In the northwest of the province of Syria lay Antioch, Syria’s bustling capital, which had a population of more than half a million people. Here, at his palace on an island in the middle of the Orontes River, which passed through the famously beautiful city, the province’s Roman governor for the past year, Proconsul Gaius Cestius Gallus, had been vacillating over what to do about the Judean problem for weeks. Josephus refers to him as Cestius; for continuity’s sake, he is referred to here by his last name, Gallus.
A senator, and a consul of Rome twenty-four years before this, Gallus was likely to now be aged well into his sixties. His family, the Cestii, came from humble origins, and his father had been the first family member to obtain a consulship. His surname, and that of his father, Gallus, usually indicated a Roman whose family origins lay in Gaul. But as Gallus’s father is believed to have come from Latium near Rome, the appendage would have derived from its other meaning—gallus is Latin for “cockerel.” So Gallus, like his father, may have been seen as a strutting rooster.
Gallus’s job as proconsul of Syria was the highest-paid and most sought after provincial gubernatorial post in the empire. Apart from attracting a large salary, the role had entitled Gallus to hand out appointments on his provincial staff to relatives as well as to his other “clients” and the sons and nephews of clients, making him a very popular patron. As a result, he was keen to do nothing that shortened his term as governor and reduced his power and influence.12
On receiving word of the unrest and protest in Jerusalem that spring and early summer, before the massacre of Roman troops at Masada, Jerusalem, and elsewhere, Gallus had called his senior civil and military officers together for a conference at his Antioch palace. When they came together, most of his officers, who included the commanders of the four legions then based in Syria, advised Gallus to lead a military expedition into Judea to put down the unrest. But Gallus, although he had served as a legion commander himself many years before, was not a militarist. He was in fact a timid man. Instead, he chose to send an envoy to Jerusalem to carry out an inquiry into the causes of the unrest.
The Jewish superintendents of the Temple and Queen Berenice had separately written to Gallus laying the blame for Jewish discontent firmly at the feet of Procurator Florus, who had also written to Gallus. In his report, Florus predictably blamed the Jews for the problems in Jerusalem and absolved himself of any wrongdoing. Even though Florus was Gallus’s subordinate, Gallus was intimidated by the procurator and reluctant to either dismiss him or attribute any blame to him. This was because Florus’s wife, Cleopatra (not the Cleopatra, but another noblewoman of the same name), was a close friend of the emperor Nero’s wife, Poppaea Sabina, and through the empress’s influence Nero had personally given Florus his Judean post.
The direct connection with the emperor had given Florus the confidence and the arrogance to act abominably toward his Jewish subjects from the start of his tenure in AD 64 and to not care a bit what Governor Gallus thought. Florus had continued his outrageous behavior even though the empress had died, apparently due to a miscarriage, in AD 65. Florus believed he still had the emperor’s blessing, and so, too, did Governor Gallus.
The man Gallus chose to conduct his Judean inquiry was a Tribune Neapolitanus, who was “one of his intimate friends” according to Josephus. In other words, Neapolitanus was one of Gallus’s clients, from a family he knew extremely well, and was therefore a man he could trust. Neapolitanus’s rank of tribunus laticlavius, or tribune of the broad stripe, was a military one, referred to as that of “military tribune” to distinguish the holder from the civil post of tribune of the plebeians at Rome. The equivalent of a colonel today, the military tribune of the broad stripe was significantly more senior than the tribunus angusticlavius, tribune of the thin stripe, who was merely an officer cadet and of such unimportance that his six-month appointment, which was like an internship, didn’t appear on the official biographies of Roman officers.
A native of today’s Italian city of Naples, Tribune Neapolitanus was a member of the Equestrian Order and was likely in his mid-twenties—he would qualify for senatorial rank at age thirty. In the first century, men of military tribune rank served as second in command of legions; however, it’s likely Neapolitanus occupied an administrative post on Gallus’s staff at Antioch and held the rank of supernumerary military tribune. This relatively new rank had come about because, with less than thirty legions, there had only been the need for an equivalent number of military tribunes, creating a bottleneck on the Roman civil service promotional ladder. To correct this, the emperor Claudius had permitted the appointment of more than the required number of military tribunes, thus pushing larger numbers of talented young men through to the Senate. As a result, a provincial governor might have several military tribunes on his staff in administrative positions.
As a matter of “good form,” Gallus had avoided giving the Judean investigative post to an officer who outranked the procurator of Judea. For the same reason, the officers commanding the legions currently stationed in Judea and Egypt were tribunes, so as not to outrank their superiors, the Equestrian Order procurator of Judea and prefect of Egypt. Most importantly, to the weak Gallus, the appointment of Neapolitanus would not give Procurator Florus grounds to complain to the emperor about his actions.
Accompanied by an escorting cavalry troop and wearing a white cloak and ornate bronze armor over his white tribune’s tunic, Tribune Neapolitanus hurried south from Antioch to carry out his inquiry. In telling us about Neapolitanus’s mission, Josephus makes no mention of him consulting with Procurator Florus or even visiting Caesarea. Gallus had Florus’s written report giving his side of the story; all that the proconsul required from Neapolitanus was the other side of the story, through impartial non-Jewish eyes.
Once the tribune reached Jamnia in Judea, today’s town of Yavne, midway between Jaffa and Aschod on the southern coastal plain and four miles inland from the Mediterranean, the tribune met up with King Herod Agrippa II and the king’s sister Berenice. Neapolitanus was also met by members of the Great Sanhedrin who had come down from Jerusalem to escort him to the city. All swore that the Jewish people had no rebellious intent. Together, Neapolitanus, Agrippa, Berenice, and the Jewish elders turned inland to climb up into the hills and make for Jerusalem. On arriving outside Jerusalem, they were met by throngs of weeping women who called for Procurator Florus’s removal and punishment, as their husbands had been killed earlier on Florus’s orders.
Tribune Neapolitanus found Jerusalem peaceful, with the Roman garrison seemingly in control of affairs—this was months before the massacre of Roman troops at Jerusalem and Masada. At the behest of Agrippa, Neapolitanus walked around the center of the city accompanied by just a single servant, and saw the wreckage of the city marketplace and the ransacked houses left in the wake of the earlier rampage by Florus’s troops, before he’d replaced the offending 3rd Gallica cohort. All the Jewish people Neapolitanus saw in the city were calm, reverential, and acted friendly toward him. Going up to the Temple, he addressed the priests and a vast crowd that had assembled in the complex’s outer Court of the Gentiles.
“I highly commend you for your faithfulness to Rome,” the tribune declared, “and I earnestly exhort you to keep the peace.”13
After courteously taking part in those aspects of the Temple’s religious observances that were permitted to foreigners in the Court of the Gentiles, Neapolitanus and his escort departed the city and made their way back to Antioch. On his return, the tribune reported to Governor Gallus that all was peaceful in Judea, and that the Jews blamed Procurator Florus for the previous unrest. The peaceful state found in Jerusalem by his investigating officer had led Gallus to believe that all was now well in Judea, that the problem had sorted itself out.
King Herod Agrippa II was not as easily fooled as the tribune. He was aware of the underlying discontent in the city. Following Neapolitanus’s departure from Jerusalem, Agrippa had remained in the city, where he was approached by Jewish elders who urged him to allow them to bypass Governor Gallus, who they believed would support Florus no matter what, and send Jewish envoys to Rome to put their case for the removal of Procurator Florus direct to the emperor Nero.
The Jewish king felt this would only worsen the situation; young Nero had neither the compassion nor the understanding of his predecessor Claudius, who had more than once ruled in favor of the Jews. Besides, Governor Gallus would be furious that the Jews had gone over his head and would likely punish Judea as a result. In a long speech addressed to a massive public meeting in Jerusalem, Agrippa spelled out the might of Rome and her vast empire and the fate of those who opposed Rome.
“Why not,” he said at one point, “just kill your children and your wives with your own hands, and burn your beautiful native city? At least, as a result of such madness, no one can reproach you for having been defeated! My friends, it’s best to foresee the impending storm while the ship is still safe in the harbor, and not set sail out onto the middle of the hurricane. Do you imagine that when the Romans have got you under their power again they will act toward you with moderation? Or will they rather burn your holy city, and utterly destroy your whole nation, as an example to other nations? Even those of you who survive the war won’t be able to find a place to flee, for, all men have the Romans for their masters already, or are afraid they will.”14
In tears, and with his watching sister Berenice also in tears, the king begged the people to pay the outstanding tax to Rome, to repair the broken bridges between the Temple and Antonia Fortress, and to make the most of Roman occupation and the concessions that Jews enjoyed, rather than take a confrontational approach to mighty Rome—an approach which, he predicted, would only end badly for all Jews across the world.
His words made sense to a moderate minority, but for the majority, sense had taken flight on the wings of the dream of independence and self-mastery promised by Jewish religious texts. The people had angrily responded to Agrippa that their argument wasn’t with Rome, it was with the arrogant, brutal Florus, and if Agrippa didn’t help them they would take matters into their own hands. It was following this meeting that the king and queen had been driven out of Jerusalem and the revolt had turned to violence at Masada and the Antonia Fortress.
Weeks later, with Jerusalem and much of Judea and Galilee in rebel Jewish hands, Governor Gallus finally realized that he had no alternative but to lead an army south to put down the revolt. From the Syria garrison he took one complete legion, the 12th Fulminata, known as the Thundering Twelfth, and four cohorts from each of the other three legions, the 4th Scythica (4th Legion of Scythia), 6th Ferrata (6th Ironsides Legion), and 10th Fretensis (10th Legion of the Strait). By using men from all four legions of the Syria station, Gallus seems to have wanted to share the glory and the spoils of the Judean operation. To these legionary units Gallus would add three thousand men of six cohorts of auxiliary light infantry based in Syria.
He would also incorporate into his force a quartet of five-hundred-man wings of auxiliary cavalry, taking three with him from Syria and collecting the fourth from its station at Caesarea once he reached that city. The balance of the legionary and auxiliary cohorts in Syria would remain at their bases, continuing to face east, confronting the recently pacified Parthian Empire beyond the Euphrates.
Gallus’s choice of the entire 12th Fulminata to lead the Judean task force, or even to participate in it, was, to say the least, unwise. This was a legion that had performed badly in an AD 62 campaign in Armenia, when the inept Roman general Lucius Caesennius Paetus had surrendered a fortress to the Parthians, then led the 12th and the 4th Scythica on a humbling retreat out of Armenia. It had taken Rome’s best general, Corbulo, to reverse the situation, leading other legions in a swift campaign that had in turn humbled the Parthians and led to the king of Parthia, Vologases I, submitting to Roman control of Armenia.
Roman historian Tacitus says that in AD 62, after their Armenian disgrace, the 12th Fulminata Legion, “from the loss of their best and bravest men and the panic of the remainder, seemed quite unfit for battle” as they marched out of Armenia and down to Syria, where they were based for the next four years. Tacitus adds that the legion was suffering from “numerical feebleness” at this time—the unit was significantly under-strength.
Unlike modern army regiments, which receive a regular flow of new recruits to bring their battalions up to or near full fighting strength, with only a few exceptions following major battle losses, Roman legions of the first century only had their losses made up when they underwent mass discharges and recruit intakes every two decades. This was when the twenty-year enlistment of its legionaries expired and a large proportion of its troops went into retirement, with a small number of the old enlistment reenlisting to march beside the new recruits.15
At the time the Jewish Revolt broke out, the 12th Fulminata Legion was still suffering from that numerical feebleness mentioned by Tacitus, which would only be reversed when the legion undertook its scheduled new intake of recruits, due to take place in AD 67/68. The legion’s current soldiers, who were now aged in their late thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties, were worn out and looking forward to their looming retirement. Perhaps the fact that the entire legion seems to have numbered little more than two thousand men fit for action dictated that the entire legion would join the two thousand men assigned to Gallus’s Judean task force from each of the other three Syria-based legions. Commanding the detachment from the 6th Ferrata was Camp Prefect Tyrannius Priscus. As for the two other detachments of four cohorts each from the 4th Scythica and 10th Fretensis Legions, a Tribune Longinus is known to have commanded one, and a camp prefect may have commanded the other.
Gallus may have thought the operation would offer the 12th Fulminata’s men the opportunity to regain their reputations before they retired and allow them to amass proceeds from the sale of Jewish booty to add to their retirement funds. As the men of the under-strength legion marched out of Antioch when Gallus’s army set out in October of AD 66, we know that the 12th Fulminata’s commander was a legate by the name of Gallus. He was quite possibly a relative of Governor Gallus—although Gallus was a relatively common Roman name. We also know that the 12th Fulminata’s second in command was a tribune by the name of Placidus; later events suggest his first name was Julius. As for Governor Gallus’s client, Tribune Neapolitanus, the young man would accompany Gallus as a member of the governor’s staff.
Gallus had sent messages to regional Roman allies calling for sixteen thousand additional troops to bring his army’s overall numbers to around thirty thousand men, although he didn’t wait for the allied forces to join him in Antioch. Instead, probably worried that Nero would be angry if he put off his punitive Judean expedition any longer, Gallus hurriedly departed the Syrian capital with his legions and sent orders to three kings to have their troops link up with him at the Syrian port of Ptolemais.
King Herod Agrippa II joined him from Beirut, bringing 3,000 of his own light infantry and 1,000 cavalry. King Sohaemus of the autonomous Syrian city-state of Emesa set off in the wake of the large Roman column, bringing 1,500 of his personal cavalry and 2,500 foot archers. King Antiochus of Commagene, to the immediate north of Syria, whose force would take the longest time to reach Ptolemais, sent 3,000 light infantry, 3,000 foot archers, and 2,000 cavalry.
Ptolemais had been used in the past as the staging point for an earlier operation against rebellious Jews. In 4 BC, amid the political instability that had followed the death of Herod the Great, Judea had been rent by Jewish unrest and protest against Roman influence. The then proconsul of Syria, Publius Quinctilius Varus—the same Varus who would lose three legions and his own life in the Teutoburg Forest massacre of AD 9—had promptly brought several legions down to Ptolemais from Syria. Using the city as his base of operations, he had thereafter rapidly marched on Jerusalem, where he crucified two thousand Jewish agitators en masse and snuffed out the nascent revolt.
Ptolemais had been granted Roman military colony status by the emperor Claudius, who had settled numbers of retired legion veterans there. In addition to offering Governor Gallus loyal citizens and port facilities, Ptolemais contained grain and a significant water supply, both of which were essential to a campaigning army. There, King Herod Agrippa II joined Gallus with his troops, becoming the governor’s chief adviser on Judea and the Jews for the campaign.
Establishing a vast, tented military camp outside Ptolemais, Gallus, while he waited for the last of the allied troops to arrive, led part of his army inland, into the territory of Zebulon. This was in southeast Galilee, bordering on the Sea of Galilee—like the Dead Sea, a lake; in fact, the lowest freshwater lake on Earth. Jewish partisans in the area fled to the mountains of Galilee, leaving their villages to be plundered and burned by Gallus’s troops. After Gallus withdrew back to Ptolemais, local Syrians lingered behind, sifting through the ruins of the pillaged villages as they looked for spoils the legions had missed, only for Jewish partisans to return and put them to the sword.
Once King Antiochus’s and King Sohaemus’s troops arrived, Governor Gallus led the combined army from Ptolemais, leaving Syria and marching into northern Judea. Large numbers of locals had gathered from throughout the region to support the Roman army, and these camp followers swarmed along behind the army as Gallus led it down the coastal highway to Caesarea. At Caesarea, Gallus was greeted by Procurator Florus. Here, too, he took part of the Caesarea garrison into his army—four of the six cohorts of the 3rd Gallica then at the Judean capital and the one wing of auxiliary cavalry that formed part of Florus’s garrison.
That cavalry wing was commanded by a prefect, Aemilius Jucundus. The rank of prefect of auxiliaries was, like that of military tribune, the equivalent of a colonel today. Like tribunes, prefects were officers of Equestrian rank. Appointment as prefect was at that time the next step in the career of a Roman officer after service as a military tribune.16 Jucundus, who was likely in his late twenties, was a member of one of the most noble of Roman families, the Aemilii, which could trace its lineage back to the second king of Rome. Jucundus’s name means “delightful,” suggesting he’d been a charming child—Romans’ last names were sometimes acquired when they were children.
For the past two years, Prefect Jucundus had been stationed in Caesarea with his cavalry wing. Procurator Florus had frequently used Jucundus and his troopers in brutal policing actions against the Jews in Judea, and, as events were to prove, Florus had secured Jucundus’s personal loyalty, no doubt by boasting of his direct connection with the emperor and promising Jucundus favored treatment in the future. Another prefect with the family name of Aemilius, Aemilius Secundus, commanded one of the cavalry wings that Governor Gallus brought with him to Caesarea from Syria. With the name Secundus often applied to a second-born son, this cavalry prefect may have been Jucundus’s brother; he would later join Jucundus in talking Governor Gallus into rash action.17
Governor Gallus now based himself at Caesarea, delegating the task of subduing the region to subordinates. He began by sending two forces down the coast to the Jewish-held city of Joppa, today’s Jaffa. One force traveled via the coast road while another took an inland route, so that they approached Joppa from two different directions. Surprising and overwhelming the partisans there, the Roman troops killed 8,400 and set the city on fire. Gallus also dispatched a large force of cavalrymen to range through the toparchy of Narbatah several miles east of Caesarea, killing all Jews they found and looting and burning their villages.
Meanwhile, the general commanding the 12th Fulminata Legion, Legate Gallus, with Tribune Neapolitanus attached to his staff, was sent by Governor Gallus into Galilee with a large force of infantry and cavalry. Legate Gallus made straight for Sepphoris. Three miles north of the village of Nazareth and largest of all the 250 cities, towns, and villages of Galilee, Sepphoris had housed a palace of Herod Antipas during the lifetime of Jesus Christ and possessed Greco-Roman refinements such as a drama theater seating four thousand. By the time Gallus and Neapolitanus reached it with their troops, Sepphoris’s Gentile residents had been holding out for weeks against besieging Jewish Sicarii partisans, and they now joyfully welcomed the Roman relief force.
The Sicarii rebels who had been threatening Sepphoris fled from the area to Mount Asamon to the north, and with the bulk of his force, Legate Gallus pursued them to the mountain. As legionaries pushed up the slopes in pursuit, they were ambushed by rebels who lay in wait for them. Throwing short, metal-tipped, lead-weighted javelins called darts, the Jews killed two hundred Roman troops caught in the open below. In response, the Roman general divided his legionary forces. While some troops kept the rebels busy, two detachments outflanked them. Having worked their way around the partisans, legionaries surprised them from above, and in close-quarters fighting they easily dealt with the lightly armored Jews. These partisans fought bareheaded and with nothing more than thick leather vests for body protection, which, while it made them more fleet of foot than the heavily armored legionaries, meant they were massively disadvantaged in close quarters fighting.
Any rebels who fled to the plain were cut down by Gallus’s waiting cavalry. A handful of the partisans escaped up into the more remote parts of the mountain, but the vast majority, more than two thousand of them, were killed by the general’s infantry and cavalry. Seeing no more threat from rebels in Galilee, Legate Gallus led most of his men back to Caesarea, leaving Tribune Neapolitanus in command at Sepphoris accompanied by the 120 troopers of the 12th Fulminata Legion’s own legionary cavalry troop, with orders to hold the city against future rebel attack. To ensure that Sepphoris remained loyal to Rome and supportive of the tribune and his men, Legate Gallus took members of the families of the city’s leading men to Caesarea with him as hostages. These hostages were soon sent to the coastal town of Dora, today’s Israeli village of Dor, just to the north of Caesarea. They would sit out the rest of the war there in comparative safety.18
Once these detachments rejoined him at Caesarea, Governor Gallus gave the order for the army to march. First reaching Joppa, then turning east into the dry hills, the strung-out army, with its thousands of pack animals plodding along near the rear, tramped up the dusty road toward Jerusalem, following the Yarkon River to its head, where springs bubbled to the surface at the town of Antipatris. Word had reached Gallus that a large body of rebels had gathered at the Tower of Aphek near Antipatris, so he sent a force in advance of the main army to deal with them. The rebels had disappeared by the time the Roman advance force reached the Tower of Aphek, leaving their camp for the Romans to destroy.
From Antipatris, Gallus’s army marched south to Lydda, today’s Lod. Only fifty Jewish men were found there, and they were swiftly killed. Before they were put to death, they revealed that the rest of the town’s Jewish population had gone to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Tabernacles. Leaving Lod in flames, Gallus again turned left, directing his army along the ascending road toward Jerusalem to the east. Destroying deserted villages en route, the Romans followed the road as it continued to climb steeply through the Beth Horon Valley, a place that would before long be etched in Roman memory.
After passing through the deserted villages of Beth Horon Inferior and Beth Horon Superior, the leading elements of the column reached another village, Gaba, which lay just nine miles north of Jerusalem. Here, Governor Gallus gave orders for a marching camp to be built, and as surveyors laid out the camp and legionaries began to toil in their armor, digging entrenchments and throwing up an earth wall around the campsite, several thousand auxiliary infantrymen from the column’s vanguard stood guard in ranks that faced Jerusalem, and cavalrymen foraged for fodder and firewood.
At Jerusalem, word arrived that a Roman army of thirty thousand men was winding up the road from the coast and setting up camp at Gaba. Despite the fact it was a Saturday, the Jewish day of rest, Jewish men left their feasting and took up arms on the Sabbath. Tens of thousands of armed men, perhaps hundreds of thousands, rushed out of the city, disorganized, yelling, angry, and ignoring calls from more levelheaded men not to act rashly.
Among prominent partisans hurrying to do combat with the Roman foe were a number of men from outside Jerusalem’s priestly class. Silas the Babylonian had previously served as an officer in King Herod Agrippa II’s army. Niger, a native of the Perea district east of the Jordan River, which had once formed part of Herod the Great’s kingdom, had left his post as governor of the district of Idumea, south of Judea. Also among the rebel leaders were two noble sons of King Monobazus of Adiabene and Erbil—today’s Urfa in Turkey and Erbil in Iraq—whose royal family had converted to Judaism and had two palaces at Jerusalem.
Within a few hours the excited, exhilarated partisan horde arrived at Gaba and swept onto the stationary Roman sentry lines in their path. Led by the likes of Silas and Niger, the rebels threw themselves onto the locked oval shields of the auxiliary light infantry who stood between them and the camp building works. By their very numbers, the Jews overwhelmed auxiliaries at one point and broke through their ranks, hacking left and right as they went.
Roman cavalry on foraging duty wheeled about and came at the gallop to stop Jewish fighters before they reached the camp works, and more auxiliary infantrymen came at the run from the still arriving column. Eventually, Roman troops succeeded in driving off the partisans, but not before four hundred auxiliary infantrymen and one hundred and fifteen cavalrymen had been killed. The partisans, who had lost just twenty-two of their men, withdrew to Jerusalem congratulating themselves on stinging the nose of the Roman beast.
Meanwhile, a Jewish peasant by the name of Simon bar Giora, a native of the city of Gerasa in southern Samaria, today’s West Bank town of Jurish near Nablus, had taken a large party of fellow peasants and skirted the Jerusalem road north through the hills until they reached the Beth Horon Valley. Here they found the rear of the Roman column on the road, with its drawn-out baggage train of thousands of mules and donkeys loaded with equipment. The Roman army used one baggage animal for every eight soldiers, to carry their tents and grinding stones, plus more animals for camp material and supplies, officers’ chattels, dismantled artillery pieces, and ammunition. Gallus’s army was using more than four thousand pack animals.
Sending unarmed civilian muleteers fleeing in panic, Simon and his men rushed down the slope, cut out the mules carrying some of the legions’ dismantled artillery pieces and ammunition, and led them away into the hills before the column’s rearguard could stop them. Hours later, Simon and his men triumphantly led the mules into Jerusalem, showing off the captured Roman artillery and gloating over their success.
These two partisan attacks on his army unnerved Governor Gallus. By nightfall that day the marching camp at Gaba was erected, and as the next day dawned Gallus was reluctant to leave its protection. He had clearly thought he would shock and awe the Jews by his troops’ ruthless rampage through Galilee and coastal Judea and seems to have been hoping the Jews of Jerusalem would capitulate once his army drew near. The stiff resistance encountered outside Gaba had suggested otherwise. As Gallus and his army sat in the camp at Gaba for two days and did nothing more than cremate their dead outside the camp walls, King Herod Agrippa II, seeing Gallus’s reluctance to push on to Jerusalem, offered a suggestion.
The king’s idea was to send two of his own chief aides, Borceus and Phebus, men well known to the Jewish leadership, to Jerusalem as peace envoys. They would go with two objectives—to convince all the rebels to lay down their arms in return for a full pardon from Gallus, or at the very least convince the more moderate Jews to desert the revolt and leave Jerusalem. Governor Gallus jumped at this idea. So, Borceus and Phebus set off for Jerusalem on their mission, mounted, but unarmed and unescorted.
By this time the rebels had organized themselves. They occupied the elevated parts of the city with lookouts and placed guards at all the entrances to Jerusalem, implementing a system of regulated watches. When Borceus and Phebus arrived at the northern entrance to the city, they were stopped by Jewish sentries, and a crowd quickly gathered. The Zealots in the crowd, who immediately recognized the king’s men, feared that moderates would capitulate in fear to the envoys. So, they never let lead negotiator Phebus open his mouth. They speared him as he sat in his saddle, then turned on Borceus. Although wounded, Borceus was able to turn his horse back the way he had come, push through the crowd, and gallop to safety. The moderate Jews in the crowd were furious with the Zealots for killing the king’s envoy when he’d come in peace, and drove the Zealots back into the city with sticks and stones. But the damage had been done.
To Gallus, the message brought by the wounded Borceus was clear: there was no negotiating with the most extreme of the rebels, and he would have to conquer Jerusalem, the jewel in the Jewish crown, by brute force. Reluctantly, Gallus gave the order to march on Jerusalem. Three days after establishing the Gaba camp, the army moved out. Normally, marching camps were destroyed as a Roman army moved on, to deny it to the enemy, but as a fallback position, Gallus left the Gaba camp essentially intact.
Some partisans came out to attempt to harry the advancing column, but Roman cavalry soon put them to flight, enabling the main army to arrive unmolested at Mount Scopus, the ridge to the north of Jerusalem, where it began to build its latest camp. From the summit of the ridge, 2,710 feet above sea level, Governor Gallus, King Herod Agrippa II, and their aides and officers were able to look out over the city below as legionaries dug their camp’s defenses and erected their tents.
Immediately below Mount Scopus stood the narrow stone-paved streets and flat-roofed houses of the northern sector of Jerusalem. Called the Bezetha, or New City, it was a sector unprotected by city walls. Beyond Bezetha lay the Lower City, the fire-blackened Antonia Fortress, and the impressive Temple Mount with its Second Temple complex. South of the Temple Mount spread the Upper City, in the west of which rose the walls of the Palace of Herod. The palace’s three ornate towers, previously the location of the last stand of Centurion Metilius and his doomed men, were now occupied by rebel Jewish lookouts. All the older parts of the city were protected by ancient stone walls thirty feet high, known as the First Wall and Second Wall.
Gallus had visited Jerusalem before in more peaceful times and stayed at the grand Palace of Herod, which was like a five-star hotel to its high-ranking guests. It may have been tempting to secure the palace first, but Agrippa would have advised Gallus to aim all his efforts on taking the Temple Mount. Secure the Temple and all its treasures, he would have said, and rebel resistance would crumble to nothing.
Still Gallus hesitated. He ordered his cavalry to scour the countryside around Jerusalem and empty surrounding villages of their grain supply but otherwise instructed the remainder of his troops to stand down from offensive operations and stay within the protection of their new camp’s walls. With the imposing Roman army now on Jerusalem’s doorstep, weak-kneed Governor Gallus was hoping the sight would intimidate the rebels into backing down. He was giving the Jews yet another opportunity to capitulate.