Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (48 page)

In September a.d. 70, as Titus marched away, he left a newly appointed Procurator of Judea, Colonel Terentius Rufus, in command at Jerusalem.

Rufus had orders to destroy any evidence that a city had ever stood there, although Titus did spare the surviving towers of Herod’s Palace. Cohorts of the 10th Legion were to occupy a base on the site of Jerusalem in addition to the existing legion base at Caesarea. As they destroyed much of the Jewish city, stone by stone, the men of the 10th recycled the building materials and used them to build a legionary fortress.

All the time they labored on construction work, the men of the 10th were on the lookout for treasure hordes hidden by the Jews during the siege. Early in a.d. 71, as Titus returned from his triumphal progress through Syria, which had taken him as far as the 6th Victrix’s base at Zeugma on the Euphrates, where Parthian envoys had come to present him with golden crowns to commemorate his victory, he came back through Jerusalem on his way to Alexandria. And in Jerusalem he was amused to see the men of the 10th highly delighted with themselves. Jewish prison-

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ers had just revealed the hiding place of a vast cache of gold, which the legion retained.

Such quantities of gold were taken from Jerusalem that when it was sold, with so much on the market, the price of gold in Syria halved overnight. Not that the surviving legionaries of the 10th would have minded.

They still emerged from the siege of Jerusalem comparatively wealthy men.

But the 10th hadn’t finished with fighting Jewish partisans just yet.

There was a little nut to crack down by the Dead Sea that would demand their attention before long. A nut called Masada.

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XXIV

MASADA

he civil war in Europe was over. On December 21, a.d. 69, a day after the murder of Emperor Vitellius, the Senate at Rome had
T
declared Vespasian the new emperor. Vespasian wouldn’t set off for Rome from his headquarters in Alexandria until the summer of a.d. 70, but his deputy, Field Marshal Mucianus, formerly the Governor of Syria, was firmly in charge of affairs at the capital. A tight-fisted new Palatium was soon controlling the administration of the Roman army and navy, a task made difficult—and more importantly, expensive—by the fact that thirteen new legions had been raised by Nero, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius during the two years of civil war. Faced by a huge war debt racked up by his four predecessors—estimated by Vespasian himself at three times the revenue of the empire—he had to reduce the army to a manageable and affordable size. An old Latin proverb says that economy is too late at the bottom of the purse, but in this case Vespasian had no choice.

Taxation was his first remedy—taxes were as much as doubled throughout the empire. But in restoring Rome’s finances to an even keel, Vespasian also was to implement a major shake-up of the army, the first since Augustus’s remodeling of the Roman military a hundred years earlier.

Vespasian was able to promptly merge four new legions, but apart from two units made up of seamen, noncitizens, Vespasian couldn’t just abolish legions overnight—legally, legionaries were entitled to their retirement bonuses on discharge, and the funds for this simply did not exist. But, just as it been little touched by the civil war, the 10th Legion escaped the drastic measures that would see the abolition over the next decade or so of a number of long-established legions such as the 1st, 17th, and 18th as their normal reenlistments fell due.

General Lepidus left the 10th Legion following the wrapping up of the Judean offensive at the end of a.d. 70, and for a time the legion would have been commanded by its senior tribune once more. But by the spring of a.d. 71 the Palatium had sent the 10th a new commander, Brigadier
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General Lucillus Bassus. Once he’d taken up his post at Jerusalem, General Bassus took the 10th campaigning in southern Judea to mop up the last isolated Jewish resistance.

After securing Hebron, the ruins of which had been occupied by refugees from Jerusalem following its fall, General Bassus’s first objective was the hill fortress of Machaerus, to the east of the Dead Sea. Built one hundred and fifty years before by Alexander Janneus and remodeled by King Herod Antipas, the palace, atop a cone-shaped hill, was surrounded by a wall forty feet high into which were built four towers. It was at this palace that John the Baptist had been beheaded some forty-five years earlier to satisfy the whim of Herod’s stepdaughter Salome.

In a.d. 66 a cohort of the 3rd Augusta Legion on garrison duty here had been surrounded by rebels, who agreed to let the Roman troops depart unharmed and retaining their arms if they abandoned the fortress, and the Syrian legionaries of the 3rd Augusta had marched out behind their standards and made it back to Caesarea. The Machaerus fortress had been occupied by rebels ever since, and in the wake of the fall of Jerusalem, the small Jewish garrison had been augmented by a number of resistance fighters who’d escaped the city.

Down the northern slope from the old fortified palace on the hilltop stood the walled town of Machaerus, referred to as the Lower Town, and as the 10th Legion and its auxiliary cavalry crossed the Jordan River and marched around the head of the Dead Sea toward it in the spring of 71, the Jewish residents closed the town gates and took up defensive positions.

The 10th surrounded the hill, cutting off the town and the four-thousand-square-yard fortress above it, preparing for a lengthy siege. In their usual fashion, the Jews sent raiding parties out to harass the legionaries as they dug the trenches and threw up the walls of a two-mile circumvallation, with the raiders always returning to their hilltop refuge. But on one such raid a handsome and confident young partisan named Eleazar lingered outside the wall, chatting with his friends on the ramparts. As he did, a legionary named Rufus of the 10th crept up and grabbed him, then dragged him back to the Roman lines.

The Jewish defenders were mortified by the capture of young Eleazar, and even more so when General Bassus had him tied to a cross in front of the walls for a long, lingering death. Eleazar begged his comrades to surrender so that he didn’t have to die. Amazingly, the defenders of the fortress agreed to give up the fortress to save his life, if General Bassus let them go unharmed, and marched out. Bassus kept his word and let them all go, Eleazar included.

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Meanwhile, the people of the Lower Town continued to defy the Romans, and the siege continued, with the legion starting work on a ramp to the northwest of the town. Then one night the townspeople tried to creep by the 10th Legion sentries in the darkness, in a mass exodus. Perhaps they were betrayed, because apparently the legionaries were waiting for them. Seventeen hundred were intercepted and put to the sword. Little more than a hundred townspeople managed to escape in the night.

The men of the 10th then surged into the town, looted it, and put it to the torch.

Leaving Machaerus a smoking ruin the next day, the 10th Legion went looking for more resistance fighters. Their search led them to the Forest of Jardes, on the western side of the Dead Sea. There, Jude ben Ari, one of the resistance leaders who’d escaped from Jerusalem via the city’s underground passageways, was holed up with three thousand supporters—fellow escapees from Jerusalem and refugees from Machaerus. General Bassus surrounded the forest with his cavalry, then sent in the 10th Legion. All three thousand Jews hiding in the forest were tracked down and killed.

At this point General Bassus died, apparently from natural causes, and the 10th Legion’s campaign was stalled as it waited for a new commanding general. The legion returned to its fortress at Jerusalem, and doesn’t appear to have received its new commander, Brigadier General Flavius Silva, until well into a.d. 72, or even the following year.

A motion picture made in the 1970s about the siege of Masada starred British actor Peter O’Toole, portraying Silva as a man in his fifties or sixties. We know that, typically, legion commanders were men in their early thirties. There is no mention of Silva prior to this appointment in any of the histories, but he went on to become consul eight years after he took command of the 10th Legion. At about the same time, Julius Agricola, father-in-law of the historian Tacitus, was made commander of the 20th Valeria Victrix Legion in Britain at age thirty, and he would also go on to become a consul within eight years, at thirty-eight, only three or four years before Silva. So it’s likely that Silva was only thirty or so when he came to the
praetorium
of the 10th, after being promoted from the position of second-in-command of another legion, the usual route to legion command. It’s unlikely he’d been second-in-command of the 10th prior to this—the Palatium made a habit of bringing in new blood when legion commanders were appointed.

In the spring of a.d. 73, General Silva resumed military operations in southern Judea. Only one Jewish center of resistance remained, at Masada.

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tramped out of Jerusalem and headed south for the Dead Sea, just a day’s march away.

Masada is a table-topped mountain of golden-brown rock that rises 1,700 feet above the level of the Dead Sea, 11⁄2 miles from its western shore. On the oval-shaped summit, 650 feet by 190 feet, King Herod the Great had built a palace in the grounds of an earlier fortress. In the spring of a.d. 73, the fortress was occupied by 960 Zealots under the leadership of Eleazar ben Jair. Another of the Jewish commanders was one of the partisan officers involved in the defense of Jerusalem, the Zealot Jude. He had escaped to Masada after the capture of the city, and joined his colleagues in preparing for a long stay.

King Herod had maintained Masada as a place he could retreat to in times of emergency. There was always the possibility that his own people might rise up against him, and he had also known that Queen Cleopatra of Egypt had an eye on his kingdom. Only his firm friendship with Mark Antony had kept him on his throne. Apart from the comfortable palace Herod built at the western end of the summit, he also kept a vast arsenal at Masada. When the Zealots seized the fortress they found a stockpile of weapons, enough to equip an army of ten thousand men, as well as iron, bronze, and lead for the manufacture of weapons and ammunition. The storehouses on the eighteen-acre summit were filled with grain, oil, dates, and wine, while the fertile summit gardens could grow fresh food, and conduits hollowed out of the limestone caught and conducted rainwater to vast underground water reservoirs with a capacity of more than two hundred thousand gallons.

When General Silva and the 10th arrived opposite the giant limestone crag of Masada—its name means “mountain fastness”—the Zealots had already occupied the mountaintop redoubt for seven years since the day they’d massacred the 3rd Augusta cohort stationed there back in a.d. 66, at the start of the revolt. Silva immediately set the 10th Legion to work building camps to the west of the mountain.

Eight camps were created—traces of their walls and streets can still be seen today—with an estimated fifteen thousand legionaries, auxiliaries, camp followers, and enslaved Jewish prisoners involved. General Silva also had a wall of circumvallation built right around Masada. More than two miles long and intersected by forts and towers, it was some ten feet high. Like the camps, it’s still there today, although half its height has collapsed over the centuries.

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this labor. But the construction work that lay ahead was reserved for the men of the 10th Legion. Not even auxiliaries were involved in building work where the legions were involved. Legionaries had the necessary skills, and they could be trusted. Besides, Romans had long felt that tough work made tough men.

There were only two ways to reach the summit of Masada. A path on the eastern side, called the Snake Path, ran for almost four miles up the side of the mountain, a path so narrow that anyone using it had to put one foot in front of the other. A path on the western side was guarded by a fort fifteen hundred feet from the crest.

Four hundred fifty feet below the top of Masada to the west, and separated from it by a rocky valley, was a promontory called White Cliff.

From this point, Silva decided, a single ramp would be built up to the summit of the mountain. Giving his chief engineering officer instructions to undertake the massive operation, he watched the earth-moving work proceed for weeks.

Day by day, the ramp crept over the gulf between White Cliff and Masada and up the mountainside. At a gradient of 1 in 3, and 695 feet wide at its base, it eventually rose 300 feet. On top, a pier of fitted stone 75 feet high and 75 feet across was erected. A wooden siege tower 90 feet tall was built and rolled up the ramp, then lodged against the wall of the fortress. While artillerymen on several levels of the tower maintained a constant fire with Scorpions and
Ballistas,
keeping the nearby ramparts cleared of Jewish defenders, down below, a battering ram pounded away at the base of the stone wall.

In time the wall gave way, and men of the 10th Legion poured through the breach. They found that the Zealots had built a second, inner wall.

When the Roman rams were brought up against this and their first blows loosened the earth covering, it was revealed that this second wall had been built using timber balks laid lengthways, alternating with layers of stone. As Julius Caesar had discovered in Gaul a century before when he and the 10th Legion were besieging Gallic fortresses, battering rams have no effect on walls built with wooden cross members. The timber absorbed the blows of the ram.