Download Messala - Inter-Disciplinary.Net

Messala: Roman Villain via Boss Tweed and Billy the Kid
Jon Solomon
Messala was the villain of the best-selling novel Ben-Hur; A Tale of the Christ. Written by
General Lew Wallace and published in 1880 by Harper & Brothers, this novel became of one the
best selling popular novels of the nineteenth century both in the United States and abroad. In
many ways its success was unparalleled. Before 1890 the novel had sold hundreds of thousands
of copies, and Wallace had already licensed the literary property to be presented in dramatic
form in tableaux and pantomime. A Detroit company began marketing Ben-Hur Cigars to men,
and housewives could purchase Ben-Hur Flour. A few years later thousand of people were
playing E. T. Paull’s “The Chariot Race or Ben Hur March,” and the Ben-Hur Tribe was on its
way to becoming one of the largest insurance companies in the Midwest. By 1900 the novel had
sold more than one million copies, and the dramatic impresarios Marc Klaw & Abraham
Erlanger had signed a contract with Wallace to produce a spectacular stage version of Ben-Hur
featuring an onstage live chariot race. This play ran for over twenty years, played to some 10
million audience members, and even traveled to London’s Drury Lane Theatre as well as
Toronto and Sidney. 1907 saw the “Ben-Hur Chariot Race” installed in Coney Island, and the
first film version of the novel, which was produced without a license and therefore halted by
court order. The court case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and set the legal
precedent, still valid, for rendering a novel into film. Far from losing momentum in its fourth
decade, in 1913 Sears, Roebuck & Company, then the largest retailer in the United States,
purchased one million volumes to sell through their mail order catalog and retail stores. As many
of you know, twelve years later, in 1925, MGM released its blockbuster version of Ben-Hur
starring Ramon Navarro and Francis X. Bushman, and this film earned over $10 million in
American and European box-office receipts. MGM’s 1959 version garnered more Academy
Awards than any film every made at that time, still an unbroken record, and was seen by millions
of spectators. Popular beyond comprehension now ninety years after its publication, the U.S.
television premier of the film in 1971 earned the third highest share of viewers for any film
broadcast on television at that time. Just within the past few years Robert Hossein and Franz
Abraham have produced spectacular versions performed at gigantic sports and entertainment
venues in Paris and London. Hundreds of thousands of spectators attended the former in 2006.
You must believe me, as the author of an as yet unfinished manuscript on the Ben-Hur
phenomenon, when I tell you that Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was the first enduirng
commercially successful popular artistic property and helped addict artists, producers, and the
buying public to the ongoing rage of consumerism that has become an integral part of Western
economies. So, for more than a century the name “Ben-Hur” has been equated with literary
familiarity, commercial success, and heroic action—particularly in the chariot race. Millions of
consumers have read the book, bought Ben-Hur products, seen dramatized performances, and/or
seen the various films.
There are many reasons one can propose to account for this unparalleled success. Part of it,
of course, has to do with the latter portion of the book, identified in the novel’s subtitle, A Tale
of the Christ. But today we are concerned mostly with the seminal plot of the novel, the tension
between the protagonist hero Judah Ben-Hur and his Roman adversary, known simply as
“Messala.” Judah was the son of a Jewish prince, while Messala was the grandson of a Roman
aristocrat who had remained faithful to Augustus during the Civil War, and the son of a man who
Messala: Roman Villain via Boss Tweed and Billy the Kid
had served in the Roman imperial administration in Judea. Judah and the Messala were friends in
their youth, despite their ethnic differences. But then Messala went to Rome for five years, and
upon their reunion in Jerusalem, they immediately quarrel about the extent and nature of the
Roman occupation, particularly about the arrival of the new procurator, Valerius Gratus. Judah is
the first to anger, for Messala always seems to maintain an aura of supercilious contempt that
never admits of emotional outbursts. Judah immediately seeks comfort from his mother and
sister, but when from their rooftop balcony they see Gratus making his way past the House of
Hur, Judah leans over the parapet, accidentally knocking a dilapidated tile down to the street,
and wounds Gratus below. When Roman soldiers force their way into the house, Messala
identifies Judah and his mother and sister as the culprits. Judah is immediately sent to labor as an
imprisoned galley slave. His mother and sister are imprisoned in the Tower of Antonia and
eventually presumed dead. Their property is confiscated, their chief merchant tortured and
severely disabled.
Through a series of events and good fortune, Judah was not only freed three years later but
was then adopted by a Roman of consular rank, and trained in Roman military arts and such
skills as hand-to-hand combat and chariot racing. He returned to Jerusalem eight years later and
challenged Messala in a chariot race at the Antioch Circus. Before the race Judah’s friends
contrived to force Messala to wager his entire fortune on the outcome of the race, and Judah
made sure that Messala’s chariot axle rode higher than his. In the last lap of the race, Judah
drives his chariot wheel hub into Messala’s wheel, crushing it, collapsing the chariot, and
ultimately leaving Messala behind, never to walk again, as well as penniless.
The very next day Messala from afar has hired two assassins to dispose of Judah, using their
mutual love interest, the Egyptian temptress Iras, as the lure to bring Judah into the trap. And
then near the end of the novel Messala sends Iras to blackmail Judah for money, threatening to
reveal his Jewish ethnicity to Sejanus. In the denouement of the novel we learn that Iras has
finally had enough of Messala and has murdered him. Meanwhile Judah is distraught about his
mother and sister, leads the rebellion against Roman rule and only at the Crucifixion of Christ
does he realize that he should embrace the message of peace.
I apologize for the plot summary, but it provides material evidence for my analysis, and it is
important for those of you familiar with MGM’s 1959 film to realize that in that popular film,
unlike the novel, it is Tirzah who knocks the tile lose, not Judah; in the film Judah is not at all an
anti-Roman rebel but an innocent victim of Messala’s cruelty; and in the film it is Messala who
attempts to wreck Judah’s chariot, not Judah who commits the premeditated attack.
The latter discrepancy in particular tells us that the Messala you may know from the 1959
MGM film is not the Messala of the novel. He does not attempt to kill Judah in the race, he does
not have a “Greek chariot” equipped with deadly serrated metal blades, nor does he use his horse
whip on Judah, as depicted in both the 1925 and 1959 MGM films. Quite the contrary, it is
Judah’s horses that Messala whips, the horses worshipped by the desert nomads of Sheik Ilderim
(another anti-Roman warrior), and lent to Judah for the purpose of defeating the prideful
Romans. The MGM Messalas wear black and their horses are black. In the novel Messala’s
colors are scarlet and gold, and he drives two white horses and two black horses.
In fact, Messala himself has relatively few appearances in the novel. There is the initial
quarrel, and his brief but fatal accusation at the arrest. After that we seem him as a participant at
a Roman orgy but by no means the instigator. He almost runs Iras and her father Balthasar over
with his chariot. Judah stops the horses just in time, and as the horses rear, Messala’s assistant
falls off the chariot. Messala just laughs off the entire incident, admits that he looked foolish, and
Messala: Roman Villain via Boss Tweed and Billy the Kid
supposes that he paid the price for his recklessness. Wallace says that Messala gives a “goodnatured, careless look and gesture.” Like the cinematic Messalas, Wallace’s Messala exudes
considerable charm, enabled by his good looks and Roman arrogance.
In an essay Wallace published in 1893, entitled “How I Came to Write Ben-Hur,” he
specifically equates Messala with the Roman Empire. But Messala bestows none of the benefits
of Roman culture or civilization upon Judah or Jerusalem. He, along with Gratus, whom we see
only as the victim of the falling tile, uses the authority of Rome to condemn Judah to certain
death as a galley slave and rob him of his property. His defeat in the circus is the project of the
anti-Roman Sheik Ilderim. His ultimate demise clears the path for Judah to leave all his
money—including Messala’s money—to the early Christian church in Rome.
As it turns out, by the end of the novel Judah is probably the wealthiest man in the Roman
Empire. Although Messala and Gratus confiscated his property, they ultimately had to return it,
and they never got control of his cash. The merchant servant Simonides, the one whom the
Romans tortured after the family’s arrest, had hidden it away, and through savvy trade and
frugality managed to build it into a huge fortune which he insisted on bestowing upon Judah. In
addition, Judah had inherited a considerable sum from the Roman Arrius who had adopted him.
All this money helps lay the foundations of the church in Rome. Ultimately, therefore, Judah is a
hero appropriate for the Gilded Age, a wealthy philanthropist attempting to make the world a
better, more peaceful place. Messala in contrast, gains his fortune illegally and unethically, and
he will consequently lose it all.
Lew Wallace seems to have derived both Judah and Messala from historical prototypes.
Judah, a Jew whose father was of the princely class in Jerusalem under Herod, spends much of
the novel mistrustful and angry, and then mobilizes three Galilean legions to fight against the
Roman occupation of his Judean homeland. In this he echoes the historical Judas of Galilee,
whom Wallace read about in Josephus and Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, two of his major sources. Judah, therefore, was based on an anti-Roman Zealot
whom our historical sources have portrayed as a rebellious and militarized alternative to Christ.
Gibbon in particular draws a comparison between the followers of Judas of Galilee, who chose
to fight the Romans, and the followers of Jesus of Galilee, who chose to follow a more peaceful
alternative.
As for Wallace’s fictitious Messala, the author identifies him as the grandson of the Messala
who “had been the friend of Brutus” (2.2). This would have been Marcus Valerius Messalla
Corvinus. Schooled in Athens with Horace, this historical Messala served as a consul, was an
accomplished orator, and became a generous patron of the arts. He was even an author himself:
Plutarch preserves part of his account in his Life of Brutus (40.1-2). Wallace could have come
across the name in a number of sources—Plutarch, Gibbon, Tacitus, or others, but there is little
doubt that Wallace derived the spelling from the Messala in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, who
is, accurately, loyal to Brutus. But in one striking passage Josephus [The Jewish War 1.243]
places this historical Messala with Mark Antony not only in the Eastern province of Syria but in
Antioch and in fact in the village of Daphne—precisely where Judah will reconnect with
Messala after his eight-year absence and return to the East.
Although Ben-Hur is by title “A Tale of the Christ,” Messala was by no means the agent of
Satan, or even of the wicked Tiberius or Sejanus, who barely play a role in the novel. To
understand his evil characteristics perhaps we should attempt to put him into a historical context,
into the world of the 1870s in which he was conceived, and, to a lesser extent, into the world of
the 1880s and 1890s, when the novel became so popular.
Messala: Roman Villain via Boss Tweed and Billy the Kid
In the title and original abstract for this paper I mention Boss Tweed. Boss Tweed was the
Gilded Age’s villain. That is, if we can for the sake of argument allow that such contemporary
titans of industry as Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller created
huge fortunes out of entrepreneurial genius and smart investments and then spent vast sums on
the philanthropic betterment of others, Boss Tweed created his multi-million dollar fortune by
stealing it from the tax payers of New York through political corruption, although he did benefit
hospitals and schools to a considerable extent before being incarcerated for the final time.
Ultimately, it is doubtful that the career of Boss Tweed had any impact on Lew Wallace’s
creative process. Wallace was from Indiana, not New York or anywhere on the East Coast, and
at the time Indiana was just a generation past being what used to be known as the Northwest
Territory.
I also mention Billy the Kid. The new frontier of the United States was the Far West, and
Lew Wallace served as the Governor of the New Mexico Territory from 1878 to 1881. There he
oversaw the settling of the real Wild West, the murderous hatred and vendettas of the Lincoln
Country Wars, and as governor he issued the famous wanted poster for the infamous outlaw,
William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid. In fact Wallace met with the Kid to offer him amnesty, and
this meeting has itself become part of the popular culture, represented in numerous movies about
Billy the Kid, and its proceedings even warranted a petition asking for a posthumous pardon,
ultimately rejected by present governor Bill Richardson just this past January.
But Lew Wallace did not travel to New Mexico until 1878, and he began writing the novel in
1873. We know this because of some extant correspondence in which he writes from
Washington, DC, explaining that he has been to the Library of Congress doing research on
Judaism for his next novel. And the following November, 1874, he wrote a relative and said that
he had gotten “a Jewish youth” into “terrible trouble,” meaning Judah and the Romans. At the
time Wallace was a lawyer in Crawfordsville, Indiana, not a sheriff of the Wild West.
So where might the inspiration for the villainy of Messala have come? Wallace had
encountered evil in his life first hand. Real Evil. He was a general during the Civil War and
witnessed not only many human casualties and death but torture and starvation. After the war he
was appointed the head of the tribunal that tried Henry Wirz, the commander of the notorious
Confederate prison in Andersonville, Georgia, where thousands of union soldiers had been
starved to death. Then there is the proposal by Victor Davis Hanson in his book Ripples of
Battle. Davis, and his followers, would like to believe that Wallace wrote Ben-Hur in response to
the disgrace he had suffered at Shiloh. The morning of April 6, 1862, General Grant claimed that
he ordered Wallace to march in a certain direction, but Wallace failed to do so. Weeks after the
battle and its huge loss of life, the press, public, and Lincoln government needed a scapegoat for
the disaster of that day, and Wallace served the top brass perfectly in this capacity. He was
removed from command for the next two years. But to suppose that an Indiana soldier who loved
the Republic would make Grant, then the President of the United States [1869-1877], into the
villain of a popular novel and himself into a rebellious Jew who defeats his arch nemesis by
defeating him in a chariot race is incredible.