De-Bugging Titus

by Eliezer Segal

General Titus Caesar Vespasianus led the Roman forces against the Jewish insurrection in Palestine, presided over the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple at the age of 42 in the year 70, and later succeeded his father Vespasian as Emperor. 

Titus’s reign was a short one. According to the historian Dio Cassius, he died a natural death when he was stricken with a fever in the year 81. The biographer Suetonius described how Titus accepted his fate with a blend of tears and fatalistic serenity: “He said that there was no act of his life of which he had cause to repent, save one only.” That enigmatic statement challenged scholars to decipher his meaning. Suetonius guessed that the allusion might be either to an affair he had been having with his sister-in-law, whereas Dio Cassius preferred to explain that he regretted not killing his brother Domitian who was plotting against him and  may have ultimately hastened his death.

What is wrong with the above account?

Many Jewish readers will be bothered by one glaring omission. According to the tale told in the Talmud and Midrash, Titus did not die a natural or quick death, but suffered for several years from an agonizing and debilitating sickness. 

The best-known version of this story is found in the Babylonian Talmud, in a version that satisfies our expectation that evildoers should be made to suffer for their crimes: A gnat entered through Titus’s nostril, and  continued to peck at his brain for seven years, allowing only occasional relief from the pain by means of the sound of a blacksmith’s hammer. After his death they opened up his head and found that the gnat had grown to the size of a large bird with a brass beak and iron talons. 

The discrepancies between the talmudic and the non-Jewish accounts of Titus’s death were especially troubling to Rabbi Azariah dei Rossi the sixteenth-century Italian scholar whose Me’or ‘Eynayim built upon his dazzling mastery of Classical languages and literatures. He provided an exhaustive survey of all the known rabbinic versions of the legend of the gnat, including the Talmuds and several collections of homiletic midrash.

Dei Rossi noted that, notwithstanding the minor differences between the texts, they agree about important narrative and thematic features, in that the unrepentant heathen blasphemer is made to suffer horribly for his crimes against God and the holy temple; and divine justice arranged matters such that the world’s most powerful tyrant was struck down by one of nature’s tiniest and least significant creatures.

Rabbi Azariah regarded the numerous disagreements among the Jewish texts as evidence that they should not be trusted as historical fact; for if they did stem from a true event they could not have diverged to such an extent. 

Furthermore, the story of the gnat is medically implausible. Granted that anatomic research confirms that a passage leads from the nostrils to the brain—nevertheless, the cerebral membrane is not capable of supporting a bird-sized growth. Furthermore, the notion of metals like brass or iron growing in an organism is clearly an impossibility. Some modern writers have speculated that the portrayal was inspired by autopsies of brain tumors.

Citing Jeremiah’s advice to “ask ye now among the heathen,” Rabbi Azariah consulted all available Greek and Roman histories and biographies (including Dio Cassius and Suetonius), and confirmed that their most respected authorities were in agreement that Titus died of a fever. 

Dei Rossi reasoned that we ought to accept the consensus of those independent objective testimonies that concurred in contradicting the rabbinic story. Echoing an idea that had been voiced centuries previously by Maimonides, he was concerned that credulous Jews would mistake these legendary tales for attempts at factual history, and thereby discredit our sages and the entire Jewish tradition. It is therefore crucial to recognize those stories for what they were intended—as moral allegories that teach the common people about the inscrutable paths of how divine justice is integrated into the natural order. (Interestingly, even the Maharal of Prague who was adamantly opposed to the Me’or ‘Eynayim, conceded that the gnat story should not be taken literally, and that the rabbis were not interested in conveying simple historical facts.)

Dei Rossi’s concerns had actually been expressed a generation earlier by Rabbi David Gans of Prague in his pioneering historical chronicle the Tzemaḥ David. In contrast to the attitudes of rabbinic literature which painted Titus as a quintessential antisemite, sadistic killer and blasphemer, Gans  generally followed the Roman historians, as well as Josephus Flavius and the author of the medieval Hebrew adaptation of Josephus’s histories known a the Yosippon. In their portrayals Titus came across as quite an admirable figure, a patron and contributor to the arts who ruled his people justly and generously, and regretted the bloodshed he had been forced to inflict. Josephus, who had defected to the Roman camp and became part of Titus’s entourage, insisted that the Jews brought the disaster upon themselves by following extremist leadership. Gans argued that Josephus predated the rabbinic texts, so his assessment should be given preference. 

In noting that none of those historians knew about the Talmud’s tale of the gnat, he cited a theory that the chroniclers excluded the episode intentionally so that Titus would not be blamed for the suffering he inflicted on Israel.

Like Dei Rossi, Rabbi Gans advocated reading the rabbinic account as a fictitious parable. He recommended the approach taken by the commentary Paḥad Yiṣḥak by Rabbi Isaac Chajes of Prague, who allegorically derived the name “Titus” from the Hebrew “ṭiṭ,” meaning “mud,” alluding to one who who is mired in the evil inclination of heathen materialism that will eventually be vanquished by enlightened Torah values (symbolized as Jerusalem) such as humility (a gnat) and freedom (bird).

Regrettably, history provides us with enough literal, physical foes and oppressors that we don’t really need to resort to symbolic readings.

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