The picture drawn by Josephus of the Judea of those days represents a condition nothing short of anarchy. Such a situation could have existed only under an incompetent Roman governor. Whether the procurator Gessius Florus was or was not quite the monster he is depicted as being in the Wars, he can scarcely have been an efficient administrator. It is very likely that the various acts of cruelty imputed to him by Josephus were examples of the intemperate violence of a weak man exasperated by his own failure to control the situation. However this may be, it certainly was not the excesses of an individual governor that provoked the rebellion of 68 C.E., even if we accept Josephus’ account of him in full, and assume him to have been a second and worse Verres. The outbreak of that year was the result of causes lying far deeper in the condition of the time and the character of the people. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVIII THE REVOLT OF 68 C.E. The Jews were not the only nation that fought with desperate fury against complete submergence in the floods of Roman dominance. The spread of the Roman arms had encountered, from the beginning, seemingly small obstacles that proved more serious checks than the greater ones. Thus, after the Second Punic War, when Rome was already in the ascendant in the world, the relatively fresh strength of a conquering people was all but exhausted in the attempt to subdue and render thoroughly Roman the mountain tribes of the Ligurians in the northern part of the peninsula.[318] In later times, after Caesar’s conquest, the subjugation of Belgium was a weary succession of revolts and massacres and punitive expeditions that stretched over several generations. Similarly in Numidia it was found that formal submission of the tribes that filled this region insured no permanence of control.[319] In the last cases, however, the danger that was warded off seemed in Roman eyes to be remote. In the case of Judea the very existence of the eastern empire was threatened. On the other side of the Syrian desert there was a watchful and ready enemy, who might appear in force at any time and with whose arrival there might break out into open conflagration the smouldering disloyalty that still was present in the Asiatic provinces.