Sicarii by Flavius Josephus. Premodern terrorists or the founding myth of modern Israel?

Abstract

Contemporary international terrorism differs a little from the acts of violence that took place
in ancient history. The first known example of the use of political terrorism was Sicarii, a Jewish
sect operating in Palestine and Egypt in the years 66–73 CE. Virtually all information about this
group comes from Flavius Josephus, a first-century Romano-Jewish historian and military leader.
The term sicarii itself has a Latin etymology and means murderers or assassins. It comes from the
word sica, meaning dagger. It appeared in legal Latin in 81 BCE together with the Act Lex Cornelia
de sicariis et veneficis, which was one of the first legal regulations in the field of serious organized
crime. The Sicarii, however, fought in their own country with the intention of liberating it from
the rule of a foreign power, Rome. To this day, it remains unresolved whether the Sicarii and Zealots
belonged to the same political group that used terrorism for political purposes: killings, arson,
poisoning water supplies, and even the seizure of the mountain fortress of Masada, ending in
mass suicide. And the myth of the desperate courage of the defenders of Masada became the
glue of the national consciousness of the citizens of the modern state of Israel.