Suddenly, he realized that he might be arrested and murdered out of hand, partly because of his plain speaking and partly because more than a few members of his class were already suspected of collaborating. Josephus probably looked very much the noble, in a silk tunic and wearing a gold ring. It was time for him to hide. The Antonia had already been captured so he took refuge in the inner court of the Temple, which he could enter because he was a priest. No doubt he disguised himself in cheaper clothing, taking care to avoid any smart acquaintances, since the lower clergy who staffed the Temple were staunch supporters of Eleazar and fanatically anti-Roman. The fact that he had been away for so long may have given him anonymity. He did not dare to emerge until Menahem and his friends disappeared from the scene.
Then I felt safe enough to venture out of the Temple and was once again able to talk to important people [who mattered]—high priests and influential Pharisees. Naturally, we were all very worried. We could see the people arming and had no idea what to do because we had no way of stopping the rebels. Aware every moment of the day that each one of us was in real danger, we tactfully pretended to share their opinions, but at least we tried to suggest they should do nothing rash and ought to leave the enemy alone until he attacked, so as to have the excuse of only using weapons in self-defense. While doing this, we were of course all hoping that Cestius was soon going to arrive with a large army and quickly put an end to the rebellion.10
At Antioch, Cestius Gallus realized that he had to act without further delay, as the Romans normally campaigned only between March and September. He assembled a formidable army, his best force being the Twelfth Legion Fulminata (the “Thunderer”), which may have numbered 6,000 men if up to strength, along with about 2,000 men from each of the other three legions stationed in Syria. He also took six cohorts and four troops of local recruits. (A cohort consisted of roughly 600 men.) In addition, he had 20,000 auxiliaries supplied by friendly potentates such as King Agrippa II and by the Syrian cities of northern Judea. Mainly light horse or bowmen, these native levies were of questionable value, but at least they could be relied on to hate Jews.
Accompanied by Agrippa who acted as his guide, Cestius marched down the coast to Ptolemais, from where he sent out a detachment to destroy the beautiful city of Zabulon, burning it to the ground, while he himself sacked the Jewish villages in the area. During his absence, however, a Jewish force attacked Ptolemais, killing 2,000 troops. He then marched on to Caesarea, where he set up his base. From here his men ravaged the surrounding country and put the villages to the torch, besides exterminating the entire population of Joppa—over 8,000 people—after surrounding the city by sea and land so that no one could escape. Finding Lydda empty of inhabitants, save for fifty who were butchered, he burned it to the ground.
The commander of the Twelfth Legion, Caesennius Gallus, advanced into Galilee with a strong detachment, receiving a warm welcome at the capital, Sepphoris. Even so, some guerrillas held out in the mountains in central Galilee and inflicted 200 casualties when the Romans approached. However, the legionaries quickly outflanked them, killing about 2,000 and ending armed resistance in the area—for the time being.
These tactics were designed to terrify Judea into abject submission, particularly Jerusalem, and were standard Roman practice. No doubt, Cestius expected he would have very little trouble when he reached the capital. However, he had given all too clear warning of his approach and was in for a very nasty surprise.
Marching by way of Antipatris and Lydda and climbing Beth-horon, Cestius pitched camp at Gibeon, six miles from Jerusalem. He was accompanied by Gessius Florus. Although it was the Sabbath, the Jews attacked the Romans here, with such fury that they broke through their ranks and killed over 500 of them while incurring a loss of only twenty-two men on their side, before retreating into the city. A ferocious young man called Simon bar Giora—who subsequently came to play a major role in the war with Rome—fell on the enemy rearguard while it was ascending Beth-horon, inflicting further casualties and capturing a mule train laden with weapons.
King Agrippa II made a final, frantic effort to secure a peaceful solution, sending two of his men, who were well known in Jerusalem, to promise the Jews that Cestius would do his best to persuade Caesar to give them a complete pardon if they laid down their arms. Fearful that the offer might be accepted, the extremists deliberately killed one of the envoys and wounded the other, who barely escaped with his life by running away. If Josephus has told the truth, a great crowd of people in the city were so angry at losing this last opportunity of ending the conflict that they stoned the saboteurs of the king’s peace efforts.
The legate now moved his headquarters camp closer to Jerusalem, up onto Mount Scopus (“Lookout Hill”), which was a mere three-quarters of a mile away from the walls. However, he did not launch an assault for another three days, as he was still hoping the city would surrender; in the meantime he sent out foragers to gather provisions. At last, on 4 October, he made a move and—no doubt much to his astonishment—was able to march his men into the Upper City without meeting any resistance, setting fire to Bezetha (the New City) and the timber market, before setting up a new camp outside Herod’s Palace. Terrified, the extremists and their followers retreated into the Inner City and the Temple.
Had Cestius forced his way into the Temple at this moment, the rebellion would have been over. However, he was persuaded to postpone the attack by his quartermaster, who had been bribed by Florus, desperate to have a war. As it was, Ananus, son of Jonathan, sent a message to the legate, saying he would open the gates, but Cestius refused to believe that the message was genuine. Next day, the Roman assault began in earnest, but the hard-liners had regained their nerve and resisted fiercely. After five days of inconclusive fighting, the legate sent in his best troops supported by picked archers, attacking the Temple from the north side, yet the defenders beat them off time and again with a hail of missiles.
Finally, the legionaries adopted the Roman tactic known as the testudo (tortoise), which consisted of holding their shields over their heads so that any spears thrown at them glanced off harmlessly. Protected like this, they were able to undermine the wall and set the Temple gate alight. Some of the defenders fled while supporters of the Romans prepared to open the gate, led by Ananus ben Jonathan, who seems to have been a member of the ruling class. Josephus may well have been among them. “If Cestius had kept on for just a little longer, he would certainly have captured the city,” he says. “But I think those criminal rebels had already made God take a deep dislike to both city and sanctuary, and that He would not allow the war to come to an end.”11
The legate did not realize that his opponents had nearly abandoned hope or that he had so many supporters inside the city. Suddenly, he called off the attack. He withdrew from Jerusalem to his camp on Mount Scopus, as the defenders harried his rearguard, killing a substantial number of Romans. Next day, Cestius withdrew still further, again for no apparent reason. Led by Eleazar ben Simon, his enemies followed closely, throwing javelins from the roadside at his columns and cutting down stragglers, the lightly armed Jews being able to dodge their heavily equipped opponents. Sometimes the Roman formations disintegrated, making the soldiers still more vulnerable. Among the casualties were the commander of the Sixth Legion and a tribune, along with other senior officers. They also lost a great deal of baggage.
Withdrawal turned into retreat and retreat into a rout. Cestius attempted to make a stand in his fortified camp at Gibeon, but after two days he saw that he was almost surrounded by the insurgents whose numbers, now that they were winning, grew by the hour. On the third day, 8 November, he decided to pull out, killing all his pack mules except those that carried throwing spears and siege weaponry. As he and his men painfully descended the narrow, difficult road down from Gibeon to Beth-horon, the Jews kept up a constant hail of spears, inflicting more and more casualties. It was too steep for cavalry to have any chance of dispersing them; what is more, the legionaries
could not keep their ranks, so their shields and armor failed to provide enough protection. Roman morale began to break, the men groaning and cursing. In contrast, the Jews were cheering. But for nightfall, Cestius and his whole army would have been butchered or taken prisoner.
During the night of 8 November, Cestius positioned 400 crack troops at what seemed to be a defensible site on Beth-horon, with orders that on next morning they should hoist emblems that would give the impression he and the army were still inside. Then, abandoning his siege weaponry, he and the rest of his men marched off as quietly as possible while it was still dark. The next morning, the Jews came up, overwhelmed and massacred the 400 legionaries, and then set off in hot pursuit of the retreating legionaries. But by then Cestius and the bulk of his troops had got too far ahead and were able to reach Syria in safety. Not since Varus’s defeat by the Germans sixty years earlier had the armies of Rome experienced such a crushing defeat.
Singing with joy, the Jews returned to Jerusalem and a heroes’ welcome. They carried the arms and armor stripped from the dead Romans, which could be used to equip their own men. They also brought back the siege weaponry and heavy artillery abandoned by the Romans in their flight, which included stone-throwing catapults for demolishing walls and large, quick-firing mechanical bows that shot a huge arrow capable of going straight through several men one after another. These, too, would be employed against the enemy in future battles. In addition, they seem to have captured Cestius’s war chest, which contained a large sum of money.
During the recent engagement at Beth-horon the Jews had suffered surprisingly few casualties, despite fighting the legionaries at close quarters. On the other hand, it was plausibly estimated that the Romans had lost 5,500 infantry and 380 cavalry. Most impressive of all, we know from Suetonius that the poorly armed, amateur soldiers of Jerusalem had succeeded in capturing one of Cestius’s “eagles,” that of the Twelfth Legion Fulminata. A legion’s eagle, it will be remembered, was a hallowed standard for which legionaries were supposed to give their lives rather than suffer the indelible disgrace of losing it. No one could deny that the Jews had won a victory worthy of the Maccabees.
6
Governor of Galilee
“How long shall I see the standard, and hear the sound of the trumpet?”
JEREMIAH, IV, 21
CESTIUS’S DEFEAT WAS an unmitigated disaster for Rome’s military reputation and authority. The news might easily unsettle other parts of the empire, besides encouraging Parthia to attack. Above all, it had turned the Jewish revolt into a war of independence.
Already Judea was a free country again. There was no movement to restore the monarchy, however, since Agrippa II, the last surviving Herodian, was all too obviously a client of Rome and would never cooperate with the new regime. Instead, a kind of junta, a coalition of notables, emerged in October 66, led by Ananus ben Ananus, who was a former high priest (and had been responsible for the murder of James, the brother of Christ). The Sanhedrin met again, taken more seriously now that the Romans had gone. Coins were minted, thick silver shekels and large numbers of smaller denominations in bronze, which bore such inscriptions as “Jerusalem the holy” or “The freedom of Zion”—later changed to “The redemption of Zion.” A fair number of Judea’s ruling class rallied to the cause of independence, even if some of them had tried to open the capital’s gates to Cestius. They had no wish to lose their beautiful mansions in Jerusalem or their lands, and they saw opportunities for increasing their power. The swiftness with which they formed a government shows that it was people like this who had organized the resistance to Cestius, handing out the weapons and dictating the strategy that defeated him.
There were some grounds for thinking the new state might be viable. As it was not on the Mediterranean littoral, it posed no direct threat to the Romans, who could well be deterred by the prospect of a long, difficult war and besieging a city stronger than Carthage. Not only did its walls look impregnable, but the surrounding Judean hills were ideal for ambushes; they provided cover for guerrillas and deprived large armies of room to maneuver. Moreover, as the Jews had shown under the Maccabees, they were one of the great fighting races of Antiquity when properly led. Nero’s regime seemed to be weakening, while there was also the possibility that the Parthians might intervene, despite their king’s timidity. It was not entirely unreasonable, therefore, to hope that Rome might agree to a looser form of suzerainty in order to save face and avoid paying for an expensive series of campaigns.1
Ananus’s most powerful allies in the junta were Eleazar ben Ananias and Joshua ben Gamala—the friend of Josephus’s father. An uncompromising fanatic, the son of the high priest recently murdered by Menahem, Eleazar still commanded the Temple guard. It was he who had been responsible for discontinuing the sacrifices for the well-being of the emperor and, although a member of the upper class, for burning the moneylenders’ archives. His total commitment to war with Rome was beyond doubt. Even if his championship of the poor was inspired by a thirst for power, he had many followers who stayed loyal to him, especially the more radically minded among the lower clergy. On the other hand, Joshua ben Gamala seems to have been much less of an extremist, despite maintaining a formidable army of private retainers. Unlike Eleazar, he hoped for a compromise. Yet, however different their ultimate aims may have been, men like these worked together, providing Judea with a government.
Nevertheless, as soon as the legate had been chased back to Syria, “many of the most eminent Jews swam away from the city, as if leaving a sinking ship,” says Josephus.2 They suspected that utter ruin was coming upon their country and that it was likely to come soon. Some fled to the humiliated Cestius at Antioch, who sent them off to Nero, to inform him of the loss of Judea—with instructions to lay all the blame for starting the war on Florus and deflect the emperor’s anger from himself.
Besides these upper-class pessimists, the entire Judeo-Christian community decided to leave Jerusalem. Writing in the fourth century, with access to accounts long since lost, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea says they had been “warned by a prophecy to depart from the city before the war began and go to Perea, to the gentile city of Pella.”3 The little community’s exodus meant the extinction of Judeo-Christianity and its Jewish ritual observances, their formal worship having until now been centered around the Temple, though they broke bread together in services at their houses.
The first really serious reaction to the defeat, however, was not against the Romans but against the Jews. At Damascus, thousands of Jews were herded into the public gymnasium where their throats were cut, during a massacre that lasted for an entire hour. Josephus says that the perpetrators did not dare tell their own wives beforehand because so many women in Damascus sympathized with the Jewish religion. Reports of the atrocity stiffened the determination of the Jews at Jerusalem to go on fighting for their liberty.
“People in the neighboring cities in Syria turned on and killed the Jews who lived among them, together with their wives, without the slightest provocation, since these folk had never even considered the possibility of rebelling against the Romans, nor had they shown any sign of disliking Syrians or of wanting to harm them,” Josephus recalled.4 After describing what he regarded as the worst of these massacres—at Scythopolis, where many thousands were butchered despite having demonstrated their readiness to fight for Rome—he tells us that he has recorded these atrocities “because I want to show readers that the war with the Romans was not so much because the Jews wanted one as because they had no other option.”5
It is difficult to determine Josephus’s actual behavior during these days since he wrote after going over to the Romans and after the Jews had been totally defeated. Although he had tried to prevent the revolt from breaking out, undoubtedly his own attitude toward the war had been changed by the pogroms. Yet if he felt it necessary to fight the legions, he did so very reluctantly. Having so much to lose, he always hoped for an agreement with Rome.
Meanwhile the i
ndependence party in Jerusalem prepared for war. Of those who still favored yielding to Roman rule, some were won over by argument, while others were bullied into accepting the new regime by threats of violence. A great public meeting was held in the Temple, attended by thousands, at which ten generals were chosen. To some extent the meeting seems to have been influenced—if scarcely dominated by—the Sanhedrin, despite the ingrained antipathy toward revolution of most of its members, whose families had prospered under the Roman regime.
Upper-class influence can be detected in the meeting’s opposition to making a Zealot, Eleazar ben Simon, overall leader. No doubt, he had played an important part in defeating the Romans. In fact, the captured weapons and Cestius’s war chest were still in his possession, and he had somehow got control of the treasury. The magnates were nervous about him, however, because he was a Zealot and had a bullying, dictatorial manner, while people were frightened by his arrogant bodyguard of fanatical knifemen. In the end, an urgent need for Eleazar’s money, exploited by subtle political maneuvering on his part, prevailed, and he was put in nominal charge of all matters of state. In practice, he was bypassed by the Sanhedrin and had little influence on policy—for the moment.
Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea Page 8