, most Romans were completely fine with believing that the Jewish god existed, but that he was just a weak ass god who could get absolutely bullied and dunked on by the much more powerful Roman gods like Jupiter, which is exactly what happened during the Jewish revolt. Vespasian decided that if the Jews had been willing to pay taxes to their god, then it only made sense for them to divert their taxes to the god who had absolutely low diff their god in a 1v one. So Vespasian announced the Jews would continue to pay the temple tax except this time the funds would go toward the temple of Jupiter in Rome which was at this point undergoing expensive renovations. Yet even after the renovations of the temple of Jupiter had been completed the Jews were forced to continue paying the special tax and it became known as the fiscus Judeus or

27:35 the Jewish tax. Since all Jews had paid the temple tax now all the Jews in the empire were forced to pay the fiscus Jakus, not just the ones in Judea. But this wasn't actually an unusual move for Vespasian. That guy taxed everything you can think of, famously even implementing a controversial heavy tax on the sale of human piss. So yeah, if you were a Jewish guy in Rome looking to go into the piss business, this was not the time for you. Anyway, Vespasian would soon be faced with another problem. Many of the rebel zealot Jews had escaped from Judea and ran to North Africa. A group of Jewish rebels from a faction called the Sakari arrived in Egypt and became clashing with local Jews in the city of Alexandria. Before long, a mini Jewish civil war had broken out in Alexandria with scores of Jews dead. The disturbances brought the issue of the Sakari presence in Egypt to the

28:20 attention of Vespasian. Vespasian was concerned that the Egyptian Sakari might launch a second Jewish revolt. And his fears were compounded when he learned that apparently there was an entire second Jewish temple in Egypt that he hadn't known about until now. Let me explain. Most people, even most Jews, will probably be surprised when I tell you that there were actually two Jewish temples in the early Roman period. the temple in Jerusalem and the Oniad temple and they both existed simultaneously. Essentially, the story begins about 200 years earlier when two Jewish priestly families, the Oniads and the Tobiads, were locked in a bloody feud over which of them would dominate temple politics in Jerusalem. The Tobiads came out on top and kicked the Oniads out of Jerusalem. Their leader, the priest Onias, was like, "Fine, you know what? I never needed your temple anyway. I'm going to make my own temple with blackjack and hookers and just straight

29:05 up built a second Jewish temple in the Egyptian city of Leonopoulos. The new temple gained some popularity among the local population, but never managed to eclipse the Jerusalem temple. And most of the world's Jews rejected the Oniad temple as illegitimate. But now the Jerusalem temple was destroyed. Vespasian feared that the Onia temple might be accepted as the new temple and it would become the center of a new Jewish revolt. So he wrote a letter to the new governor of Egypt, a guy who was named Lupus, by the way, and ordered him to destroy the Onian temple. For reasons unknown, Lupus never did destroy the temple. Instead, he just had it shut down. This makes Vespasian the only person to have presided over the demise of two different Jewish temples. But Egypt wasn't the only place where rebel fugitives escaped to because a few of them managed to make their way to a part of North Africa that's now part of Algeria. One of them, a guy named Jonathan, caused quite a bit of trouble

29:52 until he was captured by the Roman governor Catalyst. But Catalyst was ridiculously corrupt, even by Roman governor standards. He had a lot of enemies, most of them Jews, who he wanted to get rid of. And now he knew the perfect way to do it. He went to Jonathan and offered him a deal. He said he wouldn't execute Jonathan if he named all of Catalyst's enemies as members in an alleged massive Jewish conspiracy against the empire. The two of them got to work with Jonathan naming over 3,000 wealthy North African Jews as members of the alleged conspiracy, which let Catalyst execute them and confiscate all their money, becoming super rich in the process. But Catalyst overplayed his hand when he decided to go after none other than Josephus. By the way, most of the Romans would have hated Josephus. He was a former Jewish general who was responsible for countless Roman deaths. Yet now he was living as a wealthy

30:38 nobleman in Rome. Convinced that he would easily be able to get rid of Josephus, Catalyst went to Rome, bringing Jonathan with him. When he accused Josephus of treason, Emperor Vespasian saw right through his lies. Instead of executing his friend Josephus, he had Jonathan executed instead. And Catalyst died of a very mysterious disease shortly after. And that about wraps up the reign of Emperor Vpasian. So, I think it's time that I rank him on my Roman Emperor's tier list, which ranks the emperors by how they're seen in Judaism. And no, I didn't forget about the tier list. Overall, Vespasian was the biggest surprise out of all the emperors here. Before researching this video, I expected him to be an easy F tier, but later, I came to see him as a pragmatic general who didn't want to destroy Jerusalem and is even portrayed as an intelligent and rational figure in Jewish religious sources. Then, as emperor, he successfully protected the status of Judaism as a protected

31:23 religion with the exception of his institution of the Jewish tax. Overall, I'm going to surprisingly be putting him in Ctier. Now, let's move on to the reign of Vespasian's son, Titus. And unlike Vespasian, who surprised me, Titus is basically exactly what you're expecting. But before I talk about Titus's reign as emperor, I want to go back in time a bit and talk about his time fighting the Jewish rebels in Judea. As I mentioned, when Vespasian went to crush a Jewish revolt, he took Titus with him. During the Galley campaign, Vespasian sent Titus to conquer the small Jewish village of Giscala, which was being led by a rebel named John. This was likely a test to see if Titus was capable of leading wars like his father. Titus arrived at Kiscala and called on John to surrender. John told Titus that he was currently celebrating the Jewish Sabbath and asked Titus to come back on Sunday. For some

32:08 inexplicable reason, Titus was like, "Understandable. Have a great day." And he actually withdrew his legions. He came back on Sunday and surprise surprise, John and the rebels had fled the town and gone to Jerusalem. If this was a test, I'm pretty sure Titus failed it. But it's also our first sign that the historical Titus might also be a bit different than the man that he's often portrayed as. Anyway, later on during the siege of Jerusalem, Vespasian went back to Rome, leaving Titus to finish the siege. During the siege, his main translator was Josephus. And his second in command was actually the apostate Jewish governor of Egypt, Tiberius Alexander, who after killing 50,000 Jews in Alexandria, had made the journey from Egypt to Judea in order to take part in the destruction of Jerusalem. So yeah, Jewish moms, if he thought you that your son was off the Derek, he's got nothing on Tiberius Alexander. Toward the beginning of the siege, Titus tried to negotiate with the Jews. He felt like it

32:54 might be good to have them talk to one of their own. So he sent Josephus to talk to them, but the Jews just threw spears at him from the city walls. Then Titus again sent Josephus to talk to them. And the Jews threw rocks on him and almost killed him. Then Titus again sent Josephus and Josephus was like, "Are you trying to get me killed, man?" So Titus stopped sending him. Around this time, John, the rebel leader who had escaped from Guscala, took over the Jewish temple and turned it into his faction's main base for warfare against the Romans. Just imagine how Titus probably felt seeing that. His act of mercy had only been used to trick him, and now the man he had let live was actively killing Roman soldiers. Suddenly, we see a change in Titus's strategy. Instead of trying to negotiate with the Jews, he just starts crucifying them instead. Unlike his father, who had treated Jewish desertters from Jerusalem well, Titus just had them crucified, no questions asked. Before long, the entire

33:41 valley outside Jerusalem was covered in crosses with the dying sounds of those crucified being constantly heard in Jerusalem, serving as psychological warfare against the starving population of the besieged city. Anyway, the siege of Jerusalem was grueling for both sides, and the Jews fought back viciously against the Romans. At one point, Titus completely flipped out and angrily yelled at his troops for displaying poorer discipline than the Jewish soldiers. But slowly, Titus and his forces advanced into the city. It's now that we need to address a very important question. Did Titus want to destroy the Jewish temple? If you're going by Jewish sources, the answer is completely obvious. Of course, he did. But historically, what happened is a bit more complicated. According to Josephus, Titus called the war council with his top general to decide what should be done with the temple. Hello everyone. Thank you all for coming to this meeting. I wanted to take a few minutes

34:28 and discuss what exactly are we going to do with the Jewish temple. Destroy it. Burn it to the ground. Make those Jews pay. Kill everyone in. Uh try to contain yourself, Tiberius. On the contrary, I think the temple is a beautiful feat of architecture and I don't want to say it destroyed. All soldiers are treated with care during the assault. According to Josephus, Titus gave explicit orders not to destroy the temple. But while the Romans restoring the city, one soldier threw a torch into the temple, making it catch fire and burn to the ground. Josephus then explains that upon seeing this, Titus himself ran into the temple and frantically attempted to put out the fire. But as I've hope you've guessed, this story is complete fiction. You see, Josephus was literally being paid by Vespasian and Titus to write his book. And he quite literally had Titus looking over his shoulder while writing it. Because of that, when it comes to Titus,

35:14 the works of Josephus are essentially propaganda made to make Titus look good and merciful and exonerate him from the brutality committed by the Romans in Jerusalem. So, if the account of Josephus is fake, what really happened? Well, it's likely that Titus probably didn't have a real desire to destroy the temple and maybe even want to transform it into a military garrison after taking the city. But at the same time, there isn't really any reason that Titus would have a real problem with the temple being destroyed. And the story of him trying to save it can be dismissed completely as a fiction. After the total destruction of the temple, we're told of a series of interesting interactions between Titus and his new best friend, Josephus. The dynamic between the two of them is legitimately the funniest thing ever. Josephus is a deeply traumatized man who is forced to watch the destruction of his homeland and the genocide of his people through the lens of the perpetrator. But for Titus, this is just a regular Tuesday for a Roman general. and he couldn't quite seem to

36:00 understand what Josephus was so sad about. He constantly tried to cheer up Josephus, but each completely tonedeaf thing he did only made his friends sadder. First of all, after plundering the temple, Titus told Josephus that he could take any of the Jewish treasures that he wanted. Josephus wasn't interested. Yo yo, Josephus, you guys see all this stuff? The temple priests don't want you know this, but all this [ __ ] in the temple just lying around. It's free. You can take it home. I have 823 temple treasures in my house. I mean, just look at this stuff. Like, what do they even do with this thing? I mean, like, at what point in your life does a need for this thing come up? I don't know, but I can promise you what's going on my coffee table. Come on, take something. I know you want to take something. For the last time, I'm not interested. Really? Come on. How about a cool hat? I know you want a cool hat. Look at me. I'm a Cohen. I'm a Cohen. You have I'm a Cohen. >> Please stop. After that, Titus offered Josephus a beautiful house overlooking the charred ruins of his hometown. But,

36:46 interestingly enough, Josephus wasn't interested. Then, he gave Josephus a captured Jewish slave to be his wife. But that marriage fell apart immediately because like [ __ ] obviously. Finally, Joseph has had enough. Look, Titus, I understand you're trying to be my friend and everything, but I don't want any of your stolen riches or your slave girls or any of that crap. I just want one thing. I want to be able to see my friends again. Can I just do that, Titus? Just that one thing. All I want is for you to have mercy on my friends and let them see me again. Oh, of course, bro. I'll take you to see Oh, no. These these guys were your friends. Oh. Oh my Oh, whoopsie. Uh, well, I I suppose I did let you see them again. Titus had Josephus's friends removed from the crosses, but it was too late. All except for one of them died of their injuries. Maybe by crucifying all Josephus's other friends, Titus was just trying to eliminate his friendship

37:32 competition. So, yeah, Josephus was unexpectedly taken from his homeland to a completely new land and culture where he rose from being a nobody to being the emperor's confidant and was given a slave girl to marry. But whenever I call the Jewish war an eekai, people still give me weird looks. Anyway, now that we've covered Josephus's experiences with Titus, I want to talk about the Titus portrayed in Jewish sources. As opposed to his father, who is portrayed as a brutal but reasonable man, Titus is essentially portrayed as the embodiment of pure evil. He is known as Tetusa, which means Titus the evil. And whenever his name is mentioned, it is followed by the phrase, meaning may his bones be crushed. According to the Tammud, immediately after conquering Jerusalem, Titus had sex with two prostitutes on top of a holy Torah scroll in the ruins of the most sacred chamber of the temple, the Holy of Holies. That room was so holy

38:18 that only the high priest was allowed to enter it, and only once a year. Titus's act was essentially the most over-the-top heretical thing you could possibly do in Judaism. It's actually surprising how many Jewish laws he broke with that one act. It's like he was trying to minmax speedrun his way to Jewish hell. After deseering the holy of holies, Titus took his sword and cut down the parro a curtain at the entrance of the room. Suddenly, blood started spurting out of the curtain covering Titus. It said that Titus started freaking out because he thought that he had killed himself. Was he [ __ ] Oh, okay. I just checked. And actually, the word himself in this passage is a euphemism for God. That makes more sense than the other option. Essentially, Titus was sure that he had personally slain the Jewish god in his own home, the temple. While obviously none of these stories are recorded in the works of Josephus, we do have a lot of historical evidence for Titus being really petty and gloating

39:04 over the Jews. For instance, the legion he assigned to Judea was the 10th Legion, whose symbol was the Bora, an extremely unclean and impure animal to the Jews. This wasn't a coincidence. It meant that for centuries, the survivors of the siege had to see the image of a pig stamped on the bricks, tiles, and military standards all over the ruins of their holy city. In addition, Titus reportedly refused to accept a victory wreath, claiming that there was no honor in defeating a people who had already been forsaken by their own god. After that, instead of heading back to Rome, Titus decided to take a victory tour through the newly reconquered province of Judea. To celebrate the birthdays of his father and his brother, he had over 4,000 Jewish slaves fed to wild animals in gladatorial arenas. News of Titus's massacres spread through the region and suddenly anti-Jewish elements

39:49 in neighboring lands felt empowered to make plays against the Jews. It's against this background that we see an explosion in anti-Jewish sentiment in the area surrounding Judea. First, let's talk about what happened in the city of Antioch. It all started with a Jewish man named Antiochus who rejected his Judaism and adopted Greek culture. By the way, a guy from Antioch named Antiochus. Did JK Rrowling write this crap? Also, what Jewish woman names her son Antiochus? Like, Antious? Seriously? Anyway, despite being born Jewish, Antiochus became the leader of the massive anti-Jewish movement in the city of Antioch. And his efforts climaxed when he accused the Jews of secretly trying to burn down the entire city of Antioch. As this was all happening, Titus arrived in the city of Antioch. Seeing a guy who was basically known as the most anti-Semitic man alive coming to their city, the faction of Antiochus felt emboldened and made their move.

40:35 They asked Titus to expel the entire Jewish community at Antioch, feeling sure that he would support them. But Titus did something that surprised absolutely everyone. He took the side of the Jews and refused any request to expel the Jewish community. You see, Titus, like his father, saw the rebelling Judean Jews and the diaspora Jews as two completely separate groups and was opposed to punishing the Antioch Jewish community for a rebellion that they took no pardon. After Titus refused to expel the Jews, the people of Antioch put forth a second request. Instead of expelling the Jews, they just asked Titus to cancel the special privileges that Julius Caesar had granted the Jews. Once again, Titus utterly refused. The story would repeat itself when Titus visited the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Once again, the Greek population of the city asked him to expel the Jews. And once again, he utterly refused and confirmed the rights of the city's Jews.

41:21 And so, in a weird twist of fate, the guy who had just been slaughtering Judean Jews by the hundreds of thousands wound up being the most steadfast protector of Jewish rights in the Roman East. After finishing up in the East, Titus finally returned to Rome. A few years later, his father Vespasian died and he was finally proclaimed emperor. As we've seen, Titus actually had the most Jews in his inner circle out of any Roman emperor in history. First off, of course, was Josephus. It was actually during the reign of Titus that Josephus completed his book. And we know from his memoirs that Titus actually signed multiple copies. By the way, I don't know why it's so funny to me that book signings were already a thing back then. In addition to Josephus, Tiberius Alexander also remained a member of Titus' inner circle. After his time as governor of Egypt, Vespasian appointed him to become the emperor's Ptorian prefect. In case you don't know, the Ptorian prefect was the leader of the

42:07 emperor's elite guard, the Ptorian Guard. And the prefect was usually considered the second most powerful man in the entire empire. We don't know anything about Tiberius's tenure as Ptorian Prefect. But we do know that he didn't kill the emperor, which automatically makes him more competent than like 90% of Ptorian prefects, but by the time Titus had replaced his father's emperor, Tiberius had already finished his time as prefect. Anyway, no Jewish man ever reached the levels of imperial power that Tiberius Alexander reached. Ironically, while his climb up the imperial power ladder might have been motivated by his desire to disassociate himself with Judaism, nowadays people only ever mention him because he was Jewish. But I'm ignoring the elephant in the room. Because around this time, the Jewish person closest to the emperor wasn't his court historian, Josephus, or his top general. It was actually Titus's romantic partner, the

42:52 unofficial queen of Rome, Princess Baroni. But before I get into the weird relationship between Titus and Baroni, I want to give a quick shout out to my sponsor, myself. Do you want to go beyond the same boring headlines and actually dive deep into extremely obscure Middle Eastern lore? Well, you're in luck because in one of my next videos on this channel, I'm going to be covering something that everyone has been asking me for for years now. The ultraobscure Israel and Palestine iceberg. But I need your help. Due to their content, basically all of my videos are demonetized. That's why I can created a Patreon where you can help fund my videos. Patreon is basically the only way I can make money from YouTube. So, feel free to go ahead and join the merchants guild. Now, back to the video. Anyway, let's talk about one of the weirdest relationships in Jewish history. First, we need to understand who Baroniki was and how she and her brother came to power. So, let's go back

43:37 in time a bit. King Herod Agria the first had ruled the kingdom of Judea. But when he died, Roman Emperor Claudius simply annexed his kingdom into the empire instead of letting it pass to his children. Because of that, his son Herod agria and his daughter Boniki were essentially left as two randos with no royal titles whatsoever. But the siblings being extremely politically ambitious weren't about to let it stay that way. Now at this point, Baneiki had come of age to get married, which in ancient Roman terms meant that she had turned 13. She married Marcus Alexander, one of the richest Jews in Egypt, who was also incidentally the brother of Tiberius Alexander. But pretty soon after marrying him, Marcus died suddenly, and a lot of his riches went to his wife, Baroni. Boniki now held wealth, so she started looking towards acquiring political power. At this point, you understand something that'll

44:22 surprise many of you. The Jewish Herodian dynasty didn't just rule over the kingdom of Judea. Members of the dynasty at different points ruled over various powerful kingdoms such as the kingdom of Armenia. Most importantly for this video, the dynasty ruled a kingdom that bored Judea, the kingdom of Kelsus. This is very relevant because for her second marriage, Boniki married her uncle, King Herod V of Kelsus. Very quickly after she had become queen of Kalysus, her husband suddenly died and she quickly cemented her power, becoming the new ruler of the kingdom. I'm starting to see a pattern here. Since female monarchs weren't super popular at this time, Roman Emperor Claudius granted the kingdom to Baroniki's brother, Agrippa, but she kept ruling the kingdom as co-monarch. Eventually, Emperor Claudius decided to reward the siblings even more. Instead of continuing to rule over the irrelevant kingdom of Kalis, Agrippa was granted a

45:07 new kingdom that included a lot of land in northern Judea and much of the Galilee. While he never ruled all of Judea like his father had, his new kingdom allowed him to position himself as the der king of the Jews and he became a massive power player in local politics. Now, King Agria very strangely never married. Instead, the role of queen was filled by his sister, Princess Boniki. It's kind of like how the first lady of Argentina is the president's sister. Wait, what? That's actually true. Anyway, Baroni and Arya were inseparable. They did almost everything together. And when one of them is mentioned in an ancient source, the other one is almost always with them. Even when Kieran Grippa is mentioned in the Christian Bible, he always has Baneiki by his side. Given this, it should be unsurprising that many ancient sources alleged that a Gria and his sister were in an incestuous relationship. It seems that this rumor was completely agreed upon to be true by the people of this time. While it's

45:54 important to remember that it's possible that all these rumors were just made up by Gria's political enemies, when you look at the Herodian dynasty's family tree, there's uh certainly a precedent for questionable family relations. Anyway, for some inexplicable reason, Baneiki marrying her uncle did little to dispel the incest rumors, and the rumors just continued to spread. The siblings decided that something needed to be done and it just so happened that a very powerful king at this time was very interested in Baneiki. This king was Poland II who ruled over the kingdoms of Pontis and Cissia and Asia Minor. This guy was a really big deal. Anyone who studied late Republican history knows just how important the kingdom of Pontis was. He had fallen for Boniki's beauty as well as her reputed wealth. So the siblings hatched a plan. Baroni would marry Poland for the sole explicit purpose of proving to the world that she

46:40 and her brother were just friends. The actual marriage wound up being like the funniest thing ever. To put it lightly, Baroni didn't seem too excited to marry Poland. Since it would be a massive scandal for a Jewish princess to marry a girl like Pleon, Baneiki told him that to marry her, he would need to circumcise himself and convert to Judaism. Polon being absolutely down bad, agreed. But like 5 seconds after he married her, she was like, "You're not in my life enough and you're too controlling and you give me the ick and the guys on Reddit told me that you were the [ __ ] and I want a divorce." And she left him and moved back in with her brother. Instead of dispelling the incest rumors, the filled marriage only fueled them. As for poor King Polan, he awkwardly packed up, went back to his kingdom in Pontis, and immediately abandoned Judaism. Though tragically for him, he would never get his foreskin back. There isn't anything else notable about the guy aside from the fact that the Lithuanian nobility claims descent from him, which is probably the most

47:25 random thing I learned while researching this video. Years later, the great Jewish revolt rolled around and King Agria decided to take the side of the Romans. In order to demonstrate his loyalty, he invited the generals Vespasian and Titus to stay in his luxurious palaces while they conducted the Galilee campaign. It was while staying at a Grippa's house that Titus first met a Grippa sister, Baneiki, and he immediately fell madly in love with her. Baroniki's first two husbands had died quickly after marrying her, and her third husband had been cucked so hard that he might as well have died. But that didn't scare Titus, and he quickly began a romance with the Jewish princess who had thus been queen. That definitely led to some awkward interactions between him and a Grippa. Hey, you know, Agria, I've been checking out your sister, and I'm starting to understand why people have circumcised themselves just to get

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