The Hammer: A Story of the Maccabean Times

A NEW ORDER OF THINGS.

The time is the evening of a day in the early autumn of the year 174 B.C. There has been a great festival in Jerusalem. But it has been curiously unlike any festival that one would have expected to be held in that famous city. The people have not been crowding in from the country, and journeying from their far-off places of sojourn among the heathen, to keep one of the great feasts of the Law. Nothing could be further from the thoughts of the crowd that is streaming out of this new building which stands close under the walls of the Temple. What would they who built the Temple some two and a half centuries before have thought of this strange intruder on the sacred precincts? It is not difficult to imagine, for the new erection is nothing more or less than a Circus, built and furnished in the latest Greek fashion, and the spectacle which the crowd has been enjoying, or pretending to enjoy—for it is strange to all, and distasteful to some—is an imitation of the Olympian games. Things then, we see, have been curiously changed. Even the city has almost lost its identity. It is no longer the capital of the Jewish nation, but the chief town of an insignificant province in the Greek kingdom of Syria, one of the fragments into which the great dominion of Alexander had split some hundred and fifty years before. We shall understand something more about this marvellous change if we listen to a conversation that is going on in one of the houses that adjoin the Temple.

“Well, Cleon, you will allow that our little show to-day has been fairly successful. We are but novices, you know; barbarians, I am afraid you will call us. But we hope to improve. You Greeks are wonderful teachers. You can give in a very short time a quite marvellous appearance of refinement to the merest savages. And we are not that; you would not call us savages, my dear friend.”

“Savages! The gods forbid that such insolent folly should ever come from my tongue! You have a most elegant taste in art, my dear Jason. Our own Callias—he is our first connoisseur at Athens; you must have heard me mention him—would not disdain to have some of the little things which you have about you here in his own apartment.”

And, as he spoke, Cleon looked round the room, which, indeed, was very handsomely furnished in the latest Greek taste. The walls were covered with tapestry, showing on a purple ground a design, worked in silver and gold, which represented the triumphant return of the Wine-god from his Eastern campaigns. At one end of the room stood a sumptuously-carved bookcase, filled with volumes adorned by the most skilful binders of Alexandria. The bookcase was flanked on either side by a pedestal statue, one displaying the head of Hermes, the other the head of Athené. On a sideboard were ranged twelve silver goblets, on which had been worked in high relief the labours of Hercules. But probably the most precious object in the room—at least in its master’s estimation—was a replica, about half the size of life, of the statue that we know as the “Dying Gladiator.” It was the work of a sculptor of Pergamum, a special favourite of the art-loving dynasty of the Attali. It had been purchased for the enormous sum of half a talent of gold;(1) and Jason had thought himself especially fortunate in being allowed to secure it on any terms. The Pergamene artist was bound, in consideration of the handsome payment which he received from his royal patron, not to execute commissions for strangers, and it was only as a special favour, and not till a heavy bribe had been paid to some influential personage in the court, that the rule had been relaxed in favour of Jason.

And who, it may be asked, was Jason?

Jason was the Jewish high priest, the successor of Aaron, of Eleazar, of Jehoiada, of Hilkiah, and as unlike these worthies of the past in appearance, in speech, in ways of thinking, as it is possible to conceive. His costume, in the first place, was that of a Greek exquisite. He wore a purple tunic, showing at the neck a crimson under-shirt, and gathered up at the waist with a belt of the finest leather, clasped with a design in silver, which showed a dog laying hold of a fawn. His knees were bare, but the shins were covered with silk leggings of the same colour as the tunic, against which the gold fastenings of the sandals showed in gay relief. His hair was elaborately curled, and almost dripping with the richest of Syrian perfumes. The forefinger of the left hand showed the head of Zeus finely carved on an amethyst, that of the right was circled by a sapphire ring with the likeness of Apollo.

His speech was Greek. Hebrew of course he knew, both in its classical and its conversational forms; but he was as careful to conceal his knowledge as an old-fashioned Roman of his time would have been careful to hide the fact, if he had happened to know any language besides his own. His very name, it will have been observed, had been changed to suit the new fashion which he was endeavouring to set to his countrymen. Really it was Joshua—no dishonourable appellation, one would think, seeing that it had been borne by the conqueror of Canaan, and by the most distinguished of the later high priests. But it did not please him, and he had changed it to Jason.

As for his ways of thinking, these will become evident enough if we listen to a little more of his conversation.

“And you think, Cleon,” he went on—Cleon was a Greek adventurer who gave himself out as an Athenian, but who was shrewdly suspected of coming from one of the smaller islands of the Ægean—“you think that our games went pretty well?”

“Admirably, my dear Jason,” answered the Greek, who really had thought them a deplorable failure, but who valued too much his free quarters in the high priest’s sumptuous palace to give a candid expression of his opinion.

“You see we had great difficulties to contend with. You can hardly imagine, for instance, how hard I found it to persuade our young men to run and wrestle naked. They quoted some ridiculous nonsense from the Law, as if we could be bound nowadays by some obsolete old rules that no sensible person would think for a moment of observing.(2) You saw, I dare say, to-day that I was obliged to allow some of them to wear a loin-cloth. They positively refused to come into the arena without it. Well, we shall educate them in time. They must learn to admire the beauty of the human form, unspoilt by any of the trappings with which, for convenience sake, we are accustomed to conceal it. I don’t despair of our having a school of art here some day—not rivals, my dear Lysias, of your glorious Phidias and Praxiteles, but imitators, humble imitators, whom yet you won’t disdain to acknowledge.”

“But, my dear sir, you forget the Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image.’”

The speaker was a young man who had hitherto taken no part in the conversation. He also had a Hebrew name and a Greek. His father, a rich priest who claimed descent from no less a person than the prophet Ezekiel, had called him Micah; but he had followed the fashion, and dubbed himself Menander. Still, Greek ways and habits did not sit over-easily upon him. Fashion has often a singular power over the young; but it could not quite drive out the obstinate patriotism of the Jew. He could still sometimes be scandalized at the thorough-going Hellenism of the high priest; and he was so scandalized now. The Commandment was one of the things which he had learnt at his mother’s knee, and which he had solemnly repeated when, at the age of twelve, he had been regularly admitted to the privileges of a “son of the Law.”

“My dear Menander,” broke in the high priest, “what can you be thinking about? I had hoped better things of you. You do discourage me most terribly. ‘No graven image or likeness of anything that is in heaven or earth!’ Was there ever anything so hopelessly tasteless? Why, this is the one thing that has checked all growth of art among us? And without art where is the beauty of life? Now tell me, Menander, did you ever see anything so hideous as the Temple? There is a certain splendour about it—or was, till I had to strip off most of the gold for purposes of state—but of beauty or taste not a scrap. You, Cleon, have never seen the inside of it. Well, you have lost nothing. It would simply shock you after your lovely Parthenon. Bells and pomegranates—things that any moulder could make—and sham columns, and everything as bad as it can be. And then the dresses! You should see—though I should really be ashamed if you did see it—the absurd costume that some of them would make me wear as high priest. Anything more cumbrous and clumsy could not be. A man can hardly move in it; and as for showing any of the proportions of the figure—and I take it that dress is meant to reveal while it seems to hide them—one might as well be wrapped up in swaddling clothes.”

“Did you ever wear it?” asked Cleon.

“Once, and once only,” answered Jason. “That was on the day when I was admitted to the office. You see it had to be done. Some of my enemies—and I am afraid that I have enemies after all that I have done for this ungrateful people—might have said that things were not regular without it, and when one has paid twenty talents of gold for the office, it would be rank folly to risk it for a trifle. But I have never worn it since, and never mean to again. I did design something much lighter and neater, worthy the Greek fashion, but with just a tinge—it would be well to have a tinge—of our own in it; but it did not please the elders when I showed it to them, a bigoted set of fools!”

“But your worship is very fine, I am told,” said the Greek.

“Very tasteless, very tasteless,” answered the high-priest, “the singing and music as rude as possible. I tried to improve them when I first came into office. When I was at Antioch I saw some very pretty performances in the groves of Daphne, and I wanted to remodel our ceremonies on something of the same lines. Of course I could not transplant them just as they were: you will guess that there were one or two things that would hardly do here. I am not strait-laced, as you know, but there are limits. However, it all came to nothing. Our people are so clumsy and obstinate. So the only thing will be to let these antiquated ceremonies die out by degrees.”

Micah broke in at this point. Disposed as he was to follow Jason’s lead, this was going too far. “Surely, my dear sir, if you take away from us all that is distinctive, where will be our reason for existence? After all is said, we are not Greeks and never can be Greeks; and if we cease to be Jews, what are we?”

“_Jews!_ my dear fellow,” cried the high-priest, “why do you use the odious word? We are not Jews, we are Antiochenes. Do you know that I paid five talents to the treasurer of Antiochus for license to use the name? For Heaven’s sake, let us have our money’s worth. By the way,” he went on, turning to Cleon, “when does your Olympian festival next take place?”