On the morning of November 1, AD 66, the fourth day since his Roman army had encamped on Mount Scopus, Governor Cestius Gallus finally commenced an attack on the city of Jerusalem.19 Leaving auxiliaries to guard the Mount Scopus camp and his baggage, and with legionary infantry leading the advance in close battle formation, his army marched down off the ridge astride the Damascus Road, the highway that led into the north of Jerusalem.
The northern suburb of Jerusalem, the New City, then had no defensive wall. In the early AD 40s, the last king of Judea, Herod Agrippa I, had laid the foundations for a Third Wall that encompassed the New City, inclusive of at least sixty towers and several gateways. Agrippa, as he was familiarly known, had ceased work on this wall when he became worried that his patron, the Roman emperor Claudius, would construe this as a preparation for a revolt against Rome. In 2016, construction workers would make the first modern discovery of part of Agrippa’s abandoned Third Wall foundations, involving a six-foot-wide wall and the base of a tower, in Jerusalem’s present-day Russian Compound northwest of the Temple Mount.
Gallus’s legionaries entered the streets of the New City in tight formation and with their long, rectangular, curved shields locked together. Partisans who attempted to stand in their way in narrow streets were confronted by what appeared to be an unstoppable machine advancing at a steady mechanical walk, and they soon gave way without offering resistance, retreating behind the city’s Second Wall and closing the gates.
Gallus’s troops now set fire to all the buildings in the New City and to Jerusalem’s timber market, which was in this sector and would burn well, before withdrawing. As the New City blazed, instead of attacking the city walls, Governor Gallus sent legionaries around the western side of the city to build a new camp outside the wall in the Valley of Gihon, opposite the Palace of Herod.
“Had he only at this moment attempted get within the walls by force,” wrote Josephus, who was in the city at this time, seeing the panic engendered by the Roman push into the New City among the hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children around him, “the war would have been terminated at once.” But, on the verge of victory, Gallus had preferred the security of a new camp closer to the city rather than pressing home the advantage.20
As the day passed with nothing but building work in the Gihon Valley, one of the senior priests, Ananus bar Jonathon, persuaded leading moderate men of the city to secretly send envoys to the Roman commander extending an invitation to come into the city to conduct peace talks. Expecting Gallus to accept, they prepared to open the Valley Gate to him. But Gallus, ever cautious and fearful, and unaware of both the dissension within the ranks of the Jewish leadership and the widespread support in the city for a peace deal, suspected a trap and failed to take up the invitation. Once again Gallus let success slip through his fingers. Instead, he changed strategy and ordered preparations made for an assault on the Temple Mount to the north.
Meanwhile, Eleazar and his Zealots came to hear of this invitation to Gallus and angrily sought out Ananus and his peace party colleagues. Finding them on the wall awaiting the anticipated approach of Governor Gallus, they threw them from it and then rained stones down on them. Somehow, Ananus and his companions survived this, although probably with broken bones. Escaping to their homes, they barricaded themselves inside.
Having witnessed this dissension among the rebels, Gallus changed his mind yet again and gave a new order, to attack now from the west. This sent troops with scaling ladders against the First Wall opposite the Palace of Herod. With limited support from their remaining artillery pieces, legionaries went against the wall for five days, with the rebels fighting off each attack from the walls with spears, darts, and stones. When, by the fifth day of fighting, some Roman troops succeeded in coming over the wall, they were picked off by rebels using the dart-firing ballista artillery captured by Simon bar Giora, operating from the nearby towers of the Palace of Herod. Once again, the Roman assault was beaten off.
On the morning of the sixth day, Gallus called off this attack and shifted operations to the north, to the Second Wall at the Temple Mount, around the Sheep Gate, close to the Antonia Fortress. For this new assault, the Roman tactics were dramatically different. This time, Gallus employed all 5,500 of his allied archers, putting them behind the cover of the shells of burned-out houses. From there, they provided barrage after barrage of arrows to cover troops going against the wall. With rebels on the wall restricted by these clouds of arrows, this tactic succeeded in getting hundreds of legionaries close in under the wall.
As protection, these legionaries employed the famous Roman testudo, or tortoise formation—the men of the first rank held their shields at body height while those of the following ranks interlocked their shields overhead and at the flanks, creating a protective roof, like the shell of a tortoise. As the legionary testudo approached the wall along city streets, they were met by rebel missiles, which only glanced and bounced off the interlocked shields. Once the front-rank men were at the wall, while protected by the testudo created by their comrades, they lay aside their shields and set to work undermining the wall with their pickaxes. For generations, Roman military engineering had often held the secret to winning wars, and the Roman legionary’s dolabra, or pickax, was, in the view of leading general Corbulo, “the weapon with which to beat the enemy.”21
The legionary cohort that went against the wall had come prepared with lumber and fire-making material, which was inserted into the hole they dug beneath the wall and piled beside the gate. Seeing this, a number of Sicarii rebels, believing it only a matter of time before the Romans burned down the gate and burst in, fled out other gates and departed the city. Moderates regained hope of terminating the revolt and began talking of opening the Sheep Gate to Gallus and surrendering. But then Providence, and the weakness of Cestius Gallus, combined to save the day for the Jews.
Even as commanders on the spot reported it would only be a matter of time before they had the Sheep Gate alight, Gallus ordered all his troops to withdraw immediately—from the gate and from the city—to the camp on Mount Scopus. Gallus had been talked into this stunning retreat by a group of his own officers. While the 6th Ferrata Legion detachment had been briefly in Caesarea during the slow advance down the coast, the detachment’s commander, Camp Prefect Tyrannius Priscus, had been corrupted by Procurator Florus. The procurator wanted Governor Gallus, his superior, to fail. If the Jews at Jerusalem were seen to foil Gallus’s attempts to conquer Jerusalem and terminate their revolt, it would be Gallus, not Florus, who would be facing the wrath of the emperor Nero and recalled, and Florus’s earlier provocation of the Jews would be forgotten. Or so Florus hoped.
Now, Florus’s instrument, Camp Prefect Priscus, combined with cavalry prefect Jucundus, who was already in Florus’s power. They brought in Prefect Aemilius Secundus and the prefects of the force’s other cavalry wings, plus all their decurions—the Roman warrant officers who commanded cavalry troops—to petition Gallus to call off the assault and withdraw from Jerusalem to the coast.
In the city, Josephus, who watched the Roman withdrawal in astonishment, could not fathom the reason for it and would only much later learn of the key role Priscus and the cavalry prefects had in talking Gallus into pulling out. What grounds Priscus, Jucundus, and the other prefects and decurions had for convincing Gallus can only be speculated on. It was true that Roman armies traditionally ceased campaigning and went into winter camp in the middle of October every year, and that deadline had passed. Perhaps it was the threat posed by the weather that caused Gallus to lose heart. November rains were expected to lash Jerusalem. Winter snow was even a possibility in the coming weeks. Perhaps Priscus and his colleagues convinced Gallus that he risked being cut off and surrounded in enemy territory. The disgrace suffered by Roman general Paetus in Armenia just a few years before this, when he’d allowed his army to be surrounded and cut off, forcing him to surrender his base and retreat from the country, would have been fresh in Gallus’s mind.
Many rebels, seeing the Roman army depart up the Damascus Road to Mount Scopus, gleefully gave pursuit, harassing the Roman rearguard and causing casualties to both infantry and cavalry. That night, Gallus kept his army behind the protective walls of the Mount Scopus camp. At dawn the next day, after just nine days at Jerusalem, the Roman force marched out of the camp, six men abreast and in close formation, heading north through the hills along the Damascus Road toward the village of Gaba and away from Jerusalem.
Sicarii rebels watching from the hills were hardly able to believe their luck. Emerging from their hiding places, they swarmed around the army as it marched north, attacking the column’s rear and flooding along the slopes on both sides of the road, throwing darts at the marchers from both flanks. The helmeted legionaries had their shields on their left arms and their baggage poles on their right shoulders. To each pole were tied two stakes used on the top of their marching camp palisade, plus a javelin or two, their pickax, and other entrenching tools. From the poles hung each man’s bedroll, a cooking pot, a sickle, a bag containing their personal items, military decorations, and helmet crest for parades.
Encumbered with all this equipment and under strict instructions from bellowing centurions to keep formation, totally prevented from firing back or launching counterattacks, all the Roman troops could do was keep step while trying to protect themselves with their shields as darts came flying from all directions. Legionaries were forever struggling to close ranks to fill gaps, conscious of the threat of agile, lightly armored Jews dashing in to exploit those gaps.
The rear of the Roman column suffered worst, with heavy casualties and a number of baggage animals abandoned. Mounted men, on their horses sitting above the column, presented especially juicy targets to Jewish dart throwers. Roman officers rode when on the march, and senior Roman officers, who didn’t carry shields as a rule, were now particularly vulnerable. Camp Prefect Priscus, commander of the 6th Ferrata contingent, fell dead from his horse, impaled by darts. His mounted colleague Prefect Aemilius Secundus was also killed. Ironically, Priscus and Aemilius had led the call for Gallus to withdraw the army, and that withdrawal had led directly to their deaths. Another mounted senior Roman officer killed on this stretch of road to Gaba was Tribune Longinus, who commanded either the 4th Scythica or 10th Fretensis legionary contingent. The bodies of most of the fallen had to be abandoned where they fell, to be stripped and defiled by their killers.
Even worse, as far as the Romans were concerned, the 12th Fulminata Legion, apparently at the rear of the column, lost its golden eagle standard to Jews. Josephus wrote that the Jews were ever “ready for making incursions upon them,” while, saying of the Roman troops, “their ranks were put in disorder, and those that were put out of their ranks were killed.” The standard bearer of the 12th would have died trying to defend his eagle, as did the primus pilus, the chief centurion of the legion. To lose its eagle was the greatest disgrace to a legion, which would carry the stain of it forevermore.
In the space of a few miles, Gallus lost an eagle and three of his most senior officers. First-rank centurions stepped up to take the places of these officers, but the impact on the morale of their troops can only be imagined. Governor Gallus himself was in shock. Once the bloodied column reached the safety of the walls of the old marching camp at Gaba and took refuge there, Gallus refused to proceed any further. For two days he kept the army stationary. This only allowed thousands more partisans to arrive from Jerusalem to join the Sicarii in surrounding the camp.
Seeing the numbers of rebels growing by the hour, Gallus’s remaining senior officers were able to convince the governor that they had to move on or risk being trapped here. Clearly, the baggage train was slowing the army, so Gallus ordered all baggage animals other than those carrying artillery to be slaughtered and their loads destroyed, to prevent everything falling into enemy hands. On the third morning since reaching the Gaba camp, the army resumed its march toward the Beth Horon Valley.
Where the army’s route passed through flat country, rebels melted away. But where the road descended sharply five hundred feet into the valley, it passed through several narrow passes, so the rebels hurried ahead and lay in wait on the heights either side of each pass. When the column passed beneath them, the Jews rained missiles down on the Romans and their allies. Several times the column was halted as these passes became death traps. The dead piled up on the road, and wounded Roman troops wailed in pain and fear as their assailants above whooped with joy. Only with raised shields and more casualties was the army able to push on through.
Normally, a legion would march eighteen to twenty-one miles in a day, marching in the morning and building their overnight camp in the afternoon. Because of the delays in the passes, and despite having disposed of much of its baggage, Gallus’s army only made feeble progress of a few miles on this day. By nightfall it had reached the two villages of Beth Horon, where the Romans built a marching camp that incorporated the village houses. The rank and file had to sleep under their blankets in the open, as their tents had been destroyed back at Gaba when there were no mules to carry them. As for the rebels, they retired to the surrounding hills to get a good night’s sleep before resuming the attack the next morning.
That night, Cestius Gallus chaired a conference with his officers. All agreed that their situation was desperate. So, an assembly of the legionaries was called. Standing before his troops in the darkness, Gallus asked for volunteers to remain at this camp as a rearguard, to delay the enemy while the remainder of the army made its escape. It was clearly a suicide mission, but that didn’t prevent volunteers stepping forward. Four hundred of the four legions’ best men were chosen—probably one hundred from each legion represented in the column. Gallus then ordered the remainder of his men to lighten their personal loads of everything that would slow them down. The surviving mules carrying the artillery were also to be left behind; it was hoped this would delay booty-hunting rebels.
Gallus’s units then drew lots for the order of march, and in the early hours of the morning all but the four-hundred-man rearguard slipped quietly from the camp and proceeded down the road in the darkness, with every man taking pains to avoid making any noise that could alert the rebels. As dawn broke over the valley, the army was close to four miles away from the Beth Horon camp and upping its pace in the increasing daylight. At the Beth Horon camp, the four hundred volunteers raised standards as usual and sounded the trumpet calls of the dawn change of watch, attempting to give the impression that the entire army was still in camp.
Watching from the hills where they had slept, the rebels saw into the camp and knew that something wasn’t right. So, in their tens of thousands, they launched attacks on the camp from all sides and soon fought their way into it. The Roman legionary volunteers fought to the last man from the camp ramparts and the roofs of the village houses. But they were all soon overwhelmed by the rebels, who, realizing they had been tricked, gave chase to the escaping army along the Damascus Road.
The Jews pursued Gallus and his column almost all the way to Antipatris. But the Romans had too great a start and reached the town. Soon they would be down on the plain, where their cavalry, operating freely at last, would make mincemeat of Jewish foot soldiers. So, the rebels retraced their steps to Beth Horon, where they stripped the Roman dead and looted the camp of its artillery pieces, standards, and items jettisoned by the retreating army. They then returned to Jerusalem with their booty, running in through the city gates and singing elatedly.
As many Jews at Jerusalem dared to think that they had defeated almighty Rome and gained their freedom, Governor Gallus withdrew to Caesarea, where he returned to quarters the troops of the regular garrison that had participated in the hellish march to and from Jerusalem. To offer some semblance of Roman authority in Galilee, Gallus left Tribune Neapolitanus and his cavalry inland at Sepphoris for the time being, although, changeable as ever, he later withdrew them and left Sepphoris to fend for itself.
Meanwhile, King Herod Agrippa II dispatched a force to surround and besiege the partisan-held Galilean citadel at Gamala and control the surrounding countryside. This force was made up of some of his own infantry under Equiculus Modius, the king’s longtime friend and companion, and a troop of Roman cavalry under a Decurion Ebutius. Modius’s numbers would prove insufficient for the task, and after an unsuccessful siege of seven months, he and his force would also withdraw.
Departing Caesarea, Gallus then marched the balance of his army north up the coast to Ptolemais. There, he left Tribune Placidus with two cohorts of his humbled 12th Fulminata Legion and a troop of cavalry, with orders to hold the walled port city against rebel attack. Gallus then proceeded all the way back up the coast to Antioch, taking his legions with him. En route, King Herod Agrippa II and his troops departed Gallus’s column at Beirut, where the king’s sister Berenice had awaited his return and where Agrippa set up temporary headquarters. Beirut had a predominantly Roman character, with a number of its residents being the grandchildren of veterans of the 5th Macedonica and 8th Augusta Legions who had retired to Beirut in the reign of Augustus.
Gallus arrived back at the governor’s palace at Antioch around the end of November. He would, at some point, have to glumly dictate a report to a secretary informing the emperor Nero that he had failed him. It was an admission that was likely to cost him his career. During his disastrous expedition into Judea and Galilee, Gallus had lost 5,300 foot soldiers, 380 cavalrymen, and the eagle of one of Rome’s legions, all for nothing—Jerusalem and much of Judea and Galilee were now firmly in the hands of Jewish rebels.22
But for now, Gallus, in shock, did nothing. He knew that it would take a week or ten days for his report to reach Nero by sea, putting it in the young emperor’s hands just as he was preparing to celebrate his birthday on December 15. Perhaps Gallus told himself that such bad news on this occasion would only make Nero even more irascible and arbitrary than normal. Perhaps the governor used the excuse that, as the Mediterranean sailing season had ended in October, he could not safely send a ship carrying the ill tidings across the stormy sea. That same termination of the sailing season saw the Mediterranean merchant fleets tied up in port until March, meaning word could not reach Nero of Gallus’s failure via a gossipy captain or passenger of a cargo vessel until the spring.
Gallus could send his report overland via the horse-drawn carriages of the official Roman government courier service, the Cursus Publicus Velox—literally, the state’s very fast way. That could take weeks, meaning the report might not reach the emperor until the new year. But, dreading what Tacitus describes as Nero’s “savage temper,” Gallus could not bring himself to confess his failure. Apparently hoping that some miraculous event would intercede to save him, he put off the inevitable and kept news of his disastrous expedition from his emperor.23