Legions of Rome

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  When news of the revolt reached Hadrian, he was in Greece. He immediately ordered one of his best generals to Judea to command the Roman response to the revolt. The task fell to Sextus Julius Severus, then governor of Britain. With one of the consuls for the year in Rome stepping down to hurry to Britain to take Severus’ place there, the general, who is likely to have made his military reputation in Trajan’s Parthian campaign—a general identified only as Severus was named by Dio among the successful Roman commanders against the Parthians—set off for the East.

  Clearly, the militarily conservative Hadrian would not release any legions from the west to help Severus, for there is no record of legions being transferred to the East at this stage of the revolt. Severus would have to put down the uprising using whatever resources he found in the East, together with the few auxiliary troops that accompanied him from Britain.

  But Hadrian did give Severus sweeping powers that placed him above provincial governors, whose authority did not extend beyond the borders of their individual provinces. Those powers would enable Severus to bring in units from outside Judea. They also allowed him almost carte blanche authority in the region while acting in the name of the emperor—as demonstrated by the term ex indulgentia divi Hadriani, meaning, at the indulgence of Hadrian, which was used on special military discharge diplomas issued by Severus in Judea. [Starr, V, 2]

  Severus probably took several British-based auxiliary units to Judea with him, plus detachments from various other units as his personal bodyguard. One of the units likely to have contributed to, or been part of, Severus’ British contingent was the 1st Hispanorum Cohort, based at Maryport on the Solway Firth—the unit’s prefect Marcus Censorius Cornelianus is known to have gone to Judea with Severus. [Hold., RAB, 4]

  It is probable that Severus did not reach Judea until the spring or summer of AD 133. The situation that confronted Severus and his accompanying troops when they arrived at Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast, having been brought from a port in southern Gaul or western Italy aboard warships of the Misene Fleet, can only be imagined. [Starr, VIII] Modern-day writers have speculated that a legion was wiped out by the Jewish rebels during Bar-Kokhba’s revolt. But while Dio wrote that the Romans suffered grievously during this revolt, neither he nor any other classical author stated that a legion was totally destroyed, nor even lost its eagle.

  Of two legions known with some certainty to have been wiped out in the second century, one, the 9th Hispana, disappeared after AD 120, and can be demonstrated to have perished in northern Britain. [See Disappearance of the 9th] The other legion that disappeared from the records, the 22nd Deiotariana, is likely to have been the unit which, according to Dio, was most definitely wiped out in Armenia in AD 161.

  What Dio did say about Roman losses in the Second Jewish Revolt was that “many Romans” perished in this war, and that, as a consequence, when Hadrian sent one of his annual new year’s letters to the Senate during this conflict, to be read to the House on January 1—probably in AD 133, after the first bloody year of the revolt—he omitted the traditional opening of, “If you and your children are in health, it is well; I and the legions are in health.” [Dio, LXIX, 14] But this does not constitute evidence that a legion had been wiped out.

  Certainly, the two legions stationed in Judea, the 10th Fretensis and 6th Ferrata, would have taken heavy casualties in the opening stages of the revolt. The 10th Fretensis in particular must have suffered severely. As evidence of this, newly arrived Roman commander Sextus Severus was forced to take an almost unprecedented step in order to bring the 10th Fretensis up to some sort of fighting strength. As discharge diplomas show, Severus granted Roman citizenship to a number of sailors and marines crewing ships of the Misene Fleet that had brought him to Judea, and whom he transferred into the ranks of 10th Fretensis Legion. [Starr, VIII] Such a heavy toll was taken on the ranks of the centurions of the 10th Fretensis that Severus took the equally rare step of transferring the prefect of the 1st Hispanorum Cohort to this legion as a senior centurion. [Hold., RAB, 4] No doubt other transfers of a similar nature also took place.

  Shimeon bar-Kokhba established his headquarters at the hilltop fortress of Bethar, 8 miles (12 kilometers) southwest of Jerusalem. Today, the village of Bittir sits at the bottom of the hill, and the rail line to Tel Aviv runs by it. There had been a small fortress on the hill here since the time of the First Temple at Jerusalem, and Bar-Kokhba’s fighters rebuilt the tumbled-down stone walls that ran for 1,000 yards (915 meters) around the hill, repaired the semicircular bastions set along the walls, and dug out the 15-feet (4.5-meter) deep and 50-feet (15-meter) wide moat which ran across the saddle of earth connecting the hill to a mountain ridge to the south. The roughly oval-shaped fortress covered 25 stony acres (10 hectares). [Yadin, 13]

  It is certain that the rebels succeeded in taking and destroying the fortress of the 10th Fretensis Legion in Jerusalem at the outbreak of the revolt, and tearing down the offensive marble pig that stood above the city gate. All the men of the legion caught there would have been put to the sword by the rebels, in the same way that the Roman garrison of Jerusalem had been slaughtered in AD 66. Only those cohorts of the 10th Fretensis occupying outstations, and its 1st Cohort stationed with the legion’s eagle at the provincial capital of Caesarea, escaped the fate of their comrades at Jerusalem.

  Bar-Kokhba remained at Bethar for the next three years, ruling Judea as its self-proclaimed “prince” and “president” with the help of his Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish religious council. He also appointed Jewish administrators to various parts of Palestine. Surviving documents reveal that several of those administrators were still approving land leases in their areas three years later. [Yadin, 12] Bar-Kokhba also minted his own coins—possibly melting down captured Roman coinage, for Roman coin images representing the emperor and his legions were alien to the Jews. On those new coins were inscribed legends such as, “Year 1 of the Liberty of Israel,” and “Shimeon, President of Israel.” [Ibid., 1]

  Roman general Severus was faced with the very same task that had awaited Vespasian in AD 67—the recovery of Jerusalem and much of Judea from rebel Jewish hands. To achieve that, he needed many more men. Numismatic evidence reveals that, to consolidate the Roman position in Judea, for the duration of the revolt Severus brought in two legions from neighboring provinces—from Arabia, the 3rd Cyrenaica, and from Raphanaea in southern Syria, the 3rd Gallica.

  In all likelihood Severus also used vexillations from other legions in the East. A vexillation from the 4th Scythica Legion, for example, which was based at Zeugma in Syria, was very likely to have taken part in Severus’ Judean counter-offensive, because a centurion of the 20th Valeria Victrix Legion, Ligustinius Disertus, accompanied Severus from Britain to Judea and subsequently served with the 4th Scythica during the revolt. Disertus’ name suggests that he was a Syrian native, like a number of men of the 20th VV. Centurion Disertus’ local knowledge may have been the reason that Severus took him to Judea. After the revolt, Disertus returned to his own unit, the 20th VV, in Britain. [Hold., RAB, 4]

  The fourth-century author Eusebius gave the province’s governor Tineus Rufus credit for supervising the Roman offensive against the rebels, writing that “Rufus, the governor of Judea, once military aid had been sent to him by the emperor, moved out against them treating their madness without mercy.” Severus outranked Rufus, and Roman command in this war was his. According to Eusebius, too: “He destroyed in heaps thousands of men, women and children, and under the law of war, enslaved their land.” [Eus., EH, IV, VI] There can be no doubting that the Roman response was indeed harsh and merciless, just as the rebel slaughter of Romans had been when the uprising began. But the counter-offensive was not as swift or as sure as Eusebius implied. It would prove to be a long, grinding war.

  With just the two full-strength 3rd legions, the battered remnants of the 6th Ferrata and 10th Fretensis, vexillations from several more legions and his auxiliary units, Severus devised a brut
al but effective strategy for the best deployment of his vastly outnumbered troops against hundreds of thousands of armed rebels and their supporters. “Severus did not venture to attack his opponents in the open at any one point, in view of their numbers and their desperation,” said Dio. [Dio, LXIX, 13] Severus broke up his units into a number of wide-ranging smaller groups. These parties intercepted Jews in small groups, captured them, locked them up, deprived them of food and allowed them to die. Elsewhere, Roman flying columns made lightning raids in which they located the hidden Jewish outposts, destroying fifty of them. [Ibid.]

  As the outposts were eliminated, surviving Jewish fighters and their families withdrew to remote hiding places. Numerous such rebel hiding places were located by twentieth-century Jewish archaeologists in the rocky heights west of the Dead Sea. Between Engedi and Masada, the archaeologists found several caves along the cliffs of the Nahal Hever wadi, one containing ancient skeletal remains of eighteen men, women and children plus clothing and implements, which were dated to around the second century.

  Tellingly, in one of the caves, the archaeologists also came upon an archive of Jewish documents written on papyrus. Among them were letters from Shimeon bar-Kokhba himself to his subordinates, giving them orders. In one of those letters, Bar-Kokhba wrote, “Get hold of the young men and come with them. If not, a punishment. And I shall deal with the Romans.” Other letters, from Bar-Kokhba and his deputies, urged the capture of traitors. [Yadin, 10]

  These Nahal Hever caves, some precariously placed in cliff faces, were difficult to reach and even more difficult to locate, making them ideal hideouts for the rebels, from where they could emerge to make hit-and-ruin raids on Roman forces. Eventually, the Roman military became aware that there were Jewish hiding places somewhere in this vicinity, for the remains of two small Roman camps are located in the area, high on opposite clifftops overlooking the Nahal Hever wadi. Both camps were capable of housing eighty men—a unit of century strength. [Ibid.] This fits the story told by Dio, of a number of small units being separated from their legions, cohorts and wings and sent out into the countryside relentlessly to track down the rebels.

  A papyrus of AD 124 put the 1st Thracian milliaria Cohort at Engedi, not far from the Nahal Hever caves. [Hold., DRA] This 800-man cohort continued to be based in the area following Bar-Kokhba’s revolt. [Yadin, 10] It would seem likely that the two Roman camps of the Nahal Hever belonged to centuries of the 1st Thracians, and that these troops eventually caught and dealt with most of the Jews hiding out in the region—with the exception of the group of eighteen, never found by the Romans, who must have starved to death in what became known as the Cave of the Letters.

  While some rebels were being hunted down in the barren Dead Sea region, to deny them shelter and support other Roman troops progressively destroyed one Jewish village after another across the length and breadth of Palestine, as Roman control edged closer and closer to Jerusalem and Bar-Kokhba’s headquarters at Bethar. According to Cassius Dio, in the application of this scorched earth policy, 985 villages were destroyed. [Ibid., 14] It was a slow process, said Dio, but the Roman troops were gradually able to “crush, exhaust and exterminate” the Jews. It was an ethnic cleansing operation which, over three years, took the lives of 580,000 Jewish men; Dio could not calculate how many Jews also died from famine, disease, or in those villages put to the torch, but between these remedies and the sword “nearly the whole of Judea was made desolate.” [Ibid.]

  Roman operations against the rebels continued in Judea for three years, but it appears that by the winter of AD 134–135, two years after the revolt first erupted, only Bar-Kokhba’s headquarters at Bethar remained to be taken, and had already been isolated. The Judean situation had stabilized sufficiently for Hadrian’s Palatium to remove auxiliary units from the province and transfer them north to the command of Arrian, governor of Cappadocia, for a campaign against the invading Alans in Lesser Armenia.

  That transfer was also made possible by the fact that legionary reinforcements had arrived from Europe. Probably assured by Severus that one final, reinforced push would bring about the downfall of the rebels holed up at Bethar, and that the legions in the East were exhausted, Hadrian sent vexillations from the 5th Macedonica Legion, then based at Troesmis in Moesia, and from another legion based in Moesia, the 11th Claudia, whose base was at Durosturum. [Yadin, 13]

  Cohorts from these two Moesian legions would have been shipped from Europe together, arriving in time for the spring offensive of AD 135. Severus marched his army to Bethar, surrounding it with a siege wall 4,000 yards (3,656 meters) long, and setting up two major camps on the dry, rocky soil, camps which can still be traced today. One of those camps measured 400 yards (365 meters) by 200 yards (182 meters), and was large enough to accommodate 5,000 men, the equivalent of a full legion, while the other was roughly half the size of the first camp. [Ibid.]

  Using the loose stones littering the area, the Roman troops built low walls around their tents in the camps, and these walls remain to this day. There is a spring close to one of the camps, and idle legionaries of a water-carrying party cut an inscription into the rock there—“LEG V MAC ET XI CL,” identifying two of the legions taking part in the siege of Bethar, the 5th Macedonica and 11th Claudia. [Ibid.]

  According to the Jewish Midrash, 200,000 Jews congregated in the Bethar fortress with Bar-Kokhba. Other Jewish sources give a far greater number. Either way, the hilltop compound would have been crowded beyond belief. Standing more than 2,000 feet (609 meters) above sea level, the fortress was surrounded by a deep natural canyon on three sides, with the rocky saddle connecting the hilltop to the surrounding mountains to the south—where the defenders had dug their moat. [Yadin, 13]

  In undertaking the siege of Bethar, Severus followed the model used in the siege of nearby Masada sixty-two years before. Once he had surrounded the Jews and cut them off from outside supply, he commenced to build a ramp of earth across the southern saddle toward the fortress wall. Once completed, the ramp would fill in the defensive moat and lead to the summit of the hill, allowing the legions to drive up it as if it were a highway and gain entry to the fortress over the wall. In the meantime, Roman catapults maintained steady fire against the Jewish defenders.

  “The siege lasted a long time,” said Eusebius, “before the rebels were driven to final destruction by famine and thirst, and the instigator of their madness paid the penalty he deserved.” [Eus., EH, IV, VI] The siege was terminated before the summer had ended—traditional Jewish sources say that Bar-Kokhba was dead by September AD 135. [Yadin, 10] From Eusebius’ narrative it would seem that Bethar fell, and Shimeon bar-Kokhba died—probably at his own hands—before the Roman legions’ assault ramp was completed.

  With the fall of Bethar and massacre of all those within its walls, the Second Jewish Revolt had come to its bloody conclusion. On the orders of Hadrian, Jews were banned from ever setting foot in Jerusalem again, or of even approaching it, “so that even from a distance” they “could not see [their] ancestral home.” [Eus., EH, IV, VI] Roman colonies would progressively be built at Jerusalem and throughout the province in previously Jewish areas. On Hadrian’s orders, to expunge any reference to the Jews, the name of the province was changed from Judea to Syria Palestina—the Palestina referring to the Philistines, age-old foes of the Jewish people.

  Shimeon bar-Kokhba’s bloody revolt and his brief reign as the prince of Israel had brought about a predictably fierce response from Rome. This had been the second time that Romans had paid a painful price at the hands of the Jews in Judea. Hadrian was determined that there would not be a third time. The Jewish people had been expelled from their homeland, and Judea would never again be a flashpoint for Rome.

  AD 135

  XLVIII. ARRIAN AGAINST THE ALANS

  Throwing the barbarians back

  By the winter of AD 134–135, Roman forces had all but quashed the Second Jewish Revolt in Judea. With the last of the rebels confined at Bethar, and le
gionaries arriving from Europe to undertake a siege of Bethar through the summer, the situation in Judea had been sufficiently turned around for Hadrian’s Palatium to turn its attention to another threat in the East.

  In the summer of AD 134, after learning from Pharasmanes, king of Iberia, today’s Georgia, that Rome’s forces were tied up fighting the Jews in Judea, many thousands of mounted warriors of the Alani tribe, Sarmatians from the Caucasus region between the Caspian and Black Seas, had pushed southeast. [Dio, LXIX, 15] According to Dio, the Alans invaded the territory of the Albani and also the kingdom of Media, where they “caused dire injury.” [Ibid.] From there, the Alans threatened Armenia, Lesser Armenia, Cappadocia, Pontus and the neighboring Roman provinces.

  Originating from north of the Black Sea, the nomadic Alani, or Alans, were renowned both as horse-breeders and as fierce mounted warriors. Hadrian’s military policy, unlike that of his predecessor, the soldier emperor Trajan, was one of defense rather than offense. But an offensive operation against the Alans, designed to drive them back across the mountains and seal the western passes from the Caucasus, had a defensive objective, that of securing existing Roman territory and that of Rome’s allies.

  Now that much of the pressure had been taken off the Roman military in Judea, sufficient Roman resources could be redirected for an offensive against the Alans. The man chosen to lead the operation was Flavianus Arrianus, or Arrian, as later writers would dub him. Then Roman governor of the province of Cappadocia, Arrian had been born at Nicomedia in Bithynia around AD 90. Working his way up the Roman promotional ladder, Arrian had entered the Senate in Rome in approximately AD 120, becoming a consul ten years later.