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“And many nations shall pass by this city, and they shall say every man to his neighbor, ‘Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this great city?’”
JEREMIAH, XXII, 8
IN FORMER TIMES the prophets had exulted over the fall of Niniveh and Babylon, but now it was Jerusalem’s turn. There was no need for the Romans to mount a full-scale assault on the Temple. They simply overran the entire compound, the defenders being by now too demoralized by the fate of the Sanctuary to put up a proper fight. No pity was shown to children or the old, no distinction made between rich and poor, between those begging for mercy and those with swords. The Jews’ throats were cut wherever they were caught. The din was ear-splitting—clashing weapons, war cries, women screaming, the groans of the dying. Even those expiring from hunger found strength to bewail the Holy of Holies. Whipped up by heat from the flames, the clamor echoed from the surrounding hills.
“The suffering was still more terrible than the noise,” recalls Josephus who had watched it. “You would have thought the hill on which the Temple stood was boiling from the bottom upwards, that everywhere was a mass of flames, that there lay a sea of blood deeper than the fire, that there were more killed than killers. You could not see a single piece of ground anywhere because it was so thickly covered with bodies, forcing the soldiers to climb over them in order to reach further victims.”1
In the end, a large number of the Zealots in the Temple broke through the Romans, forcing a way out of the inner court into the outer and from there into the city. Most of the noncombatants in the precincts stayed behind, however, climbing up onto the outer colonnade, which was twelve feet wide, some priests among them tearing railings from the Sanctuary to hurl down at their enemies.
As the Sanctuary had been destroyed, the legionaries could see little point in preserving the Temple’s other buildings so they torched the lot, including what was left of the colonnades and the gates. They lit fires beneath the terrified people cowering on top of the outer colonnade, mainly women and children, many of whom jumped to their deaths to escape the flames; Josephus says that about 6,000 perished in this way. They had taken refuge here because earlier in the day yet another so-called prophet had told them, “Go up onto the Temple where you will receive a sign of your deliverance.”2
The troops also burned down the Temple’s treasure chambers after plundering them. These had been used as strong rooms by Jerusalem’s richer citizens, and they contained immense amounts of coin, gold and silver plate, jewelry, robes, and other valuables, together with goods stolen from the houses of murdered magnates. According to The Jewish War, the plunder taken in the city by the Romans was so great that its sale halved the price of gold throughout Syria.3 Later, they would systematically raze the entire precincts of the Temple above foundation level.
“A large number of false prophets had been hired by the tyrants to delude the people, by telling them to wait for help from God, so that there would be less desertions, and that those who could not be frightened or controlled would respond to hope instead,” says Josephus.4 Yet it is more than likely that Simon and John had themselves believed fervently in “these impostors and pretended messengers of heaven.”5
The Jewish War castigates such prophets for not heeding the “obvious portents that had foreshadowed the coming desolation.”6 It lists a sword-shaped star hanging over Jerusalem, a comet staying in the sky above for a whole year, a light hovering around the Holy of Holies, a sacrificial cow giving birth to a lamb in the Temple, and a bronze door into the Sanctuary that took normally twenty men to open doing so of its own accord, besides chariots and an armed host in the sky that encircled the city on a day in May 66—“a phenomenon so amazing as to stagger belief.” One night before an important feast the priests had gone into the inner court of the Temple to make their customary preparations, when they felt the ground moving and heard a ringing noise, and then the sound of many voices that seemed to cry, “Let us go hence.” (Tacitus repeats this story, perhaps told to him by someone who had read The Jewish War, a book that was not among his sources.)
Josephus also tells of an illiterate peasant farmer and holy man, Jesus ben Ananus, who had stood outside the Temple crying, “A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the Sanctuary, a voice against bride and bride-groom, a voice against the people!” Everyday he went through the streets of Jerusalem shouting this message. People grew so angry that they had him arrested and whipped, but he went on. Believing he was under some demonic influence, they dragged him before the procurator Albinus. Scourged until the bones showed, the man neither wept nor begged for mercy, but whispered at every stroke, “Woe! Woe unto Jerusalem!” The procurator demanded that he explain who he was and what he meant, but he did not answer, only continuing his lament. Albinus decided he was a lunatic and let him go. When the war broke out, Jesus went on crying his lament every day, speaking to no one. He never cursed anybody who hit him, never thanked anybody who fed him, his only reply being, “Woe! Woe unto Jerusalem.” When the siege intensified, he changed his cry to, “Woe! Woe once more to the city, to the people and to the Sanctuary!” When he added to his litany the words, “Woe! Woe to myself as well,” he was killed by a stone from a ballista.7
Another of the portents that Josephus describes must have been highly satisfactory to his Roman patrons. He explains that one reason why the Jews went to war so eagerly in 66 CE was an ambiguous prophecy in their sacred writings, which predicted that at about this time someone from their country was going to become ruler of the entire world. Many Jewish scholars thought it applied to their own race, but obviously the prophecy had referred to Vespasian.
Now, the triumphant Romans carried their eagles into the Temple, placing them opposite the east gate. Then they sacrificed to them, cheering Titus, whom they hailed as “Imperator!” “Victorious General!”
A few priests still held out on top of what was left of the walls of the Sanctuary, without food or water. After four days they were forced to come down by hunger and were taken into Titus’s presence. When they begged him to spare their lives, he told them that the time for pardon was over and that since the one thing that might have given him a reason for sparing them had been destroyed, it was fitting they should die with their Temple. Then he gave orders for their execution. This seems out of keeping with his usual clemency toward upper-class Jews, but Josephus may have explained to him that, far from being members of the nobility, these were men from the ranks of the lower clergy. As such, they are likely to have been committed Zealots.
Now that they had been defeated and were completely surrounded, Simon bar Giora and John of Gischala tried to make terms. Accordingly, Titus went to a place at the west of the outer Temple, where a bridge joined the Temple to the Upper City. The Zealot leaders stood at the far end of the bridge, on the other side of the Tyropoeon Valley, surrounded by their followers, hoping against hope for a pardon. Titus had some difficulty in making his troops restrain their anger and keep their swords in their scabbards, and only did so by issuing the strictest orders. His interpreter was almost certainly Josephus, who must have relished the abasement of the two men he hated most in the world.
Titus spoke first.
So, are you at last satisfied with your country’s misery? You never bothered to think about how strong we were or your own weakness, but through your reckless impetuosity and madness you’ve destroyed your people, your city and your Holy House. Because of it, you’re going to die as you deserve! Your nation had never stopped rebelling against the Romans since the time Pompey’s troops crushed you, until you finally declared open war. Was it because you were so confident about your numbers? Well, only a tiny part of the Roman army has been more than able to cope with you. Or was it because you thought you might have allies, although what nation outside our empire prefers Jews to Romans? Did you rely on your physical strength, despite our having made slaves of the Germans, or on the thickness of your walls? No walls can be more of an obstacle than an ocean, yet the Britons have had to surrender to the Roman army! Or were you intoxicated by your leaders’ determination and cleverness? Yet you must have heard how we defeated even the Carthaginians.8
Titus’s speech contains some very interesting information. The reference to “allies” is highly significant, since it reveals that the Romans had been more worried than they liked to admit about the possibility that Parthia might join the Zealots’ side, especially during Rome’s recent civil wars. The comparison of the Jews’ physique with that of the Germans shows that they must have been a big and well-built race, because we know that contemporaries always thought of the Teutons as giants.
He went on to rebuke the Jews for turning against the Romans after they had treated them with so much kindness, allowing them to observe the laws of their fathers and levy taxes for their God. However, they were untamable reptiles, biting the hand that fed them. His father had come to Judea not to punish but to caution them, but they had despised his benevolence as weakness. He accused them of taking advantage of the Roman civil war and sending embassies to fellow Jews on the other side of the Euphrates, implying that the envoys had not merely asked them to come and fight but tried to persuade the Parthians to send an army.
He claimed he had been exceptionally merciful and had tried to make peace every time he won a victory, that he had begged them to save the Sanctuary, their Holy House, that he had invited them to leave Jerusalem with permission to resume the war elsewhere. They had spurned every one of his offers. They themselves had set fire to the Sanctuary “with their own hands,” insisted Titus, a charge he must have known was untrue. The fact that he made it reveals his sensitivity on the subject, besides showing that he genuinely regretted the destruction of the Holy of Holies; he may even have felt a certain guilt.
After all this, you miserable men, you actually invite me to a conference! What is the point when you’ve destroyed your Sanctuary? Why do you hope to survive your Temple when it lies in ruins? Yet here you are, in your armor, unable to bring yourselves to beg for mercy when you’re at your last gasp. You abominable animals, what makes you so deluded? Aren’t your people dead? Haven’t you lost your Holy House? Isn’t your city in my power? Aren’t your lives in my hands? And yet you still believe it’s glorious to fight to the death? But there is no reason for me to share your madness. Throw down your weapons and surrender unconditionally, and I will let you keep your lives. I shall act like the master of a household with a name for kindness, punishing the real sinners among you and sparing the rest of you for my own uses.9
Intoxicated by his victory, Titus was scarcely magnanimous. Yet Josephus could see nothing wrong with his harangue, since he includes it in The Jewish War. Never a forgiving man, he himself plainly felt the same way, and no doubt he inserted a few extra insults while interpreting Titus’s words.
The Zealots replied that they could not accept Titus’s demand for surrender because they had all taken an oath that they would never surrender under any circumstances, however desperate. Instead, they asked to be allowed to go out through the wooden wall into the desert, taking their women and children with them, and leaving the city to him. They must have known that their request was bound to be refused by a people so merciless as the Romans, but despite their hopeless situation, they had not lost their dignity.
Enraged that men whom by now he regarded as no better than prisoners of war should dare to try and make terms with him, Titus had a proclamation read out. The gist of it was that deserters would no longer find a welcome among the Romans, since he had no intention of sparing anybody but was preparing to attack them all with his entire army. Would-be refugees must fend for themselves as best they could, since from now on he was going to treat everyone according to the rules of war, without any exceptions. His troops would receive orders to burn down and plunder what was left of Jerusalem.
The next morning the legionaries overran the whole of the Lower City. They set fire to the building that housed the magistrates and the archives, to the council chamber in the part known as Acra where the Sanhedrin had met, and to the area called Ophel. Soon the blaze spread to the palace of the late Queen Helena of Adiabene, which was in the center of Acra. The streets went up in flames as well, destroying many houses that were full of dead bodies, filling the air with the smell of burning human flesh.
On the day their grandmother’s palace was burned down, the sons of King Azates of Adiabene and their uncles, who had been fighting with the fury of converts at the side of the Zealots, came with a group of leading citizens to beseech Titus to give them his protection. Despite his proclamation and although very angry, he spared their lives. All were kept under guard, however, and the king’s sons and kinsmen were put in chains and later taken as hostages to Rome, to ensure their countrymen’s loyalty.
In the Upper City the Zealots used the Royal Palace as a last-ditch bastion because it was so strongly built and because a considerable number of rich citizens had stored their valuables in it. They drove out the Roman troops who had occupied it and then murdered “8,400” people who had taken refuge inside, besides looting the place. (The figure that Josephus gives for those killed looks like yet another of his exaggerations.)
The Jews captured a legionary and a Roman cavalryman, cutting the legionary’s throat and then dragging his body through the streets, kicking and cursing it. However, the cavalryman said he had a wonderful idea that might save the defenders’ lives, so they took him to Simon, who quickly discovered he was lying and handed him over for execution to Ardalas, one of his officers. Intending to cut off his head, Ardalas blindfolded the man and took him in front of the Romans, but while he was drawing his sword, the trooper broke free and ran, reaching his comrades in safety. Titus had him stripped of his weapons and dismissed from his legion, however, saying that it was a disgrace for a Roman soldier to let himself be taken prisoner. Josephus, who after months on the staff had absorbed the army’s harsh ethos, comments that being expelled from a legion was worse than death for a man with self-respect.
Meanwhile, the Romans methodically drove the Zealots out of the Lower City, which they torched all the way down to the Pool of Siloam. They were delighted to see it go up in flames, but very disappointed at finding such a small amount of loot, since everything of value had been moved into the Upper City. Here, the defenders put on a brave face, declaring bravely if unconvincingly that they were overjoyed by the sight of so many buildings burning, since it showed how little would be left standing for their enemies.
Josephus tells us that even now he did not stop begging the Zealots to surrender and save what was left of Jerusalem. While he could not stop himself from reminding them of how savage and impious he thought they had been, he suggested that they might save their lives, but his advice was greeted with contempt. Although they could no longer fight the Romans on equal terms, they kept their oath never to surrender. Some of them were no less active than the enemy in setting buildings alight. Others hid among the ruins on the edge of the city, killing any deserters they could catch, for people were still trying to go over to the Romans, regardless of Titus’s announcement that they would no longer be welcome. Fugitives too weak from hunger to run were butchered on the spot, their bodies thrown to the dogs.
One reason why Zealots in the Upper City went on fighting for so long was a belief that they would be able to escape through the labyrinth of caves beneath them. Anybody not a Zealot who fled into the sewers was killed and robbed; if he had food, they snatched it from him and devoured it, although covered with blood. They were on the point of eating dead bodies, says Josephus who takes a horrid pleasure in recording these last minute agonies. As he saw it, such uncleanliness meant that they could not possibly be true Jews.
On its hilltop, behind massive walls that were reinforced by a very steep ascent, the Upper City was a formidable fortress in itself. The place could only be captured by a full-scale siege operation, for which Titus gave orders on 20 August. Once again, the troops had to build ramps equipped with assault platforms. The legionaries built mounds on the western side opposite the Royal Palace, while auxiliaries and allied troops erected other ramps on the eastern side near the gymnasium and where Simon had built his tower.
The Idumeans realized that the situation was beyond hope and sent five men through the lines to Titus to see if he would give them terms. After some hesitation, knowing that they were among the toughest elements in the Zealot army and hoping that their defection might force Simon and John to surrender, he sent the five back to say he was ready to guarantee their lives and their freedom. As they were preparing to go over, Simon learned what was happening and executed the messengers, placing the Idumean leaders under arrest. Deprived of their officers, their men did not know what to do and stayed put. Simon watched them closely, placing guards on the ramparts; at this desperate moment he could not afford to lose such good troops.
But Zealot efforts to prevent further desertion proved unavailing. Although many people were killed when trying to escape, an even larger number got away. Ignoring his own proclamation, Titus spared their lives. Male citizens were kept as captives, while their women and children were sold as slaves, although they fetched a very low price since there was a glut of slaves from the city. The Jewish War says that during the siege an “incalculable” number of deserters had been packed off to the slave markets, yet it also tells us that even at this late stage 40,000 citizens were given their lives and allowed to go wherever they liked in Judea.10 This was after they had been examined by specially appointed officers to make sure they were not Zealots, an operation perhaps organized by Josephus.
During the last phase of the siege a priest named Jesus ben Thebuthi obtained a pardon from Titus on the condition that he hand over the Temple’s treasures. From a hiding place in a wall of the Sanctuary, he produced two seven-branch gold candlesticks similar to those that had lit the shrine, as well as golden tables, basins, and cups, and the high priest’s jewel-studded vestments. The keeper of the Temple treasury, whose name was Phineas, also cooperated, leading his captors to where the priests’ tunics and girdles were concealed, together with a stock of priceless purple and scarlet cloth for repairing the Veil of the Temple, a huge quantity of cinnamon and cassia and other spices intended for use as incense, and various sacred ornaments. In reward, he was granted the pardon given to genuine fugitives, although he had been taken prisoner.
After eighteen days the ramps against the Upper City were at last ready for use, and by 8 September the Romans had all their siege engines in place. As soon as they went into action, some of the defenders fled from the walls to hide in the citadel, while others dived into the sewers. There was a general mood of despair inside the Upper City yet there were still enough Zealots to man the ramparts, and they did their best to shoot down the troops bringing up the siege towers. This time the defenders proved no match for the Romans, who knew that they were dealing with beaten men. When the rams brought down part of the wall with several of its towers, panic set in, and there was no attempt to defend the breach. During this final attack, Titus shot at the Jews himself with a bow, killing twelve. The entire Roman army knew that it was the day of his daughter’s birthday, which delighted the troops.11
Even Simon and John lost their nerve as the legionaries climbed toward them over the rubble. “Watching these two men, who had once been so arrogant and boastful about their crimes, suddenly become so abject, trembling with fear, would have made you pity them, vile as they were,” we are told by a gloating Josephus. “For a moment they thought of charging the enemy, with some idea of breaking through the guards, smashing down the wooden wall and escaping. But there was no sign of their supposedly faithful followers, who had all fled, while messengers came rushing up to say that the entire western wall had collapsed and the Romans were everywhere, and with their own eyes they must have realized that the enemy were looking for them. When somebody, bewildered by terror, said he could see legionaries on top of one of the three great towers, they fell on their faces and cursed their folly. Paralyzed with fear, they could not even run away.”12
When they recovered their wits, they made the disastrous mistake of abandoning the impregnable towers that were their headquarters, against which the most powerful siege engines would have been useless. Rushing into the ravine below the Pool of Siloam, they tried to break out of the city but were driven back by the Romans. Having failed to escape, they hid in the sewers.
When they discovered they were masters of the Upper City—and therefore of all Jerusalem—the Romans could scarcely believe their final success. After planting the eagles of all the legions on the towers, they began cheering, clapping, and singing. As The Jewish War says, they were finding the end of the war much easier than the way in which it started. Their last assault through the breach had not cost them a single casualty, and after so much savage hand-to-hand combat with the Zealots, they were astonished at finding no further resistance inside the walls.
After a few minutes of rejoicing, the Romans began to celebrate victory in their own special way. Pouring into the streets, sword in hand, they butchered anyone they saw so that the thoroughfares became blocked by bodies, and they burned down buildings in which fugitives had taken refuge with everybody inside. When they broke into houses in search of plunder, they often found whole families dead from hunger and recoiled in horror empty-handed. Despite their pity for the dead, they had no mercy on the living, Josephus tells us, but killed every living soul they met, so that the whole city ran with blood that in some places even put out the fire. For on all sides there were flames, which during the night engulfed the entire city.
When Titus made his entry into the Upper City, he was astonished to find that it was so strong. In particular he was impressed by the three great towers that Simon and John had so insanely abandoned. Noticing their height, the massive solidity of their construction throughout, the size of the stone blocks with which they were built and how neatly these fitted, he exclaimed, “We must have had the gods on our side when we were fighting for it can only have been the gods who overcame the Jews, since how could human hands or human machines be of any possible use against such [mighty] towers?”13 He set free all the people who had been imprisoned in them by the two leaders, and when he later destroyed the remainder of the city, he left the towers standing as a monument to the good fortune that had enabled him to triumph over what had at first seemed to be impregnable defenses.
As his troops were finally beginning to growing tired of such unending slaughter, and as there was a surprisingly large number of survivors, Titus ordered that only men with weapons in their hands were to be killed; the rest were to be made prisoners. The troops interpreted the order as they pleased, massacring all who were old or feeble. Those in the prime of life and fit for work were herded into the Temple and penned in the Court of Women, where officers interrogated them, a task that was made easier by the prisoners’ readiness to inform against each other. Anybody identified as a committed Zealot was executed on the spot.
The Romans searched the sewers and caves beneath the city, digging up the ground and killing everyone they found. Over 2,000 dead Zealots were discovered; some had killed themselves or been killed by a comrade, but most had died from hunger. The revolting stench from dead bodies that met those who entered the tunnels caused many of the pursuers to turn back in disgust, although a few of the greedier soldiers climbed over the corpses to look for loot.
The tunnels underground proved to be not such a refuge after all. Rather than die of starvation John of Gischala, who had been hiding in a sewer with his brothers, crawled out and gave himself up. It took a little longer for Simon bar Giora to surrender. Taking a few friends and some miners, bringing picks, stonecutters, and food for several weeks, they had gone down into a secret cave, hoping to dig their way out of the city. Although the miners did their best, the food ran out. Simon went up to look for further supplies, dressing himself in white to look like a ghost and emerging where the Temple had stood. Arrested, he demanded to be taken to a general, who put him in chains.
“Thus was Jerusalem captured in the second year of the reign of Vespasian, on the eighth day of the month Gorpiaeus [8 September],” says Josephus with a fine rhetorical flourish.14 Although their defense of Jerusalem had ended in horror, the Zealots nonetheless deserve credit for a heroic feat of arms, however passionately The Jewish War may insist that the city fell because it was a “victim of revolutionary frenzy.”15 The siege was one of the great sieges of history. What had begun as a rabble transformed itself into a formidable army that for nearly five months kept at bay the best troops in the world. Despite their leaders’ rivalry having deprived them of proper leadership and a unified central command, they had to a large extent made up for it by sheer bravery. Josephus tactfully omits to give a figure, but they must have inflicted tens of thousands of casualties on the Romans. Under another Judas Maccabeus, the Zealots might well have beaten off the besiegers, humbled the Flavians, and brought the Roman Empire crashing down. Their modern fellow countrymen should take pride in their fighting qualities.
Now that the capital had fallen, the Romans had almost wrested back control of Judea. They had already recovered every other Jewish city. Only the isolated fortresses of Herodium, Machaerus, and Masada remained in Zealot hands.
Citizens of Jerusalem who perished during the siege were lucky. While the Romans were deciding what to do with their captives, 11,000 of those penned inside the Temple ruins died from hunger—some because the guards deliberately starved them, others because they refused to eat. In any case, as Josephus tells us, there was not enough food to feed so many prisoners.16
The conquerors kept 700 of the tallest and best-looking young men for Titus’s triumph at Rome. Of the remaining men, those over seventeen were sent in chains to a living death as forced labor in Egypt or to arenas all over the Roman Empire where they would die in gladiatorial combats or be fed to wild animals. Women and children were packed off to the slave markets.
Josephus says that only 97,000 prisoners of war had been taken in the entire Judean campaign, while 1,100,000 people had died during the siege. 17 As he is so prone to exaggeration, the estimate of 600,000 dead given by Tacitus seems more plausible, even if still enormous. On the other hand, Josephus justifies his figure by explaining that a large number of the casualties were pilgrims who had been trapped in the city while visiting it for the feast of Passover. In addition, there were all those who had come in from the countryside for miles around in order to take refuge.
He tells us that on Titus’s instructions, all Jerusalem, including the Temple and the Sanctuary, was razed to the foundations. Only the three great towers—Phasaelus, Hippicus, and Mariamne—were left standing, with a small stretch of the fortifications at the western side, which was turned into a barracks. The rest of the walls were leveled to the ground so that according to Josephus there was nothing to suggest the place had once been a city. This is an exaggeration; although the city walls and the Temple were demolished, much of Jerusalem survived until the Bar Kokhba revolt. Moreover, the “wailing wall” of the Temple Mount still exists. The statement may be due to faulty information, suggesting that he never again saw his birthplace with his own eyes.
A victory parade was held at the headquarters’ camp, Titus and his staff standing on a dais. After a speech in which he congratulated his legionaries on their skill and courage during “a war that had lasted so long,” he announced that he was more interested in rewarding gallantry than in punishing cowardice. He then decorated all those men who had performed an outstanding act of bravery. When their names had been read out, they marched up to the dais where golden crowns where placed on their heads and gold chains around their necks, while long gold lances and silver standards were put in their hands, and they were promoted. In addition, they were each given large amounts of the booty—gold and silver, valuable clothing. Finally, Titus sacrificed a large number of oxen to the gods in thanksgiving, the meat being distributed to the troops to be eaten at a banquet. He himself joined in the party, which went on for three days.
Just before the final assault, Titus had told Josephus to take anything that he liked “from the wreck of my country.”18 He also presented him with some “sacred books,” which seem to have included an especially fine copy of the Torah, presumably found in the Temple. Josephus was more interested in saving Jewish lives than in loot, however, and begged Titus to free some of his fellow countrymen who had been taken prisoner, in particular his brother and fifty friends. (His father seems to have died.) The request was granted. Still hoping to rebuild a pliant ruling class, who would cooperate in rebuilding Judea, his amiability was due to more than a wish to please his protégé. In addition, Josephus tells us in the Vita that he went into the prison camp in the Temple and got possession of every acquaintance he saw there, about a hundred and ninety people. They were handed over to him as slaves, but he refused to let them buy their freedom and set them at liberty.
Shortly after, he was sent by Titus with Sextus Cerealis, the legate of Syria, and a thousand cavalry to a village called Tekoa, twelve miles south of Jerusalem. The purpose of their journey was to see whether the place would be suitable for a legionary camp, yet another of the jobs he was called on to do as an unofficial staff officer. At Tekoa he found a large number of prisoners who had been crucified, including three old friends. Galloping back to headquarters in tears, he told Titus, who immediately gave orders for them to be taken down and given the best medical treatment. One survived, but the others died in the surgeons’ hands.19
The autumn storms had set in by now, making the Mediterranean too dangerous for Titus to risk shipping his prisoners and wagon loads of plunder back to Italy. He spent the winter in Judea. When he was at Caesarea, Simon bar Giora was brought to him, and he gave orders for the Jewish leader to be taken to Rome to feature in his triumph—just as the Gallic leader Vercingetorix had featured in Julius Caesar’s. The Fifth Legion and the Fifteenth Legion guarded the loot and the prisoners, who were confined outside the city. The Tenth Legion was left to garrison ruined Jerusalem and was entrusted with keeping the peace in Judea. The emblem on its eagle was a wild boar—a pig.
Many of the captives died in a succession of “games” at the city’s amphitheater, where they were thrown to starving animals to be eaten alive or made to fight each other to the death in large numbers. On 24 October there was a particularly splendid entertainment to celebrate Titus’s brother Domitian’s birthday. On that day, “the number of those [Jews] who were killed in fights with wild beasts, burned alive or slain in combats with each other was more than 2,500,” Josephus informs us. He adds, in what is probably an attempt to excuse Titus’s abominable cruelty, “Although the prisoners were dying in countless [cruel] ways, all the Romans thought it was far too mild a punishment [for Jews].”20 On 17 November Titus celebrated his father the Emperor Vespasian’s birthday at Beirut in the same way, a further 2,500 dying a terrible death in the arena.
More Jews died in the entertainments that he gave at various Syrian cities, including Antioch. Only recently that city had witnessed a pogrom, in which its Jewish inhabitants became scapegoats for a fire that devastated the city center and were persecuted for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods. However, when the Antiochenes asked Titus to expel all Jews from the city, he refused, saying they could only be sent back to their own country, which had been destroyed, and no other place was prepared to take them. Nor would he agree to withdraw their privileges. When he left Antioch, the city’s Jews were in a better position than ever before, since the Antiochenes dared not disobey him. Titus became famous throughout the East. King Vologaeses, the one man who might have saved the Zealots, sent him a golden crown as a sign of respect.
During the winter, Titus paid a last visit to Jerusalem. Instead of boasting of his victory, he deplored the destruction of such a wonderful city, cursing the men who had brought ruin upon it by rebelling against Rome. Josephus, who was with him, tells us that the Romans were still digging up large quantities of gold and silver hidden during the siege. But he reveals nothing about his own feelings.
Titus’s melancholy mood may have had to do with more than the sight of a ruined Jerusalem. There was worrying news from Europe. The Germans and the northern Gauls had revolted, encouraged by the recent civil war and the hope that Vespasian would not last long. At the same time, the Scythians had launched a serious raid across the Danube into Moesia. However, the Germans and Gauls were quickly defeated, the Scythians were checked, and peace was restored to the entire empire.
Accompanied by Josephus, Titus marched into Egypt across the desert, attending the consecration of the sacred bull Apis in the temple at Memphis. During the service he wore a diadem, which seemed to confirm rumors of his planning to invade Italy and replace his father. During the siege the legionaries had hailed him as “Imperator,” and although they were only acclaiming him as a victorious general, it had aroused suspicion. His troops were so devoted to him that when he was leaving Judea they begged him to stay, which made some think that he intended to revolt against Vespasian and make himself ruler of the East. Josephus must have listened to these rumors with horror. He had no wish to find himself in the middle of another dangerous civil war in which once again he would have to choose sides.
But Titus was much too sensible to rebel and risk losing his chance of inheriting the empire. Sending ahead of him the 700 prisoners who had been chosen for their fine appearance, together with Simon and John, he sailed from Alexandria to Italy in the spring of 71. It was a pleasant voyage, according to The Jewish War.21 Josephus writes from personal experience, since he says in the Vita, Titus “took me on board with him, treating me with every mark of esteem.”22 Their ship put in at Regium, then at Puteoli. From there, Titus rushed up to Rome where, to show that the rumors about him were groundless, he burst into Vespasian’s presence with the words, “Here I am, father, here I am!”23 “From that time on he never ceased to act as the emperor’s partner, even as his protector,” Suetonius tells us.24
“On our arrival in Rome, I was treated with the greatest consideration by Vespasian,” Josephus informs us in his autobiography. “He gave me a lodging in the house in which he had lived before becoming Emperor, honored me by making me a Roman citizen, and bestowed a pension on me. He continued his benevolence towards me until the day he left this life, without any lessening in his kindness.”25 That inspired prophecy at Jotapata was certainly paying dividends. Becoming a Roman citizen meant a considerable rise in his legal and social status and was particularly useful in any dealings with the authorities. He was no longer just a Jewish refugee.
In June, Titus and Vespasian shared a joint triumph, which was almost a coronation. Josephus records every detail in The Jewish War with such enthusiasm that one has to remind oneself that he was a Jew, since it celebrated the humiliation of his nation and his faith. However, by then he was writing for a non-Jewish readership and had been a Roman citizen for several years.
The entire Roman army paraded before dawn in front of the Temple of Isis, where father and son had spent the night. The pair came out at daybreak, in purple robes and crowned with laurel wreaths, and then proceeded to the Octavian Walks where the Senate and chief magistrates were waiting. Here they seated themselves on two ivory chairs on a tribune. After offering sacrifice and prayers, they put on triumphal robes before taking their places in the pageant.
The plunder was carried in procession, “like some flowing river,” masses of gold and silver, rare jewels set in crowns or simply in heaps. Even the robes worn by the 700 prisoners were beyond price. There were floats, some of them four stories high, depicting battles by sea and land, the storming of fortresses and towns, all deluged in blood, temples burning down, houses being demolished and burying their owners in their ruins, warships sinking. A captured city governor was made to sit on each float. Then came the crimson veils, the great gold table of the shewbread, and the seven-branched candlestick that had once adorned the Sanctuary, with a copy of the Torah, after which followed ivory and gold statues of the Roman gods who had supposedly conquered the God of the Jews. As a climax, Vespasian and Titus brought up the rear of the procession, riding superb chargers.26
The procession ended at the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, where it was a hallowed Roman tradition to await the news that an enemy leader was dead. This time the leader was Simon bar Giora, who had been forced to walk in the pageant with a halter tied round his neck. Beaten as he went, he was dragged along by the halter into the Forum and then into the Mammertine prison at its northeastern end where he was ceremonially scourged and tortured before finally being put to death. When the news that he had been killed reached the Temple of Jupiter, the crowd broke into a great shout of joy.
There is a mystery about what happened to John of Gischala, who also marched in the triumph. All we know from The Jewish War is that he was sentenced to lifelong captivity. The novelist Lion Feuchtwanger makes an oddly convincing case for it having been far from unpleasant, although he would never again see Gush Halav. One wonders how he escaped the ghastly fate of his fellow commander, Simon. For all his savagery, the Romans may have recognized a certain greatness of spirit in the man.
Josephus tells us that afterward, Vespasian built a Temple of Peace, which he lavishly embellished with marvelous paintings and statues. Here he placed the golden ornaments from the Sanctuary, although he kept the Torah from the Holy of Holies and the crimson veil in the Palace. The seven-branched candlestick appears in one of the reliefs of the Arch of Titus. Nearly five hundred years later, King Genseric of the Vandals took the menorah and the golden table to Carthage, from where they were recovered by Belisarius in 533. Then the Emperor Justinian sent them back to Jerusalem. They vanished for good during the seventh century.
Despite Josephus’s glowing account, the triumph must have been a dreadful experience for him. The crowd’s mood was not just one of rejoicing; it was also one of bitter hatred for the race that had more than once humiliated their supposedly invincible army. No doubt, the new Roman citizen was reassured by his patron’s popularity, and presumably he felt satisfaction at the death of the “tyrant” Simon bar Giora. But throughout his entire life he can have seen no more harrowing spectacle than this reenactment of his country’s defeat and destruction, together with the parade of the sacred ornaments from the Holy of Holies.
What happened at the fall of Jerusalem was genocide. No other word can describe what took place. The Romans never showed mercy to defeated enemies, and the realization that the siege had almost failed—which could have meant the fall of the Flavian dynasty and renewed civil war—made them still more merciless. In any case, after suffering so many casualties the legionaries were determined to exact a memorably vicious reckoning, while as usual the Syrian and Arab auxiliaries were bent on doing as much harm to Jews as they could. Titus’s prolonged cruelty to prisoners was excessive, even by Roman standards. Far more dreadful than the Babylonian sack of the city six centuries earlier, the siege and fall of Jerusalem was the worst disaster suffered by the Jewish people until the twentieth century. It is no exaggeration to call it a holocaust.