Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea

by Seward, Desmond

  Ironically, Nero had developed a deep dislike for Vespasian, who in any case was hardly a kindred spirit. After falling asleep while the emperor was singing, he had very nearly been executed because of his lack of appreciation. Suetonius tells us that on the day after the concert he was refused admission to the imperial presence and banished from court. He was more or less in hiding at an out-of-the way town in Achaia, fearing the worst, when messengers came to offer him the governorship of Syria with command of an army.4 Having been on the retired list for some years, the offer must have come as a surprise, but he accepted with alacrity.

  Crossing the Dardanelles, Vespasian went as quickly as possible to Antioch where he took over command of the Fifth Legion and the Tenth Legion (Macedonica and Fretensis) from Cestius Gallus, whom he replaced as legate of Syria. He had sent his son Titus to Egypt, to bring the Fifteenth Legion (Apollinaris) from Alexandria, while he was reinforced by auxiliary troops from client states, including the whole of King Agrippa II’s little army. Eventually, he assembled a force numbering over 45,000 men—Josephus says it was 60,000—the best being twenty-three cohorts of legionaries and six squadrons of regular cavalry. This was more than had been used in the recent conquest of Britain. It was an indication of how seriously Rome was taking the Jewish threat. According to Suetonius, Vespasian overhauled the discipline of every single unit.

  The Jews did not wait for the new Roman general to arrive but decided to attack the Greek city of Ashkelon on the coast, which was garrisoned by only a single cohort and a squadron of cavalry—less than a thousand soldiers. Still elated by Cestius’s defeat, “like people blown into flame by good fortune,” a large, overconfident army led by Niger the Peraite, Silas of Babylon, and John the Essene marched out from the capital. 5 But while their objective was inadequately garrisoned, they forgot that it had strong fortifications and possessed an exceptionally resourceful commander, Antonius.

  When the Jews reached Ashkelon, they rushed headlong at the city, but instead of sheltering behind its walls, Antonius drew up his horsemen outside. Then he charged. Undisciplined, badly armed, and on foot, the Jews did not stand a chance. Many ran, to be pursued and slaughtered. Others fought bravely until evening, suffering 10,000 casualties, which included two of their leaders. The Romans lost only a few men. Undiscouraged by the sight of so many comrades lying dead on the battlefield, the Jews made another attack the next day, led by Niger the Peraite, but were cut to pieces. Niger and some of his troops took refuge in a tower at a village called Belzedek, which the Romans promptly fired. They thought they had succeeded in killing Niger, but he jumped down through the flames and hid in a cave, emerging three days later when his men were tearfully searching for his corpse. His miraculous survival delighted the Jews, who felt proud to have such a commander. But it was the last time they attacked a Roman garrison.

  Vespasian marched out from Antioch with his army, along the sea road down to Tyre and then to Ptolemais where he went into winter quarters. He installed a garrison at Sepphoris, under the tribune Placidus, a thousand horse and 6,000 infantry camped on the plain outside the city. An unrealistic attempt by Josephus to recapture his capital failed; not only did he have too few troops, but the Sepphorians did not want him back. Although it was not the campaigning season the Roman cavalry raided far and wide throughout the winter of 66-67 CE, burning crops and villages, driving off cattle, sending the wretched ’am ha-arez off to the slave markets. “Everywhere, Galilee was filled with fire and blood,” we are told in The Jewish War. “The only refuge for the inhabitants being hunted for their lives was inside the cities that Josephus had fortified.”6

  For the moment, people felt safe behind city walls. Realizing this, Placidus decided to storm Jotapata, the strongest of the cities, which was only a few miles from Sepphoris, hoping its capture might frighten the others into surrendering. However, learning that he was on his way, its citizens ambushed his troops and routed them with a hail of javelins—although the Romans withdrew in such good order that they lost only seven men.

  Bringing the Fifteenth Legion with him, Titus joined his father at Ptolemais where they wintered together, training their army in siege warfare. Vespasian’s experience of besieging and storming hilltop forts in Britain was going to be useful, even if Galilean mountain towns would prove tougher nuts to crack. By the spring of 67 the Romans were ready. In The Jewish War, Josephus gives us a picture of their army as it marched out from Ptolemais to conquer Galilee:Lightly armed native horse and bowmen rode in front, guarding against sudden assaults by the enemy and always ready to search any suspicious looking thickets that might conceal an ambush. After them, wearing full armor, came a force of horse and foot, then ten men from each century carrying camping equipment besides their own, then pioneers with tools for leveling road surfaces or clearing a way through woods, to save the troops from being worn out by marching. Then followed the general’s carriage and those of other senior officers, along with a strong cavalry escort. He himself came next, marching at the head of a picked body of horse and foot soldiers, with a troop of pikemen. Then came the legions’ special cavalry, each legion having a hundred and twenty horsemen of its own. Next, the mules with the siege engines and other heavy weaponry. After these marched the senior officers, commanders of cohorts and tribunes, with an escort of crack troops.

  Then came the eagles, those standards which are borne at the head of every Roman legion, since they consider the eagle to be the king of birds and the strongest, a symbol of victory and an omen they will always win, whatever the odds against them. These sacred battle emblems were followed by the trumpeters, and in their train marched the main army in cohorts, six infantrymen abreast, with a centurion to see they kept in step. Camp servants followed the infantry, leading the pack animals which carried the legionaries’ baggage. A vast host of mercenaries came after the Roman soldiers, followed by a rearguard composed of heavy and light infantry with a large body of horse.7

  Vespasian knew all about psychological warfare; he restrained his men from attacking while he prepared to overwhelm the cities of Galilee. He guessed that the spectacle of such a huge, well-equipped army would deter them from fighting, and he was right. Josephus admits that mere rumors of the approach of this gigantic war machine, as it clanked along at a carefully regulated pace toward his own makeshift army, in camp at Garis, four kilometers from Sepphoris, were enough to rout the Galileans. The men he had taken such pains to train bolted before the enemy came in sight. Devastated by their desertion, he decided the war was already lost and, with the few troops who remained at his side, took refuge in Tiberias.

  Vespasian’s reconquest of Galilee started with Gadara, which he found almost without defenders. Storming the little city at the point of the sword, he slaughtered not just the young men but the old, with all its women and children. Besides burning down the city, he methodically put to the torch every small town and village in the area, killing anyone who was foolish enough to stay within reach.

  The people of Tiberias were panic-stricken when Josephus arrived, suspecting that their once confident governor would never have run away had he not been convinced the war was lost. They were quite right. He knew exactly what was going to happen, and that the only chance was to try and make peace. However, he insists he would have died many times over rather than dishonor his post as army commander by reaching a cowardly understanding with its enemies against the wishes of his government. Instead, he sent a full report to the leaders at Jerusalem by fast messenger, in the hope that it might persuade them to negotiate without delay.

  One need not believe the claim he made years later that he always felt sure the Romans would give him a pardon. In those days, it was more likely that they would crucify him, and he must have been living in fear, desperately trying to find a means of changing sides. He cannot have had much confidence in the Tiberians, who had given him such trouble, but he knew of another Galilean city on an almost impregnable site with very strong fortifications, where he mi
ght be safe. It was so formidable that Vespasian had made a point of besieging it after demolishing Gadara. Quietly abandoning Tiberias to its fate, in May 67 Josephus slipped into the hill city of Jotapata, just after the Roman army had pitched camp nearby. He informs us, in his selfless way, that he did so “to raise the drooping spirits of the Jews,” but his real motive was almost certainly that he thought it stood a better chance than Tiberias of surviving a siege. However, he was going to find that he was caught in the city like a rat—albeit a resourceful, smooth-talking rat—in a trap from which there was no possibility of escape.

  8

  The Siege of Jotapata

  “In the morning thou shalt say ‘Would God it were even!’ and at even thou shalt say, ‘Would God it were morning!’”

  DEUTERONOMY, XXVIII, 67

  JOTAPATA WAS CERTAINLY the safest place in Galilee, hidden away in the mountains and practically invisible until you reached it. Perched around a precipice, guarded on three sides by ravines so deep that the bottom was out of sight, it could be attacked only from the north, where the lower part of the city sloped down the mountain and then up to a slight ridge. At this strategic point, another wall had recently been built, on Josephus’s instructions, to defend the ridge. The approach road through the hills was scarcely better than a goat track, just about adequate for men on foot but not for horses or even for mules, and the little mountain city must have seemed impregnable to those who had never encountered Roman sappers. Its one grave weakness was the lack of a spring inside its walls so that it depended for water on rain stored in its cisterns.

  Our sole source for the siege of Jotapata is what Josephus cares to tell us in The Jewish War, since he does not make any mention of it in the Vita, and no other history of the period contains any reference to Jotapata. It has to be remembered, too, that as always he was writing some years later, with two very different audiences in mind: the Romans whom he had joined during the war and the Jews whom he had abandoned. In addition, he was trying to portray his behavior in the best light possible, as that of a heroic commander fighting against impossible odds.

  Whether he liked it or not, he was in command and had to fight the Romans. If he attempted to escape, the Jotapatans would try to kill him, and even if he succeeded he stood a fair chance of being caught by enemy patrols who would give him short shrift. In The Jewish War he portrays himself as the gallant and determined leader, the strategos (general) who was always resourceful, always undismayed. In reality, during the forthcoming siege he became increasingly desperate to negotiate but was never given the opportunity.

  Yet even if some of his account in The Jewish War is obviously distorted, most of it is plausible enough and carries conviction, in particular when he is not describing his own actions. There is another reason to believe that the broad outline of the siege is correct: when Josephus was writing his history, he knew that it was going to be closely read by the man who had been the commander of the Roman army in the siege. This was the eagle-eyed Vespasian, who lent him his notebooks of the Palestinian campaign. A substantial number of details, especially those concerning the Roman army—such as troop numbers and the names of the enemy commanders—can only have come from Vespasian’s notebooks.

  Jotapata’s strength made it a priority for Vespasian. If he succeeded in taking the place, no other Galilean stronghold could think itself impregnable. Moreover, he knew that large numbers of fanatical Jews were in the city. When a deserter told him the governor of Galilee was there as well, he was delighted and thought it divine providence. “The man whom he considered his cleverest opponent had shut himself up in a self-appointed prison,” Josephus modestly records.1 The Roman general’s first move was to send Placidus and the decurion Ebutius, “an exceptionally brave and resourceful officer,” with a thousand men to surround the city and ensure that the governor did not escape. “He thought he would be able to capture all Judea if only he could get hold of Josephus,” says The Jewish War.2 This sounds like boasting, yet it may be true since he knew that Vespasian was going to read the account.

  On 21 May, a few hours before Josephus reached Jotapata, Vespasian had arrived there with his entire army. He chose a small hill about three-quarters of a mile north as the site of his camp so that it was within full view of the defenders, whom, he hoped, would be terrified by the sheer number of besiegers. His first action was to fence the city off with a double line of infantry and another of cavalry, preventing anyone from getting in or out.

  Next day, the Romans launched a full-scale assault. Some of the Jews tried to stop the attackers before they reached the walls, but Vespasian engaged them at long range with archers and slingers while he led his infantry up a slope to where the walls were easiest to climb. Realizing the danger, Josephus rushed out with his entire garrison and drove the legionaries back from the walls. The fighting went on all day, the defenders losing seventeen dead and six hundred wounded, while thirteen Romans were killed and many more wounded. The Jews were so encouraged that the next morning they again sallied out and attacked the enemy. Sorties and savage hand-to-hand fighting continued for five days, with many losses on both sides. When a lull at last ensued, the Romans had inflicted such heavy casualties that the Jews began to lose heart.

  Even so, the Jews had fought effectively enough for Vespasian to realize that their city’s walls were a much more serious obstacle than he had appreciated. After consulting his senior officers, he ordered the construction of a siege platform next to the section of the wall that looked the weakest. His troops set about cutting down every tree on the neighboring mountains and gathering big stones and sacks of earth. Layers of wooden hurdles protected them from the javelins and rocks that rained down as they built the platform.

  At the same time, the Roman siege artillery, a hundred and sixty “scorpions,” fired nonstop at the walls, together with the catapultae and the stone projectors. There seem to have been two types of scorpion—a big, repeating crossbow, and a smaller, portable version of the catapulta. Mounted on carts, catapultae had multiple strings of twisted catgut and shot armor-piercing bolts or stone balls at very high velocity. Stone projectors (onagers) were huge mechanical slings that hurled boulders, barrels of stones, or firebrands in bundles. This artillery was so effective that some defenders were too frightened to go up on to the ramparts. Nevertheless, some particularly gallant Jews made sorties again and again, pulling off the hides, killing the sappers beneath them, and knocking down the platform.

  In response, Josephus built up the wall opposite the platform until it was thirty feet higher, using shelters covered in the hides of newly slaughtered oxen to protect his workmen against missiles. The moist skins gave but did not split when hit and were more or less fireproof. He also added wooden towers along the wall together with a new parapet. The Romans were taken aback by these measures, while the Jews took fresh heart and stepped up their sorties at night, raiding and burning the siege-works.

  Irritated at the siege’s slow progress and impressed by the defenders’ pugnacity, Vespasian decided to starve Jotapata into submission, so he pulled back his troops while continuing the blockade. The city had all the food it needed, but not enough rain fell to replenish the cisterns, and water had to be rationed. However, when Josephus saw that the Romans suspected the inhabitants were suffering from thirst, he made them hang heavy garments from the walls, dripping with water. Vespasian was so discouraged that he resumed his daily assaults on the walls.

  Despite a close blockade, for a time Josephus was able to communicate with the outside world and obtain at least some of the supplies that he needed. There was a narrow gully, so nearly impassable that the Romans did not bother to guard it, down which he sent couriers disguised by sheepskins on their backs. But eventually this stratagem was discovered, and the city became completely cut off.

  What is fascinating about Josephus is how he sometimes lets us see into his mind, in a way that is almost akin to honesty. As he admits, he had gone to Jotapata for his own sa
fety, but now he began to lose his nerve. “Realizing the city could not hold out much longer and that his life might be in danger were he to stay, Josephus made plans to escape with the local notables,” he blandly informs us.3 He had no qualms about leaving its people to be butchered. Hearing rumors of his plans, a large mob gathered and begged him not to abandon them. “It was wrong for him to run away and desert his friends, to jump from a ship sinking in a storm, in which he had embarked when everything was calm,” they cried. “By leaving, he would destroy the city—nobody would dare go on fighting the enemy if they lost their one reason for confidence.”4

  Without mentioning that he was worried about his own safety, Josephus replied that he was leaving the city for their sake. If he stayed, he could not do them any good even if they survived, while should the place be stormed he would be killed pointlessly. If he got away from the siege, however, he would be able to do a lot to help, since he could raise a new Galilean army, a huge one, and draw off the Romans by attacking elsewhere. But he really did not see how he could aid the people of Jotapata simply by staying put. It would only make the Romans intensify the siege because what they wanted more than anything else was to capture him.5