At dawn one day in May, AD 67, the massive Roman camp at Ptolemais came to life as “Prepare to March” was sounded by the trumpets of each cohort. More than thirty thousand soldiers rose, packed their personal equipment and dismantled their tents. Again “Prepare to March” was sounded, and the troops loaded their tents and grinding stones onto mules, which were led away by their drivers. When “Prepare to March” was sounded a third time, the troops assembled in marching order on the camp’s parade ground, where they waited in disciplined silence.
As Titus, King Herod Agrippa II, Prince Epiphanes of Commagene, and Vespasian’s subordinate officers stood watching, Vespasian stepped up onto his tribunal, a reviewing stand made of earth. Another Roman officer, the “announcer,” probably a tribune of the legions, followed his general and stood to his right. Vespasian cast a severe eye around the troops in their neat ranks and files. If he was pleased by the sight, he didn’t show it. Vespasian frequently bore a constipated expression. Once, when a noted wit was making jokes at the expense of the other members of his party, Vespasian asked him to make a joke about him. “I will,” said the jokester, “when you’ve finished relieving yourself.”45
Now, the announcer spoke, bellowing to the assembled troops. “Are you ready for war?”
“We are ready!” was the massed response, with legionaries and auxiliaries punching the air with their fists.
“Are you ready for war?” the announcer repeated.
“We are ready!” the army responded a second time.
“Are you ready for war?” the announcer asked a third time, in a demanding tone this time.
“We are ready!” the Roman troops came back, with a deafening roar now, enthusiastically punching the air yet again.46
Vespasian nodded, and the trumpets sounded. The camp gates opened, and the troops began to march out of camp. Allied cavalry and infantry went first. As was the rule in Roman camps, the cavalrymen led their horses until they were outside the camp; only then did they mount up. Even Vespasian and King Herod Agrippa II mounted their steeds once outside the camp gates.
The legions had drawn lots for where they would march in the column. On the march, their standards were carried in a bunch at the center of the column, which was where Vespasian and the other commanders were located. Vespasian was surrounded by several hundred men chosen from all of his legions to form the Commander in Chief’s Guard. These men were armed with round shields and long spears as opposed to the regular long, curved, rectangular shield and shorter javelins of the legions’ rank and file. At the very end of the column, trailing the last mules of the baggage train, came the officers’ servants, thousands of them, unarmed and on foot. Josephus was to put the number of men in Vespasian’s force at sixty thousand, excluding noncombatants and camp followers such as servants and booty and slave traders, but the details he provides of the units involved make approximately thirty-two thousand fighting men a more likely number.47
Heading east, Vespasian’s column crossed the border between Syria and Galilee, with allied foot archers fanning out ahead into woods on the army’s route to ensure no partisans lay in ambush. At this point, rebel commander Josephus was at the fortified Lower Galilean hill village of Garis, not far from Sepphoris, with an army of thousands of partisans. Apart from fighting the Romans, Josephus had of late been contending with rival partisan leaders who’d attempted to get their hands on him and kill him. Several times he’d discovered betrayers in his own ranks. Rather than execute them all, he’d had the hand of one betrayer chopped off. He’d threatened to chop off both hands of another but then gave him the option of chopping off his own left hand, an option the man had taken. These tactics had served to keep his fractious underlings in line, but at the news of the approach of Vespasian’s army, many of his men melted away from Garis. Josephus was to say that, at this point, he began to despair of winning this war.
With those partisans who remained loyal to him, Josephus withdrew farther east to the rebel-held city of Tiberias, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. This Romanized, Greek-speaking city, complete with drama theater near its south gate, had been built in AD 18–20 by Herod the Great’s son Herod Antipas, who featured in the last days of Jesus Christ. Tiberias was the capital of Antipas’s tetrarchy, or governate. Named by Antipas for Roman emperor Tiberius, the city had, after his death, become part of Herod Agrippa II’s realm. Despite the fact that Josephus’s rebel forces now controlled it, the city’s majority Gentile population retained loyalty to Agrippa.
Vespasian ignored Tiberias for now. Marching his army southeast, he headed for the rebel city of Gadara, which he knew was only lightly defended. Near today’s Umm Qais in northern Jordan, Gadara was one of the ten cities of the Greek Decapolis and had been in rebel Jewish hands since early in the revolt. With a protective wall and sitting on a ridge facing north, from which it was possible to see the Sea of Galilee, Tiberias, and the southern tip of the Golan Heights, Gadara was considered highly defensible.
With the Romans expected to first attack the larger city of Jotapata to the northwest, not far from Ptolemais, the approach of Vespasian’s army caused many partisans at Gadara to panic and flee, leaving few rebels to defend the town and no time to summon reinforcements. It took just a day for Vespasian’s troops to storm over the walls and into Gadara. After all the young Jewish men in the city were killed, Vespasian had Gadara and all surrounding villages and country villas put to the torch. Any Jews found in the district were dragged off into slavery.
Now Vespasian sets his sights on Jotapata to the northwest, closer to Ptolemais, which meant doubling back. Jotapata, he knew, had a much more formidable rebel presence and was a threat at his back that must be removed before turning south to Judea. To give the Roman army a direct route, cavalrymen and foot soldiers became road-makers, and after four days’ toil they turned a path through the hills into a straight and solid road. As they worked, Vespasian waited with the remainder of his encamped army.
Urging his men to work harder and longer, Vespasian was a strict taskmaster. His troops didn’t seem to mind. They had found that their new commander in chief was a man without airs and graces, a man who ate the same rations as themselves and regularly visited them as they toiled. A century earlier, the consul Marius had taken much of the personal equipment of the legions off the backs of mules and transferred it onto the backs of legionaries. As a result, legionaries had come to refer to themselves as Marius’s Mules. Now, knowing Vespasian’s background as an investor in mule farms, legionaries who still considered themselves mules coined a nickname for their general—the Mule Driver.
On the day after the new Roman road to Jotapata was completed, Josephus arrived at Jotapata from Tiberias to take rebel command at the city. His arrival, he was to later say, “raised the drooping spirits of the Jews.”48 One Jew whose spirits weren’t raised slipped out of Jotapata and hurried south to find Vespasian, offering information in return for a pardon. When the Roman general learned from this deserter that there were more than forty thousand Jews in the city, and that the rebel commander for all of Galilee was now in charge at Jotapata, he became doubly determined to take and destroy the city. Giving the industrious Tribune Placidus a thousand cavalry and, as his deputy, the equally active Decurion Ebutius, Vespasian sent him ahead at the gallop with orders to quickly surround the city to prevent any rebels getting in or out. Meanwhile, Vespasian marched the rest of the army over the hills toward Jotapata via the newly built road.
When his army arrived outside Jotapata in the late evening of June 2, Vespasian added a double row of infantry to Placidus’s line of cavalry surrounding the city. Legionaries then dug entrenchments and pitched camp on a hill a little under a mile north of the city, deliberately in full view of the Jewish defenders to daunt them.
When the Romans awoke the next morning, they found that Josephus and thousands of his rebel fighters had encamped outside the city walls on the northern side of Jotapata. The city’s long, thin ground plan looked like the imprint of a north-facing left foot. The ground east, west, and south of Jotapata’s walls, which curved around natural gradients, sloped away steeply, making the northern wall the easiest to assault and most difficult to defend. With no prospect of escape, Josephus had convinced his partisans to take the initiative and fight outside the wall, catching the Romans in the open. “Nothing makes men fight so desperately in war as necessity,” Josephus was to later say.49
Vespasian clearly thought that Jotapata would fall as easily as Gadara. Instead of having his legions raise firing mounds for his artillery pieces, he simply arrayed his thousands of archers and sent massed ranks of Roman legionaries marching toward the wall under the cover of swarms of arrows. But Josephus and his men didn’t stand still to receive the arrows. They dashed at the legionaries and threw themselves at the slowly advancing Roman wall of locked shields, forcing the archers to suspend their fire rather than hit Romans.
Soon, there was hectic hand-to-hand fighting as the Jews dove in and out against the wall of shields. As annoying as bees to a bear, they kept this up all day, harassing the Roman front line and preventing it from moving forward. Hostilities ended at sunset, with both sides withdrawing. This first day of the battle had cost just thirteen Roman lives and seventeen Jewish lives, although six hundred rebels were wounded. But the Romans had made no progress.
For another three days this was repeated, with the Roman infantry stopped before the north wall by the continual harassment of Josephus and his men, who had gained great courage and enthusiasm from their success with these tactics on the first day. So, five days into the assault, and no further advanced, Vespasian called a council of war with his senior commanders. At his camp praetorium, or command center, on the hill outside Jotapata, he sought their input.
The upshot of this meeting was a decision that two of the three legions, the 5th Macedonica and 10th Fretensis, would build earth ramps against the city’s north wall. Once they were completed, Roman troops could advance up the ramps to mount the fortifications and enter the city. This would take time, but Vespasian curbed his impatience and gave the order for the ramps’ construction.
While some Roman troops maintained the encirclement of Jotapata, others ranged the surrounding hills, chopping down every tree and quarrying and rounding stones to be used by the legions’ heavy artillery pieces. Those stones were cut to the same size and weight. Josephus says each weighed a talent, which was around sixty pounds. The standard weights for legion catapult stones ranged from two pounds to a massive 360 pounds—the latter being known as the “wagon stone” because it needed a wagon to carry it. At the same time, at a range of no more than 220 yards from the wall, stable earth mounds were built for the artillery so that it could fire over the heads of Roman troops in front of it. In addition to one heavy-stone-throwing catapult per legion cohort, there could be as many as fifty-five lighter Scorpios and Carroballistas per cohort. According to Josephus, Vespasian deployed a total of 160 catapults against him at Jotapata.50
These catapults opened up a barrage of metal-tipped darts, ordinary stone balls, and burning balls that had been dipped in sticky black pitch. All these weapons let fly with a whoosh that could be heard within Jotapata. These missiles were joined by arrows of the archers from Arabia, and this rain of projectiles not only kept the rebels off the north wall, the Jews were cleared from all the open spaces in the north of the city. As an added precaution, two mantlets, wheeled wooden sheds with protective hide coverings, were moved into position ahead of the artillery. Under the cover of these, legionaries began piling earth dug in the rear to commence the pair of earthen ramps some yards apart, aiming for the northwestern section of the wall—using the earlier analogy of the left foot imprint, they were heading for the middle toes.
To hamper this construction work, Josephus sent out raiding parties who caught the workers in their mantlets and set fire to the woodwork at each ramp. To counter this, Vespasian linked the mantlets to each other with wooden palisades and stationed troops to closely protect the work teams. As the ramps continued to creep closer to the north wall, rising higher as they went, Josephus came up with another strategy.
In the dark of night, Josephus’s men installed poles on top of the city wall. Between these poles they stretched the hides of oxen freshly killed in the city, creating a leather barrier. When the Romans resumed artillery fire in the morning, darts and stones bounced off this barrier. The hides, dripping with oxblood, even resisted the flames of fireballs. Under the cover of these hides, Josephus and his men increased the height of their wall by piling up more and more stones and earth until the wall was eighty feet high, and mounted a number of wooden towers offering cover to defenders.
This clearly frustrated the laboring Romans, as did the fact that Josephus’s men resumed their hit-and-run raids on the ramp workplaces, setting fire to woodwork wherever they could. Annoyed by the rebel tactics, Vespasian had work on the ramps suspended and ordered his troops to settle in for a long siege. Bringing in water and food from the coast, the Romans could sit pat, intent on starving out the Jews. As it turned out, food was not a problem for Josephus and his partisans in Jotapata, but water was. Water collected in basins on city rooftops normally supplied the people of Jotapata through the dry summer, until the spring rains. But this normal supply was nowhere near enough for the more than forty thousand people now crowded into the city.
Josephus implemented water rationing, but even then people going to rooftops to collect their daily cup of water had to be careful not to be picked off by Roman artillery. Josephus responded by having people wash clothes, using their scanty water supply, then hang the dripping clothes on the wall to make their besiegers believe they had water to spare. The Jewish commander even resorted to sending men over the western wall at night and down the steep escarpment beyond it, covered in sheepskins so they could escape to other rebel-held towns in quest of water. Once these men neared the Roman lines, they got down on all fours and pretended to be dogs to avoid the sentries, but the ruse didn’t fool the Romans.
As hot days passed and the water supply continued to run low, Josephus convened a meeting with his lieutenants to discuss whether they should try to escape. But the rest of the people in the city got wind of their meeting and a crowd gathered, some demanding, others begging, that they not leave. So, to show that he was dedicated to remaining, Josephus led a surprise attack outside the city. Breaking through the Roman lines, Josephus and his men reached Vespasian’s camp a mile away, ripping down tents, setting fire to equipment, and causing general consternation before withdrawing to the city again, outdistancing the chasing legionaries, whose heavy armor slowed them down. For several days Josephus kept up these sallies, in daylight and darkness, until the Romans stationed Arabian archers and Syrian slingers to pelt the Jewish raiding parties as soon as they appeared in the open. The slingshot was more than an annoyance. Modern experiments have shown that Roman lead slingshot could travel at 100 mph and had a stopping power almost equal to that of a .44 Magnum handgun cartridge, with an accurate range of 130 yards.51
Rather than sit and let the rebels take the offensive day after day, Vespasian now ordered a resumption of ramp construction. The artillery and archers were moved closer to the north wall, and as the ramps grew higher, and closer to the wall, they were linked up to form one large ramp. We know that this ramp even used concrete revetments—they have been unearthed in recent times by archaeologists working at the Jotapata site. Eventually, the now single, broad ramp reached the wall. Two massive battering rams had already been prepared. Josephus spotted them lying in the open field behind Roman lines. The rams were now installed inside two wheeled mantlets, suspended from an overhead beam and with just a small opening at the front of each mantlet to allow the ram’s iron head to protrude.
With the ram operators stationed inside, the mantlet built by the 5th Macedonica Legion was run up against the ramp to the top of the recently elevated wall. The ram was swung back and forth, and soon the iron head was pounding into the stones and compacted earth of the wall, which had been shored up with timber during construction. Immediately, the wall shook, and a wail of alarm went up from people inside the city. As the ram continued to pound, Josephus had men fill sacks with chaff and then attach the sacks to ropes. Via the ropes, the sacks were hung down over the wall where the ram was working. Lowered to sit in front of the ram’s head, they softened its blows.
To counter this, the ram was moved to a new location on the ramp, where it started pounding afresh. But the defenders simply moved their chaff bags to the new location. Roman ingenuity finally overcame Jewish ingenuity when a razor-sharp scythe was strapped to the end of a pole. A Roman volunteer emerged from the mantlet with the pole. Reaching up, he sliced the ropes holding the bags of chaff, which fell to the ground.
Two rams were soon at work, side by side on the ramp, with the second operated by the 10th Fretensis. As the rams pounded away, Jewish defenders became desperate. One Galilean, naked to the waist and perspiring heavily, appeared on top of the wall directly above the ram being operated by the 10th Fretensis. He was holding a massive rock. Roman artillery quickly zeroed in on him, but despite sustaining five wounds from Roman darts, the man held his position. Raising the rock above his head, he flung it down with such accuracy that it broke the head off the ram. Then he jumped down among legionaries at the mantlet and fought them hand to hand. A pair of Galilean brothers jumped down to join him, and together they drove the 10th Fretensis men from their ram. Josephus and his fighters now rained burning brands down on the two mantlets, although the mantlets’ hide covers resisted catching alight.
With one ram knocked out, the Roman troops withdrew until nightfall to strategize, leaving the mantlets and the one still functional ram in place on the ramp. After dark, Moesian legionaries returned to the 5th Macedonica’s ram and resumed pounding where the wall had first shaken. Vespasian personally oversaw operations here, and while standing to the rear of the mantlet he was hit on his toe by a dart launched by a rebel on the wall. Men came running from all around to aid their general, and Vespasian was quickly carried to the rear, where he was attended by physicians and joined by his anxious son Titus. Learning that word of his injury had quickly spread, and Roman morale had consequently taken a dip, as soon as his foot was bandaged Vespasian returned to the action and urged his men to fight all the harder.
With their general hale, hearty, and full of determination, albeit with a limp, men of the 5th Macedonica let out relieved cheers, and shouting encouragement to one another, they again set the ram to work pounding the already weakened wall. All the while, the Roman artillery continued its barrage of balls, knocking the parapet from the wall and the corners from its defensive towers. In the darkness, defenders continued to appear on top of the wall with burning brands, in the process making targets of themselves. Countless rebels were cut down holding brands. Others, wounded, jumped down to attack the Romans at the mantlet, only to die in the effort.
Josephus was standing atop the wall watching all this when a Roman ballista ball cannoned past him. Looking around, he saw that the man who’d been standing immediately to his right had been hit, and with such velocity that his head had been cleaved clean from his shoulders. In daylight, the man’s head would be found in the city, more than six hundred yards from the wall. Elsewhere, a pregnant woman hit by a ballista ball inside the city was ripped open by the impact, with her unborn infant cast onto the ground.
The noise the Roman artillery made as it fired, and the groan the balls and arrows made in flight—like the groans of the decomposing dead, Josephus said—were as frightening to people in the city as the missiles themselves. Terrified women and children cried so much at this horrific din that Josephus ordered them all to block their ears and be locked in their houses so that their lamentations didn’t affect the morale of the Jewish fighting men.
In the night, a section of the wall gave way to the 5th Macedonica’s ram. Vespasian now ordered preparations made for an all-out assault through the gap created at dawn, when his men could see what they were doing. The mantlets were rolled back, and scaling ladders and a siege tower that had been built in the rear readied for the attack. Vespasian’s plan was simple. While the 5th Macedonica used the siege tower to attack the breach in the wall, which was where Vespasian’s main hopes lay, the 10th Fretensis and 15th Apollinaris would use scaling ladders at other locations to force the wall’s defenders to split their efforts over the multiple locations.
Inside Jotapata, Josephus and his lieutenants knew what was coming and weren’t idle. Defenders labored through the night to build another, inner wall around the breach in the outer wall. Older men were then stationed with Josephus on the wall’s tallest, soundest parts. The younger, fitter men were placed to defend the breach. Women and children locked away in the city’s dwelling places were ordered by Josephus to remain quiet—and none cried or screamed, none besought their men to come to them. Josephus then joined the five men assigned to the front rank of the defense of the broken wall, opposite the ramp of the 5th Macedonica Legion.
On the other side, Vespasian made his troop dispositions with care. Volunteers from among his cavalry were dismounted and equipped with long, pointed poles, then formed up in three ranks on the ramp. Their task was to use the poles to jab rebels who appeared on the wall, to prevent them raining missiles down on the best men of the two legions who lined up behind the cavalrymen with scaling ladders. All remaining cavalrymen were placed on their horses all the way around the east, west, and south walls of the city to intercept Jews who attempted to escape. Archers and slingers formed a second line behind the cavalry.
At the appointed time, all the trumpets of the legions sounded “Attack!” and the entire army roared a unified war cry that boomed around the hills. Josephus, who was on the receiving end of this war cry, described it as “a terrible shout.” And now the Roman artillery let fly. Legionaries and the dismounted cavalry rushed forward, some up the ramps, others to the wall. On the other side, Josephus had instructed his men to drop to one knee and hold their shields above their heads, forming a solid roof over them all. He knew that the artillery would cease firing as soon as Roman foot soldiers had reached the wall. Once missiles stopped falling, the Jews cast aside their shields, which were peppered with darts, and rose up to fight.
The struggle at the wall lasted all day. Climbing legionaries came up the siege tower and ladders in endless streams. When some Romans were knocked away, there were always others to fill their places. Jewish defenders had no such reinforcements, and as more and more of them fell, and Romans succeeded in reaching the top of the wall in one place, Josephus called on a new desperate weapon. Several caldrons of oil—apparently lamp oil—had been simmering over fires. These were hauled up the wall and, sizzling and smoking, were poured over climbing Moesian legionaries of the 5th Macedonica below.
The effect was startling, and horrifyingly effective. The boiling oil covered Roman soldiers from head to foot, got in their eyes, seeped beneath their armor, and ate into their skin. Screaming, they fell like lemmings. And when they hit the ground, they could only rip off helmets and “leap and roll about in their pain,” according to Josephus, who witnessed their agonies, or run blindly, howling, into the path of the next wave of legionaries coming to take their turn at the wall. Enraged by this barbaric treatment of their comrades, the following legionaries bellowed their determination to get their hands on the dealers in boiling oil and give them a taste of their own medicine, and began climbing.52
Josephus had one more defensive card to play. As the day was drawing out, vats of a greasy oil produced from the seeds of the herb fenugreek, which was used by Jewish cooks to make a relish, were poured down onto the woodwork of the siege tower and ladders, making them impossibly slippery. To the delight of the defenders, legionaries slipped and fell left and right. The Roman assault was becoming a farce. With the sun setting, Vespasian had “Withdraw” trumpeted, and his attacking troops pulled back to camp, taking their wounded with them. Jewish casualties had been relatively light, and the Romans had failed to exploit the breach in the wall to get inside Jotapata. The honors remained with the rebels.
Vespasian now ordered the construction of three massive wheeled siege towers. Each was to be fifty feet high, made from wood covered with iron plates that would both fend off missiles and make the towers impervious to fire. This would take several days to accomplish, leaving the majority of Vespasian’s men idle in camp. So, seeing his troops impatient for Jewish blood after the injuries and frustrations of the last few days, Vespasian called in two of his generals and gave them assault missions to accomplish. These were designed to keep a portion of his troops busy and potentially give them plenty of booty—under the laws of war observed by Rome, if an enemy city surrendered, the Roman commander could determine the fate of its residents and contents, whereas if legionaries took it by storm they were entitled to a share of the proceeds from the sale of booty and from the sale into slavery of inhabitants.
Trajan of the 10th Fretensis was ordered to take two thousand of his legionaries and a thousand cavalry and storm the rebel-held town of Japha, not far from Jotapata. Cerialis of the 5th Macedonica was to take three thousand legionaries and six hundred cavalry south into Samaria to occupy Mount Gerizim. Vespasian had learned that thousands of Samaritan Jews had gathered on that mountain, which was a holy place to them—Samaritans believed that it was there that Abraham the Patriarch had taken his son Isaac to execute him as per the wishes of God, whereas the Jews of Jerusalem believed that Abraham had taken his son to Mount Moriah, which became the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Japha had been surrounded by two relatively low defensive walls by its Jewish defenders, and General Trajan’s troops soon stormed the outer wall. As the Roman assault troops came over this, rebels fled toward the inner wall. But their compatriots at that inner wall, fearful of allowing the pursuing Romans inside the town, locked the gates, shutting out their retreating Jewish comrades and refusing to let them in, even when the refuge seekers called out to friends and relatives by name, begging to be saved.
When the Romans closed the gates in the outer wall, thousands of rebels were trapped between the inner and outer walls. The legionaries proceeded to slaughter the now panic-stricken men caught in the trap, running them through with their swords if they stood up to them, slitting their throats if they turned their backs and tried to escape. According to Josephus, twelve thousand Jewish rebels died in this slaughter.
Trajan now sent word to Vespasian that he had all but taken Japha. Estimating that few partisans remained inside the surrounded town, Trajan suggested that his brother-in-law Titus might like the honor of completing the Japha assault. Vespasian agreed and sent his son to the doomed metropolis accompanied by another thousand legionaries and five hundred cavalry. Once Titus reached Japha, he joined his troops to those of Trajan, and with Trajan in charge on the left wing, Titus stationed himself on the right wing and took command of the assault. At a trumpet call, the Roman legionaries surged forward with scaling ladders, all the way around the encircled town.
Rebels resisted from Japha’s inner wall for a time, then withdrew into the town. When Roman troops flooded over the wall, they were to find that the partisans and their women had stationed themselves on the town’s flat rooftops. As the legionaries tried to force a passage down Japha’s narrow streets, they were pelted from above with darts by partisans and with anything that came to hand by their women—roof tiles, bricks, broken furniture. Forced to fight from house to house, Titus and his men took six hours to clear the town.
Any adult male Jew the legionaries found in houses or in the open, armed or unarmed, was assumed to be a rebel and killed on the spot. In this final Roman assault, a further 3,000 Jewish men were killed, while 2,130 Jewish women and children were rounded up and led away in chains to be sold by the slave merchants. With very few Roman casualties, Titus’s first battle of the campaign had proven a cheap and easy victory.53
Meanwhile, in Samaria, General Cerialis was dealing with the problem posed by the thousands of Samaritans massed on Mount Gerizim. Arraying his 3,600 troops at the foot of the mountain, Cerialis sent the Samaritan leaders a message vowing to spare the lives of all if they surrendered peacefully. But the Samaritans feared they would be sold into slavery if they surrendered, so they turned down Cerialis’s offer. Two days after Titus had stormed Japha, Cerialis sent his 3,000 infantry up the mountain with orders to take no prisoners. According to Josephus, 11,600 Samaritans were killed that day.
Missions accomplished, Titus, Trajan, Cerialis, and their troops returned to Jotapata, where work had continued to further elevate the assault ramps as the massive siege towers were constructed to the rear. On July 19, the forty-seventh day of the Roman siege, these ramps were higher than the city wall. That same day, a Jewish deserter came to the Roman lines and offered Vespasian information on how to take the city.
Vespasian didn’t entirely trust this fellow. Previously, a Jew had been captured while attempting to escape Jotapata, and he had defied torture by fire, refusing to reveal anything about the state of the rebel defenses inside the city. That man had died crucified on a cross, smiling down at his Roman tormentors. Now, without coercion, this latest Jewish deserter was advising the Romans how to take the city, telling Vespasian that he’d seen the exhausted Jewish sentries of the last watch before dawn always nod off to sleep, making this the ideal time to launch a stealthy surprise attack on the city. Do that, said the deserter, and Jotapata would fall.
Although Vespasian feared a trap, he ultimately felt that little would be lost if he tested the man’s information. Keeping the informer in custody for now, Vespasian gave his son Titus the task of leading a commando raid on the northern wall, to see whether the Jewish sentries were indeed asleep leading up to dawn. The 15th Apollinaris Legion had yet to figure prominently in the Jotapata assault, so as his companions in the commando raid, Titus chose the tribune commanding the legion, Domitius Sabinus, and a group of his best 15th Apollinaris legionaries.
In the darkness, and with the added cover of a thick mist that descended on Jotapata in the early hours that night, Titus, Sabinus, and their men crept up a ramp and dropped down onto the city wall. Not a creature stirred nearby. The deserter had not lied—the Jewish sentries were indeed asleep at their posts. Creeping up to them, Titus and his men slit their throats. Then, quietly descending into the slumbering city, Titus’s party tiptoed to the nearest gates, then flung them open. Thousands more Roman troops who had been lying in wait by the ramps silently rose up and came jogging to the gates before pouring into the city.
As cohort after cohort of legionaries flooded through Jotapata with flashing swords, every Jew encountered was cut down. Thousands of men, women, and children screamed with terror as they fled down the slopes of the citadel in the north of the city and into the suburbs of the south, with Roman soldiers on their heels. Jewish commander Josephus awoke to the cacophony and, grabbing his sword, emerged to find that he had no chance of organizing resistance now that his enemy was inside the walls. He instead turned and ran to a hiding place that he would have previously reconnoitered. The hill of the citadel was pitted with caves, which were essentially shallow holes in the ground, and Josephus jumped down into a pit among these caves. This pit, he knew, opened into a cavern that, uniquely among those on the hillside, was invisible from above. Inside the cavern he found forty leading people of Jotapata, men and women, and he joined them in cringing in its dark concealment.
With the coming of daylight, the Roman slaughter grew to its height. No one was spared. The Romans, incensed by the way some of their comrades had been killed and maimed by the desperate Jewish defense via boiling oil, had blood lust. Even if their commanders had wanted to stop them as the massacre continued, they couldn’t. Josephus, in his Jewish War, estimated that forty thousand Jews died in Jotapata during the siege and its bloody last day. Some today question that figure, considering it exaggerated and accusing Josephus of inflating the number to gain sympathy for his fellow Jews, putting the actual figure at more like seven thousand.
One reason for suggesting Josephus inflated the number of dead stemmed from the fact that, when a mass grave was unearthed by archaeologists at the Jotapata site during the 1990s, the number of human remains indicated far less than forty thousand victims. However, the Romans left the Jewish dead at Jotapata in the open and forbade the burial of the bodies for another year. After Jewish relatives of the dead came to the site in AD 68, it’s probable that remains that could be identified were removed for burial elsewhere, with unidentified remains going into the mass grave. Certainly, that mass grave would not have been dug by the Roman army; they always left enemy dead where they fell.
Not all Jewish casualties occurred in the first flush of the Roman surge through the city. Some Jews fled to the caves, where most could be seen from above. Those who refused to surrender were incinerated in their holes by fires lit by the legionaries. But they were first given the chance to surrender, with the slave market their destination. It was here that Centurion Antonius again enters the story. Josephus doesn’t identify him as the same Centurion Antonius of the 3rd Gallica Legion who was the Roman hero of the defense of Ascalon, but neither does he say that he wasn’t the same man.
Centurion Antonius reached his right hand down to a partisan who had been hiding in one of the holes and had agreed to surrender, to haul him out. With the centurion off guard, the Jew thrust a spear up between his legs. Entering Antonius’s groin, the spearhead passed up into his vital organs, and he died instantly. If it was the Centurion Antonius from Ascalon, we can’t escape the irony of the fact that the man who had led the slaughter of eighteen thousand Jewish rebels there perished at Jotapata extending his hand to help a rebel. We aren’t told of the fate of his assailant. Antonius’s compatriots would have ensured it was horrific—incinerated alive, probably.
Once the killing had ceased, Vespasian ordered the utter destruction of Jotapata, first by fire and then via the tumbling down of the brick and stone shells that remained. On July 22, two days after the city’s fall, a Jewish woman was discovered in the ruins searching for food. On being questioned by Vespasian, the woman revealed her hiding place and identified the forty people hiding with her, including Josephus, the Jewish rebel commander for all of Galilee. Vespasian, seeing the possibility of rebel resistance across Galilee crumbling if it became known that Josephus was in Roman hands, immediately sent two of his tribunes to the pit. They called down to Josephus that Vespasian wished to offer him his life if he surrendered.
These two officers, Tribunes Paulinus and Gallicanus, were likely the second in command of the 5th Macedonica and 10th Fretensis Legions. But they were unable to convince Josephus to trust them, even though they assured him that Vespasian admired his courage and leadership skills and only wished to talk with him. So Vespasian sent a third officer, Tribune Nicanor, to try to convince Josephus to give himself up. This tribune was Syrian, and Josephus says in his Jewish War that Nicanor had been his “familiar acquaintance in time past.”
As previously discussed, it’s probable that Nicanor had been in charge of the 3rd Gallica Legion at Caesarea for at least several years prior to the recent departure of six of its cohorts for Moesia. Titus and Vespasian would have retained his services because of his intimate knowledge of Judea and Jerusalem, and in AD 64 Nicanor and Josephus would have become acquainted after Nicanor organized his passage to Rome and back from Caesarea for the hearing in which Josephus successfully represented several Jews of Judea. Travel between Roman provinces by noncitizens required a pass approved by the Palatium at Rome and issued by the local governor, and if a military escort was involved it would have been organized by the local military commander—in this case, Tribune Nicanor.
Calling down into the pit, Nicanor assured Josephus that he and his fellow Roman officers didn’t hate Josephus; they admired him. As for Vespasian, said Nicanor, he had nothing but the best motives for seeking Josephus’s surrender. “The general is very desirous to have you brought to him, not to punish you,” Nicanor went on. “For he could do that anyway, if you didn’t come voluntarily. He is determined to save a man of your courage.”54
Josephus trusted Nicanor more than he trusted most Romans. As he wavered over his answer, Roman legionaries, impatient with this stubborn Jew, crowded around the pit with incendiary material, declaring that if he didn’t come out of his own accord they would burn him out. When Tribune Nicanor angrily ordered them away, Josephus’s trust in him grew. After offering up a prayer, Josephus called to Nicanor that he was coming up. But Josephus’s fellow Jews in the cave were horrified that he would even contemplate giving up and swarmed around him with drawn swords.
“Are you so fond of life that you can bear to see the light in a state of slavery?” one demanded.
“How many have you persuaded to lose their lives for liberty?” growled another.55
They had all committed to dying rather than capitulate to the Romans, and several of Josephus’s companions raised their swords to ensure that Josephus kept to that commitment. Quickly rethinking his plan to immediately surrender, he sweet-talked his companions.
“Since it is resolved among you that you will die,” he said, “come on, let’s commit our mutual deaths to determination by lots.”56
Josephus himself later wrote that he had no intention of dying when he made this suggestion. He arranged for his companions and himself to pair up, then the members of each pair drew lots. The bearer of the second lot was to execute the holder of the first lot, then kill himself. Josephus deliberately chose a weak-minded individual as his partner in death, then convinced him to wait until all the others had killed themselves. Then he talked the man into preferring life to death. Josephus was then able to climb out of the pit after all, and offer his wrists to Nicanor for binding.
As Tribune Nicanor led Josephus away to the Roman camp, heading for Vespasian’s headquarters, word quickly spread among legionaries that the Jews’ general was being brought in alive, and thousands soon surrounded the pair. Some of the troops were merely curious and wanted to clap eyes on the man who’d defied them for so long. Others, more passionate and angered by the loss of friends to partisans, called for his immediate execution. Nicanor attempted to cool tempers, but it took Titus arriving on the scene to calm the situation.
Josephus was then led before Vespasian by Titus, who expressed sympathy for the young Jewish commander, a man much the same age as himself. Titus, who was to later demonstrate a compassionate side, imagined himself in Josephus’s shoes, but Vespasian was much less kindly than his son. A practical man, he was a soldier first and foremost, and after all the tricks that Josephus had pulled while leading the resistance against him, Vespasian didn’t trust him an inch. When he seemed inclined toward ordering Josephus’s immediate execution, Titus succeeded in convincing his father not to kill Josephus but instead to keep him under close guard. It seemed to Josephus that Titus’s plan was to convince his father to send him to Nero to allow the emperor to decide his fate.
As Josephus was about to be led away, he took a gamble, one that would both save and change his life. Having learned that Vespasian was known to seek the prophesies of oracles, he now boldly told the general that he had something to tell him, if permitted to speak with him alone. It was something to the general’s advantage, he said. Vespasian, suspicious but curious, ordered everyone to leave his praetorium apart from Titus and two of their friends—almost certainly Vespasian’s clients, the generals Trajan and Cerialis. Josephus then proceeded to prophesy that both Vespasian and his son Titus would become emperor of Rome and urged Vespasian to keep him close, for his own benefit, and not send him to Nero. Vespasian considered this prophesy nonsense, an invention to buy the prisoner time. Impatiently, he ordered Josephus taken away, but kept in chains for the time being. A centurion was appointed Josephus’s personal jailer.
One of the two friends of Vespasian who’d been in that meeting—later events suggest it was Cerialis, because he and Josephus would go on several missions together and have the opportunity to talk—subsequently asked Josephus why, if he possessed the gift of prophesy, he hadn’t told the people of Jotapata that it was pointless to resist the Romans, as the city was destined to fall. In response, Josephus told the general that he had indeed prophesied this to the Jotapatans, even predicting the city would fall after forty-seven days of siege—we don’t know whether he did make such predictions, or not, but Josephus claimed that several among the 1,200 Jewish captives at Jotapata would confirm them.
Vespasian, like many Romans, was indeed a deeply superstitious man, guided by auspices, influenced by omens, and awed by the forecasts of oracles. As Josephus’s prediction played on his mind over the coming weeks, he softened his attitude toward the man. While still maintaining Josephus under close arrest, Vespasian had fine new suits of clothing and other expensive gifts sent to him. Titus also paid him various honors. And all thoughts of sending the Jewish priest to Nero evaporated.