Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (47 page)

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 c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 252

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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 c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 253

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.

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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 vio-lators 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 c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 255

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 c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 256

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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 stran-gled. 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.