XXI
On a lazy day in January A.D. 67, guards on duty in the towers at the decuman gate of the 10th Legion’s base at Cyrrhus would have peered down the road to Antioch to the south as a legion courier came galloping toward them.
The base at Cyrrhus was a permanent installation. Back in 30 B.C., Augustus had required permanent winter camps to be established for all the legions of his new standing army, throughout the empire. Augustus stipulated that there was to be a maximum of two legions at each base, although from the Greek geographer Strabo we know that the main legion base in Egypt, at Babylon Fossatum, just up the Nile from Alexandria and today the site of Cairo, was occupied by three legions when he visited there in 25 B.C. Probably one of these legions was just passing through at the time, heading west or northeast to a new station.
The buildings at the Cyrrhus base in A.D. 67 may have been wooden, standing behind a wall of earth and timber and punctuated by wooden guard towers, giving it the appearance of a fort of the nineteenth-century American Wild West. Or it may have originally been built from stone, like other permanent structures of the region. Before the century was out, all the legion bases throughout the empire would be upgraded to be constructed of solid stone buildings behind formidable stone walls and featuring cleverly engineered granaries and luxuries such as vast bathhouses. The layout of the legion marching camp was preserved in these permanent bases, with neatly set-out barrack rooms lining the camp streets instead of rows of tents, as well as workshops, stables, and a praetorium, the legion headquarters complex.
Occupying the praetorium at Cyrrhus in January A.D. 67 was a colonel, the 10th Legion’s deputy commander, a senior tribune in his late twenties. Like so many legions, the 10th would have seen its commanding general depart late the previous year, moving on to a fresh assignment elsewhere in the empire or perhaps back at Rome, and the unit was now awaiting the arrival of a new commander for the next campaigning season beginning in the coming spring.
The colonel of the 10th received important news via several sources. The most regular was the Acta Diurna, or Daily News, the world’s first daily newspaper. Founded by Julius Caesar in 59 B.C. when he was consul, by imperial times it was produced by industrious secretaries working in one of the departments of the Palatium in Rome. The handwritten copies of the Acta were distributed to Roman officials in every corner of the empire in the satchels of the couriers of the Cursus Publicus, the remarkably efficient state courier service also run by the Palatium. The Acta contained details of official decrees and appointments; birth, death, and marriage notices; sports results—the outcomes of the latest gladiatorial contests and chariot races at the capital; and even news of traffic jams and house fires in Rome.
It’s likely that once he and his senior officers had perused the Acta, the legion commander posted the latest copy on a notice board in the camp, as they were in Rome itself, for all the men to read. Even in far-off Judea, this news from Rome would still have been quite current. Regularly changing horses at way stations every six to ten miles along the military highways that crisscrossed the empire, the carriages and mounted couriers of the Cursus Publicus covered an average of 170 miles a day. This compares favorably with the 180 miles-per-day average of the short-lived Pony Express of the United States in 1860–1861. Cursus Publicus inspectors made sure the horses, way stations, and highways were always in top condition.
News that more directly affected the 10th Legion arrived from regional headquarters at Antioch and was carried by legion couriers. Since republican times it had been a tradition that couriers bearing good tidings, such as news of a Roman victory on the battlefield, adorned their javelins with laurel. The guards who watched the courier dismount outside the decuman gate on this particular day—it was forbidden for even a Roman general or a foreign king to ride within a Roman camp—would have been hopeful of news of a victory over the Jewish rebels who had been embarrassing the Roman army down in Judea since the previous summer. But his javelin was unadorned.
The dusty courier wouldn’t have needed to be told where to go. The layout of the camp of every legion had been the same for hundreds of years; he probably could have found his way to the praetorium with his eyes closed. Passing between the prescribed complement of four sentries at thepraetorium door—Polybius sets out the precise number of sentries at each post within a legion camp, a formula that seems to have been adhered to by the legions for centuries—he would have entered the headquarters pavilion, removed a roll of parchment or vellum from his dispatch case, and handed it to the legion’s colonel in charge.
Almost certainly, the dispatch, in the form of a scroll, would have borne the Sardonychis, the wax Palatium seal depicting a profile of the emperor Augustus, which had been used by every emperor of Rome since Augustus. It would continue to be used by all emperors but one at least up to and including Severus Alexander in the third century, and possibly much later. The exception was Galba, briefly emperor in A.D. 68–69, who used his family seal of a dog looking over the prow of a ship.
Accepting the dispatch, the colonel of the 10th would have broken the seal or seals and unraveled the document, to find it set out in pages of two parallel columns written neatly in Latin by an imperial secretary of the Palatium staff.
As the colonel read, other officers probably crowded into the praetorium to hear their orders. They would have been anticipating instructions to march, were no doubt straining at the leash to go into action after what had recently taken place to the south. The previous year, the Jews of Jerusalem had laid siege to the single cohort of the 3rd Augusta Legion based in their city, and after days of vicious fighting had killed every man except the cohort’s commander, Camp Prefect Metallus, most after they’d surrendered. At the same time, members of the Zealot sect had tricked their way into the fortress of Masada on the Dead Sea and massacred the 3rd Augusta cohort based there. Another band of rebels had done the same at the fortress of Cypros, overlooking the city of Jericho. The rebels had then flooded into the countryside and occupied Judea and much of Idumaea and southern Galilee. A cohort of the 3rd Augusta had managed to escape from its fortress at Machaerus and reach the provincial capital, Caesarea. Another 3rd Augusta cohort holding the port city of Ascalon had fought off attackers but had been cut off there ever since.
A punitive operation against the Jews had been called for, and Field Marshal Corbulo should have been the man to lead it. The problem was, Corbulo had recently been recalled to Rome under a cloud of suspicion. His son-in-law, Brigadier General Vinianus Annius—some ancient authorities call him Vinicianus—onetime commander of the 5th Moesia Legion in Corbulo’s Armenian task force, had foolishly become involved in a plot against the emperor.
New conspiracies against Nero were regularly being discovered in Rome and being put down by the Praetorian Guard in these increasingly conspiratorial times. The year before, the widespread “Piso plot” had even implicated Nero’s retired chief secretary, the famous writer and philosopher Seneca, who’d been forced to commit suicide for merely associating with conspirators, including his nephew, the poet Lucan. In the same way, as Vinianus now met his death, his father-in-law’s position was looking precarious. In the new year, guilt by association would see Corbulo also forced to take his own life, the act causing Rome to lose arguably her best general at the worst of times.
Corbulo’s replacement as Governor of Syria, Lieutenant General Cestius Gallus, achieved his appointment on seniority, not ability. After a delay of three months, Gallus had reluctantly marched with a force of twenty-eight thousand men to restore Roman control in Judea. Among the units he chose for his task force were four cohorts of Syrian legionaries of the 3rd Augusta and four of the 22nd Primigeneia, a legion traditionally recruited in Galatia to the north. But the core of Gallus’s force had been eight cohorts of the 12th Legion. The 12th Legion was due to undergo its twenty-year discharge in the new year—its youngest legionaries were thirty-nine, while most of those of its senior cohorts were fifty-nine and would have been enthusiastically looking forward to their looming retirement. But General Gallus was supremely confident that when it came down to it, the resistance of the Jewish partisans would dissolve at the sight of a Roman legionary army and that his men would not have to lift a sword against them.
How wrong Gallus turned out to be. Making a leisurely progress down through Galilee, burning everything in his path, he turned up outside the walls of Jerusalem in November, with winter just around the corner and with the partisans determined to resist Rome’s might. After a desultory five-day siege, Gallus had inexplicably ordered his troops to pull out. In the Beth-horon valley, trying to retrace its steps back down the road to Lod and the coast it had traveled only a week before, General Gallus’s column was surrounded and very nearly wiped out by the partisans. Only by leaving behind a four-hundred-man suicide squad of volunteers was Gallus able to extricate the rest of his troops in the night. When the task force staggered back into Caesarea, it was without six thousand of its men and numerous standards, including the eagle of the 12th. Among the dead was Brigadier General Priscus, commander of the 6th Victrix Legion, who’d apparently been acting as Gallus’s chief of staff for the operation. Gallus himself died shortly after; some said of shame. It had been all for naught—Judea was still in Jewish hands.
The dispatch from the Palatium would have informed the colonel of the 10th that the emperor had appointed Lieutenant General Gaius Licinius Mucianus to replace Gallus as Governor of Syria. It also would have said that Nero had appointed Lieutenant General Titus Flavius Ves-pasianus—Vespasian, as history would come to know him after he became the ninth emperor of Rome—to head a special task force to end the Jewish Revolt in Judea. And the colonel would have nodded approvingly as he read the emperor’s orders for the 10th Legion—the 10th was to mobilize immediately and march south to General Vespasian’s task force assembly point at Ptolemais on the Mediterranean coast, a little north of Caesarea. There it would join the 3rd Augusta Legion, the 5th Moesia Legion, the 15th Legion, and numerous allied and auxiliary units for Vespasian’s Judean operation.
What was more, the emperor had appointed a new commander to take charge of the 10th for the offensive—Major General Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, or Trajan, father of another future emperor of Rome.
Nero had been visiting Greece in December when the news of the Gallus disaster reached him. General Vespasian had been a member of the entourage accompanying him. The son of a moneylender and grandson of an enlisted man who’d fought for Pompey at the Battles of Dyrrhachium and Pharsalus, Vespasian had commanded the 2nd Augusta Legion in the emperor Claudius’s A.D. 43 invasion of Britain. This had been the first return of Roman legionaries to England since the 10th Legion last set foot there, in 54 B.C. But this time the invaders didn’t go home. Vespasian had led the 2nd Augusta in overrunning much of southwestern England. For this deed, Claudius had presented the young major general with Triumphal Decorations, an award usually reserved for lieutenant generals, and also bestowed on him several prestigious priesthoods. Vespasian had gone on to be a valued military adviser to both Claudius and Nero.
A consul in A.D. 51 at age forty-one and Governor of Africa in A.D. 63, Vespasian was liked and respected by the legions because he’d come from common stock like themselves and because he was a good soldier. He was infamous for being tight with the government purse, but his personal commercial dealings up to this point had been disastrous. He’d invested heavily in a business that ran mule farms, and with government contracts to supply the army with pack animals, it should have been a license to print money. But inexplicably the owners of the business had mismanaged it woefully and sent it bankrupt. To cover his debts and maintain his membership of the Senate, Vespasian had been forced to mortgage his family home on Pomegranate Street in Rome’s 6th Precinct to his elder brother Flavius Sabinus.
Vespasian’s unfortunate personal finances had no bearing on his military credentials—he was the ideal choice for the task in Judea, an unpretentious, no-nonsense general who could get the best out of his men. And Nero knew it. According to Suetonius, Vespasian had fallen asleep during one of Nero’s poetry recitals on the Greek tour and been dismissed from court. He was keeping out of the way in a quiet Greek backwater when news of his appointment to lead the Judean task force arrived.
Probably as the 10th Legion marched out of Cyrrhus and headed south to Ptolemais on the Mediterranean coast, just above the border between the provinces of Syria and Judea, in present-day Lebanon, it was joined by its new commander, Major General Trajan. Born at the town of Italica in Farther Spain—the 10th Legion’s home territory—like Vespasian, General Trajan is also likely to have been traveling with the emperor’s party in Greece at the time of his appointment. In his late thirties or early forties, capable and reliable, he would have been a popular choice with the men of the 10th, as it was extremely rare for a legion to be commanded by a general who came from the same area as its legionaries. At this time Major General Trajan’s son, the future emperor, was only fourteen and probably still living back in Spain, where he’d been born.
It was unusual although not unheard of for a major general to command a legion. This was normally a role filled by a less senior brigadier general. But there appears to have been a scarcity of suitably qualified and experienced generals in the East at the time. With the death of its commander, Brigadier General Priscus, in the Gallus disaster, the 6th Victrix Legion, for example, located not far from the 10th’s Cyrrhus base, at Zeugma on the Euphrates, would be led for the next few years by its senior tribune and second-in-command, Colonel Gaius Minicius, who took up his post in A.D. 67 at age twenty-seven after promotion from command of an auxiliary unit. Likewise, the 12th Legion, also based in Syria, appears to have been commanded by its second-in-command throughout this period, even when it, too, was eventually brought into the Judean offensive.
The new supreme commander in the East quickly came overland to Antioch. There, Lieutenant General Vespasian made careful logistical preparations for his Judean operation before joining his troops. At the same time, his eldest son, Titus, took a fast frigate from Greece and sailed down to Alexandria on his father’s orders. Titus, who’d just turned twenty-seven, had served in the army as a colonel commanding auxiliary units but had left the military and was working as a lawyer at Rome when his father invited him to join him for the emperor’s trip to Greece. Suddenly Titus was back in uniform.
The 15th Legion, one of the units selected for this operation, had been based in Egypt since Corbulo’s last Armenian campaign, and Titus had been sent to get it. The old Augustan laws still made it illegal for a member of the Senate to enter Egypt, but as Titus wasn’t yet old enough to sit in the Senate, he was able to enter the province. As the 10th Legion arrived at the assembly point at Ptolemais, Titus brought the 15th marching up the coast from Egypt. At the same time, six cohorts of the 3rd Augusta came up from Caesarea, aching to revenge the deaths of more than fifteen hundred of their Syrian comrades at the hands of the Jewish rebels, and the 5th Legion came down from its base in Pontus. By the late spring the army numbered forty-five thousand men, including auxiliaries and troops supplied by allied kings in the region. All impatient to go to war.