XXIII
At dawn on May 10, A.D. 70, the full-scale Roman assault on Jerusalem began. Ravines three hundred feet deep dropped away from the southern, eastern, and southwestern sides of the city, so the young Roman commander had chosen to concentrate on a section of the city’s Third Wall, to the northwest. While assault troops tried to get to the wall and breach it using testudos, mantlets, siege towers, and battering rams, the combined artillery of the legions raked the wall in this locality to keep defenders off the ramparts.
Simon ben Gioras was in charge of defenses in this sector, and he tried to counter the Roman efforts with frequent sallies beyond the walls by raiding parties and with 340 artillery pieces of his own mounted on the wall. Ironically, the Jewish gunners were using Roman artillery, captured from the 3rd Augusta, 12th, and 22nd Primigeneia Legions at the taking of the Antonia Fortress and the Battle of Beth-horon four years earlier.
But the Jews didn’t have the training or the skill of their Roman counterparts, and the artillery of the 10th Legion played a leading role here in the assault on the Third Wall. Its artillery comes in for particular mention from Josephus, who says the 10th possessed the most powerful spear-throwing Scorpions and the largest stone-throwing Ballistas of all the legions. The former Jewish commander, now with Titus’s party, writes of the prodigious rate of fire of the 10th’s quick-firing dart launchers, and tells of how the legion’s biggest stone-throwing weapons—possibly Onagers, heavy Ballistas—could hurl stone shot weighing a hundred pounds more than four hundred yards and kill not only men on the front lines in its whooshing progress but also continue on, to mortally wound others in the rear as well. Josephus writes of one Jewish fighter who had his head taken clean off by a Roman artillery shot—the man’s head was later found hundreds of yards from his torso. At the earlier siege of Jefat, he says, a single Scorpion bolt skewered several Jewish defenders at once.
Roman gunnery was no hit-or-miss affair. The 10th Legion artillerymen set their ranges with precision. The science of guided missiles—ballistics, as we call it—derives from the catapult, the original missile launcher. To make their gunnery so precise, the artillerymen of the 10th and the other legions at Jerusalem measured the distance from artillery platform to city wall with lead and line.
Josephus tells of how, at the height of the assault on the Third Wall, Jewish spotters on nearby towers were able to yell warnings to their comrades in specific areas to take cover when Roman artillery shot came whizzing toward them with a cry of “Baby coming!”
Partisans in the target area would then hit the dirt. This was made easier by the fact that the Roman artillerymen were using Judean stone for their projectiles, which was quite light in color, almost white. To counter the spotters, the legions’ artillery commanders had their men coat their ammunition in black pitch, making it harder to see.
Under fire all the way from the Jewish defenders, three massive Roman siege towers were rolled over the leveled ground and into position against the Third Wall. A tower had been built by each of three legions—the 5th, 12th, and 15th—and while the 10th concentrated on its artillery expertise, these three units now competed to see which could be the first to breach the wall.
Each wooden tower was covered in protective metal plate and had three levels. From the top level, archers and slingers tried to keep defenders at bay. Catapults operated from the next floor down. At ground level, teams of legionaries operated a battering ram slung from the framework of the tower. The ram consisted of a heavy metal head on a long pole, which was swung back and forth to pound away at the base of the wall. Battering rams acquired their name from the metal ram’s head attached to the business end of the length of pole.
The din made by the three rams pounding relentlessly away at the Third Wall was an ominous sign. It forced all three Jewish factions to unite—for the moment. Defenders concentrated their efforts in the sector where the Romans were conducting their siege operations. But apart from a corner of a tower being loosened by the ram operated by the 15th Legion, no damage was done by the siege towers in the first week.
At one point the Roman cavalry protecting the towers was withdrawn. Seizing the opportunity, a large band of Zealots led by John the Idumaean, a senior resistance commander, rushed out a concealed gateway and set fire to one of the towers. Titus personally led a cavalry squadron that drove the partisans back the way they had come. It was a costly foray for the defenders—among the Jewish dead was the Idumaean, killed by an arrow. The fire on the tower was soon extinguished.
As the rams kept up their work, day in, day out, the Jewish defenders inside the city walls, who slept in their armor, went to sleep with the sound of the pounding in their ears, and awoke to it again the next day.
On day fifteen of the assault, May 25, the wall began to give way to all three rams. Cohorts of Roman shock troops moved into position. As the wall crumbled close by the gate, legionaries scrambled up the rubble like so many ants, overwhelmed and slaughtered any partisans who stood in their way, and opened the gate. Thousands more legionaries poured in through the gateway.
The defenders fled to the nearby Second Wall. Dating back before 37 B.C., this wall was much higher and thicker than the Third. It didn’t possess as many towers, but it incorporated the bastions of the Temple to the east and Herod’s Palace on the western side of the city.
The assault now moved into its second phase. While he left the camp of the 10th Legion where it was, Titus quickly moved the 5th, 12th, and 15th Legions closer to the city, consolidating their quarters in an area, still on the western outskirts, called the Camp of the Assyrians. It had acquired its name from its use by King Sennacherib and his Assyrian army during their siege of Jerusalem back in 701 B.C. Sennacherib had called off that siege after the people of Jerusalem paid him a huge ransom. The city was not to be so lucky this time.
While his troops threw up their new camp, Titus maintained the momentum of the success at the Third Wall by immediately resiting his artillery to attack the northern part of the Second Wall and by sending one of his siege towers against the central northern tower of the Second Wall. Partisans venturing out in raids against the tower were quickly beaten back by supporting infantry and cavalry.
A few days into the operations at the tower, a Jew named Castor and ten others appeared on the ramparts nearby and indicated that they wanted to surrender. Titus suspended siege operations and offered to let the eleven men come down from the wall unharmed. They then appeared to fight among themselves, with some deciding not to surrender. An archer on the Roman side then let loose an arrow that hit Castor in the nose, and this brought a halt to the fighting. Pulling out the arrow, Castor protested to the Romans. Titus asked Josephus the defector to speak with Castor, but he declined, saying the men on the wall were up to something. When Titus sent a Jewish deserter named Aeneas to the foot of the wall with a legionary escort, to parley, Castor threw a stone at Aeneas, missing him and wounding one of the legionaries of the escort. As Aeneas and his party hastily withdrew, and Castor and his companions yelled mocking comments at the Romans, Titus ordered the ram to resume work against the tower. The tower collapsed from the pounding of the ram shortly after. Castor and his men set fire to the ruins and then committed suicide by jumping into the flames.
From dawn till dusk the legionaries continued to pound away at the Second Wall. Like all Romans, the men of the legions rose before dawn, the Roman day being dictated by whatever could be achieved in daylight hours. The troops slept in their uniforms and frequently in their armor, being summoned from their tents by the trumpets sounding reveille and ending the last watch of the night at the camps.
Five days after battering operations had begun against the Second Wall, on May 30, a section of the wall adjacent to the ruined tower collapsed. The Jewish defenders retreated to the First Wall, ignoring Titus’s suggestion that they come out and fight in the open like soldiers, or surrender. All who capitulated would be treated honorably, Titus had assured them, and would even be allowed to retain their property. In response, the armed defenders threatened death to the hundreds of thousands of refugees still sheltering within the remaining sections of the city if they dared attempt to surrender.
Ordered into the attack, legionaries went climbing over the rubble at the breach in the Second Wall. Surging triumphantly into the city, they found themselves in a maze of narrow lanes flanked by the walls and barred doors of houses. Suddenly gates opened in the First Wall and thousands of partisans rushed into the streets. The leading legionaries were overwhelmed and cut down. Their comrades hurriedly retreated to the gap in the Second Wall, but in the frantic crush few could squeeze out at any one time. There were numerous Roman casualties before the legionaries were able to withdraw. The gleeful Jews regained control of the Second Wall, convinced God was on their side and that the Romans were fated never to penetrate any farther.
Titus launched new, sustained ramming operations on the Second Wall. Three days later, on June 2, legionaries poured through several new breaches, and the defenders were again forced to retreat to the First Wall. This time Titus had his troops demolish every building between the two walls. Soon a clear, dusty space was opened.
Now Titus suspended the siege. In an attempt to awe the defenders, he paraded his legions in full-dress uniform, and over the next four days ceremoniously doled out the pay of every legionary, in full view of the people of Jerusalem who crowded the walls and windows of the city to watch the process. One at a time, every man had to come forward in parade dress and full equipment and sign for his pay. Cavalrymen were required to lead up their horses adorned with full decorations.
When this didn’t have any visible effect on the morale of the partisans, the young Roman general sent Josephus to attempt to negotiate a surrender from the defenders. Josephus had a very personal reason for wanting the city to capitulate—both his mother and his father were among the refugees still inside Jerusalem. Standing behind cover near the First Wall, Josephus called out to his fellow Jews that Rome would treat well all who surrendered.
There was no immediate response. But over the succeeding days many people did manage to escape from the city and reach the Roman lines. As the days passed, some Jews inside the city secretly bargained with Roman soldiers outside to buy food. In the night they lowered baskets containing gold to legionaries below the wall. When they hauled the baskets back up again, expecting to receive food, all they found was straw. It would have been highly amusing to the legionaries, but a bitter disappointment to the starving people on the wall. The rate of Jewish desertion rapidly increased, to five hundred a day. But even at that rate it would have taken years for the city to be cleared.
To speed defections, Roman troops even roasted goats under the walls. As the aroma of cooking meat was carried into the city on the breeze, some starving refugees inside apparently went crazy. One demented Jewish woman was said to have even cooked and eaten her own baby. Armed bands roved the city searching for hidden reserves of food, killing anyone who resisted. Families fought each other over scraps; parents supposedly took food from the mouths of their children. When the widow of former high priest Jonathan couldn’t buy food despite her wealth, she threw her gold into the street in disgust. People died from hunger even as they were attending the funerals of friends and relatives.
Jews caught by Roman troops foraging for food outside the walls were whipped, then crucified. Soon there weren’t enough crosses to accommodate all the victims, so instead of crucifixion, many prisoners had their hands lopped off before being sent back to the city.
Once his surrender terms were rebuffed by the Jewish leadership, Titus set in motion the third phase of the assault. He assigned a different sector to each of his four main legions, no doubt conscious of the poet Ovid’s observation that a horse never runs so fast as when he has other horses to catch and outpace. The young general intended to use the spirit of competition that always existed among the legions as a spur to a rapid completion of the assault.
From officers such as Colonel Alexander, who knew Jerusalem well as a former administrator of Judea, Titus would have learned the city’s strong points, those key bastions he would have to take if the city was to fall. He also would have been able to draw on the firsthand knowledge of 3rd Augusta men who had been stationed in the city in the past. From the advice he received, Titus knew that he had to concentrate on the Antonia Fortress and the adjacent Temple, and, on the western side of the city, the massive castle that was Herod’s Palace.
The 10th Legion was assigned a section at the northeastern corner of the First Wall near the Amygdalon, the Almond Pool, next to Herod’s Palace. The 15th’s sector was forty-five feet away, opposite the High Priest’s Monument. The 5th was assigned the northwestern tower of the Antonia Fortress. The men of the 12th were just 30 feet away. Each legion was instructed to build an embankment of earth against the sixty-foot wall. With a gentle slope from base to top, each embankment would be just wide enough for a siege tower to be rolled along it to the wall. The rams would then go into action against the upper works of the wall.
It took fifteen days to build the embankments. All four competing legions finished work at much the same time. But the defenders hadn’t been idle all this time. One of the their commanders, John, who had escaped to Jerusalem from Gischala, led a team that dug a tunnel out under the First Wall from the Antonia Fortress, using a natural underground water conduit as a starting point. The miners supported the walls and roof of their tunnel with wooden uprights. As the Romans finished work on the two embankments above, the partisans coated the tunnel supports with pitch and bitumen, then withdrew, setting fire to the timbers. Once the fire had consumed the wooden supports, the tunnel roof caved in, and the embankments above collapsed, to the horror of the troops about to push their siege engines up the slopes.
There was consternation in Roman ranks at the embankment collapse over by the Antonia, but at their sector the men of the 10th and the 15th were able to push their siege towers up their ramps all the way to the wall. Just as the legionaries were congratulating themselves on their efforts, a Jewish raiding party dashed out a nearby gate, overwhelmed men at the two towers, then set fire to wicker palisades around the towers.
Reinforcements were urgently summoned from both legions to save the towers from the flames, but even as legionaries of the 10th strained to drag their massive metal-sheathed tower free of the burning palisades, partisans pulled in the other direction, ignoring the heat and fire, even grasping hold of red-hot metal. Determined to see the towers destroyed, the Jews won the day. The legionaries had no choice but back off as flames roared up inside the pair of wooden structures, and both towers were consumed.
Then the jubilant Jews went on the offensive, chasing the Roman troops all the way back to the camp walls at the Camp of the Assyrians. There the legionary pickets held the attackers until reinforced, and the legions drove the partisans back to the First Wall. Just the same, the day’s work was a morale-boosting success for the defenders of Jerusalem and a crushing blow for Titus and his troops.
The quick victory that had been on the cards up till now had eluded Titus, and he called a meeting of his commanders and staff to discuss a revision of tactics. As mime writer Publius Syrus had noted a century before, it is a bad plan that admits of no modification. And Titus was open to suggestions. Some of his officers advocated an all-out frontal attack from one end of the First Wall to the other. Others advocated settling in for a long siege, to wait for the Jews to either starve or surrender. Titus’s cautious father would have chosen the latter, and now Titus was inclined the same way. He decided to prepare for a long siege, without giving up on the idea of breaching the First Wall in several places simultaneously.
Titus now ordered his legionaries to surround Jerusalem with a wall of their own, a so-called wall of circumvallation. One of the factors that set the Roman military apart from its opponents over many centuries was its engineering skill. Caesar had been as much an engineer as a soldier, and the men who inherited his empire inherited his practices. This Roman wall was designed to seal the Jews within their city. Their daring raids outside the city walls before now had been more than a hindrance—several times they had driven all the way to the Roman camps.
Titus had no idea how many fighting men the Jews actually possessed inside the city, and how many they could therefore throw into a major sally outside the walls. He’d been told there were 600,000 to 1.2 million people in the city. Most were refugees, but even refugees can throw stones. They were starving, but supposedly starving men had just dug a tunnel and burned his siege towers, so he could never be sure whether the Jewish fighters hadn’t maintained food reserves for themselves while they let the rest of the city starve. Throughout the siege, even though he did extract information from prisoners and defectors, Titus would never have been entirely sure what he was up against in Jerusalem.
Then there were his lines of communication. Titus had to bring everything to his siege camps from miles away. His troops had already cut down every tree within a twelve-mile radius, so even wood for the legionaries’ cooking fires had to be brought in from far off. Water was of prime importance. There was plenty of water inside the city—that was why it had been built in this desolate location in the first place, its fresh-water cisterns keeping the occupants supplied. Outside the walls, there was no water for many miles. So Titus had to bring in fresh water for sixty thousand troops and perhaps as many noncombatants in hundreds of water wagons every day. As well as food and ammunition.
The principal supply base for the offensive was back at Caesarea on the Mediterranean, so the road that clawed up into the hills from the maritime plain must have been one constant sea of wagons and mule trains during the months of the siege, bringing in supplies and ammunition and taking out wounded. In quarries somewhere behind the lines, workers were chipping out massive white Judean rocks, rounding them to the satisfaction of their supervisors, who would then have them swung onto waiting wagons for the lurching journey to the front lines, to feed the insatiable Roman artillery pieces.
All this made Titus and his task force vulnerable. The Jews had proven themselves masters of guerrilla warfare. If they managed to get a large force out of Jerusalem that could cut his supply route to the north, Titus would be in trouble. All the more reason to seal in the Jews.
His troops quickly began work building the wall of circumvallation. They astonished the Jews by completing the five miles of trench and wall, inclusive of thirteen forts built along its length, in just three days. This construction feat was a record for the Roman army. Not even Julius Caesar had built so much so rapidly. Erection of Titus’s wall at Jerusalem would become legendary within the Roman military. To achieve these results, Titus had again treated the project as a competition, with each legion assigned its own section of wall to construct and with Titus making nightly inspections to praise, encourage, and reward his troops.
The breached Third Wall would have come in handy as legionaries cast about the barren, dusty landscape for building materials. Today there is little trace of the Third Wall. Without doubt, the toiling legionaries would have plundered it for building material. The wall of circumvallation ran within about two hundred yards of the First and Second Walls, following the Valley of Hinnon to the south, running along the bottom slope of the Mount of Olives to the east, and inside the Third Wall in the north, cleaving through the middle of the Betheza district, the so-called New City. On the western side of the city, Titus’s wall ran down past the Serpent’s Pool, at the foot of his headquarters at the Camp of the Assyrians.
Inside the surrounded city, civilians now became even more depressed, and partisans turned on each other once more. John of Gischala murdered Eleazar the Zealot. On the wall, Simon the Zealot executed Mattathias, one of the chief priests, for the Romans to see, having first killed the priest’s three sons in front of him. When Jude, one of Simon’s lieutenants, began to talk of surrender, Simon killed him, too.
Seeing this disarray among the opposition, Titus sent Josephus to once more call for a Jewish surrender. According to Josephus, this time he was hit on the head by a stone thrown from the walls, and knocked out cold. The rebels cheered with delight, thinking Josephus had been killed. A Jewish party was sent out to collect his body, but Titus had already sent a strong legionary detachment to his aid, and he was brought back to the Roman lines and revived. He returned to the wall to resume his peace efforts, but the Jews, disappointed that the traitor had survived after all, sent him away.
Titus now decided to concentrate all his offensive activities on taking the Antonia Fortress. All four legions began building new embankments against the Antonia’s northern walls. Work was hampered by lack of timber, and several times new embankments gave way for lack of wooden support. For the first time, the spirits of the legionaries began to sag. This hot, unrewarding work was now in its third month.
On July 20, all four siege towers were rolled up into position against the Antonia, their progress unimpeded by a hail of missiles from the fortress. John of Gischala led another sortie outside the walls with firebrands, hoping to repeat the fiery success of the attack on the earlier towers of the 10th and 15th Legions. But this time the legionaries were expecting the attack—compressed tightly together and with their shields locked, they created an impenetrable barrier around their towers. Meanwhile, accurate Roman close artillery support cut down attackers in droves. The surviving partisans retreated inside the First Wall, and the battering rams began their pounding of the northern wall of the Antonia.
The massive fortress of the Antonia, which dominated the Temple the way the Temple in turn dominated the city, resisted the rams, so infantry came up under cover of their shields, in a testudo, and undermined part of the wall by hand, dislodging four massive stones with their crowbars. Unbeknownst to the assault troops, this happened to be right over part of the tunnel built earlier by John of Gischala. In the night, the tunnel collapsed beneath the weakened section of wall. As if by a miracle, a breach appeared in the wall. But with the dawn the Roman troops saw that the Jews had built yet another wall, using piles of rubble, inside the First Wall. The legions would have to start all over again.
Seeing his men dejected by the prospect, Titus called an assembly of his elite troops, telling his generals to send him the best legionaries from each legion. As the picked men sat on the dusty ground in front of him, he climbed onto a tribunal to address them. Josephus also was there, and he recorded Titus’s speech.
“My fellow soldiers,” the young general began, “it would be scandalous for men who are Romans and my soldiers, in peacetime trained for war, in war accustomed to victory, to be outshone by these Jews in strength or determination. And on the brink of success and with Jupiter to help us!” He went on to say that death in battle was glorious, and that Roman soldiers who died in this battle could look forward to their souls being set free amid the stars. The taking of this wall was a dangerous enterprise, he conceded, but he would not insult Roman soldiers by asking them to take risks and expose themselves to danger—risks and danger were commonplace to a legionary. This was just another job that had to be done. And for those who succeeded, he promised, the rewards would be great. Then he called for volunteers to attack the new wall.
A Syrian legionary named Sabinus, from the task force’s single cohort of the 3rd Augusta Legion, now came to his feet. His unit was famed as one of Rome’s fiercest, bravest legions. The six cohorts of the 3rd Augusta recently sent to Europe from Judea had immediately added to their reputation after their arrival in Moesia—on a single icy winter’s day they had wiped out an entire raiding party of ten thousand Sarmatian cavalrymen who had crossed the Danube, and with barely a casualty of their own. These same cohorts of the 3rd Augusta had subsequently spearheaded the bloody, unrelenting drive through Italy that had taken Cremona and Rome and secured the Roman throne for Vespasian.
But according to Josephus, the little, shriveled, dark-skinned Syrian legionary who now stood before Titus looked like anything but a soldier. Almost certainly a second-enlistment man, he would have been fifty years of age, having joined his legion in the 3rd Augusta’s enlistment of A.D. 40. Inspired by his example, eleven other legionaries from various units now also came to their feet, volunteering to join the Syrian for what was likely to be a suicide mission.
“If I fail, General,” Josephus says Legionary Sabinus declared, “I have chosen death with my eyes open.”
That morning at dawn, like all the men of the 3rd Augusta in all parts of the Roman world, Sabinus would have bowed down to the sun as it crested the eastern horizon, just as he had every day of his adult life, saluting and offering prayers to Baal, his patron deity. Tacitus describes how the Syrians of the six cohorts of the 3rd Augusta that took part in the Battle of Cremona the previous year broke off at dawn to salute the rising sun before returning to the fight. Their religious observances, it seems, came before all else. On this day, Legionary Sabinus would have asked the Syrian sun god to watch over him, as he did every day. No doubt now, as admiring 3rd Augusta friends helped him strap on his armor and handed him his shield, Sabinus offered another silent prayer to the heavens—a prayer for success in his mission, for the chance to greet great Baal again the next morning.
Perhaps a worried Syrian friend, less influenced by the heady excitement of the moment, might have voiced the age-old disdain that soldiers have for volunteering. To volunteer at any time was foolish, he might have said, but to volunteer for a mission like this was lunacy. He may have reminded Sabinus of the old Latin proverb “Wise men learn by other men’s mistakes, fools by their own.” And this mistake could well be fatal. But the little legionary of the 3rd Augusta had set his mind to the task, and he was not going to be diverted from his chosen course.
A little before noon, as the men of the Roman army watched from their lines, Legionary Sabinus led the group of volunteers in a sudden rush at the new wall, shield raised, sword drawn. From the top of the wall above, defenders opened up with a barrage of missiles. While companions all around him were hit and tumbled back under a hail of javelins, arrows, and stones, Sabinus scrambled up the rubble unscathed. Josephus says that as the lone legionary kept coming, climbing the rubble like a veritable monkey and without a scratch, Jewish defenders thought the diminutive Syrian must be some kind of superman and fled, leaving him free to climb up onto the top of the wall.
From the uneven summit, turning back to his watching army, Legionary Sabinus, grinning, raised his shield and sword victoriously. The cheers of thousands of his comrades would have reached his ears. For this deed, for being the first to mount the wall of the enemy city, he could expect to be presented with the Corona Muralis, the Mural Crown, one of the most prestigious bravery awards available to a Roman soldier, equivalent to the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor, or Britain’s Victoria Cross.
The solid gold crown, crenellated in imitation of the walls of a city, singled out the holder as an exceptional soldier. Polybius tells us that the holders of golden crowns—there also were crowns awarded for storming an entrenchment and for conspicuous gallantry in a sea battle, the Corona Vallaris and the Corona Navalis, respectively—were given place of precedence in religious parades when they went home after leaving the military, and they hung their crowns in a prominent place in their houses for all to see. He says that Romans of all classes had an almost obsessive concern with military rewards, attaching immense importance to them. So it wasn’t surprising, Polybius said, that Romans emerged “with brilliant success from every war in which they engage.”
This quest for glory had driven Legionary Sabinus to climb the Antonia wall. As he stood there, he would have pictured himself called to the front of an assembly of the entire army. General Titus Flavius Vespasianus, the emperor’s son, would read his citation, then personally place the heavy crown of gold on his head. Tens of thousands of Sabinus’s comrades would cheer and applaud. And how he would be received when he went home once his current enlistment expired in another ten years. Perhaps to Beirut, hometown of many men of the 3rd Augusta, so we gather from Josephus. Sabinus’s fame would precede him, of course. He would write home, perhaps paying a literate comrade to pen a note to his family, and sending the letter with a traveler plying the coastal road north, or slipping it, along with a bribe, into the hands of a bronze-badged rider of theCursus Publicus courier service. How proud they would be in Beirut of their son, brother, cousin, and uncle Sabinus, winner of the Mural Crown.
But then, in that instant of success, the brave, daydreaming soldier lost his balance. To the horror of the watching Romans, Legionary Sabinus fell, landing with a crash of his segmented metal armor inside the wall. The noise alerted the fleeing partisans. They turned to see Sabinus, injured by the fall, raising himself up onto one knee. They swarmed back and surrounded him. Sabinus raised his shield to defend himself, but his arms were soon a mass of wounds. The shield dropped, and Sabinus was cut to pieces.
The Roman army didn’t make a habit of bestowing bravery awards posthumously. One of the rare instances on record was when Caesar buried Chief Centurion Crastinus of the 10th Legion after the Battle of Pharsalus. So it seems that Sabinus’s death robbed him of the glory that precipitated it.
Of Sabinus’s fellow volunteers, three were killed and eight wounded before they could even reach the top of the wall. As Jewish defenders reoccupied the wall, other legionaries dashed forward and brought the wounded men out and carried them away to the nearest field hospital behind the lines.
Two nights later, another party of volunteers—twenty legionaries and the eagle-bearer from the 5th Legion, plus two cavalrymen and a trumpeter—quietly climbed the rubble in the darkness and overpowered the Jewish sentries on duty. The legion trumpeter then blew his instrument. This signal sent panic through the other Jewish guards, who thought the entire Roman army had broken into the Antonia in the darkness, and they ran for it. In fact, the trumpet was merely the signal to summon more Roman troops waiting in the night. Titus and his officers were among those who flooded, unopposed, over the wall. The Jewish defenders withdrew to the Temple via a tunnel connecting it with the Antonia and dug by John of Gischala, presumably filling in the tunnel behind them.
The Roman army had secured the Antonia. In the end it was achieved much more easily than either side would have imagined weeks or even days earlier. The Roman success signaled the beginning of the end for the Jewish defenders. But a lot of blood was yet to be spilled. Legionaries surged through the Antonia and into the Sanctuary of the Temple. Here, warring Jewish factions combined to stand shoulder to shoulder against the invaders in the desperate hand-to-hand fighting that followed in the tight confines of the Sanctuary courtyard. From the moment the first Roman mounted the wall, the struggle lasted from the middle of the night until the afternoon of the next day.
Julianus, a centurion from Bithynia, in the north of present-day Turkey, tried to exhort the exhausted Roman troops as more and more Jews pressed forward. Single-handedly he drove the partisans back across the Temple forecourt. Then his feet went from under him, slipping on blood on the paving stones. He fell on his back with a crash of his armor. Jewish fighters sprang forward and surrounded him. Somehow, Centurion Julianus killed seven of his assailants before he was hacked to pieces. Inspired by this Pyrrhic success, the Jews rallied and drove the Romans back into the Antonia. Its walls became the new front line.
Titus ordered the fortress destroyed to create a broad entrance into the Temple from outside the First Wall. During the week that this demolition work was being carried out, Titus again sent Josephus to offer surrender terms. In tears, Josephus implored his fellow Jews to save themselves and the city. Again the resistance leaders refused.
Leading Jews, especially priests, who managed to escape the Temple and surrender were sent by Titus twelve miles north to the town of Gophna. Garrisoned by Vespasian early in the campaign, it now served as a POW camp for Jewish prisoners, with the inexperienced men of the four cohorts of the 18th Legion almost certainly acting as their guards. When partisan leader John of Gischala spread the rumor around Jerusalem that these senior prisoners had been executed by their Roman guards, hoping to dissuade others from attempting to emulate their escape, Titus got wind of it and brought the prisoners back, parading them outside the walls for all to see that they were safe and well.
Once a path had been cleared through the Antonia, Titus gave Colonel Sextus Vettulenus the task of leading a surprise night attack in force, with the goal of penetrating as far as the forecourt of the Temple. But this time the Jewish sentries weren’t taken by surprise, and they summoned support as the Romans launched their assault. A bitter fight took place in the forecourt. Colonel Vettulenus and his troops charged in their maniples of up to 160 men at a time, closed up and with their shields locked together. They held the courtyard until daylight, then withdrew to the Antonia again when it was obvious they couldn’t proceed any farther forward against determined and concentrated opposition.
Amid the ruins of the Antonia, Titus had his legions start constructing four more embankments so he could launch his troops into the Temple from four different assault points at once. His main target was the Sanctuary, which lay on the other side of the Court of the Gentiles, the courtyard that was as far as non-Jews had been permitted to venture in peacetime. With timber trundling up from the coast, work proceeded slowly.
Jewish raiding parties continued to slip out from behind the First Wall to create a nuisance behind the front line. One day, an hour before sunset, a large party surged up the Mount of Olives to attack the 10th Legion’s camp. Taught a rude lesson by the two Jewish raids earlier in the operation, the 10th was ready this time. There was a fierce battle along the length of their fortifications, until the guard cohort of the 10th drove the attackers back down into the ravine at the foot of the mountain.
The men of the 10th were joined in the pursuit by cavalrymen. One trooper, named Pedanius, galloped after the fleeing Jews and, leaning from the saddle, grabbed a sturdy Jewish youth by the ankle as he ran, then pulled him from his feet and dragged him off, kicking and screaming. The teenage prisoner was presented to Titus. Unimpressed by his tender years, he had him executed.
After the Jews tried to burn the eastern porticos linking the Temple with the Antonia, unsuccessfully, on August 15 they tried another of their many ruses. Up to that point resistance fighters had occupied the roof of the western portico. Now they made an obvious withdrawal. Roman troops climbed up and victoriously claimed the rooftop, running along its length above the Jews in the courtyards below. Once the roof was crammed with Romans, the Jews set fire to pitch and bitumen that they’d previously packed between the rafters at one end. Some soldiers at the Antonia end managed to jump back down to their anxious comrades. Others had to jump into Jewish-held sections of the Temple to escape the flames, and were immediately killed by waiting partisans. Rather than jump, some legionaries were burned to death on the roof, or took their own lives.
On August 16, the Romans burned down the northern portico. Five days later the rams were at work again, battering the massive white marble blocks of the Sanctuary walls, trying to force a breach. On August 27, frustrated by lack of progress, Titus sent a storming party armed with scaling ladders and grappling hooks against the porticos surrounding the Sanctuary. Although they sustained heavy casualties, the Jews repelled this attack.
Next, Titus had the massive gates to the Sanctuary set alight. The silver decoration on the woodwork melted in the flames, but the huge doors remained intact. The flames spread to the adjacent porticos. They burned until the following day.
Titus now called a council of war with his senior officers: Colonel Alexander his chief of staff, General Lepidus of the 10th; General Cerialis of the 5th; General Titus Phrygius of the 15th; Colonel Fronto of the 18th/3rd Augusta detachment; and Colonel Antonius Julianus, the acting Procurator of Judea. Josephus gives no commander for the 12th Legion, so apparently it was led by its senior tribune. Later, the colonels of the legions and colonels who had been appointed procurators for the Galilee and Idumaea regions also were brought in and asked for their views. There was lengthy, perhaps heated debate about whether the massive white marble Temple, said to be one of the most handsome buildings in the ancient world, should be left standing in the final assault.
Two differing accounts of the meeting remain. Josephus says that Titus wanted to preserve the Temple and brought his officers around to his way of thinking. Josephus apparently was present at the meeting, but subsequently he would have wanted to paint Titus, now his patron, in a good light. The fourth-century Christian writer Sulpicius Severus, thought to have been quoting a now lost reference from Tacitus, wrote that Titus was all for destroying the Temple, the symbol of Jewish resistance. On one hand Titus had a reputation for being a kindly and fair man, and was well liked, but he also didn’t hesitate to execute POWs, so he wasn’t all sweetness and light. The Tacitus version, if accurately reported, is more likely to be correct.
Titus gave orders for the burned gate to be stormed. It gave way to ram and axes and swords before legionaries surged into the Sanctuary. The fight that followed was a stalemate, and Titus withdrew his troops beyond the Sanctuary and retired to his bed. In the night, Jews made a raid out against the Roman lines. Legionaries on guard drove their assailants back, into the Sanctuary. According to Josephus, one Roman soldier tossed a burning brand through a golden gate, which quickly started a raging fire in the Sanctuary.
Titus was summoned in time to see the Sanctuary ablaze. Josephus says that Titus issued orders for Roman troops to put out the fire, but in the noise and confusion the orders either didn’t get through or, as is more likely, many legionaries actively stoked the fire, determined to see the place that had caused them so much grief for so long go up in flames. While Jews tried to fight the fire, Roman troops swept into the Sanctuary.
Titus and his bodyguard of lanky auxiliary spearmen made their way to the inner sanctum—through the Outer or Women’s Court and then the Court of Israel, up a circular flight of fifteen steps to the Court of Priests and the Altar of Burned Sacrifice, through a massive arch, and up another twelve broad steps to a door of solid gold. Men of the general’s bodyguard, using wooden clubs, forced the golden door.
Titus walked into the so-called Holy Place, where only the Jewish high priest had been allowed to tread. A flat ceiling soared 150 feet above. In front of him stood the Altar of Incense, the Table of Shewbread, and the symbol of Judaism, the golden Seven-Branched Candlestick, the branches representing the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. He walked a little farther on, through a curtained opening, into the Holy of Holies, God’s abode, where even the high priest could venture only on the Day of Atonement. On the day the Temple fell, Titus found God’s room to be empty.
Once before, a great Roman general had succeeded in storming the Jewish Temple of Jerusalem and stood in this place—Pompey the Great, back in 63 B.C., during his conquest of the East with legions including the 1st and the 2nd. Pompey, too, had personally entered the Temple’s inner sanctum. But he had left it intact.
Now, with flames engulfing many parts of the Temple, Roman legionaries were putting any Jew who stood in their way to the sword as they removed the obvious treasures—gold, silver, and brass doors, and the implements of the Jewish religion, such as the golden candelabra—and the massive hoard of treasure hidden here by the Jews. The treasury was plundered and every nook and cranny of the massive Temple complex scoured for more loot.
With their eyes only for booty, many plundering legionaries let some refugees flee past them, unless they were carrying valuables. Other legionaries went on a killing frenzy, climbing over piles of the dead to kill more. Blood flowed across the Temple flagstones like water. The tumult of the spreading inferno, the smoke, the heat, the crashing timbers, the yelling of excited Roman troops and their centurions barking orders, the screams of the victims, the wailing of the dying and those who feared for their lives, would have been deafening.
In the confusion, a number of resistance leaders mixed with the refugees and escaped the city, some using water viaducts to reach the Upper City. Meanwhile, the Zealots looked to the heavens, certain that the prophecies of old would be fulfilled and God would smite the heathen violators of the Temple and save the Jews. But their prayers went unanswered, their expectations were unfulfilled.
The fires didn’t spread quickly enough for some legionaries, who went about lighting new blazes. On an undamaged portico clustered six thousand men, women, and children, Jewish refugees. Legionaries who still had vivid memories of comrades who’d been burned to death on one such portico as a result of Jewish duplicity torched the portico, and all six thousand perished. At the same time, priests who tried to surrender were put to death.
The Temple had finally been taken. It was August 30. But even in succeeding days, as the flames died down and the legions assembled in the ruins to sacrifice to their gods, the siege of Jerusalem was not yet over. Partisans still held Herod’s Palace, and the surrounding Upper City, in western Jerusalem.
Now two resistance leaders, John of Gischala and Simon the Idumaean, asked for a peace conference. When they met Titus, on the wall of the Temple platform, Titus offered them their lives if they surrendered now, the same offer he’d made numerous times over the previous weeks and months. In turn, they offered to end their resistance if permitted to pass unmolested through the Roman lines and depart into the desert with their families. Titus was furious. “The vanquished do not dictate the terms of their own surrender,” Josephus reports him saying. He abruptly terminated the talks.
As the rest of the city was put to the torch, Titus concentrated on the sector remaining in the hands of the resistance, the Upper City. The lay of the land made an assault from the west, from near the Camp of the Assyrians, the most practical. On September 8, the legions began work raising embankments against the massive white marble blocks of the eastern wall of Herod’s Palace. Seventeen days later the embankments were completed.
Many partisans lost heart and slipped away, hiding in underground passageways. The remaining rebels retired to one of the three tall towers of the palace, the 135-foot Phaseal Tower, whose base still stands today, and which was Simon’s headquarters. The four rams began their work on the western wall. It quickly gave way, and legionary assault troops went surging over the ruined barrier. John and Simon and their last remaining supporters planned to burn down the palace, then cut their way through the legionaries and escape. But the fire didn’t spread, and the escapees were repulsed. They, too, then fled into the subterranean passageways.
The glittering standards of the legions appeared on the top of the tower. A mighty cheer rang around the valley as the Roman troops realized that the siege was over. Jerusalem was theirs. Much of what was left of the city was burned, and ninety-seven thousand prisoners were accounted for. Those identified as resistance leaders were executed. The seven hundred most handsome prisoners would adorn Titus’s and Vespasian’s joint triumphal procession in Rome the following year. Other able-bodied young men were sent to the mines of Egypt. The children were sold into slavery. Adults were dispatched to many provinces of the empire, to fight wild animals in the arena. A million people were said to have died in Jerusalem, from wounds inflicted by the Romans, or at the hands of their own people, or from starvation. Roman losses in the siege were never put on paper, but the dead and wounded would have run into the thousands.
The legions now assembled in a formal parade outside the ruined city, and Titus addressed them, praising them for their victory. He then presented the customary bravery awards to men of the legions who had shown outstanding courage during the campaign. Civic Crowns and golden Mural Crowns and Crowns of Valor, golden torques, miniature golden spears, and silver standards were presented, with citations for each recipient read aloud to the legions. Many legionaries received promotion as well as an additional portion of the massive booty that was to be shared by every soldier who had lived through the assault. The legions’ rules of plunder were clear: Jerusalem had been taken by storm, and while some major items were reserved for the imperial treasury, most of the plunder was shared among the legionaries.
From the tribunal, Titus then announced the new assignments for the legions. The 5th and 15th were to accompany him on a triumphant progress through the region, which would lead them back to Egypt in the new year. The 5th would eventually be posted to Moesia after its A.D. 80 reenlistment, which would take place in Macedonia. The 15th was to go straight to a new station in Cappadocia. Undergoing its latest twenty-year discharge and reenlistment in the new year, the 15th Legion would leave eight hundred of its retiring veterans in Judea to settle on land grants at Emmaus. The 12th was going north, to be based at Melitene, also in Cappadocia, not far from the Euphrates River. And the 10th was staying in Judea—from now on it was to be the resident legion in the province.
Days later, John of Gischala was discovered in his underground hiding place beneath the city. Titus spared him, sentencing him to life imprisonment. Simon ben Gioras was captured by soldiers of the 10th some days later and sent in chains to Titus, who had returned to Caesarea by this stage. Titus paraded both John and Simon at Rome in the Triumph of A.D. 71, at the end of which Simon was customarily lashed, then strangled. The commander of the third Jewish faction, Eleazar, had died while defending the Temple.
After spending several months parading his prisoners around the region and pitting them against wild beasts and each other in provincial arenas, in the new year Titus set sail from Alexandria for Rome, with Titus’s father, the new emperor Vespasian, to join Titus’s fractious younger brother Domitian, who was already in Rome with Field Marshal Mucianus. The former Governor of Syria had marched the 6th Victrix and the rest of his task force to Italy to join legions from Balkan bases loyal to Vespasian in overthrowing Vitellius’s army and occupying Rome. Subsequently Vespasian was to appoint Titus commander of the Praetorian Guard, a post he would hold until his father’s death in 79. Titus would then ascend the throne, reigning for only a little over two years before his premature death brought Domitian to power. Titus would be greatly mourned throughout the empire. But not by the Jews.
In September A.D. 70, as Titus marched away, he left a newly appointed Procurator of Judea, Colonel Terentius Rufus, in command at Jerusalem. Rufus had orders to destroy any evidence that a city had ever stood there, although Titus did spare the surviving towers of Herod’s Palace. Cohorts of the 10th Legion were to occupy a base on the site of Jerusalem in addition to the existing legion base at Caesarea. As they destroyed much of the Jewish city, stone by stone, the men of the 10th recycled the building materials and used them to build a legionary fortress.
All the time they labored on construction work, the men of the 10th were on the lookout for treasure hordes hidden by the Jews during the siege. Early in A.D. 71, as Titus returned from his triumphal progress through Syria, which had taken him as far as the 6th Victrix’s base at Zeugma on the Euphrates, where Parthian envoys had come to present him with golden crowns to commemorate his victory, he came back through Jerusalem on his way to Alexandria. And in Jerusalem he was amused to see the men of the 10th highly delighted with themselves. Jewish prisoners had just revealed the hiding place of a vast cache of gold, which the legion retained.
Such quantities of gold were taken from Jerusalem that when it was sold, with so much on the market, the price of gold in Syria halved overnight. Not that the surviving legionaries of the 10th would have minded. They still emerged from the siege of Jerusalem comparatively wealthy men.
But the 10th hadn’t finished with fighting Jewish partisans just yet. There was a little nut to crack down by the Dead Sea that would demand their attention before long. A nut called Masada.