by Baker, Simon
When the Romans tried to protect the building of the siege towers with hurdles, the Jews made the work difficult by launching rocks from the walls and smashing the Roman defensive works. When the Romans built the siege towers higher, Josephus simply ordered the north wall to be built higher too, his workers protecting themselves with screens made from stretched ox hides. Next, under the combined cover of screens and firepower from a semicircle of 160 artillery engines, Vespasian deployed the unit of soldiers in charge of the battering ram (so called because the iron weight at one end was shaped like a ram’s head). When it eventually drew up against the city wall and began pounding, the Jews dropped huge sacks filled with cloth to soften the blows.
However, the Romans raised their game too. When, in one encounter, Vespasian received an arrow in the foot, he used the occasion to inspire his men. He rose above the pain and urged his soldiers on to ever more intense fighting. Josephus saw how a man was decapitated by an artillery stone, ‘his head flung like a pebble from a sling more than 600 yards [away]’.24 Similarly, a pregnant woman was carried 100 metres (135 yards) under the force of another missile. All around the extraordinary Jewish resistance was the rushing sound of approaching missiles, the noise of their final crash and the constant thudding of dead Jewish bodies as they fell from the walls.
Eventually, the Roman attack yielded a prize: a break in the wall. But as the Romans attacked the breach and forced their way into the town, the Jews had one last surprise in store for them. To protect themselves from the barrage of missiles, the Roman infantry approached in the formation known as the testudo (tortoise). This required twenty-seven men to form up in four ranks and to deploy their shields in a set pattern: some shields protected the sides of the unit, while others were held overhead, each row overlapping with the next. With their protective ‘shell’ in place, the unit moved slowly towards the north wall. Josephus, however, found a way to neutralize even this. Just as the Romans approached, the Jews poured boiling oil over them. The blistering liquid seeped through every little crack in the testudo and threw the Roman units into agony and panic. Some soldiers nonetheless managed to escape and laid a plank in the breach of the wall. The Jews had a plan for this too. They covered it with an oily slick made from boiled fenugreek and thus forced the Romans to slip. Despite these feats of Jewish cunning, nothing could keep the Romans out for ever.
Just before dawn on the forty-seventh day of the siege, Titus led a killing squad noiselessly through the breach. So exhausted with fatigue were the Jews that Titus’s men were able to get within reach of the dozing sentry guards, cut their throats and infiltrate Jotapata. Soon the alarm was raised, but it was too late for the Jews to obstruct the legions now charging like ants into the town. Panic-stricken, the rebels dispersed through the narrow streets. Some surrendered, some put up a meagre fight, while others made a desperate bid to take refuge in pits and caves. Most of the rebels were quickly and easily wheedled out and overpowered. However, as the Roman soldiers took control of the town, it was difficult for them to distinguish the insurgents from the surrendering civilians. When one Jew asked a Roman centurion to help him out of a cave, the Roman willingly gave his hand. He was immediately repaid with a quick upward thrust of a sword that killed him instantly. The Romans continued to search high and low for the insurgents, and one man in particular had yet to show his face.
The man who had correctly prophesied that the city would fall on the forty-seventh day (so he said) had also found a hideaway in a pit. Here he joined forty other rebels. For two days they successfully held out, but on the third day one of their party who sneaked out at night to gather provisions was caught and gave away Josephus’s whereabouts. Vespasian immediately sent two military tribunes to entice the commander out with the promise of safe conduct. Josephus and his men refused. The rank and file of Roman soldiers gathered at the pit entrance were baying for his blood. However, a third Roman officer, by the name of Nicanor, arrived on the scene and was able to keep them back.
Nicanor was a friend of Josephus whom the priest most likely met in Jerusalem. He now swore on that friendship that Vespasian wanted to save the life of the commander who had put up such an extraordinary defence of the town. Down below in the pit, however, the offer sparked a fierce debate. Josephus wanted to surrender. Interpreting his recent dreams, he believed that God was angry with the Jews and that it was His will that the Romans prosper. The others, however, furious that surrender was even being considered, called Josephus a coward and a traitor. They insisted that suicide was the only honourable way out for all of them. If Josephus refused to join them, they said, they would kill him anyway.
Caught in a dilemma, Josephus at first argued that suicide was an offence against God. The argument only provoked his audience of rebels to violence. They rushed at him with their swords raised, shouting and threatening him. Again Josephus, ‘turning like an animal at bay to face each assailant’, tried all manner of persuasion: ‘. . .he called one by name, glared like a general at another, shook hands with a third, pleaded with a fourth until he was ashamed.’25 It was no use. Eventually Josephus agreed to the mass-suicide pact. However, he suggested a particular method.
To avoid offending God, lots were to be drawn. Then, beginning with the person who drew the short straw, every third man was to be killed by the man next to him. So began the horrific sight of Jew cutting the throat of fellow Jew. As the lifeless bodies of rebels dropped to the ground, one man was consistently passed over and remained standing. Being a scholar and perhaps well versed in mathematics, Josephus, it seems, had devised the count in such a way that he would always be one of the two survivors. Although the story later inspired a maths problem known as the ‘Josephan count’, we will never know whether Josephus had used luck or judgement. What is clear is that he now seized his opportunity. He turned to his fellow survivor and desperately tried to convince him to abandon the suicide pact. It must have taken all his powers of persuasion not to be killed for going back on his word after so many had just been murdered, but both men surrendered.
Josephus later put his survival down to the will of God. However, this escape was far from the end of his troubles. The commander of Galilee, the young appointee of Hanan and the Temple authorities in Jerusalem, had failed in his task to resist Rome. He was now a prisoner of Vespasian. Galilee was as good as lost, and Josephus himself faced imprisonment, a long, pathetic journey to Rome and possible execution. Yet the fortunes of Vespasian, Titus and even Josephus were now about to be transformed. With that change of circumstance, the stakes of the war in Judaea were about to be raised.
REVERSALS OF FORTUNE
To raucous jeers from the crowds of Jewish prisoners in the streets of Jotapata, and to a barrage of insults, jabbing elbows and calls for his death from the Roman soldiers, Josephus was dragged out of his hiding place and frogmarched to Vespasian’s camp. According to Josephus, it was his noble bearing that now made the general’s son, Titus, take pity on him. Indeed, he claimed that it inspired the Roman to reflect on the captive’s extraordinary reversal of fortune and ask his father to spare Josephus’s life. The reality was perhaps more prosaic. Josephus was not to receive special treatment because of his noble demeanour. The fate awaiting him was that of hundreds of leaders of Rome’s vanquished foreign enemies before him: Josephus would be taken to the metropolis, paraded in chains at a triumphal procession, then perhaps ritually executed in the Forum. Before all this could happen, though, he took one of the greatest single gambles of his entire life.
Josephus asked if he could have a private audience with Vespasian and Titus. Having been granted his request, he held his nerve and delivered the words that would make or break him. He told them he came as a messenger of God. There was no point in sending him to Nero, he said, because that man would soon no longer be emperor. The future emperors of Rome, he prophesied, were standing before him. Vespasian must have guffawed at such a preposterous suggestion; emperors of Rome had, after all, always come from a sing
le dynasty of the aristocracy. Perhaps he even grew angry in the belief that Josephus was mocking both Rome and him, an ordinary Roman who had risen through the ranks. He certainly suspected that the scholar and priest was saying anything to save his skin.26
In truth, Josephus had taken the messianic prophecy in the Book of Numbers that a saviour would arise from Israel and applied it not to a Jew, but to a Roman. When an officer present asked why, if Josephus was so adept at prophecy, he had not predicted that the town would fall and that he would be captured, Josephus replied that he had. Vespasian’s interest was sufficiently pricked by this extraordinary conversation to check on Josephus’s prophecy. A messenger soon came back confirming it: Jotapata had fallen on the forty-seventh day, just as Josephus had predicted. It is reasonable to imagine that Titus and his father spied an opportunity. Perhaps this man could somehow be useful to them after all. As far as Josephus was concerned, the gamble had paid off. He was not just safe, but his fortunes had once again taken a rapid u-turn. He was given gifts, clothing and shown every kindness. Although he was still a prisoner, he was now a prized, talismanic one.
As for Vespasian and Titus, their minds soon returned to the more practical matters of war. The campaign of terror in Judaea and Galilee had only just begun. At Tarichaeae, in the kingdom of the Roman client-king Agrippa, 6000 Jews were massacred as Titus made a dramatic amphibious assault on the unfortified part of the city from a lake. After it was taken, Vespasian discriminated between civilian and insurgent, in order to avoid outraging the local population with mass executions and thus make peace-keeping operations easier for Agrippa in the future. However, he broke his promise on the advice of his staff, who feared further insurgency. ‘Expediency must be preferred to conventional morality,’ was their message.27 The Jews he had set free were later rounded up in a theatre and 1200 of the old and infirm were slaughtered. The 6000 strongest were sent to Greece to work as slaves on Nero’s planned canal in the Isthmus of Corinth. Some 8500 of Agrippa’s subjects were returned to him, and the remaining 30,400 were sold into slavery. Similarly, at Gamala the Romans repaid Jewish resistance by putting 4000 Jews to the sword; the remaining 5000 insurgents had already jumped to their deaths in a deep ravine.
While Vespasian surged south, ‘liberating’ the coastal cities on his march to Judaea, Titus focused on mopping up remaining pockets of resistance in Galilee. In the last conflict of the campaign in AD 67 a surprise lay in store for the Roman general. John of Gischala had been busy rallying and training peasant armies in the Golan Heights and in his home town. Most of these Titus easily crushed. However, when Titus prepared to storm Gischala, John pleaded with him not to attack the town on the Sabbath, but to wait a day. After agreeing to the brief respite, Titus took the town, only to discover that John had vanished. Once again, the rebel leader had made a theatrical, last-minute escape. This time, however, his destination was more predictable: Jerusalem.
In fact, the Holy City was the refuge of every resistance fighter who escaped death or enslavement at the hands of the Roman legions. The result of their arrival in Jerusalem threw the direction of the war into crisis. Many brought with them only bad news. Galilee was lost, they said, and now the Romans were making a slow but unstoppable sweep south. Others, however, violently disagreed. When John and his band of followers rode into Jerusalem they spread their belief that the defeat of the Romans was utterly achievable, that the Jews could still beat them.28 While the clash of opinions intensified and entrenched the Jewish factions, there was one group caught in the eye of the storm.
The leadership of the war under Hanan and the Temple authorities, cried the nationalist leaders in accusation, had brought only failure after failure. Had the Jewish resistance proved so weak, so ineffectual because the moderate priests wanted all along to surrender the city and Judaea to Rome? With time the argument of the extremist factions only gained momentum; by the end of the year their patience had run out. John’s followers first imprisoned and then massacred the moderates. Then they turned their firepower on Hanan and the religious élite. John’s faction denounced them as traitors, expelled them from the Temple, then took control of both it and its funds. Soon the Temple complex had become a battleground, and by December Hanan and three other leaders from the priestly élite were dead. With their deaths, wrote Josephus, the fall of Jerusalem began.29
In the power vacuum left by the moderate leadership, the city fell into the hands of rival factions of nationalists all struggling for supremacy. Over the next year their numbers increased. When, in AD 68, Vespasian’s army swept through Judaea, Peraea and Idumaea, the peasant leader Simon ben Gioras and his army also eventually fled to Jerusalem. His arrival provoked further conflict. Informed of the Jews’ infighting by deserters, Vespasian’s war council urged their commander on. They said that now was the time to attack Jerusalem. Once again, Vespasian disagreed, choosing to avoid a direct assault on the Holy City. Let the Jews destroy themselves, was his view; with the rebels killing each other and deserting to Rome, the Jews of Jerusalem were doing the Romans’ work for them. However, it was not for this reason that in July of AD 68 the Roman operations in Judaea suddenly came to a complete halt.
The suicide of the emperor Nero launched the government of the Roman empire into the greatest crisis of its history. Vespasian knew that according to the constitution he needed to be reinstated by the new emperor before pursuing the war. Therefore, while a successor was chosen, he temporarily suspended his campaign.30 However, the change that was afoot was far greater than a simple switch of personnel. A revolution was under way that would take the Roman empire into a savage civil war. At stake were two questions: which emperor was to run the empire, and on what grounds should he be appointed? Under the empire’s first dynasty, the Julio-Claudians, succession was in practice hereditary although in principle it could only be confirmed by the Senate and the Roman people in Rome. That system was now challenged by an extraordinary revelation: the power to appoint new emperors lay not only in Rome, but with armies in the provinces, championing their own generals. ‘A well-hidden secret of the empire had been revealed: it was possible, it seemed, for an emperor to be chosen outside Rome.’31
From the sidelines of the Roman east, Vespasian and Titus witnessed a series of amazing reversals in fortune. When Nero’s first successor, Servius Sulpicius Galba, refused to give traditional cash donations to the military on his accession, the armies that had brought him to power withdrew their support, and his brief administration came to an end. Galba’s head was cut off and the Praetorian Guard in Rome declared his successor to be Marcus Salvius Otho. The new emperor’s power base, however, did not stretch beyond the metropolis, and soon the army of the Rhine in Germany declared support for their commander Aulus Vitellius. When his armies defeated Otho’s at the battle of Cremona, Otho committed suicide and Vitellius became emperor. However, the rule of this aristocrat, like that of the two men who preceded him, was to be short-lived. Now a man not of high birth, but of practical military experience, a man who could command widespread support among the armies of the eastern provinces, was about to step into the running for the most powerful job in the ancient world.
On 9 July AD 69 the armies of Judaea declared Vespasian emperor of Rome. They were quickly joined in their chorus by the armies of the Danube. While Vespasian took control of the critically important province of Egypt, two armies made their way to Italy in his support. One was made up of eastern legions and led by the governor of Syria, Gaius Licinius Mucianus; the Danubian legions, led by Marcus Antonius Primus, formed the other. The legions based on the Danube beat the eastern legions to Italy and prepared to take on the forces of Vitellius. Once again, two Roman armies met at Cremona. In a horrendously bloody conflict, the supporters of Vespasian won. The vicious slaughter of Romans, however, was far from over.
In the capital Vespasian’s brother Flavius Sabinus spearheaded an insurrection against Vitellius’s forces before the armies of Antonius and Mucianus could join him.
The coup failed, so Sabinus and his faction took refuge on the Capitol. In the attack that followed, the ancient Temple of Jupiter went up in flames. Smoked out, Sabinus and his faction were hauled in front of Vitellius and promptly executed. Revenge was not long in coming. Outside Rome, the legions supporting Vespasian brutally forced their way into the city and defeated Vitellius’s army. Search parties hunted high and low for the emperor himself. They discovered him hiding in a doorkeeper’s lodge beside the palace, the door blocked pathetically by a bed and a mattress. He was then dragged half-naked into the Forum, publicly tortured, beheaded and thrown into the Tiber.32
Vespasian received the news of his victory while still in Egypt in December AD 69. But the celebrations could not have been entirely jubilant. His accession had been a vicious bloodbath in which thousands of Romans had lost their lives. It was hardly the glorious start to the principate that Vespasian wanted. In order to justify seizing power by force and to unify the citizens of the empire in support of his regime, the new emperor Vespasian needed a grand military victory, and he needed it fast. He looked to Judaea. He appointed Titus to be commander of the war, and advised him that with the appointment came a new war aim: immediate victory over the Jews at all costs. The future of the new Flavian dynasty now depended entirely on success in Judaea.33
The news capped an extraordinary change in circumstances for Titus. The young general had suddenly risen from legionary legate to the dizzying heights of son and heir of the emperor of Rome. Now he was given the go-ahead for a mission to match the transformation of his status: an assault on the one city that Vespasian and he had avoided for the best part of three years – Jerusalem. But Titus was not the only man who could now reflect on his dramatic change in position. Since Josephus’s prophecy had come true, Vespasian summoned his prisoner, cut his chains and set him free.