Pilate

Ann Wroe is the American editor of The Economist, and was formerly its literary editor. She is the author of Lives, Lies and the Iran-Contra Affair and A Fool and His Money: Life in a Partitioned Medieval Town.

Acknowledgements

This book was written on the sly, in bits and pieces of time snatched from running a family and doing my job, and there are many people to thank that it has appeared at all. First, as always, my husband Malcolm and my three sons, for not minding my odd disappearances to the shed at the bottom of the garden, or my scribbling away in bed after lights out. I tried to put the thing away whenever I was needed, but I’m sorry for the times when I wasn’t as attentive as I should have been.

Second, I should thank the Economist for providing me with a computer on which I could type in the second draft, largely (though not entirely) by dint of coming in an hour earlier in the mornings; and I should thank all my colleagues who turned a blind eye when they caught sight of the letters ‘BC’, or a slug of Latin, in the story the American editor was working on. A large technical-support team, especially Ginny O’Riordan, Pauline Cuddihy and Helen Mann, helped me through the hitches with unfailing patience. Special thanks should go to Graham Bayfield, who, at a crucial stage in producing the manuscript, came in on a Saturday to fix the system which had somehow crashed around me.

The Economist should also be thanked for having the foresight to install itself just round the corner from the London Library, where I spent any moments I could spare. Thanks to the staff there for putting up with my queries, extending my borrowing limit, obtaining copies from other libraries of the rare articles they did not have themselves, and for getting down on their knees in the dustier parts of the stacks to find obscure volumes translated from the Syriac.

Michael Walsh, the librarian of Heythrop College in the University of London, allowed me to use the wonderfully ordered library there to unearth yet more information. And Babette Grolman translated many bizarre texts from the German, some of them in a gothic script that gave both of us a headache to read.

Once the book was done, many people encouraged me with their enthusiasm and good advice. Alexandra Pringle, my agent at Toby Eady Associates, gave her usual great moral support. Dan Franklin, my editor at Jonathan Cape, nobly extended the delivery deadline and showed unflagging faith in the enterprise; Charlotte Mendelson copy-edited with great care and good humour; and Joy de Menil, my editor at Random House in New York, happily edited many pages not once but twice when they went astray in mid-Atlantic. My thanks to them, and to Maria Wyke, senior lecturer in Classics at Reading University, who read through the manuscript with an academic’s eagle eye. The mistakes that remain can only be mine.

Extract from interview with Tony Blair in the Sunday Telegraph © Telegraph Group Ltd, London 1996.

Extract from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, © in the English translation by Michael Glenny, The Harvill Press and Harper & Row, Publishers Inc. 1967. Reproduced by permission of The Harvill Press.

Extract from ‘Ecce Homo’ by David Gascoyne, from Selected Poems (Enitharmon Press 1994).

Extract from Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally reproduced by permission of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

Extract from ‘The Fight with the Angel’ and ‘Nothing to Fear’ by Jacques Prévert by permission of Editions Gallimard.

Extract from Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Letter to George Kennan’, Translation © R.F. Christian 1978, by permission of The Athlone Press Ltd.

About the Book

Although very little is known for certain about Pontius Pilate, the man who crucified Christ, this has not stopped writers in every age from imagining his life. In this extraordinary book, Ann Wroe recounts the lives of all our Pilates; among them the glittering medieval tyrant, devoted to gambling and getting around the law, and the wriggling modern pragmatist, whose dilemma over Jesus has been described by Tony Blair as ‘a timeless parable of political life’.

This is also the story of the man Pilate might have been; and the man who mirrors us. Ann Wroe shows how, in his struggles with fate and free will, Pilate’s story has also become the story of ourselves.

ALSO BY ANN WROE

Select Bibliography

The Bible quotations in this book are taken mostly from the Jerusalem Bible, sometimes from the King James. Quotations in Chapter 5 (the trial) are often Raymond L. Brown’s literal translations in The Death of the Messiah (Doubleday, New York, 1994).

The translations or modernisations of the mystery plays are mine, with the exception of the Gréban play (cf. under ‘Medieval sources’).

For the Acta Pilati, the Gospel of Stephen, Pilate’s ‘letters’, fragments of the Coptic and Greek Anaphora and fragments of Anglo-Saxon apocrypha, see

For the Gospel of Peter, see Raymond L. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, Appendix I, Vol. II, pp. 1317–1349 (Anchor Bible Reference Library, 2 vols., New York, 1994)

For the Martyrdom of Pilate, see E. Galtier, Mémoires et Fragments inédits, Institut Français d’Archéologie du Caire; Mém.t. 27 (Cairo, 1912)

For Pilate’s Sentence, see J.P. Lyell, The Sentence of Pontius Pilate (1922)

For the ‘correspondence’ between Pilate and Herod, see W. Wright, Contributions to the Apocryphal Literature of the New Testament (1865)

For Pilate’s prayer at the tomb, see the Newbery House Magazine, vol. VII No. 6 (December 1892), pp. 641–646

For the ‘Hymn of the Soul’, see the Acts of Thomas in M. R. James, op. cit., pp. 411–415

For Pilate’s ‘Effigy’, see E. Cerulli, ‘Tiberius and Pontius Pilate in Ethiopian Tradition and Poetry’, Proceedings of the British Academy, LIX (1973), pp. 141–158

Budge, Sir Wallis E. Coptic Apocrypha (British Museum, 1913)
Coptic Martyrdoms (BM 1914)

Jabobus de Voraigne The Golden Legend, tr. William Granger Ryan (2 vols., Princeton, 1993)

The Chester Plays, revised from the MSS by Dr Matthews: Part II (Early English Text Society 23, 1916)

The Corpus Christi Play of the English Middle Ages (The Coventry Play) ed. R.T. Davies (1972)

The True History of the Passion, adapted from the French Medieval Mystery Cycle of Arnoul and Simon Gréban, ed. J. Kirkup (1962)

The Redentin Easter Play, tr. A.E. Zucker (Columbia University Press, New York, 1941)

Le Livre de la Passion; poème narratif du XIVe siècle ed. G. Frank (Paris, 1930)

A Stanzaic Life of Christ, ed. F. Foster (Early English Text Society 166, 1926)

Du Meril, E. Carmina Latina: Poésies Populaires Latines du Moyen Age (Paris, 1847)

Manitus, M. Geschichte der Lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (3) (Munich, 1931)

Brent, A. ‘Luke-Acts and the Imperial Cult in Asia Minor’ (Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. 48, 2 (Oct. 1997)

Jones, A.H.M. Procurators and Prefects in the Early Principate, in Studies in Roman Government and Law (Oxford, 1960)

Mommsen, T. The Provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletian (Vol. II, ch. XI, Judea and the Jews) (1909)

Perowne, S. The Later Herods: The Political Background of the New Testament (1958)

Raaflaub, K., and Toker, M. Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and his Principate (Berkeley, 1990)

Sherwin-White, A.N. Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford, 1963)

Smallwood, E. M. The Jews under Roman Rule (Studies in Judaism in late Antiquity, XX, 1976)

‘High Priests and Politics in Roman Palestine’ (Journal of Theological Studies, XIII, 1962)

Smith, G.A. ‘The Historical Geography of the Holy Land: IV, Judea’ (Expositor, Series 4, Vol. v, 1892)

‘Studies in the History and Topography of Jerusalem: III, The Waters’: Ibid, Series 4, Vol. vii, 1894)

Stevenson, G.H., ‘The Administration of the Provinces’, in Cambridge Ancient History, X, The Augustan Empire (Cambridge, 1934)

Suolahti, J. ‘The Junior Officers of the Roman Army in the Republican Period’, Annales Academicae Scientiarum Fennicae, Vol. 97 (Helsinki, 1955)

Doyle, A.D. ‘Pilate’s Career and the Date of the Crucifixion’ (Journal of Theological Studies, XLII, 1941), pp. 190–193

Gonzales, Echegaray Pilato, Poncio: Enciclopedia de la Biblia, V (Barcelona, 1965)

Hedley, P.L. ‘Pilate’s Arrival in Judea’ (Journal of Theological Studies, XXXV, 1934), pp. 56–7 (for details of Pilate’s coinage)

Hoffman-Kreyer, E. & Staubli, H.-B., Handworterbuch des Deutschen Aberglaubens (Berlin/Leipzig, 1935–6) (for Pilate’s supposed German origins)

Lemenon, P. Pilate et le Gouvernement de la Judée: textes et monuments (Paris, 1980)

Liberty, S. ‘The Importance of Pontius Pilate in Creed and Gospel’ (Journal of Theological Studies, XLV, 1944), pp. 38–56

Maier, P.L. ‘Sejanus, Pilate and the Date of the Crucifixion’ (Church History, XXXVII, 1968), pp. 3–13

Maier, P.L. ‘The Fate of Pontius Pilate’ (Hermes, XCIX, 1971), pp. 362–371

MacGregor, ‘Christ’s Three Judges: Pilate’ (Expositor, Series 6, Vol. ii (1900)

Rosadi, G. The Trial of Jesus, tr. and ed. E. Reich (1905) (especially for Pilate’s supposed Spanish origins)

Smallwood, E.M. ‘The Date of the Dismissal of Pontius Pilate from Judea’ (Journal of Jewish Studies, V, 1954), pp. 12–21

Vardaman, J. ‘A new inscription which mentions Pilate as “Prefect”’ (Journal of Biblical Literature, LXXXI, (Philadelphia 1962), pp. 70–71

Wansbrough, H. ‘Suffered under Pontius Pilate’ (Scripture, XVIII, 1966, pp. 84–93

Bammel, E. & Moule, C.F.D. Jesus and the Politics of his Day (Cambridge, 1984)

Bloomfield, S.T. Recensio Synoptica Annotationis Sacrae (Annotations on the New Testament), (1826)

Blunt, H. Lectures upon the History of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1851)

Brown, R. L. The Death of the Messiah (Anchor Bible Reference Library, 2 Vols., Doubleday, New York, 1994)

Cook, F.C., ed. The Holy Bible with Commentary, New Testament, Vols. I and II (1878)

Edwards, R.A. The Gospel According to St John: Its Criticism and Interpretation (1954)

Ellicott, C.J. Historical Lectures on the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1865)

Clarke, S. The Miracle Play in England: An Account of the Early Religious Drama (1897)

Williams, A. The Characterisation of Pilate in the Towneley Plays (Michigan, 1950)

Hoffman-Krayer, E. & Staubli, H.-B., Handworterbuch des Deutschen Aberglaubens (Berlin/Leipzig, 1935–6)

Zurich, Comte P. de Les Voyages en Suisse de Madame de la Briche, 1785–1788 (Neuchâtel, 1935)

Bauckham, R. ‘Nicodemus and the Gurion Family’ (Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. 47, Part i, April 1996)

Gavic, A.E. ‘Studies in the “Inner life” of Jesus: XVI, The foreshadowings of the Cross’ (Expositor, Series vii, Vol. ii, 1906)

Ramsay, W.M., ‘The Divine Child in Virgil’ (Expositor, Series vii, Vol. iii, 1907)

Redpath, H. ‘Christ, the Fulfilment of Prophecy’ (Expositor, Series vii, Vol. iii, 1907)

Selwyn, E.C. ‘The Trial-Narratives based on the Oracles’ (Expositor, Series 8, Vol. ix, 1915)

Thoreau, H. The Journal (1850), in Writings, Walden Edition (New York, 1906)

Gandhi, M. Non-Violence in Peace and War: 43, Theory and Practice of Non-Violence (Ahmedabad, 1944)

Gill, E. Social Justice and the Stations of the Cross (London, 1939) The Stations of the Cross: Some Meditations on their Social Aspects (1944)

Keneally, T. Schindler’s Ark (1982) (Extract reproduced by permission of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.)

Thoreau, H. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (in Writings, Walden Edition, op. cit.)

Tolstoy, N. Letters, Vol. II, 1880–1910, selected, tr. and ed. R.F. Christian (1978)

Brown, C. (ed.) The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Vol. 3): Truth (1978)

Whitaker, G.H. ‘Aletheia in the New Testament and in Polybius’ (Expositor, Series 8, Vol. xx, 1920)

See generally the section on apocrypha and hagiographies Nutt, A. Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail (1888)

Baedeker, K. Switzerland and the adjacent portions of Italy, Savoy and Tyrol (1895)

Bonney, TG. The Alpine Regions of Switzerland and Neighbouring Countries (1868)

LeRoy Ladurie, E. Le siècle des Platter 1499–1628, t. 1, Le mendiant et le professeur (Paris, 1995)

Budge, Sir Wallis E. The Book of Saints of the Ethiopian Church: A Translation of the Ethiopic Synaxarium (Cambridge 1928)

For Queen Victoria’s trip to Switzerland, see the Illustrated London News for 10, 29 August and 12 September, 1868

The Forum and the forest

THE MOST PLAUSIBLE account runs as follows: that he was born a few years before Christ, somewhere in Italy, most probably in Rome. But this was not, in the deepest sense, his country. His ancestors were mountain men from Samnium, south of Rome. There in the brutal hills the men scratched at stony plots, the women spun wool; they worshipped oak-groves and springs and woodpeckers, and their talk was of war. From time to time the Samnites would descend to the poppy-strewn fields of Campania, which they devastated. For years they fought the Romans, but in 290 BC Rome defeated them. The struggle had always been unequal.

After that defeat – much of their territory gone, and their power broken – the Samnites slowly and sourly picked up Roman ways. Some even became citizens. But they were still mostly peasant-fighters, as intractable as their mountains; and when civil war broke out between Marius and Sulla in 86 BC, the Samnites tried to wrestle free again. This time Sulla defeated them just outside Rome itself, right by the Colline Gate, and the reprisals were brutal. Those Samnite leaders that survived were executed; their mountain villages were burned like torches; the people were killed or scattered, and soft-skinned Roman colonists were sent to take their places.

Cicero, writing about it later, described this as the milder sort of war. The Romans were not fighting the Samnites as enemies, only as rivals for supremacy. They thought them rough and brave as Spartans; they respected them. But the difference in treatment was sometimes hard to perceive. Cicero himself described how, after the ‘respected’ people of Marseilles had forfeited their supremacy, a wooden model of the city was carried through Rome in triumphal procession ‘to show the world that they had been defeated’. In the case of the Samnites, though the names of their various families were scattered all over northern and central Italy, the polity was destroyed. There would never again be a mountain redoubt where people dreamed of liberty in quite the same way.

That is why we do not know where Pilate was born. His tribe, the Pontii of Samnium, was dispersed and broken. The Samnites were known in Rome as rustic buffoons, gallumphing creatures who were wild and clumsy as horses; Horace described one he met on the road, with such a scar on his face from the removal of warts ‘that he could dance the Cyclops-shepherd dance without a mask.’ The older ones spoke not Latin but Oscan, primitive country words that Pilate may have heard from his grandfather: ‘sollo’ for totus, ‘abzet’ for habet, ‘pipas’ for clamas; ‘Petis pipas?’, addressed to a child, meant: ‘What are you chirping for?’ Even in the gladiator’s ring these men were comic turns. It was traditional to deck them out in parti-coloured plate and helmets with huge bobbing crests, in mockery of the gorgeous new armour they had once worn proudly, according to Livy, to one of their defeats by the Romans. They would go into the ring heavily but ludicrously armed, with wooden swords and quarter-staffs, and simply belabour each other for hours, until darkness fell and the audience went home.

Yet the tribe of the Pontii was of the Samnite nobility, and it was not without heroes. The Pontii were even slightly larger than life, numinous with legends and fame. If Pilate’s father ever aspired to an atrium, an entrance hall decorated with painted wax masks of the family ancestors (in which a small boy could slide on the tiles in his slippers), it might well have contained a mask of Gavius Pontius, who had defeated the Roman army in 321 BC in a high mountain pass called the Caudine Forks. Under those walls of rock, loud with the sound of water, the Romans had fallen on their faces. But Gavius Pontius did not kill them. He simply took their weapons, made them strip to their tunics and sent them under a triumphal yoke of three spears lashed together. Thirty years later, he met the Romans again; they took him prisoner, sent his own men under the yoke and killed him, showing him no shred of the mercy he had shown them. The defeated Samnites, too, were made to strip to their tunics, giving up to the Romans the marvellous leather belts, studded with bronze clasps, that were the symbols of their liberty. Only the buffoon-gladiators wore such belts after that.

Next in the parade of family heroes came two brothers, both of whom had been caught up in the fighting in 82 BC after the Social War. Many of the Pontii were Roman citizens now, but they had been weaned on the legend of Gavius. The first brother, Pontius Telesinus, commanded the Samnite contingent for Marius against Sulla; he died beside the Colline Gate as the battle raged in the dark, cut down on the point of entering Rome. Those Samnites who survived were slaughtered by Sulla in the Campus Martius, where Pilate might later have wrestled or played hand-ball in the dust.

The brother of Telesinus was besieged with Marius’ son in Praeneste, outside the city. Heartlessly, Sulla sent them the severed heads of Telesinus and his men. At the sight of those gagging faces, with white eyes and bloodied hair, they resolved to die by one another’s hands. The younger Marius drew his sword and offered it to the breast of his friend, who fell on it. He then drew it out, shining with Samnite blood, and fell on it himself. ‘And so perished,’ wrote a modern Italian historian, ‘the noblest and last of the sons of Italy, the soul of resistance to Rome.’

These were the stories: a collection, thrilling as a Boys’ Annual, of desperate battles, struggles for liberty, magnanimous gestures, heroic sacrifices. The boy Pilate could glean from them that mercy shown to your enemies was both noble and futile: had Gavius Pontius killed those Romans, he might not have died by public execution. From the scene in the cell in Praeneste, where the two friends embraced each other and the cold blade in the dripping darkness, he could deduce that suicide for the honour of one’s nation was the ultimate act; and that death was all the nobler for being premeditated, sealed by mutual resolution and carried out with quiet efficiency. There were many such deaths to admire, from Socrates onwards.

There were lives to admire, too: for many of the Pontii had struggled after the dispersal, and their sense of illustriousness was difficult to recover. They had lost a generation of young men in the 80s BC, the generation of Pilate’s great-grandfather, and for fifty years afterwards the Samnites scarcely appeared in any public capacity in Rome. Still, they tried. Within two generations the most thriving members could be classed as just below patrician rank, respectable but decidedly second class. Julius Caesar recruited Samnites for their valour; they became equites illustriores, then special administrators, prefects and private imperial trouble-shooters. Yet not all could escape their origins. Titus Pontius became one of Caesar’s centurions in the civil war; when he refused to abandon his leader he became a hero of sorts, but only of sorts. ‘The great lights of our country,’ wrote Valerius Maximus, ‘will not be offended to see big-hearted centurions [like Titus] beside their own glorious and resplendent names . . . Nobility should encourage, not scorn, a natural goodness that springs from the breast of obscurity.’ A little later on, gracious Valerius summed up Titus again: Sine ullis imaginibus nobilem animum! ‘What a noble soul, even with no masks of the ancestors in the hall!’

It may have been during these years – if Pilate did not earn the name himself later – that the cognomen Pilatus, skilled with the javelin, became attached to his family. Javelin-throwing was thought to have come from the Samnites anyway, and the Oscan version of Pilatus, ehpeilatus, has been found on an inscription from Capua. It was another clue to Pilate’s origins: an indication of the violent past that beat, however faintly, behind him.

So his father, if not Pilate himself, held and balanced the javelin, which quivered in his hand like something living. This was the second skill of the Roman soldier, after he had been trained in the use of sword and shield. The pilum was five feet of wooden shaft and two feet of tapered iron, of which the bottom half was left soft and untempered. When the point lodged in a shield the shaft would bend and hang down, making it impossible to throw back. A trained javelin-thrower could tilt his heavy weapon skywards, flex his body, hurl the javelin thirty yards, and hit the mark. His training had consisted precisely in aiming at a fixed target, aiming again, aiming again, until his arm, bruised from the effort, could smoothly direct the missile anywhere he wanted. If you were called pilatus, it meant you excelled at doing that: that you showed decisiveness, strength, straightness of aim. But not all qualities could be transferred from the field of battle to public life.

His army service done, Pilate’s father probably settled down as a member of the Roman knightly class. We assume this because prefect-governors in the early empire were knights and sons of knights; it was not yet done to open the postings to freedmen. His father, then, had his own large house, with an atrium and colonnaded garden and piped water; several slaves would wait on him. He had a patron to whom he would present his morning greetings, but also a few men dependent on himself. Perhaps, like so many of the knights lampooned by contemporary writers, his aspirations ran ahead of his taste in furnishings, tableware and statues; perhaps, like them, he needed to impress and feel secure. And the vital element of his security was his children, the next generation. These would be given every piece of ceremonial, training and education, in order eventually to clamber back to the noble rank the gens had held before. By the time Pilate was born, the clan of the Pontii was on the point of producing Roman consuls and Roman millionaires, and the expectations had grown accordingly: the official’s toga praetexta with its purple border; a private bath, with windows overlooking a view; a litter for the streets; a villa by the sea. Wordlessly, these ambitions were laid on the shoulders of the next male child in line.

No one knows what Pilate’s first name was. As a child, whether he was called Marcus or Gaius or Lucius would have mattered; but as he grew older his friends and even his lovers would have used his cognomen, Pilate with three syllables in the vocative, when they talked or wrote to him. Mi Pilate, my Pilate, would have been a term of endearment or a nickname for the man; but his mother bending over his cradle would have whispered a name that history has rubbed away.

As a baby he would have been presented to the gods and given a bulla, a little golden pouch containing a lucky charm, which was hung around his neck. As a child he sat through several years of rote-learning in school, scratching with a metal stylus on a wax slate over which his long curls fell, absorbing the rudiments of mathematics, reading, rhetoric and writing. In order to write, he would put his small hand inside the strong hand of an adult; together they would trace the wobbly characters, until he was ready to draw them on his own. A rich boy would have slaves to carry his book-rolls; perhaps Pilate had one, or perhaps he carried the rolls himself, ‘slate and satchel slung over his left arm’, as the poets described it. At Saturnalia in December he was given presents: sweets, nuts and little terracotta figures you could fight with, at least until they broke. Richer boys got ponies and parrots.

In the last years of school he learned, like a little lawyer, to unpick the multiple sides of every question. The questions were well-worn: ‘Should Alexander have sailed the ocean, or not?’ ‘Should the Spartans have fled when they were sent against Xerxes?’ ‘Should Cicero have begged Antony’s pardon?’ Each had its series of set opposing answers, the different ‘colours’ of the schoolman, and these he would have learned too, declaiming them as well as he could with the right hand-movements and the right pitch of his breaking voice. This may have been most of his training in the practice of the law.

At the age of seventeen he would have been given his first ceremonial shave in front of the family shrine. The down was consigned to a tiny decorated box; then, dressed in the white toga of a new adult, the toga virilis, he was taken through the Forum to pray in the temple of Jupiter. The bulla was left behind at the family shrine, among the statuettes and fading flowers; and there may have been times in the years ahead when he regretted the leaving of that little piece of luck.

His days now had to be spent preparing for a career in public service. This usually meant trying for a commission in the army as a junior officer, for which he would need a recommendation to the commander. He would begin, therefore, the routine Roman round of getting himself known and noticed by the powerful. In the morning he would pay his respects, arriving at dawn at the entrance hall of the man he hoped would be his patron. He would have to wait until the nomenclator (only a slave, but the sort of slave who revelled in his authority) noticed him in the throng of hopefuls and passed on his name to his master. The nervous greetings were passed on too: Quid agis? Quid commode vales? ‘How are you? I hope you’re well?’ and in exchange might come a commission, a recommendation, or a little money. By these means he learned the essential etiquette of Roman life: all paths to advancement lay through politeness, persistence, and the favour of richer and nobler men.

Horace described the ritual in painful detail. As soon as he aspired to any rank or any noble friendship, he wrote, ‘people start asking, “Who is this fellow? What was his father?”’ Approaching the would-be patron was agony:

On coming into your presence, I said a few faltering words, for speechless shame stopped me from saying more. My tale was not that I was a famous father’s son, nor that I rode about my estate on a Saturian steed; I told you what I was. As is your way, you answered little and I withdrew; then, nine months later, you sent for me again and bade me join your friends. I count it as a great favour that I pleased you . . .

Part of Horace’s social disadvantage, though he did not say so, was that he was a provincial, from Venusia in Apulia. Those ‘few faltering words’ showed that he was still rough-cut, without polish, and with a country accent that could be heard; he still needed to learn the soft urbanity of Roman speech and manners, as perhaps Pilate did.

At last, somehow, the right impression was given. Having found a patron, Pilate would do whatever tasks he was assigned. He would run errands, take messages, whirl between the rich man’s house and the Janus Arcade where the bankers were. Sometimes he would ride in his patron’s carriage as his companion, where (by Horace’s account) he would be favoured with such conversation as ‘What’s the time?’ or: ‘Do you think Thraex is a match for Syro the Chicken?’ But on his free afternoons he would enjoy himself At the games he and his friends would sit for hours on the hard benches, discussing the muscles and stamina of fighters and the blows they had endured. There was no greater thrill than to see a man still fighting, still struggling out of the dust, when he was painted like an actor with the streams of his own blood. At that point the nameless criminal or captive, oiled and caged and conveyed to the circus in a cart, acquired a name and a reputation; he acquired the dignity of a man. And he died with that dignity on him, his own scarlet cloak.

Young men would build up their bodies in conscious imitation of their heroes. To be strong in every way, vir fortis ac strenuus, the steely character in the steel-hard body, was the Roman ideal. Together Pilate and his friends would attack the baths in style, leaping in off the side, splashing all and sundry with their ferocious strokes, wrestling one another like dolphins, belting out songs in the wonderful echo of the changing rooms. In the exercise yard they ran, lifted weights, did the long-jump and played ball until their bodies were pink with effort; then, exhausted, they made for the wineseller and the hot-sausage man. They were oiled and rubbed on adjacent tables, hung their clothes on adjacent pegs, used the same cold sponge in the latrines, fainted for the same mistresses.

Possibly Pilate was treated to a repetition of the famous lecture on sex once given (the story ran) by the philosopher Archytas to Herennius Pontius, the father of Gavius. Cicero related this story in his treatise ‘On Old Age’, recording too that Herennius was so deeply studious and intellectual that he had debated with Plato. ‘No more deadly curse than sensual pleasure,’ Archytas told Herennius, ‘has been inflicted on mankind by nature. It is a fruitful source of treasons, revolutions, secret communications with the enemy. In fact, there is no crime, no evil deed, to which the appetite for sensual pleasure does not impel us . . . Intellect is the best gift of nature or the gods. To this divine gift and endowment there is nothing so inimical as pleasure . . . since, when more than ordinarily violent and lasting, it darkens all the light of the soul.’ But perhaps your soul was not too much darkened if, during the Floral games in April, you watched the actresses take their clothes off.

In any case, sex took second stage when the call to the army came through. It probably took Pilate away from Rome for years. There seems not much doubt, from the record of his actions in office, that he was a soldier first and a diplomat second. Some have imagined he fought as a legionary, acquiring a taste for blood he never lost. Yet his class dictated against it; and if he had really been a foot-soldier, the sort of blunt and thick-headed strongman who is sometimes pictured, he would hardly have risen to become the governor of Judea. Legionaries spent their careers in the army, but Pilate clearly joined in the military tribune class that would lead, eventually, to a foreign posting as the governor of a province.

In the late Republic there was no longer an obligatory five-year stint of service before a man became a military tribune, or legionary staff officer; the minimum age for the office was eighteen, when a boy had scarcely shaved and might have been a soldier for only a year or so. His duties could be rigorous; but the experience could also be as much a shambles as military service in France in the 1970s. ‘Although our early manhood was spent in camp,’ wrote Pliny, ‘it was at a time when merit was under suspicion and apathy an asset, when officers lacked influence and soldiers respect, when there was neither authority nor obedience, and the whole system was slack, disorganised and chaotic, better forgotten than remembered.’

Pliny, bound for the civil service, would leave in a couple of years; but Pilate seemed to take the harder path. He probably did several tours of military service, both as a military tribune and as a prefect of cavalry or auxiliaries. Since he was a commanding officer, even of a relatively lowly sort and barely out of his teens, he wore lighter armour and had few encumbering weapons. The mark of his office was the parazonium, a waist-band that carried the sword on his left side, where ordinary soldiers wore it on the right. When he drew his sword the action was statelier and slower, crossing his chest like a half-salute; and he was not required to do it so often. The hardest marching, too, was not required of him. Slaves carried his gear; lowlier soldiers dug the ditches and put up the camp palisades. Superior commanding officers included him in their meetings, and sometimes offered him dinner in their tents.

Pilate was less a fighter than an administrator, keeping things straight behind the lines. For this he was paid 50,000 sesterces a year: about as much, the elder Pliny noted, as some connoisseurs would pay for a nice chandelier. He was in charge of the pay, food and floggings for his unit; he had to keep his men motivated and see they did not desert. Modern soldiers would call it a soft billet. Yet it was still active military service. He took the same oath as any foot-soldier, every third of January and on the anniversary of the emperor’s accession, to obey the emperor and his superior officers. Inside the camp palisade he would sleep as the others did, wrapped in his regulation red cloak under the cold stars, and in the morning he too woke to the long summoning blast of the army bugle. He ate the same porridge, drank the same sour wine – the wine that was offered to Jesus on the cross – and sang the same bawdy songs, like the mocking soldiers’ tribute to Julius Caesar known as ‘The Triumph over Gaul’:

Watch your wives, everyone, here we’ve got a man

Who may be bald but fucks the girls in any way he can.

Guess who’s spent your money on many a Gallic whore?

He’s used up every penny, and he’s coming to borrow more.

Not least, he took part in the same wars of conquest. Some suppose he fought in the German campaigns of Tiberius in AD 9 or Germanicus in 14, where it was sometimes cold enough to wear trousers and ride along muffled in a cloak. These were campaigns of victory, fought by legions nicknamed ‘The Triumphant’ and ‘The Indomitable’ to impose the peace of Rome on bearded and foul-smelling barbarians. Whether or not he was fighting, Pilate would have ridden out most mornings, his bridle heavy with his service medals, to see the standards with their silver medallions and wreaths and eagles flashing in the sun; and most evenings, tired, hungry, aching, he would relive his part in the day’s engagements. He was not constantly in the thick of things, but he was sometimes close enough to be in danger of enemy spears and to dread that his horse would be cut down under him; close enough to see the dilated eyes of the enemy and hear again the screams of the dying as he lay in the dark.

This was unlikely to have bothered him. The war he was fighting was generally considered a good one, a war for the future of civilisation, protected by the gods. Military discipline, wrote Valerius Maximus at about the time Pilate left for Judea, was ‘the principal glory of the Roman empire and its most secure foundation’; it was the one ancestral virtue that had been preserved intact by the soft and corrupted Romans of his day. Others among the prefects and tribunes, more languid young men doing their part-time service only because they had to, may have taken a more cynical view; like Catullus, they may have called it ‘playing billiards with our world’. But even military-tribune Pliny, not much of a soldier, could recall with emotion ‘life under arms, the camps, bugles and trumpets, sweat and dust and heat of the sun’; and Pilate probably took his soldiering seriously.

He could have gone to Judea straight from his military postings, and never become a civil servant in Rome. Yet he was not without position there. He was possibly a knight, an eques, by virtue of successive tours of military service; and it is likely that by inheritance he was also an eques in the civilian sense, with a minimum net worth of 400,000 sesterces. That would buy him two medium-sized houses in the city. He was entitled to wear a gold ring and to sit in the first fourteen rows at the theatre, where he would not be ‘elbowed or besmirched by the mob’, as Martial put it; although he was not so elevated that, naked at the baths, he could not be gently but firmly moved aside by the slave of an equally naked man of praetorian rank.

As a professional soldier, he did not have to stay abroad to qualify for governorship of a province. Although many governors-to-be passed through the same junior ranks, ending up as a military prefect on some difficult frontier, what was important was to catch the attention of the powerful at the right moment. For that, it was useful to linger in the city for a while. His family was known there; another of the Pontii, C. Petronius Pontius Nigrinus (‘the black-haired one’) was a consul when Tiberius died in 37, and there were other rich and influential relations. But Pilate’s own reputation still rested on exploits performed far away, and he would need to burnish it somehow at home.

If he stayed for a time in Rome, he may have become a member of the Praetorian Guard, the 1,000 strong personal bodyguard of the emperor himself. Tiberius, obsessed with security, had reorganised the guard, taking them out of their scattered lodgings round the city and giving them a permanent camp in which to nourish their esprit de corps. If Pilate was among them, this would explain (since Praetorians were famous for it) his well-attested public devotion to the emperor, his cult and his welfare. And it might have produced an association that was to make, as well as almost break, him.

Many scholars suppose that Pilate was taken under the wing of Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the brutal commander of the Praetorian Guard who, from 23 to 31, held sway over the emperor’s affections. Tacitus wrote that Tiberius, ‘always dark and mysterious with others, was carefree and outspoken only with him.’ Sejanus was hardy, daring and spirited, but he could affect humility when he needed to; he was a strange combination of the energetic and the watchful. In his military duties he ingratiated himself with the troops, perhaps with Pilate too, by mixing with them and learning everybody’s names. Some of those names he would then put forward to advance his own designs.

Catullus	Poems, tr. Peter Whigham (Penguin, 1966)
Cicero	On Duty, tr. W. Miller The Nature of the Gods, tr. H. Rackham Against Verres, tr. L.H.G. Greenwood (2 vols.) On Friendship and Old Age, tr. W. A. Falconer Letters to Quintus, Brutus and others, tr. W. Glynn Williams Letters to his Friends, tr. W. Glynn Williams The Laws and The Republic (containing ‘Scipio’s Dream’, Bks. VI, IV, IX-XXVI), tr. W. Keyes On Consular Provinces, tr. R. Gardner
Dio Cassius	Roman History, tr. E. Cary (in 9 vols.; vols. VI and VII are the relevant ones)
Euripides	The Bacchae, tr. W. Arrowsmith (Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene & Lattimore: Euripides V; University of Chicago Press, 1959)
Horace	Odes, tr. David Ferry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1997) Epodes, tr. C.E. Bennett Satires and Epistles, tr. H.R. Fairclough
Julius Obsequens	Prodigies (appended to Vol. XIV of the Loeb edition of Livy), tr. A. Schlesinger
Juvenal	Satires, tr. Peter Green (Penguin, 1967)
Livy	History of Rome (in 14 vols.; see Books IX-XI for the wars against the Samnites), tr. B. Foster
Lucilius	Fragments (see E.H. Warmington, Remains of Old Latin, III (Heinemann, 1938)
Marcus Aurelius	Meditations, tr. J. Collier, rev. A. Zimmern (The Scott Library, undated)
Martial	Epigrams, tr. W.C.A. Ker (2 vols.)
Ovid	The Art of Love, tr. J.S. Mozley Metamorphoses, tr. H.T. Riley Tristia and Letters from Pontus, tr. A.L. Wheeler The Fasti, tr. Sir James Frazer
Petronius	Satyricon and Poems, tr. M. Heseltine
Plato	The Republic, tr. Paul Shore (2 vols.) Phaedo, tr. Henry Cary (Everyman edition, London 1938) Timaeus, tr. Desmond Lee (Penguin, 1965) The Trial and Death of Socrates (Euthyphron, Apology, Crito), tr. F.J. Church (London, 1892)
Plautus	Plays, tr. Paul Nixon
Pliny the Younger	Letters, tr. W. Melmoth, rev. W. Hutchinson (2 vols.)
Pliny the Elder	Natural History (in 6 vols., tr. J. Bostock & H.T. Riley, Bohn’s Classical Library, 1855–98; in 10 vols., tr. H. Rackham & W.H.S. Jones, Loeb edition)
Propertius	Elegies, tr. G.P. Goold (1990)
Seneca	Moral Letters to Lucilius, tr. Richard Gummere (Heinemann, 1967) Natural Investigations, (tr. J. Clarke, as Physical Science in the time of Nero, Macmillan, 1910)
Seneca the Elder	Suasiorae, tr. M. Winterbottom
Strabo	Geography (Bk. XVI for Judea), tr. H. Jones
Suetonius	The Twelve Caesars, tr. Robert Graves, rev. Michael Grant (Penguin, 1979)
Tacitus	Histories, tr. C.H. Moore & J. Jackson Annals, tr. Michael Grant (Penguin, 1996) Germania, tr. M. Hutton
Tibullus	Poems, tr. J. B. Postgate
Valerius Maximus	Memorable Doings and Sayings (Latin/French edition, Oeuvres Completes de Valère Maxime, tr. P. Charpentier (2 vols., Paris, undated, c. 1870)
Virgil	Aeneid, tr. C. Day Lewis (Hogarth Press, 1952); H.T. Fairclough (Loeb edition) Eclogues, tr. H.T. Fairclough

Augustine	Sermons in Works, ed. Marcus Dods (Edinburgh, 1873) Treatises on John’s Gospel (ibid.) The Harmony of the Evangelists (tr. J. Innes, Vol. II (Edinburgh, 1874)
Bonaventura (attr.)	Meditations on the Life of Christ (tr. H. Frowde, 1908)
Eusebius	The Ecclesiastical History (tr. K. Lake, 2 vols., 1926) Demonstratio Evangelica (tr. K. Lake, 2 vols., 1926)
Gregory of Tours	Histoire Ecclésiastique des Francs, in 10 vols., Vol. I (tr. J. Guadet, Paris, 1836)
Gwatkin, H.M.	Selections from Early Writers illustrative of Church History in the time of Constantine (Macmillan, 1911)
Justin Martyr	First Apology in Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to AD 325. Ed. A. Roberts & J. Donaldson (Edinburgh, 1868) (ibid.) Second Apology (ibid.) Dialogue with Trypho (ibid.)
Origen	Against Celsus (tr. H. Chadwick (Cambridge, 1953) Commentaries on Matthew (ibid.) Commentaries on John (ibid.)
Tertullian	Against Marcion in Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to AD 325. Ed. A. Roberts & J. Donaldson (Edinburgh, 1868) Vol. VII Apologeticus (tr. E. Souter, Cambridge, 1917)

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The Forum and the forest