The fourth beast in undefined's vision had arrived. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle preserved by Moses Gaster in 1899, the kingdom of Rome rose against Greece just as that terrible fourth animal "devoured, crushed, and trampled upon everything." Rome conquered Antiochus and his 120 war elephants, then turned its ambitions toward the entire known world.
The chronicle pauses to tell the story of Rome's defining struggle: the war against Hannibal of Carthage. Hannibal crossed from Africa to Europe with an army "as numerous as the sand upon the seashore," sweeping through the lands of the Goths and Germania before invading Italy itself. In eighteen pitched battles, the Romans could not defeat him. At the battle of Canusi (Cannae), 90,000 Romans died in a single day, including the commander Aemilius.
When the Roman counselors debated surrendering, a young man named Scipio stood before the 320 elders and proposed a radical strategy: "Give me five legions. I will attack Africa itself. When Hannibal hears his homeland is burning, he will abandon Rome." The gamble worked. Scipio destroyed Carthage, hunted Hannibal to Egypt, and brought him back in chains. Hannibal drank poison and died. Rome became the supreme power on earth.
It was this Rome that Judah Maccabee approached for alliance. The Romans sent a letter of friendship, pledging mutual defense. But the chronicle also records Rome's dark side—the treachery of the priest Alkimos, who ate swine's flesh under Antiochus and then convinced King Demetrius to send armies against Judah. The general Nicanor tried diplomacy first, then treachery, then open war. Judah defeated him and hung his severed head and outstretched arm before the Temple gate—a gate called "the Gate of Nicanor" from that day forward. The wicked priest Alkimos met his own end suffocated in the sacred ashes he had desecrated, "for just is the Lord, who requites man according to his deeds."