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| Francis Bacon |
Francis Bacon began his essay “On Truth” with, “What is
truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” An interesting
opening, but it assumes that Pilate was joking, when it is evident that he was
not. He was simply stating what, for him, was a fact: that truth was of no
relevance to what concerned him the most.
What concerned Pontius Pilate the most? Maintaining his social and economic
position. When the mob threatened to
report him to the emperor as “no ‘friend of Caesar’,” they were directly
threatening everything that, to him, made life worth living. “Friend of Caesar” was a quasi-official title
that indicated a high degree of official
favor in Rome . . . whether or not anyone there could actually stand the sight
of you.
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| Don't look at me! |
The upshot was that Pilate, who stated quite clearly that he
considered Jesus innocent of any crime, was willing to go along with the
Galilean’s condemnation because it was expedient for him. Not surprisingly, Pilate unconsciously echoed
what Caiaphas the High Priest had used as his justification for engineering
Jesus’s execution: “Neither
do you consider that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the
people, and that the whole nation perish not.”
(John 11:50.) Jesus’s innocence —
the truth of the matter — was irrelevant.
Closer
to our day, the play and the film Judgment
at Nuremberg raised the same issue.
In times of national or personal (or any) emergency, is it better that
innocent people suffer than that our concerns, projects, hobbies, interests, or
whatever, come to nothing or be marginalized or destroyed? After all, what’s more important here? The lives and concerns of a few (or six
million) unimportant, defective, or simply irritating people, or what we want?
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| The value of a single human life. . . |
Pilate is often depicted as the quintessential moral
relativist, but maybe he wasn’t. He was
just being practical. He had worked all
his life to get even a lousy post in a provincial backwater of the Roman
Empire. If he managed to do well there,
he might go on to bigger and better things where the graft and bribes were more
suited to a man of his station.
Pilate wasn’t being dishonest, not really. The Romans, after all, had a slightly
different view of public officials than we do. They expected them to steal, skim the cream,
accept bribes and graft, and so on. It
was a perquisite of public office. Just
don’t be too obvious, don’t commit injustices against individuals (bribery in
handing out public contracts was one thing; bribery in the courts quite another
— to a Roman, anyway), and don’t tick off Roman citizens (especially real friends of Caesar).
Above all, make a lot of friends who will support you when
your term of office is completed and the Senate puts you on trial for corruption. This almost always happened, but you were
usually acquitted if you hadn’t been too greedy about your thefts and there
hadn’t been too many complaints from the right sort of people.
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| Frontinus also wrote a book on tactics |
Still, the Roman ideal was honesty. Sextus Julius Frontinus, Rome’s Curator Aquarum (Water Commissioner)
under Domitian astounded everyone and gained a place in the Roman civil service
pantheon by personally inspecting miles of waterways and aqueducts with his
slaves instead of delegating the task to them or simply taking the fee and not
doing the work. He is credited with
setting in motion maintenance and repair work that kept Rome supplied with
adequate water for the next thousand years.
His report to the emperor, De
Aquae Urbis Romae (“On the Water [Supply] of Rome”), while as boring
as any other public works report, has been preserved for nearly 2,000 years,
largely as a tribute to the honesty and integrity of Frontinus.
Yes, honesty and integrity are good and all that, but, well,
boys will be boys. Frontinus didn’t have
to worry about making his pile. He could
afford to be honest, already being a respected senator and, later, consul of
Rome. Someone like Pilate had to be
practical.
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| Better that one man suffer |
Of course, this sort of thing can backfire. At the conclusion of the film Judgment at Nuremberg, Burt Lancaster as
the German judge Ernst Janning insists to Spencer Tracy as the American judge
Dan Haywood, “We didn’t know it would come to this!”
Haywood answered, “Herr Janning, it ‘came to this’ the first
time you condemned a man to death you knew to be innocent.”
As for that Pilate fellow . . . he doesn’t seem to have had
much of a career after he allowed Jesus to be crucified. Nobody seems to know too much about him. Of course, that might mean he got away with
it, secured his retirement, and lived happily ever after. He might even have been able to live with
himself afterwards. After all, he had
slaves to shave him, so he didn’t have to look at himself in the mirror every
morning.