‘Steady, there. Watch that offside wheel. Come on, move.’
Wails came through the clouds of white dust. The Romans completed their forcing of the doors, finding it no easy task. Within the Temple they found howling women raising babies like weapons or shields. The old were on their knees, though not to the Romans. A noisy lot, the centurion Liberalis thought. There was now battle in the Temple. Young men with beards fought for the Holy of Holies. Priests cried prayers to their all highest. Sweating Roman troops, awed distractedly at the magnificence of gold and onyx and carbuncle and amethyst, stuck their spears in and seemed to hear the blood gush in cries about the horror of the ultimate desecration.
In the morning glory of birdsong, Titus surveyed the multiple crucified bodies that were crammed on the skyline. There were no trees left in the environs for further crucifixions. He walked with Josephus through smoke, dust and broken stone, stumbling over corpses. One corpse came alive and spoke:
‘Yusef ben Mattias. Traitor.’
‘Josephus Flavius. Roman citizen.’
The corpse, briskly speared, rejoined its fellows.
‘One thing I would not wish to be recorded in my history,’ Josephus said calmly. ‘The desecration of the Temple through pillage and demolition. Posterity will never forget that.’
‘Even though it’s been used as a military fort?’
‘Necessity, necessity. The citadel of the faith and the faith means the city. I will tell you the true reason why I accept the Roman mastership of the lands of the Mediterranean. The future can never lie with theocracy.’
‘Explain that big word to a simple soldier.’
‘The Christians are right when they render unto Caesar and unto God but keep the two tributes apart. All rule must be secular. When God enters politics he turns into his opposite. Always has. Always will.’ Titus did not well understand.
The troops stumbled over the bodies of men, women and children in the forecourts. ‘Heathen muck,’ Liberalis said, as the pillaging began. The veil of the Temple was rent. The great menorah was taken away. One young soldier shook his head sadly. ‘A bit doubtful, are you, lad? No direct orders, is that what you’re thinking? Haven’t you ever heard the word discretion? No general officer likes to order this kind of thing. But he knows it has to be done.’
The destruction of the ransacked Temple called for all the engineering skill the invading legions possessed. Huge metal balls swung from chains on derricks: the outer walls were stubborn, but they yielded at last in torments of dust and smoke. The pillars cracked, there was a scramble for safety as the great ornate ceilings began to bow. There were few Jews left to wail. After two or three weeks of steady destructive energy there was only a great heap of rubble, sending up dust to an invisible sun.
When Caleb landed at Caesarea he looked like a Roman growing old in the service of ships’ cooking galleys. To any who asked he gave his pseudonym Metellus. He felt a stranger in this port where there was hardly a Jew to be seen or heard. Roman patrols clanked through the streets; a homegoing legion paraded on the dockside. Caleb saw an old blind man sitting on a bollard, clanking a cup, crying for alms. He put a coin in the cup.
‘Todah, ach, achot.’
‘What news from Jerusalem, av?’
‘You don’t want to know the news from Jerusalem, ben. Jerusalem is no more, ben. Get you to Masada.’
‘Why Masada?’
‘All that will be left of Israel will be the young men of Masada. Until the Romans get there. They will come and starve you out. But the faith will prevail, ben.’
‘But tell me of Jerusalem, av.’
‘Thank the great Lord of Creation I never saw Jerusalem. And even had I the sight I would not see it. For Jerusalem will be no more. The trees cut for crucifying by the forestload. And the grass of the pasture outside the city burnt and the soil of the richness of the land sown with salt that no more life shall henceforth spring. Get you to Masada, tsair.’
Caleb trembled and sought the road. He met with a ragged column of Zealots who were seeking to join up with the forces of Eleazar.
Vitellius felt great fear when he heard the news, and the fear promoted massive appetite. He gnawed meat, trembling. He stuffed pie into his mouth, trembling, with two hands. Fight. Start recruiting campaign immediate discharge bounty regular pension after victory. Troops assembled in Palatine. Never wanted to be Emperor, never asked for it, forced against will. Give us the money now and we’ll stand by you. Call on Flavius Sabinus, brother of invading Vespasian: won’t have you put to death for disloyalty, instead offer five hundred thousand no a whole million gold pieces if hold off brother. Peace, I want peace. Tell Senate send envoys for armistice, Vestal Virgins in front cooing peeeeeeace.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, eating.
‘Explorator, Caesar. First detachments of Vespasian’s legions close at hand. Recommend immediate evacuation of palace.’
He called for a closed litter for himself and one for his chief cook and Arab expert in flaky pastry. Mouth stuffed, chicken drumstick in fist, he stuffed himself in. Quick, my father’s house on the Aventine. Soldiers outside the palace, relaxed, cooing of peeeeace, no need to worry, Vespasian is still busy in Judaea. But the palace was empty. Vitellius took from a cupboard a belt with pockets already stuffed with gold pieces and strapped it on. Not starve, limp away anonymous, unnoticed, cloak and hood. Then he heard noise. He ran, clinking, chewing, to the quarters of the janitor. The janitor’s dog, chained outside, snarled bitterly. Vitellius fed it a piece of meat and went in, jamming the bed with its mattress against the door. The vanguard could be heard tramping, smashing, looting. They broke in.
‘Who are you?’
‘Only one left. Look after palace. What have you done to my poor dog?’ The centurion and his troops eyed Vitellius’s paunch and nodded. ‘Important message for Vespasian. Demand safe custody till he arrives.’ They tied his hands behind him, tightened a noose about his neck, dragged him out of the palace whimpering, desperate for food, tore his clothes off him, sliced off his leather moneybag and threw the gold to the mob. Then they kicked him along the Via Sacra towards the Forum. He tried to bury his wineflushed face in his chest, but they stuck a sword under his chin and made him squint in the sun. The mob cried fatbellied old bastard. The troops played the game of the little cuts with him, a swordjab here, a daggerthrust there, then, on the Stairs of Mourning, they stuck into his belly and watched the guts flood out. Then they threw his body into the Tiber. He floated some time before he glugged to the bottom.
When Vespasian entered the palace he found it fully staffed and a banquet prepared for himself and his entourage. He looked at the loaded table with loathing.
‘Take this filth away.’
‘Filth, Caesar? It was specially prepared—’
‘Remember my name. It is Vespasianus Caesar and not Vitellius Pseudocaesar. Vespasianus Caesar would appreciate an imperial luncheon of bread, goat’s cheese and raw onions. And, to drink, some cervisia.’
‘Cccccervisia, Caesar?’
‘Yes. It is not wine. It is a fermented beverage made from malted barley. It foams. It is bitter and invigorating. Rome needs its salutary acerbity and an infusion of its salubrious vigour. Things are going to change around here.’
So, with the whole of Israel subdued except for the fortress of Masada, the final task of the Romans was to break the resistance of Eleazar, leader of those most zealous of the Zealots called the sicarii, who had gathered his forces and led them toiling up the steepness of the rock on which Masada stood. There were two ways up, both precipitous, one to the east above the lake Asphaltitis, the other a serpentine pass to the west. Herod had built a kind of palace at the summit, with a wall about it all of white stone, thirty-eight watchtowers set upon it, equidistant on the circumference. The new procurator, Flavius Silva, marched from broken Jerusalem with siege engines, setting them up on the so-called white promontory three hundred cubits beneath the highest part of the fortress. Forgiv
e me, I am not well able to set down the details of siege engineering, lacking the knowledge, being also in pain and somewhat drunk, but it is sufficient to say that Eleazar was able to look down on the smoke of a vast camp of ready Romans in the knowledge that the supplies of the fortress had run out, except for the water in the natural wells, that the enemy was confident none of the Jews could escape, and tomorrow or the next day a stream of Roman armour would file up by the two passes, breach the walls and commence the work of systematic, God help us, slaughter.
‘I know what some of you are thinking,’ he said to the men of the garrison (there were wives and children there too, also to be systematically slaughtered). ‘Best to be taken prisoner and fed. But they won’t take prisoners.’
The man they called old Caleb muttered something about the leeks and onions the Israelites had eaten in Egypt, that captivity was no burden.
‘You don’t seem to understand, Caleb. The Romans are not going to behave like the Egyptians. Nor like the Babylonians. This is the modern age. History is in the hands of the Romans and the new pattern of history is based not on the humanity of enslavement but on the ferocity of liquidation.’ Eleazar, though he called himself primarily a fighting man, loved to hear himself speak. He spoke now at great length about the beauty of death, how it was no more than a sleep, and was not sleep to be considered a great benison after the long day of work and thirst and heat and aching muscles? No, they were not to be killed by the Romans; the Romans would make their laborious ascent in vain; they would find the fortress filled with the corpses of brave men (and not so brave women and children who, in terms of the morality of a holy war, were neither one thing nor the other). Cheated of their prey. One man was chewing something; Caleb squinted at it: it looked like the corpse of a rat. Forbidden, of course. Mass suicide also was presumably forbidden. To manifest the glory of the law you had to break the law. ‘You men who have wives and children moaning in the quarters of the mothers,’ Eleazar said, ‘ought not to apprise them of what you propose to do. Do not afford them the time of protest, but do what has to be done without a word, though, and this is fitting, on a valedictory kiss.’
‘You mean,’ said a slow-witted man named Yigael, ‘we have to stick the knife in our nearest and dearest?’
‘Crudely put, but that is precisely what I mean. Look at the Romans down there, eating the meat of our country by their campfires, polishing their swords and slavering over the prospect of mass slaughter. I know what the law of Moses says about murder, but what I propose and indeed command does not come into the category of homicide in anger or in lust or greed. In killing each other we still fight a just war. You, old Caleb, I see shaking your head. You have been too much softened by a sybaritic Roman life and, I don’t doubt, by the watery creed of conduct of the Nazarenes. Be a Jew, be brave, set the younger ones an example.’
Cold-blooded slaughter is never easy, even in a good cause. It was found better to dispose of the children first, and this was mostly done by hurling them down the rocks so that their skulls might be fractured on the flinty prongs or solid surfaces. The Romans looked up from eating, laundering or polishing to see white things failing through the rare air of the height: tokens of surrender or what? The slaughtering of the mothers was more difficult, though some threw themselves weeping or cursing after their children. Two male friends had usually to hold down a yelling wife while the trembling husband thrust a dagger under her breast. These widowers were among the first to be willing to stand bravely against the wall, throat bared to the dagger, murmuring Israel as the blood spurted.
Caleb confronted Yigael, standing over the corpses. Eleazar, still orating about the beauty of death, had said that he would see his friends bedded down for the long night before taking the knife to himself. Yigael said to Caleb: ‘Who first? Yacob there will do in which one of us two is left.’ Caleb thought of his own Yacob, dead and buried in Rome, and felt the acid of a great despair rise to his gullet. Without voicing an answer, he walked round Yigael, who stared out to the hills of Israel, and struck him in the bone of his back with his borrowed dagger. Then he struck in the flesh and saw blood well. Yigael said: ‘Not so bad as you’d think after all.’
‘Loss of blood,’ Eleazar said, ‘induces a desire for sleep. And sleep is a benison and to be sought for.’
‘Ah, be quiet,’ Yigael said, tottering. Yacob, a brawny man in early middle age with few facial expressions, suddenly grabbed Caleb by the collar of his filthy tunic and, with a wide arm arc, let the dagger’s point fly to his throat. So that was it. What was life all about? What were we sent for? Caleb saw and heard the red tide gallop all down his tunic front, Hannah would be annoyed, have to wash it, always wash out blood in cold water, then, which was not pleasant, began to choke in it. Blow to the heart best, centre of the scarlet city, not the outlying streets. Israel, he heard someone say and remembered, choking, that the name meant a struggle with God.
Struggle with God, indeed. I am drunk enough to proclaim to the whole world, meaning these trees and that prospect of Alps beyond the lake, these nesting thrushes and the quietly though busily growing grass, that, despite all the depositions of the sceptics, God exists. There has to be an explanation for man’s unwilled misery. Yet God is above human morality and, in the arena of morals, knows not what he does. He is no more than a gamester. Was not this all a game? He played the game of bringing a fleshly son into the world, whose task it was to cry the salvation of Israel. He ensured that Israel should either shut its ears to the cry or puzzle over it as if it were in a foreign tongue, and then reject it. To ensure that Jerusalem should not be the centre of the creed of its own redemption, he smashed the church in Jerusalem and sent its father to Rome, there, before his ludicrous death, to establish the spiritual lineage of its insubstantial paternity. What worse centre for a doctrine of love could well be imagined? Oh, a great game of unquestionably divine provenance, and the game goes on. That it makes men suffer does not come into the sphere of God’s supposed omniscience: the flesh is a curious substance he does not well understand, not himself possessing it, and, since he does not possess it, it must be deemed to be of a negative quiddity. I am drunk on sour wine, so forgive me. He does not see my pain and is certainly incapable of feeling it. He does not see the deep wound in the body of Israel, the ruined Temple, the streets where dogs bark and whine in the ruins, the fields where crows caw, pecking at the eyes of the countless crucified. Trumpets shrill in Rome as the menorah is borne in the victorious procession of Titus. The woman called Israel weeps under the willows. Let me out of it, I have had enough.
In Pompeii the Israelite widow Hannah wept and Sara gave little comfort. Sardonically she recited:
‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I remember not Jerusalem above my chief joy.’
‘You’re – heartless. He was your brother.’
‘I don’t think I approve of martyrs. Life’s hard, and we have to get through it somehow. We don’t have to make it harder by inventing gods and causes and holy cities. Cities are only stones and bricks and thatch. Easily burnt. Rome was burnt, Jerusalem was burnt. What does it matter? Living is what matters, such as it is, keeping alive in spite of all of them – the hard faces, the men full of their own authority, the big causes, God, Deus, Zeus, Jehovah—’
‘It’s a comfort,’ Hannah sniffed, ‘to know he died for what he believed in.’
‘Nonsense. You are what he should have believed in. But you’ll find somebody else to believe in you. A man who gets on with earning his daily bread and doesn’t make his eyes big with dreams of big causes.’
‘You’re heartless, you just have no heart. I don’t want another husband. I just want to die.’
‘Yes, you say that now. In a few weeks’ time you’ll wake in the night, alone and cold, and want the comfort of somebody or something. Forgive the truism, but life has to go on.’
‘You keep saying that. It doesn’t me
an anything.’
‘It isn’t meant to mean anything. I’m going to make you some chicken soup. Eat, girl. Keep going. Live, if you can call it living.’
She ate, and she kept going, and she lived, if you could call it living, and she accepted the courtly advances of the widower Isidorus who, despite his name, was no cynic. And Sara’s daughter Ruth, who gave birth to a daughter named Miriam in the year of the death of Nero, was happy enough in the little house at the end of the Street of the Smiths, and Julius grew old in his work, ruddy and healthy in the air, though his back creaked. This is not the stuff out of which history is made. History pretends to be a straight road with a mapped destination at the unseen end, whereas ordinary life is a circle. Miriam grew, slender as a wand, proud of her black hair with a curl in it, and she became friendly at thirteen with a lad of sixteen named Ferrex. Ferrex, as the name will tell you, was a Briton. His father had come as a captive with Caractacus and, because of his fighting skill, had lived to be a freedman gladiator at Neapolis, dying in the arena at Pompeii when visiting Galba had given the thumbs down. Young Ferrex was in training in the same trade when he first met Miriam.
I leap ahead in my narration to these two because I have to find hope somewhere, and only in these young can I find it. They were living under a reasonable Emperor whose elder son would carry on his reasonable father’s business; of the other son, the Emperor who sends the taxman to me, I will say nothing as yet. Life and the world lay before them. The Empire was at its old distracted business of mingling bloods. Ferrex loved Miriam. They sat on the lower slopes of benignly puffing Vesuvius and talked. Ferrex’s red poll became gold in the sun. Miriam’s grandmother’s brother had not yet been wholly forgotten. Ferrex believed that he had done a stupid thing, going to a foreign country to let himself be killed.
‘But he believed.’
The Kingdom of the Wicked Page 51