by Ken Parejko
The people, we were told, were in anguish. Some said that God had vacated the Temple and its altar, leaving only common unblessed stone. Others swore to defend the Temple to their deaths, believing that since God would not desert them no earthly power could harm them.
As food ran low the cattle in the Temple precincts were killed and eaten, even those meant for sacrifice. When they were gone people chewed their shoes to cut the pangs of hunger. Famine and starvation rode their clattering steeds across an angry sky. Worst of all was the shortage of water; children cried out in thirst, and men and women of all ages withered and lost hope.
As the siege dragged on a prophet arose in their midst. He described the events of the past months as a trial; God would reward them in the end for their fealty, as He had Job. The prophet quoted scripture, where it said that after seventy weeks of years from the earth’s creation the Son of God would appear to save the world. He claimed that on the 10th of Ab, just a few days away, exactly seventy weeks of years of Creation will have passed. God had chosen him, he said, to reveal to them the Son of God. On the 8th of Ab he led thousands of them atop a colonnade in the courtyard which had withstood the onslaught of Titus’ artillery. There they stood, praising the Lord and praying, gathered around their savior in a great throng, awaiting their day of deliverance. As they prayed the fire which descended upon them came not from the hand of God but thrown by one of our men, which engulfed the prophet and his followers in a murderous flame.
Titus had ordered the Temple itself be saved. But from a tower just outside its walls built to rain missiles down into the courtyard one of our men lit a torch which he threw hard as he could toward the Temple. His aim was perfect. The torch tumbled through the Temple’s Golden Window, and the great wooden beams, raised by Herod only years before, caught fire. On the 10th of Ab, the very date prophesied, not the Son of God but our legions entered the city. The night before, as darkness gathered around them, they'd prayed for salvation: Oh Lord though we begged for salvation you have brought your Temple and your people to naught. Deliver us from this suffering, if it is Thy will. With dawn came the salvation of the sword, as the legions rolled like thunder through the city until the streets were choked with the dead and dying, and from the alleys and houses of the once-great city throngs of women and children were rounded up into slavery.
We watched the conflagration from the safety of Titus’ camp. Though frustrated that the Temple had been set afire, he saw in the acrid smoke rising high in dark billows from the Holy of Holies a sure sign of the Roman gods’ victory over the Jewish. He turned to me. “You know, today,” he said, “is my daughter Julia’s birthday. It is an omen.”
I stood watching this great tragedy unfold. The Greeks had a word for it, ekpurosis, meaning the world was destined to now and again suffer a purging fire. It had happened in the great fire of Rome, just five years before. It would happen again.
In the Temple all evidence of Divine support and all sense of order were gone. There was nowhere to run. One after another family after family, priest and philosopher alike fell to the sword. The cry Jerusalem, Oh Jerusalem! rose from the lips of prophets who in their dying breaths spoke of the end of the world. Our troops searched from house to house, ferreting out the women and children, cutting them down or taking them captive. Anything of value not hidden was taken; by the day’s end, most of our men dragged corpulent sacks full of booty.
Titus ordered the man who’d started the fire to enter the burning Temple and rescue its holiest relics and bring the Ark of the Covenant to him. Many of the Temple’s treasures had been hidden in secret nooks, and as the fire burned gold and silver melted and ran down into cracks between the rocks on which the Temple was built. For days afterward our soldiers fought one another over the right to chip away at the steaming boulders filled with precious metals.
On the afternoon of that first day three cartloads of relics rescued from the Temple were brought to Titus. What was called the Ark of the Covenant was a gilded wooden chest holding the tables of the Commandments graven with the Lord’s covenant with his chosen people, a chest which had led the Israelites as they moved from place to place and battle to battle for more than a thousand years. The Ark was the centerpiece of their history, a physical symbol of the covenant made between their people and their God. For them to lose the Ark would be to have the heart torn from their religion. But the Ark wasn’t in the Temple, and none of the many priests we’d captured, tortured and killed knew where it was, or anyway refused to say.
Josephus described the Temple relics brought to Titus. One he called the Bait Hamikdash Menorah, tall as a man and weighing three hundred pounds of solid gold. The menorah was seven-branched, six branches for each day of Creation, the center being the Sabbath, the day of rest. It took several men to unload the Menorah from the cart which carried it up from the burning city. Titus touched the Menorah, and though covered with a faint layer of ash, the sun’s beams reflected off it in a dazzling flash of gold just as a shifting wind carried to us the cries of pain and terror of the city’s citizens.
A pile of ancient and holy vestments, worn only by the high priests in the inner sanctum, were pulled off the cart and dropped unceremoniously onto the ground. Josephus watched as the holiest vestments in Judaism were treated like the chitons of a cheap harlot. Whatever his feelings about watching this dismantling of the religion of his childhood, which he’d come close to dying for, he showed no emotions but merely bent and lifted a long white robe, whose interwoven silver and gold threads glistened in the sunlight.
“This they call the ephod,” he explained and pointed to a beautiful gem woven into the garment. “This stone, of fine red and white Babylonian sardonyx, is sewn directly over the wearer’s heart. It is said that when God is in attendance in the Temple the stone shines with its own light.” Even here, with the Temple in smoldering ruins behind us, the stone seemed to glow from within. “In Hebrew the stone is called Urim, which means the Light of God.”
Josephus hung the ephod with its glowing Urim onto the 7-branched menorah and lifted another vestment from the dirt. “This breastplate our priests wore in the Temple before a battle,” he said. He turned the breastplate over, showing its front, the setting for a hundred stones of many colors. “We call it Thummim,” he said. “When its stones lit up on their own it meant God was promising us victory.” He lay the glinting breastplate over the ephod.
The gold and gem-inlaid table of the shewbread was brought to us. Chalices and bowls used in blood sacrifice and other relics were set one after another onto the table. Titus picked them up, one by one, and turned them over. To him they were but curiosities, worked in gold and silver, jewels and stones without a voice, as the statues and relics of Jupiter or Juno, Roma or Augustus were no more than dead stones to the invading barbarian.
Titus presented the gigantic iron cauldrons in which the daily holocaust was burned to Tiberius Julius Alexander to do with as he liked. But once again the Ark of the Covenant had eluded them. Where was it? It was as it had been more than a century before, when Pompey forced himself into the Holy of Holies only to find the Ark was gone. Titus sighed, turned to me. “They can have their precious Ark. It is all they have left, any more. Their Shining City is ours, and their Temple of Temples, and here all the insignia of their faith, all ours.”
Yet in our hearts we knew that without the Ark of the Covenant our victory was not final. This was a people who had wandered the desert for a thousand years with only the Ark to bind them together. The Chosen People, they called themselves. They were a long-suffering and patient tribe, behind them an ancient history of battles and what must have seemed final defeats, of survival in adversity and unimaginable horrors. As he turned away from the stack of holy relics and faced again the flames of the burning city, Titus had to admit to himself that, unlikely as it seemed at the moment, it was not impossible that the Jewish nation would out-last the Empire itself.
Mopping up in Jerusalem continued for days, s
treet by street and alley by alley. The rebel leaders were hunted out of their hiding places and one by one turned themselves in. John of Gischala had been captured but not Simon bar Giora. Then one afternoon he appeared in the middle of the smoldering ruins, as if by magic, wearing a white tunic and purple cape, the vestments of a prophet. He asked for the leader of the garrison of Antonia to be brought to him. Hearing who'd been discovered, Terentius Rufus dropped what he was doing, and bringing Titus and myself along we hurried to where the Temple had once stood, now a tangled jumble of fallen columns, stones, and smoldering beams.
“You know who I am,” Simon bar Giora said. “I come to you of my own volition. The power you have over me I have given to you. Together, we will save my people.”
Titus ordered him taken to Rome to be imprisoned until he and his father entered the city in triumph, where at the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, in an offering of thanks to our gods for final victory over his people, Simon bar Giora and others would be put to death.
I watched all this with the fascination of watching a great natural disaster, like a tidal wave rolling over an island or an eruption raining destruction upon a city. A civilization was being destroyed before my eyes. One night as I was describing the siege of Jerusalem in my journal the image of the little balsam-tree in Castor’s garden came to mind, the little prince-tree descended from those given King Solomon. I remembered then that somewhere in the burning city were Jerusalem’s Royal Gardens, archives of an ancient culture which loved and respected plants. I promised myself I would seek out the city’s Gardens. But what I found broke my heart.
The Royal Gardens, tended carefully since the days of Solomon, recently renovated and expanded by the Herodians, lay as an open wound on the body of a dying city. Fire, leaping from the conflagration which swallowed up the city’s houses and temples, had swept through the trees, which now stood as mute emblems of the carnage going on all around them, blackened, bare and skeletal. The bodies of men who had tried to find refuge here, some terribly burned, had already begun to bloat and stink with death.
I walked slowly through the ruins. Judea was the native land of the balsam-tree, which produced a resin called by some Balm of Gilead. Here was the largest grove of balsam in the world, carefully tended for a thousand years only to lay today, like the Temple itself, in ruin. Only a scattered few of the hundreds of balsams still lived. I crushed and smelled one of the leaves, and was transported from this scene of destruction to the sanity of Castor’s garden. I promised myself to ask Titus to feature one of the balsams in the Flavian triumph.
But who would take care of these last remnants of the balsam grove? Wandering the Gardens, I found a tiny shrub clinging bravely to the last bits of its life. I recognized the plant, charred and trampled as it was, a brave little sarcocolla whose leaves we ground up to use in healing wounds. But who would heal the garden's wounds? What madmen we are to treat the earth and her treasures this way.
Perhaps one in ten, no more, of the plants in the once-great Royal Garden were still clinging to life, having somehow survived the fire and trampling of the terrified citizens as they fled the oncoming army, then the trampling feet of the army itself. I found a caper, of a kind I’d never seen before, a shallot, terebinth, a sumac, a little patch of squill, of all the desert plants the latest to bloom. I bent and admired its little flower, pink and delicate, and the valiant hope it threw out into this desert of death.
I stood in the midst of flotsam from a great shipwreck, the scattered remnants of what had been a great garden in a great city. I could only imagine what had been lost. My breathing grew strained. I sat on an ash-covered marble seat, where once philosopher- kings rested to admire nature’s gifts. The garden smelled not of sweet blossoms and herbs, but instead was heavy with the acrid smell of smoldering wood and putrid with death. The quiet buzz of bees and the clarion voice of birds singing from the ancient cypresses had been replaced with the angry drone of flies attracted to the bloated bodies scattered throughout the garden, and the growl and yelp of a pack of dogs, not far away, tearing apart the flesh of a small child.
Drusus’ words came back to me, from my dream, about creating a desert and calling it the pax romana.
To heal myself from despair I wondered what I could do. I decided to ask Titus to appoint an overseer of the garden, someone to care for and keep alive its last brave survivors. For a moment I thought of volunteering. But no, Rome beckoned me. It had been nearly three years since I’d set foot in the capitol. It would not be the same, damaged as it was by the civil war. But it was the capitol of my homeland, about to be ruled by my good friend Vespasian. And I had to admit I missed Plinia. Caecilius was seven already, no longer a child but a young boy. Ever-thoughtful Plinia had written to me regularly describing the progress he was making at reading and writing. I looked forward to seeing him. I’d hitched my fortune to Vespasian’s, and now my own future was as bright it had ever been. No, I couldn’t stay. There was more death here than I cared to see.
I rose to leave the Gardens, my breathing labored, my heart heavy. These are the ashes, I thought, fending off a pack of dogs with sword-swings, the ashes upon which our empire is built. What strange gods they be who lead us this way. What strange gods we plant to honor, worship and obey.
Now all Judea had been conquered. In his letters Titus kept his father, in Rome, informed of our success. Together they drew up the plans for a Roman Judea. In an insult to Jewish monotheism the annual tax which Judeans up to that day had paid to support the priests and the Temple was now to be sent to Rome and used in the rebuilding of the Capitol building, damaged in the civil wars. Judea would lose all political autonomy, to be governed by a military officer.
We left Jerusalem and final mopping up to the Xth legion under Lucilius Bassus, who for bringing his naval fleet to the Flavian cause was rewarded with command of a legion. But Bassus’ job was not so easy. The last remnants of Jewish resistance had retired to a string of mountain fortresses built by Herod, scattered in the hills of Judea. Rooting them out would take years of patient siege and attack warfare. I’d met Bassus once, in the field. We’d become friends, of sorts. A year later I was saddened to hear of his death in the fight to capture Machaerus. It would not be Bassus but his replacement Flavius Silva who would capture the final Jewish stronghold, where the nine hundred Sicarii holed up at Masada would write their names into the history books deep in their own blood.
Meanwhile with the downfall of Jerusalem Vespasian received the acclaim of the Senate and of huge cheering crowds in the capitol. I accompanied Titus to his own acclaim in Antioch, where he was welcomed by great crowds streaming out of the city gates and lining the road for what seemed miles. Loud cheers rose into the hot desert air; flowers flew and trumpets blared. We rode first to the theater, where we met with city officials and were feted with accolades and awards. Antioch’s officials saw an excuse to expel all the Jews from the city and asked Titus to make a declaration to that effect. He refused. They demanded the Jewish special rights, such as exemption from certain sacrifices, military service, and work on the Sabbath, be abolished. He refused. Josephus would never forget the mercy Titus showed the people he had only just conquered.
But to placate the city officials, Titus directed the casting in bronze of copies of the spoils from the Temple, and of bronze cherubims and a figure of the moon with four bulls. These he had placed on the city’s gates on the road to Daphne, above the Jewish quarter. The four bulls, facing Jerusalem, were symbols of Roman might. And with Titus’ acquiescence the synagogue at Daphne was destroyed and its treasures used to finance the building of a Roman theater where it had stood. Over the entrance to the theater was to be placed the inscription: Ex Praeda Judaea, “From the Jewish Spoils.” Titus saw to it that a statue of his father was erected in the theater.
From Antioch we traveled back down to Caesarea, where we were feted with another triumph. There, in the amphitheater which Agrippa had built outside the city gates, with Agrippa�
�s daughter Berenice by his side Titus oversaw special games held on his brother Domitian’s birthday, in which more than two thousand Jewish prisoners met their deaths. As she watched her fellow countrymen die, I could see Berenice cling to Titus’ arm, for as surely as Judaism was the past, he was the future.
Titus had left Caesarea on a great campaign and returned a conquering general. Agrippa's power base, meanwhile, had been pulled out from under him, and with military governors now ruling Judea, as a Herodian he could no longer lay claim to any role in his country's future. By choosing to fight alongside Titus against his own people Agrippa had won a comfortable but impotent future. His sister Berenice chose not to go so quietly into oblivion. Though years older than him, she’d caught Titus’ eye. Having already buried his first wife and divorced Marcia Furmilla, he was the empire’s most desirable bachelor. Invited into his bed, Berenice found a place in his heart, where she settled in as his mistress while he was in Caesarea, and convinced him to take her along to Rome. I was skeptical of the relationship, and wasn’t afraid to say so. It seemed so patently clear that Berenice was manipulating Titus for her own ends. But he seemed truly fond of her, and I knew well how little I knew of affairs of the heart.
We stayed three more weeks in Caesarea, our lives filled with expensive banquets, one after another in honor of the Roman victory. Many evenings I stood, drinking-cup in hand, and watched Titus, at the height of his virility, move gracefully up the marble steps to the grand governor’s suite, the city's best rooms. Beside him, Berenice would be his shadow, and as they neared the top of the staircase she would reach out to take his hand, and the two would disappear together into the chambers above.
