In his book On the Prescription of Heretics, the early Church father Tertullian famously asks a rhetorical question: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” (quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?). The question points to the apparent impermeability between the two major tributaries of ancient Western and ancient Near Eastern cultures: the classical and the religious. The image of a seven-pronged menorah carried along on the shoulders of Romans on the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum therefore strikes the viewer all the more forcefully. It seems like the seed of a flower that the wind has carried over huge distances until it bloomed conspicuously in some new inhospitable place.

The emperor Domitian was praised lavishly by his court poets but remembered later for his ineptitude and cruelty. He had the Arch built in 82 CE. As the last of the Flavian emperors, he meant to remind his people of the victories of his dying family: his father Vespasian, who died in 79, had put down the revolt in the province of Judea that began in 66; his older brother Titus, who died in the previous year, had finished the job by besieging and destroying Jerusalem in 70. What the Arch celebrates had happened almost a decade earlier. But the monument belongs to its own political moment: in it we see Domitian struggling to construct his own image.

When do monuments cease to be political statements and pass into the much safer realm of history? Does someone have to physically move them there? Shifts in the tides of nations and politics can breathe new life into inanimate stones and symbols. This is the story of the Arch of Titus.

It is also the story of the Confederate flag that adorns many government buildings, front lawns, car bumpers and Facebook pages in the United States. Events such as the racist attack in Charleston this June remind us that the Confederate flag does much more than celebrate “heritage”. These monuments outlive the brief existences of their creators and their wars — they become available for the celebration of new brutalities and subjections.

Our most extensive witness of the Romans’ war against the province of Judea is the historian Josephus. After growing up within the fold of a wealthy religious order in Jerusalem, Josephus participated in the revolt that Vespasian promptly squashed. But afterwards he moved to Rome, enrolled as an advisor to the Flavian court, and stood on the other side of the battle line when Titus campaigned some years later. His brand new name did not hide the identity of his new patrons or his new home city: Titus Flavius Josephus.

Josephus’ double life seeps into the crevices of his history, The Jewish War. Before the first paragraph ends, he writes, “I have proposed to myself, for the sake of such as live under the government of the Romans, to translate into the Greek tongue those books, which I formerly composed in the language of our country.” We have only the Greek, not that other version, which was probably Aramaic. The new translation sealed his membership in the cultural elite of cosmpolitan Rome.

In Book 5.215 he describes what the High Priest would find in the inner sanctuary of Jerusalem’s Temple, which Herod the Great, Roman Judea’s client king, had restored as a place of elegance and deep religious significance (trans. William Whiston, who had the misfortune of being an English natural philosopher 20 years younger than Isaac Newton):

When any persons entered into the temple, its floor received them. It had three things that were very wonderful and famous among all mankind, the candlestick, the table of shew-bread, and the altar of incense. Now the seven lamps signified the seven planets; for so many there were springing out of the candlestick. [The inmost part] was inaccessible and inviolable; and was called the Holy of Holies.

This astounding image reminds us of other holy sanctuaries described in ancient literature — not least the inner palace (penetralia) of Troy to which Achilles’ son forcefully gains entrance in Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid before slaughtering Priam. To really conquer a city one must first violate its sacred core. The soldiers under Titus may have thought of that scene as they looted the “inaccessible and inviolable” place.

The menorah appears again later, at the Triumph of the Three Flavians in the summer of 71. Vespasian plays the proud father and escorts his elder son Titus, while Domitian plays the jealous younger brother and lurks somewhere off to the side “on a horse that was worthy of admiration”. George H., George W., and Jeb are all together. The triumph wound through the city along its traditional course; somebody standing in what is still called Rome’s Jewish ghetto would have had a spectacular view (7.132):

But for those [things] that were taken in the temple of Jerusalem, they made the greatest figure of them all; that is, the golden table, of the weight of many talents; the candlestick also, that was made of gold, though its construction were now changed from that which we made use of; for its middle shaft was fixed upon a basis, and the small branches were produced out of it to a great length, having the likeness of a trident in their position, and had every one a socket made of brass for a lamp at the tops of them. These lamps were in number seven, and represented the dignity of the number seven among the Jews; and the last of all the spoils, was carried the Law of the Jews.

Domitian made sure that the image of this triumph was etched onto the Arch he built in 82. Josephus’ account lets us see the process by which objects and people are sublimated into texts and images.

America’s Confederate battle flag was similarly born among the real facts of war. From the very beginning the Confederate States of America cared about its images; but its first attempt at a flag produced one so similar to the Union’s as to cause confusion on the battlefield. A frustrated general turned to an official, William Porcher Miles, with a request for a separate battle flag that would be more distinguishable in the field. Originally Miles’ new flag had St. George’s Cross — two red stripes quartering the rectangular cloth — that associated the cause with Catholic crusaders. He rotated the stripes into a diagonal cross when a Jewish Confederate named Charles Moise complained that such a symbol failed to respect religious difference in the Confederate States. This battle flag — never the official Confederate flag — is the one that Dylann Roof held up in photographs while conceiving of his attack. The greatest irony of this story is that the flag’s creators did not want to seem anti-Semitic.

After the Roman Empire fell, Titus’ Arch and its conspicuous menorah were available to Rome’s new inhabitants and visitors. The first popular guidebook to post-classical Rome — “Amazing things to see in Rome” (Mirabilia Urbis Romae) — served several centuries of curious travellers from the 12th century on, until the increasingly learned guidebooks of Renaissance Italians replaced it. That book points people to the must-see “arch of the seven candles of Titus and Vespasian, by the new St. Mary’s church” (arcus Septem lucernarum Titi et Vespasiani ad sanctum Mariam Novam, ch. 3). The Mirabilia preserved more street chatter than archaeological research: a later interpretation adds, inexplicably, “…where is Moses, his candlestick having seven branches”.

Later, Poggio Bracciolini (who recently has become the standard-bearer for the flock of Italian humanists obsessed with ancient texts and objects, thanks in part to Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve) squinted up at the Arch’s inscription and puzzled over its history. He includes it in his work “On the Vicissitudes of Fortune” (De varietate fotunae), a long lament about how much lies uncovered, fragmented, unknown, or utterly lost in the Eternal City. He writes with a sigh: “I also read the description of that arch which, when the Jews were conquered and Jerusalem razed, the nobility dedicated to Titus Vespasianus in the Circus Maximus — where, now, there are these gardens.” Then Poggio looks up from the menorah’s image to read and record the rather plain inscription: “The Senate and the people of Rome [dedicate this arch] to the divine Titus Vespasian Augustus, son of the divine Vespasian.” As a practitioner of antiquarian science he aims for names, dates, and hard facts.

Jews have lived in Rome for over 2,000 years, longer than in any other European city. Active in commerce and trade, their community —situated along the Tiber where an island sits in an elbow of the river — became the Jewish Quarter. The praetor Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Hispanus confirmed for us their presence as early as 197 BCE, when he decreed that all non-Italian Jews be deported from the city. He did not then have the Arch as a rhetorical token. But when in 1555 Pope Paul IV issued a papal bull confining all Jews to the Jewish Ghetto the Arch gave him what looked like precedent.

Pope Paul IV’s brief four-year reign forms a dark chapter in the intellectual and political backlash against the Reformation. The planks in his platform all show a consistent color. In one of his first acts he cut off Michelangelo’s pension and denounced the nudity of certain paintings in The Last Judgment, Michelangelo’s masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel. He set up the Inquisition to execute scores of heretics. And on July 14, 1555, the papal bull “Cum Nimis Absurdum” (“Since it is completely senseless…”) entered the gallery of the most violently anti-Semitic documents in the people’s long history:

Since it is completely senseless and inappropriate to be in a situation where Christian piety allows the Jews (whose guilt — all of their own doing — has condemned them to eternal slavery) access to our society and even to live among us; indeed, they are without gratitude to Christians, as, instead of thanks for gracious treatment, they return invective, and among themselves, instead of the slavery, which they deserve, they manage to claim superiority… we ordain that for the rest of time, in the City as well as in other states, territories and domains of the Church of Rome itself, all Jews are to live in only one [quarter] to which there is only one entrance and from which there is but one exit.

The bull also explains how “men must wear a hat, women, indeed, some other evident sign, yellow in color”; how the use of any language other than Latin and Italian is a crime; and that all synagogues but one are to be burned. The Jews are said to have stopped their ears with wax every Saturday while they sat through an obligatory Catholic sermon.

Paul IV initiated an annual ceremony that lasted long after his death: a representative of the Ghetto, probably a rabbi, would meet the Pope by the Arch of Titus before a crowd, where he would kiss his feet and pledge allegiance to the papacy and rule of Christendom. In this moment we see the arch in a new context. No longer a picture of Roman military control over an unruly province, it now depicts the Jewish faith itself, tied up in the menorah, stolen and held by Christians who have God on their side. I would guess that these years gave birth to the custom — untraceable but still current — according to which Jews should not pass beneath the arch at the risk of losing their connection to the faith.

We should remind ourselves of Dylann Roof at every juncture. Racist individuals (and nations) will commit terrors and injustices whether or not they have an image with which they identify. But the image encourages them. “A flag did not cause these murders”, said Obama when he eulogized the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney. “But…as we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride.”

The city confined Jews to the ghetto until King Vittorio Emmanuele unified Italy and abolished the Papal States that had enforced the subjection in 1870. The place — both the first and the last Jewish ghetto in Europe before the Nazis borrowed Paul IV’s strategy — remained home to Rome’s Jews. Meanwhile nationalism swelled across Europe, which careened toward world war and National Socialism. In these years the arch looks like a prophet of the Holocaust in Fascist Italy.

Sigmund Freud always had an anxious relationship with Rome. Classical literature clearly inspired him; his groundbreaking Interpretation of Dreams begins with a line spoken by a raving Juno in the Aeneid: “If I cannot move the gods, I will summon the underworld.” And he confesses in the same book that when he read Livy he always felt closer to Hannibal — a Semite — than to the Roman generals. Recall that Juno in the Aeneid sides with Dido and her prophesied “avenger”, perhaps Hannibal. An identification with this network of characters mattered deeply to a Jewish scientist with strange ideas struggling to make a career in Vienna — a hotbed of anti-Semitism. In 1913 he mailed a friend a postcard from Rome depicting the Arch with a scratched message: “The Jew survives it”.

If Rome’s Jews did survive Italian Fascism, they did so not without damage. Conflict occasionally flared between German and Italian officials when the latter seemed less willing to commit themselves to genocide — the German Foreign Minister complained that “Italian military circles…lack a proper understanding of the Jewish question”. About 7,500 Italian Jews became victims of the Holocaust. Many from Genoa and Florence rode in cattle-cars to Auschwitz, and German soldiers occupied Rome. The worst day there was March 24, 1944, when Hitler himself ordered SS soldiers to gather and execute 335 Romans (Jews and Christians, men, women and children) as a retaliation for an attack that had killed 28 SS officers.

During Mussolini’s regime a full-scale replica of the Arch’s relief was comissioned. Some decades later it lay almost forgotten in a government building. Here the connection between the Arch and the violence unfolding in Rome seems only implicit. We could similarly say that the violence of the Civil Rights movements in the 20th-century American South eclipsed the Confederate flag that still flew here and there in the background. Battles were so clearly raging that it was hardly necessary to gain traction with old monuments.

Tens of thousands of Jews left homeless or flung away by the war now searched for a new home. In this atmosphere — and in the midst of conflict with Islamic neighbors still raging today — the State of Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948. “The state of Israel,” reads the official translation, “will be open for Jewish immigration and the Ingathering of Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the Prophets of Israel.”

Like the Confederate States some decades earlier the Israeli government soon tasked itself with adopting a new emblem for the new state. It would appear on the presidential standard, all official documents, and public buildings of Israel. An open competition brought forward the most powerful symbols of Judaism from its rich history. The committee entrusted with the decision combined aspects of the best submissions: the product shows the very menorah of the Arch of Titus centered between olive branches and Hebrew text reading “Israel”. Nobody who examines the images side by side can fail to see that they are the same.

The use of the menorah, they said, constituted its return to Herod’s Temple. It depicted the resilience of the people from Judea. This would be the last chapter in the menorah’s journey since it was raided along with other treasures from the holy room and carried on the shoulders of Roman soldiers. And in 2012 archaeologists working on the Arch discovered indisputable evidence that the menorah originally shone with bright golden paint, not the gray one sees today. As if prescient of that find, the emblem of the State of Israel sometimes has the menorah in shimmering gold.

Here the two images I have been juxtaposing clearly part ways. Nobody who ever felt pain at the sight of the Confederate flag has reclaimed it as a standard for a people’s triumphant survival. It still belongs to the cause of hatred. This is unsurprising: the length of time that has elapsed between the Confederate Flag’s creation and now roughly equals that between Herod the Great’s birth and Titus’ violation of the temple Herod polished. Like the Arch had, the Confederate flag may yet have a long future of bestowing genealogy and history on new oppression.

Will Theiss is a senior at Yale College. His interests include Latin, Greek, and Biblical Hebrew, as well as the history of the classical tradition and the history of scholarship. His current research project explores the interpretation of dreams in the world of Renaissance humanism.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.