Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  And yet, although his rights had been restored, Josephus soon found out that he had not quite left the firing line. To the young scholar’s mind, Vespasian’s rise may well have been proof that God was on the side of the Romans and that victory over the Jews was a foregone conclusion, but not to the mind of Titus. The new commander of Roman forces in Judaea needed Josephus’s help in facing the greatest challenge of his life.

  JERUSALEM

  In March AD 70 Titus drew up his army in front of the great walls of the Holy City. To his auxiliary forces and the fifth, tenth and fifteenth legions, Titus had now added another – the twelfth. This was the same legion that had been so disgracefully defeated by the Jews under the command of Cestius Gallus. Now the soldiers of that legion were out for revenge. Yet despite the show of massive Roman force assembling outside the city, inside it the rebel groups of John of Gischala, Simon ben Gioras and Eleazar ben Simon (leader of the Zealots) were in fighting spirits, their hopes riding high. This moment, after all, was the first time that the city had seen Roman soldiers in nearly four years. Gallus, they could tell themselves, had failed to take the city in AD 66, and since that time the Jews of Jerusalem had seen only a reluctance on the part of the Romans even to try to take it.

  In fact, many inside its walls believed that Jerusalem was impossible to besiege. The Jews had food and water to last them years, while in the hills of the deserts and woods outside it the Romans would be short of supplies. The great rock of the Temple in Jerusalem was also a natural fortress surrounded by a significant additional defensive structure: three giant walls. While the Romans delayed their attack on Jerusalem, the rebels had even improved these. Despite squandering much of their time before Titus’s arrival on factional warfare, the Jews had completed parts of the unfinished north wall, increasing it to 10 metres (35 feet) in height.

  Their final hope of victory, however, resided in the Romans’ commitment of troops. With nearly a quarter of the entire Roman army dedicated to the war in Judaea, had not Rome overextended itself? Surely enemies around its empire might take advantage of the war in Judaea? Rather than pursue a long-drawn-out conflict and expose other parts of the empire, surely the Romans would prefer to come to terms? Surely they would be forced to grant Judaea her independence? The Jews were well aware of their advantages. Now, when Titus sent Josephus to approach the walls and negotiate proposals for peace, they announced their confidence with a pithy statement of intent.

  Some of the sentry guards manning the walls knew Josephus well. When he drew too close, they addressed the hated traitor not with words, but actions. A single arrow shot through the air narrowly missed him and hit instead his old friend Nicanor in the left shoulder. To the flight of that one arrow Titus responded by pitching the Roman camps 400 metres (450 yards) from the first wall. Then, after reconnoitring the perimeter of the city, he located the weakest points in the wall that would give access to the upper city, the Antonia Fortress and the Temple complex. Next he gave orders for timber to be collected and for three siege engines to be built. Drawn up in front of the north wall, the mobile wooden towers, 21 metres (65 feet) high, were going to provide essential cover for the soldiers manning the battering rams below. So began in earnest the great siege of Jerusalem. Josephus’s detailed, eyewitness account would describe its anatomy.34

  Although the army of Simon ben Gioras had at its disposal the Roman artillery captured from Gallus’s attack, the men still did not know how to use it efficiently. As a result, the Romans were able to approach the walls in units and pound away with battering rams. Despite surprise guerrilla attacks by the Jews, the greatest of the rams, nicknamed Victor, eventually smashed a hole in the wall. The detachment of Romans poured in, fought their way through to the gates, opened them and forced the Jews to abandon the first wall. Four days later the Roman war machine had taken the second wall too. That time, however, Titus made a fatal error.

  The Roman soldiers had advanced so quickly that they had forgotten to raze a wide section of the wall they had just breached. When the Jews fought back, they trapped the charging Romans against the second wall. Seizing the advantage, the Jews began slaughtering the Roman assault force as they tried to retreat and squeeze their way back through the narrow gap in the wall. The leaders of the rebel armies, John and Simon, were elated, buoyed up by their first success and scenting a Roman massacre. But the joy soon fell from their faces. Titus quickly deployed his bowmen at either end of the street where the fighting was at its thickest. In this way he pinned the enemy back while the Romans reached safety. Simon and John cared so little for the dead Jewish civilians that they temporarily blocked up the breach in the second wall with their dead bodies. Despite this gruesome obstruction, the second wall too eventually fell to the Romans, and the armies of Simon and John retreated once more.

  Titus now paused. He knew that in order to bring siege engines against the third wall and attack the Antonia Fortress and the Temple, he needed to build huge platforms on which to stabilize them. Perhaps too, he thought, the breathing space would give the insurgents time to reflect on the Roman offer of peace and the attractions of surrender. While the soldiers gathered more timber from further and further afield and set about the vast construction work, a psychological battle between Romans and Jews now replaced the physical campaign of previous weeks. It would prove just as intense.

  Titus played his gambit. He wanted to present John and Simon with an unnerving picture of the sheer strength of the Roman war machine. In a parade that lasted four days, Titus’s army marched around the city and, in full battle dress, received their pay. Inside the city the Jews grew demoralized. The parade only reminded them of their weakness. The fact was that food rations had been badly squandered over the years. Supplies were now running out, and thousands of men, women and children were starving to death. John and Simon had an answer to Titus’s display of power: terror. The houses of the rich were ransacked for meagre supplies of corn or a loaf of bread, and Jews they suspected of wanting to leave were threatened and killed.

  In desperate search of food, some Jews secretly fled the city at night. When they were successfully captured by the Romans, Titus made an example of them: they were tortured and crucified in full view of those remaining in the city. The brutalized, battle-hardened soldiers made a cruel joke by crucifying the bodies in crude, unnatural poses.35 When the resolve of some Jews wavered at such a sight, again John and Simon responded by raising the psychological pressure. They forced the waverers to look at the crucified bodies and pretended that the grossly mutilated victims of the Romans were not prisoners but suppliants who had gone to them seeking peace. Thus did the war to win over the minds of those caught in the city intensify. Next Titus deployed his secret weapon.

  Josephus was sent in once again to circle the walls of the city, shout peace proposals to the sentry guards and appeal for their surrender. Spare your lives and those of your people; spare your country and your temple, he cried out. Was it still not clear to them that God now resided not in Judaea but in Italy? The Romans were invincible, he argued. They were masters of the whole world, and the submission of great nations to them was an ordinary experience. Now that Judaea was an established province of Rome, it was far too late to put up a fight: ‘. . .to try to shake off the yoke was to show not a love of freedom, but a morbid desire for death.’36 His appeals, however, elicited only one response: a volley of jeers, insults and stones.

  Seventeen days after the suspension of the siege, the platforms were complete. The full force of the Roman war machine was about to descend on the third wall. Surely a brilliant Roman victory was imminent? John of Gischala, however, had other ideas. During the pause in the fighting, he devised a plan and put it into action. Working day and night, he and his followers dug a tunnel beneath the ground on which the massive platforms had been raised. As they dug their way through, they supported the tunnel with wooden props. In the fierce belief that Jewish ingenuity could beat Roman power, John tirelessly drove his workfo
rce on until the area beneath one of the platforms had been fully excavated. He then daubed piles of kindling wood with pitch and bitumen, brought them into the tunnel, set the whole place alight and fled.

  As the fire burnt the wood props, the ground suddenly gave way. The enormous Roman platform, as well as the men and the engines stationed on it, came thunderously crashing down, and with it weeks of Roman exertion. Inspired by John’s example, Simon now led a fanatical assault on the other platforms. Seizing firebrands, the vanguard of Jews ‘dashed out as if towards friends, not massed enemies’ and tried to set fire to the other engines and the battering rams. When the Romans rushed to rescue their precious platforms and put out the fire, more and more Jews ignored any thoughts of their own safety, threw themselves into the fight and sacrificed their lives to keep the flames burning.37

  When the damage had been assessed, the Romans were plunged into despondency. Titus knew that the slower his progress in the war, the less glorious the victory. Reputations were won by speed as well as success. Under pressure, he held a war council. When some called for an all-out assault and deployment of the full might of the Roman troops, he refused. However, rebuilding the platforms was not an option either. The scarcity of timber in the region required a round trip of 16 kilometres (10 miles) and it was impossible to prevent Jewish guerrilla attacks. It was time to adopt a different tactic – one that combined the safety of his men with speed: to starve the Jews into surrendering their city.

  With an ambition that epitomizes the Romans’ command of the ancient world, Titus instructed his officers to organize the building of a wall around Jerusalem. It was to be an airtight seal that would prevent anyone from leaving the city and foraging for supplies. The statistics of it are staggering: in three days the Roman legions built a wall 7 kilometres (4¼ miles) in circumference and punctuated it with thirteen forts. Little tasks, said Titus, were beneath the dignity of Rome. For excellence and speed in executing this gargantuan task, legion competed with legion, cohort with cohort. As Titus inspected the work on horseback, he observed how ‘the private was eager to please his decurion, the decurion his centurion, the centurion his tribune; the tribunes were ambitious for the praise of the generals; and of the rivalry between the generals, Titus himself was judge.’38 The plan was that when the siege had sufficiently weakened Jewish resistance, only then would the platforms be rebuilt and the assault reignited. According to Josephus’s gruesome account, it was not long before the Roman general reaped his grim rewards.

  Starvation was said to have driven a woman to eat her baby, the streets of Jerusalem filled with the dead, and the roofs of houses in view of the Romans were covered with the bodies of men and women too weak even to stand. When the Romans taunted the Jews with displays of food, Simon’s and John’s determination to fight on became so entrenched that they alienated some of their closest subordinates. When a tower commander named Judas gathered ten people and shouted out to the Romans that they wanted to desert en masse, Simon broke into the tower before they could make their move and executed them. Other Jews, pretending to advance for battle, successfully escaped in their hundreds and handed themselves over to the Romans, only to discover that food was more lethal than the hunger they had left behind. Instead of eating little by little and allowing their bodies to grow accustomed to food again, they ate non-stop and thus killed themselves.

  Among the people caught up in the horror of the siege were two whom Josephus was most anxious about: his mother and father. He had learnt that they were alive but imprisoned. Perhaps it was out of fear for their lives that Josephus approached the walls and made another plea for the Jews to surrender. This time the rebels hit their target. Josephus was struck on the head by a missile and knocked unconscious. A race to collect the body of the Jews’ most wanted man ensued. The Romans reached it first and rescued their negotiator.

  It took twenty-one days for timber to be gathered again and the platforms to be rebuilt. The surrounding countryside reflected the bleak, grinding work: all about were dusty tracts, grassy desert and the sad stumps of dead trees. While the Romans were sapped of all energy by their toils, the armies of John and Simon drew on inhuman reserves of determination. They seemed to rise like ghosts, thriving on famine, fatigue and infighting, only to launch yet another assault and disrupt the Roman preparations. Although these guerrilla sorties often failed, the fact that they persisted gave the Jews a moral victory.

  Soon the Romans were once again pounding at the last wall. Protected from the deluge of missiles, stones and arrows by their shields, the workers ground away with rams, hands and crowbars to lever loose the foundation stones of the wall and cut a breach through it. Eventually, it was not Roman grit that provided the breakthrough, but the tunnel dug by John. While it had once allowed the Jews to destroy the platforms, now it yielded an advantage to Romans: the tunnel fell in and the wall suddenly collapsed in a heap of giant stones. Titus ordered his strongest legionaries to take immediate advantage of this. At two o’clock in the morning an advance unit of Romans charged into the disused tunnel and collided with the armies of John and Simon waiting for them. In the close quarters the Romans jabbed mechanically with their short swords, hardly able to tell Roman from Jew and the direction of advance from retreat. Bodies were crushed underfoot and the noise of groaning and screaming filled the confined, fetid space. Eventually, however, the Roman infantry bloodily pummelled their way through, forcing the Jews to retreat to the holiest part of the city, the Temple complex.

  Titus had already taken control of the Antonia Fortress that buttressed the colonnade of the Temple complex. He now ordered it to be razed to the ground: a wide, level access would make the driving ascent of four Roman legions much easier. Before he gave the signal, however, Titus had a final offer to make to the rebels. He turned once again to Josephus, who took his stand in full view of the Jews protected by the Temple enclosure and, speaking in Aramaic, addressed John. Surrender, spare the people and the city, he said, and Rome would still pardon him. This was his last chance. If he persisted in fighting and desecrating the Temple, God would punish him. John launched a torrent of abuse at the turncoat Josephus. Stung, the young priest and scholar gave up. Choking with emotion, he shouted, ‘It is God then, God Himself who is bringing with the Romans fire to purge the Temple and is blotting out the city brimful of corruption as if it had never been.’39 With those words, a monster was unleashed.

  The Temple complex was the most well-built part of the city. After six days of battering the walls of its outer court, not a dent had been made. Eventually, the silver gates were set on fire, and as the metal melted, the Romans set fire to the colonnade bit by bit and broke in. As the massive assault drew closer to the inner court and the sanctuary, a heated debate took place between Titus and his officers: what should be done about the Temple itself? Some said that it should be destroyed. If it remained standing, there would never be peace in the Roman province of Judaea. The Temple would remain a symbol around which Jews throughout the world would rally. Others disagreed. It should be spared, they said, but only so long as the Jews did not try to defend themselves in it. If that happened, it would cease to be a holy place and become a military fortress. Titus heard all their opinions, but it was perhaps Josephus who influenced his eventual decision. The commander declared the Temple a precious work of art. In saving it, said Titus, he would bequeath a glorious ornament to the emperor and the Roman people.40

  In mid-July AD 70, over three months since the start of Titus’s campaign, the battle for the outer court of the Temple raged on. The heavy infantry lines of both Roman and Jewish armies were drawn up and warred with each other under a barrage of spears, arrows and missiles of every kind. Gradually the Roman lines, eight ranks deep, advanced and drove the Jews into the inner court. When, after some days, the Jewish army formations broke down and dispersed, the Romans broke through to the inner court. At that moment the battle boiled over and the legionaries cut loose. After the best part of four long, grue
lling years of campaign, the Roman soldiers vented their wild hatred on the enemy. Piling through all the entrances, they no longer distinguished between Jewish soldier and civilian. All were indiscriminately slaughtered. The steps of the Temple were awash with blood. In front of them and near the Holy Altar corpses were piled high, those on the top sometimes slithering to the bottom. The din of butchery, however, was about to get a lot worse.

  In the chaos a Roman soldier seized a firebrand and threw it through a small opening into the Temple. Soon the building was on fire. A messenger reported the news to Titus. The general leapt up and, with his guard panting after him, dashed towards the sanctuary. Once inside, he saw that the fire could be stopped. He screamed at the soldiers to put it out, but no one paid him any attention. They were too consumed with greed, with getting their just deserts. The slaughter of Jews had given way to mass looting. Darting through the blazing fires, soldiers raided the treasures of the Temple and carried off whatever they could get their hands on. Ancient cups and basins of pure gold, curtains and bejewelled garments, and, most precious of all, the holy seven-branched candelabrum, the shewbread table and the ritual trumpets all fell into the polluted hands of the Roman soldiers. The most sanctified part of the Temple, the iconic epicentre of the Jewish faith, was cleaned out and left to burn.

  Plundering was not confined to the Temple alone. In part of the outer court colonnade stood the treasury where the Jews had brought all their gold and precious possessions for safekeeping during the siege. The Romans now stripped that too before setting it on fire. Coincidentally, a huge crowd of 6000 civilian men, women and children had gathered there in the belief that they would find signs of deliverance from God. According to Josephus, the false prophets who had spread the word were the hired hands of John and Simon; the rebel leaders had told them to issue this prophecy because they wanted to prevent further desertions and thus shore up morale during the battle for the Temple. All the civilians were now helplessly caught up in the flames and met their deaths.