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Dr Guy Stiebel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
'Romani Ite Domum: Identity and Expressions of Resistance in Judaea'
Watching Life of Brian, anyone who ever studied Latin cannot avoid the overwhelming wave of
sympathy towards Brian Cohen being interrogated and exercised by a Roman centurion ably using
his gladius. But it is the punishment that followed that cries out the writing on the wall: the Romans
were from Mars and the Jews were from Venus. Nevertheless, they did communicate. This episode
encapsulates much of the tense between the two parties, one that intensified towards the second
half of the 1st century AD and erupted in the image the First Jewish revolt. It takes indeed two to
tango, nonetheless the military societies were the ones who played the major role in the clash
between the two parties.
In recent years, military equipment has become a significant source of information in the study of
the identity of institutionalized martial bodies such as the Roman army and local militias. Today we
have in our possession a large corpus of data, culled from a wealth of well-dated military equipment
from strata in Judaea representing the historical conflict. This data will be instrumental for my
present discussion of a variety of soldierly identity of both local and Roman forces, as well as the
nature of Jewish opposition to Roman military occupation so finely expressed in the words of the
Pythons: 'Romani Ite Domum'.
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