While the Roman military campaign in Judea was on prolonged hold due to politics across the seas, Jerusalem had continued to be run by Jewish partisans as the center of their rebel state, and they had used the lull in Roman hostilities to complete the city’s third wall on the northern outskirts, the wall commenced by King Herod Agrippa II’s father close to thirty years earlier.
Commerce and religious practice continued much as usual in the city. The rebels even minted their own currency in Jerusalem, melting down Roman coins and bronze to produce revolutionary shekels depicting images of palm branches and citron fruits that were not offensive to Jews and showing the year of the Jewish revolution in which they were minted, with AD 66 as Year 1 and AD 70 as Year 4. One such AD 70 coin, unearthed in Jerusalem in modern times and now held by the Israeli Antiquities Authority, was produced with the inscription: “To the Redemption of Zion, Year 4.”
Although business and religion had been uninterrupted, internecine leadership struggles continued among the Jews in Jerusalem through these years as ambition and ego came before cohesion and cooperation. By the time that Titus set out from Alexandria at the commencement of the spring of AD 70, planning to march overland to Caesarea, where the Roman forces allocated to the upcoming assault on Jerusalem were ordered to assemble, a Jewish tussle for power had been underway behind Jerusalem’s walls for three years. That tussle had claimed the lives of thousands of Jews, including some of their most notable and capable leaders.
A farrago of factions emerged as this cancer took hold. There were the Zealots, headed by Eleazar ben Simon. A rival religious faction was led by Ananus ben Ananus, the former high priest, who was determined to overthrow all rivals and take sole power for himself. Ananus had, he thought, eliminated one rival in the person of peasant leader Simon bar Giora, the hero of Beth Horon, whom he put in charge of the toparchy of Acrabatene, removing him from Jerusalem. But when Simon began building a large personal following in Acrabatene, Ananus had sent an armed party to deal with him. As a result, Simon and a few followers had fled back to the Masada fortress, where Sicarii leader Eleazar ben Ya’ir had again admitted them. Wary of Simon this time, Eleazar had kept him and his men in what Josephus describes as the lower part of the fortress to begin with, but before long Simon gained Eleazar’s confidence and his trust.71
From Masada, Simon and his men joined Eleazar’s Sicarii in raiding nearby villages for supplies, always on foot. But when the Sicarii showed no interest in ranging farther afield, Simon and his band raided villages in the hills, forcing the inhabitants to give up their goods, and then ventured down onto the plain of Idumea. With each passing day, Simon added new recruits to his band so that, instead of just leading slaves and robbers, Simon attracted large numbers of men from the general population. According to Josephus, Simon wasn’t as crafty as other Jewish leaders such as John of Gischala, but he was clearly charismatic to attract a following that soon grew into the thousands.
With this force, Simon returned to the Acrabatene toparchy, forcibly occupying it in defiance of the Jewish leadership at Jerusalem and building a fortress at the village of Nain in Lower Galilee, today’s Nein, just to the south of Nazareth, which he made the headquarters of his now large band. All Simon’s ill-gotten gains were secreted in “the caves of Paran,” as Josephus calls them. These otherwise unidentified caves in the south of the Judean Mountains are likely to have been the Beit Guvrin caves where Niger of Perea hid from Centurion Antonius’s troops. Meanwhile, at Nain, Simon continued building his army and training his men, making no secret of his ultimate ambition—taking control at Jerusalem.72
From Jerusalem, Eleazar and the Zealots, who were determined to eliminate the growing threat posed by Simon’s faction, launched an attack on him in Galilee. But Simon was prepared and met the Zealots in pitched battle with twenty thousand well-disciplined foot soldiers. Not only did Simon inflict heavy casualties on the Zealots, they were driven all the way back to Jerusalem. As tempting as an assault on Jerusalem was, Simon decided that his army was not yet strong enough for the task. Instead, he turned toward Idumea.
The Idumeans, putting together an army of twenty-five thousand infantry to defend their territory, met Simon on his approach. After a day-long battle ended in stalemate, both sides withdrew. Now, an Idumean commander named Jacob volunteered to go to Simon to discuss a settlement, but as soon as he met Simon he offered to betray his own people. When Jacob returned to Idumean ranks, he discreetly told fellow officers that the army of Simon he’d seen was four times larger than theirs. This was partly true; in addition to his twenty thousand fully armed men, Simon had attracted a following of another forty thousand men who only wanted for arms.
When next Simon led his army into Idumea and the Idumean army confronted him, Jacob rode off, deserting his men, as did other officers he’d spoken with. The Idumean foot soldiers, left leaderless and in confusion, broke and ran, enabling Simon to roll through Idumea, taking and burning village after village and finally taking, without a fight, the grand prize of the ancient city of Hebron, which Simon’s men gleefully looted.
The Zealots were fully aware of this and alarmed by it. So they sent out parties to set up ambushes in the mountain passes. One of these was able to surprise and capture Simon’s wife and her attendants as they passed through en route to joining Simon. Taking their opponent’s wife back to Jerusalem, the Zealots paraded her through the streets as if they had made a prisoner of Simon himself, then locked her up. Simon was known to love his wife dearly, so the Zealots waited, expecting him to offer to lay down his arms in return for her release. Instead, Simon flew into a rage and marched on Jerusalem with his men.
When Simon arrived outside the city’s closed gates with his sixty thousand followers, he vowed death to all who took and kept his wife. His men surrounded Jerusalem and seized anyone who ventured out in search of vegetables and firewood—women, children, and old men. Those they didn’t kill they sent back inside with their hands chopped off. This terrorism campaign worked. After the common people implored the Zealots to give Simon what he wanted, Eleazar eventually relented. Simon’s wife was sent out to him.
Simon marched away, back to Idumea, only for word to reach him that a Roman force of cavalry and infantry was marching into Idumea. This force, from Emmaus, was headed by General Cerialis, commander of the 5th Macedonica Legion. This was the spring of AD 69, and Vespasian, still at Caesarea, had learned of the chaos wrought by Simon and his men and had sent Cerialis to put a stop to their rampages.
First occupying the Acrabatene toparchy and denying Simon his headquarters there, Cerialis and his detachment of several thousand men came bent on occupying Upper Idumea. Josephus rode with Cerialis as his guide and translator, having been made a free man by Vespasian—because, Josephus was to say, he had predicted Vespasian would be emperor. On Vespasian’s orders, the soldier who removed Josephus’s chains ceremonially cut them into pieces in front of him to demonstrate that he would never again be bound.
As Cerialis’s force approached, Simon and his army drove every Idumean they could find to Jerusalem, then camped outside the city walls, demanding admittance. Behind him, Cerialis swiftly overran Upper Idumea, sweeping through cities and villages before lastly taking Hebron, which his troops devastated. Cerialis then returned to Emmaus. His swift campaign meant that the only fortified places now in rebel hands outside Jerusalem were Masada, Machaerus, and Herodium—a circular fortress built by Herod the Great atop a conical manmade hill on the edge of the Judean Desert, which contained Herod’s tomb. Herodium was much closer to Jerusalem than the two other fortresses—lying just eight miles south of the city and three miles southeast of Bethlehem.
While Simon and his men encircled Jerusalem and killed anyone who attempted to leave, within the city walls John of Gischala took advantage of the chaos to attack the Zealots, forcing them to retreat to the Temple. John and his followers subsequently tyrannized the rest of the city, killing anyone they didn’t like. For reasons unknown, many of John’s men dressed as women and failed to observe even basic religious practices. This incensed the priestly faction, and High Priest Matthias ben Boethus invited Simon and his men to come into the city to deal with John, his heathen band, and the Zealots. It was to prove a big mistake.
As soon as Simon and his men were granted entry to Jerusalem, they set themselves up as rulers of the city, in opposition to the three other factions, and before long killed High Priest Matthias and his three sons. With John of Gischala intimidated and many of his followers deserting him, Simon launched an attack on the Zealots in the Temple. From the walls, the Zealots rained missiles down on his men, causing heavy casualties, and Simon’s followers quickly tired of the attack. With Simon’s Temple siege faltering, then halting, he withdrew with his men to the Upper City, which he made his fiefdom, turning the Phasael Tower, part of Herod’s Palace in the southwest of Jerusalem, into his residence.
This allowed the Zealots to emerge from the Temple and threaten the rest of the city’s regions—the New City, Old City, and City of David. Ananus, the former high priest, had assumed leadership of the religious faction, and he took advantage of Simon’s pullback to attack the Zealots. The force that Ananus put together outnumbered the Zealots, but the Zealots were better armed and had more fighting experience through their involvement in the revolt from its beginning. Ananus’s men fought the Zealots in the streets, driving them back to the Temple, where the Zealots again barricaded themselves inside the Inner Court with extensive provisions. Rather than shed blood inside the Temple’s holy Inner Court, Ananus posted six thousand guards around it, hemming in the Zealots and hoping to eventually starve them out.
John of Gischala, having lost his own power base, now very visibly allied himself to Ananus, swearing an oath to support him, going everywhere about the city during the day with the former high priest as Ananus discussed the Zealot problem with other leading men of Jerusalem, and accompanying him by night as he checked the sentry posts. John was able to convince Ananus to send him into the Temple as his envoy to the Zealots, with a proposal for a truce for the following day to allow Ananus and his followers to enter the Temple, unarmed, on a fasting day, to carry out important religious observances.
Once John was admitted to the Inner Court, he vowed to Eleazar and his men that he had been their secret supporter all along. Convincingly, he assured them that Ananus was planning to send word to Vespasian, offering to open the city’s gates and surrender Jerusalem. John also declared that Ananus was requesting a truce for the next day so that he and his men could enter the Inner Court with hidden arms, and then, with the Zealots off guard, fall on and destroy them before sending ambassadors to the Roman general. John went on to suggest the Zealots seek foreign assistance against Ananus and his people. The only “foreigners” in a position to offer rapid aid were the Idumeans to the south.
John withdrew to tell Ananus that the Zealots were considering his request of a truce, and Eleazar and his deputy, Zacharias bar Phalek, dispatched two fast runners who escaped the Temple, apparently via one of the tunnels beneath it, and hurried to the Idumeans, who had returned to their destroyed towns and villages following Cerialis’s sweep. The Idu-means quickly appointed four commanders and again put twenty thousand men under arms. This force at once set out for Jerusalem. Learning that the Idumeans were coming along the Hill Road from Hebron, Ananus had Jerusalem’s city gates closed, and he and his men took to the walls with their arms.
Jesus ben Damneus, eldest of the former high priests next to Ananus, called down to the Idumean commanders from the First Wall, urging them to lay down their arms and withdraw. Simon, one of the Idumean commanders, called back indignantly that they were going nowhere. Idumeans spread out to besiege the city from the west and the north. But, not expecting to have to camp in the open, they had come unprepared, without tents, and when a thunderstorm broke over them that night they huddled together for warmth in the open and held their shields above them as protection against the rain. Seeing this, Ananus instructed his sentries to stand down for the night and sleep under cover.
The Zealots, meanwhile, using the noise of the storm to cover their activities, employed saws that had been intended for use in planned Temple extensions and sawed through a city gate. They then sent for the Idumeans, who filed in through the open gate, entering the city under the very noses of Ananus and his unwitting men. The Zealots, coming out of the Temple into the city, welcomed their new allies. Jointly, they set about killing Ananus’s sleeping sentries. But some of those sentries raised the alarm, and Ananus’s men awoke and ran to defend against what they thought was a Zealot raid.
When it became apparent that Idumeans were inside the city, the older men among Ananus’s followers, who had no experience as soldiers, lost the will to fight. Casting aside their weapons and dropping to their knees, they bewailed their situation and accepted their fate, leaving their younger counterparts to desperately fight a losing battle. By daybreak, 8,500 of Ananus’s men lay dead and the Idumeans were rampaging through the city, slitting throats and looting. Among the further 12,000 fellow Jews killed in the Idumean onslaught were Ananus and his priestly colleague Jesus. Josephus was to lament that Ananus was an enormous loss to the Jewish cause. The fall of Jerusalem, said Josephus, began with the former high priest’s murder on this day.
The Zealots now took charge in the Lower City and New City, and set up a show trial in the Temple of a much-respected priest named Zacharias, charging him with secretly being in favor of surrendering to the Romans. Zacharias scoffed at the charge, and as the trial judges began to show signs of exonerating him, two Zealots jumped up and executed the accused on the spot. The Idumean commanders, being convinced by a Zealot leader that the Zealots, having wheedled out the rotten apples from the partisan leadership, would now be able to successfully defend Jerusalem from Roman attack, packed up and went home to Idumea. Before they departed, the Idumeans freed two thousand Jewish prisoners from the city prisons. Most of these men fled straight to Simon bar Giora in the Upper City. For the moment, even as the number of his followers swelled by the addition of the former prisoners, Simon kept his head down and his mouth shut.
The Zealots subsequently led a crackdown in the sectors of Jerusalem under their control, eliminating anyone who they believed posed a threat to them. One of the victims of this purge was Niger of Perea, who had been welcomed into Jerusalem as a hero several years earlier after being the sole survivor of the bloody battles in Idumea against Centurion Antonius and his men. Others were indiscriminately cut down in the street by the Zealots, with their bodies left where they fell and their families forbidden to bury them. As the stench of death filled the streets and alleys of Jerusalem, such fear and dread gripped the general population that some of the bolder men succeeded in escaping and reaching the Mediterranean coast. There, they told of the crazy, self-defeating fight for power in their holy city.
Word of this inevitably reached Vespasian while he was still at Caesarea, and before his transfer to Alexandria. His officers urged him to take advantage of the Jews’ internal strife by marching on Jerusalem at once, to catch them divided and disorganized. Apart from the fact that his troop numbers had been reduced by the allocation of men to Mucianus’s Italian task force, Vespasian, whose eyes were on Rome, told his officers that it would be more advantageous to let the Jews continue to fight among themselves, weakening their resources and their resolve. And so the Roman army continued to sit in its quarters throughout Judea and Galilee.
During this period, too, Eleazar ben Ya’ir, rebel commander at Masada, had led a party of his Sicarii down from Masada to the regional capital of Ein Gedi. In a night attack, they drove resident Jewish males out of the city. Separating seven hundred women and children from the rest of the population, they slit their throats. Historians and scholars have long puzzled why these women and children were segregated and murdered. However, it is likely that these were the de facto wives and illegitimate children of the 3rd Gallica legionaries killed at Masada in AD 66. After looting the homes of these victims and helping themselves to fruit stored in the city, Eleazar and his men returned to Masada. They would continue to periodically raid villages of the area to top up their food supplies and find new recruits.
In Jerusalem, the fight for power continued, with John of Gischala and his faction making a move to topple Eleazar and his Zealots, who retreated once more into the Temple with stocks of food and wine and closed the doors. John’s men mounted assaults on the Temple to dislodge the Zealots and used lumber set aside for Temple extensions to build artillery to bombard them. All the while, as the priestly workers at the Temple attempted to go about their daily religious duties, a number became casualties to missiles in this firefight.
Simon bar Giora, seeing the other factions at odds with each other, took his chance to attack John of Gischala’s men from behind, leading his men from the Upper City. John was now defending himself on two fronts. In this fighting, buildings around the Temple were burned, and in some, much of the grain that had been laid up for the city’s population in anticipation of a Roman siege was also burned. Repulsing Simon’s attacks, John again focused on the Zealot-held Temple, commencing construction of wooden siege towers, which he would soon be forced to abandon by the movement of Roman forces.
Titus had arrived at Caesarea, having marched from Alexandria with a small force based around his cavalry bodyguard and the two thousand men of the 18th Legion that had been stranded in Egypt by the change in Nero’s fortunes, plus men detached from the 3rd Cyrenaica Legion—apparently a thousand of them, in two cohorts. These six legionary cohorts from Alexandria were commanded by a tribune, Eternius Fronto, who was a friend and client of Titus. Tiberius Alexander also marched from Alexandria with Titus. Vespasian had replaced him as prefect of Egypt with another Equestrian Order member so that Alexander could serve as Titus’s deputy and chief adviser for the Jerusalem assault.
In Caesarea, Titus linked up with units allocated by Vespasian to the Jerusalem campaign. The 5th Macedonica Legion was waiting at Emmaus still commanded by General Sextus Cerialis. The 10th Fretensis was in Jericho, where it had wintered and received a new young commander, the legate Aulus Larcius Lepidus, who had previously served as quaestor, or administrative assistant, to the proconsul of Crete and Cyrenaica. Marcus Trajan, who had faithfully commanded the 10th since AD 67, had been appointed governor of Cappadocia by Vespasian, who would later reward him further with a consulship and the prized governorship of Syria. The 15th Apollinaris Legion was in Caesarea, having spent the Year of the Four Emperors there. Its commander was now the legate Titus Frigius.
All three legions were still minus the two thousand men who had been sent to Italy with Mucianus. Those cohorts would eventually return to the East and reunite with their legions, but in the meantime, the three thousand men of the 18th and 3rd Cyrenaica Legions that Titus brought with him from Alexandria were intended, says Josephus, to temporarily “replenish” the three legions and partially make up for the absent troops.73
Titus would embark on this phase of the Judean War with more troops than his father had possessed at the campaign’s outset, with the addition of a fourth legion, none other than the disgraced 12th Fulminata, the legion that had lost its eagle to the Jews in AD 66. The 12th Fulminata had marched down to Caesarea from Laodicea to join Titus. In Laodicea, it had undergone its discharge of men who’d served out their twenty-year enlistments and were going into retirement, and received its intake of new recruits. The legion’s two cohorts garrisoning Sepphoris would have been withdrawn to Laodicea to rejoin the other cohorts and take part in the discharge process.
Some men of the 12th Fulminata’s old enlistment signed up for second enlistments, but the majority of the men who brought the legion up to full strength at 5,225 legionaries were new recruits aged between eighteen and forty-six. Roman citizens were required to give their names to the local authorities at the cities where they lived, and when the recruitment officers working for the province’s quaestor came around, they were given lists of these registered citizens from which to choose fit and able conscripts. Most recruits were draftees, not volunteers, although a few criminal types and down-and-outs were known to volunteer for legion service. A conscripted man could even officially pay for another to substitute for him, although that was rare.
The revitalized 12th Fulminata Legion’s centurions and optios came from both the old enlistment and via transfer and promotion from other legions. In this process the 12th Fulminata received a new chief centurion, Gaius Velius Rufus. Relatively young for a chief centurion, probably in his forties at most, he would have a long military career after the Judean War, stretching out for another two decades. It’s also likely he was promoted to the 12th Fulminata after serving as a first-rank centurion with the 15th Apollinaris Legion in Judea, for his good friend Marcus Alfius Olympiacus, who would raise a memorial to him after his death, was eagle-bearer of the 15th Apollinaris.
Chief Centurion Velius Rufus was a highly decorated soldier. We know from his later memorial in Heliopolis that he was awarded several bravery decorations by both Vespasian and Titus during the Judean War. More than once, Rufus earned gold neck torques, phalerae, which were round medal-like decorations worn on the chest, and armillae, or armbands, in Judea. These were relatively low grade and common decorations for valor in battle. More importantly, Rufus was also awarded the gold Crown of Valor in this war. Also known as the Rampant Crown, this went to the first man to cross the ramparts of an enemy camp in an assault and survive. There would be no mention of Rufus being the first man to cross the ramparts during the siege of Jerusalem. So this rare and highly valued decoration seems to have come to Rufus from Vespasian as a result of a successful assault such as that at Japha, when the centurion was with the 15th Apollinaris Legion. A torque and armillae were also later awarded to him by Titus following the fall of Jerusalem.
No legate took command of the shamed 12th Fulminata at this rebirth of the legion. After its humbling in Armenia and loss of its eagle in Judea, it seems that no senator was prepared to be associated with the unit. In this new campaign of AD 70 it would continue to be commanded by a senior tribune. It’s unlikely this officer was the 12th Fulminata’s tribune for the past year, Placidus. He isn’t mentioned again by Josephus following the tribune’s rampaging activities through Galilee in AD 67, and it’s likely that in the spring of AD 68, following the AD 67–68 discharge and enlistment of his legion, he left the unit and sailed home to Rome. There, he is likely to have received another military appointment, probably with the Praetorian Guard, and he may have been the Julius Placidus, a pro-Vespasian “tribune of a cohort” at Rome in December of AD 69, who is mentioned by Tacitus.74
When the men of the old enlistment departed the 12th Fulminata Legion in Laodicea and went into retirement, they took their silver maniple “hand” standards with them, to be stored in temples wherever they settled post-legion and to become a focal point for their Evocati militia assemblies. Many of these 12th Fulminata retirees enjoyed little more than a year in retirement before being involved in Mucianus’s AD 69 call-up of thirteen thousand Evocati veterans for the march on Rome.
As the unit had lost its old eagle to the Jewish rebels, come the annual legionaries’ oath of allegiance at a mass assembly in January, AD 68, the standard bearers of the legion would have been presented with a new golden eagle along with the twenty new manipular standards customarily presented at this time, which would be blessed at an annual religious ceremony the following March.
Titus clearly added the new 12th Fulminata to his task force not only because it was now at full strength but also in expectation that its officers would drive their raw recruits to extraordinary deeds to overcome the legion’s recent disgraces. Indeed, Josephus tells us that the new enlistment of the 12th Fulminata was bent on restoring their legion’s reputation with this campaign.
By early May of AD 70, all preparations for the year’s campaign had been made, and Titus set out from Caesarea, bound for Jerusalem via inland Samaria. The new enlistment of the 12th Fulminata Legion and the under-strength 15th Apollinaris Legion marched with him. Also in the column were numerous auxiliary units plus troops provided by the same four allied kings who had contributed to Vespasian’s original campaign—Josephus says that even more allied soldiers were now involved than in AD 67–68. These allied troops included mercenaries, says Josephus, men whose only allegiance was to gold. We know that bands of Scythian archers served with the Roman army during this period as mercenaries, so they may have been among the men referred to here by Josephus.75
Josephus describes Titus’s army on the march. The allied troops of three kings marched first. King Antiochus of Commagene had sent troops for the previous campaigns, but his contribution was delayed this time. The allied units were followed by the three thousand legionary reinforcements from Egypt. Next came the legionary road maintenance and camp preparation party, inclusive of surveyors to map out and mark the site for each night’s camp. The mules and carts of the commander’s baggage train trundled along next, carrying Titus’s tents, furniture, and dinnerware, together with the troops assigned to the train’s protection, who were fully armed and ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.
After them came Titus himself. He had turned thirty the previous December 30. Accompanying him were his senior commanders and advisers, including Tiberius Alexander, King Herod Agrippa II and other Middle Eastern royals, and Josephus, who was now serving as an adviser and interpreter to Titus. All were mounted. They were followed by several hundred legionaries detached from one particular legion by lot for the honored assignment as the Commander in Chief’s Guard, with their traditional twelve-foot spears of the bodyguard pointing skyward like a forest of saplings. Immediately after them came the cavalry squadron of the legion from which these bodyguard troops had been detached.
Next in the column came the artillery of all the legions, apparently not dismantled and loaded in pieces on mules as had been the case with Gallus’s army in AD 66, but packed onto carts. Behind the artillery marched the tribunes and cohort-commanding centurions of the legions, with legionary escorts, followed by the trumpeters of the legions, who preceded the eagles and other legion standards, which were carried in a bunch.
The legions themselves followed, with their men in marching order, six abreast, with helmets hanging around their necks, their laden baggage poles on one shoulder and shields on the other. The servants of the legions and the baggage animals of the army came next, with the mercenaries following and the legions’ cavalry squadrons bringing up the rear.
As Titus was en route through Samaria, General Cerialis and the 5th Macedonica Legion were on the march from Emmaus and General Lepidus and the 10th Fretensis Legion from Jericho, aiming to link up with their commander in chief outside Jerusalem. In Samaria, Titus camped for a night at the town of Gophna, today’s Jifna. In the hands of a Roman garrison since AD 67, Gophna was where Vespasian had relocated Jewish priests and other Jews who had fled the rebels. From Gophna, Titus advanced his force due south on the morning of May 9 to a valley near the hill village of Gibeah, two and a half miles north of Jerusalem.
As was the Roman custom, Titus’s army had marched in the morning, reaching its selected campsite by the middle of the day. Impatient to spy out the lay of the land at Jerusalem, Titus had six hundred cavalrymen detached to accompany him, and then, as the legions began to dig the trenches and walls of their overnight camp and set up the tents at the Gibeah site, he rode the several miles to his ultimate objective. He went wearing only his normal tunic and cloak, having left his helmet and armored breastplate back in camp, but with his sword belt over his shoulder. In the mid afternoon, Titus and his mounted escort arrived atop Mount Scopus, site of Gallus’s camp three and a half years earlier. Their arrival was no doubt heralded by a cloud of dust raised by the hooves of the six hundred horses, sending shouts of alarm running around Jerusalem from lookouts in the towers of the city’s new Third Wall.
Keen to take a closer look at the city, Titus rode down off Mount Scopus, taking the Damascus Road, the usual entry route to the city from the north, followed by his escort. Unexpectedly diverting from the road and turning left, Titus rode along the northern side of the new Third Wall, studying it, but being careful to stay out of the range of missiles from wall and towers. His path took him through well-tended gardens that formed part of the Queen Helena monument on lower Mount Scopus and brought him opposite the new Psephinus Tower, which occupied the Third Wall’s northwest corner. This tower, one hundred and fifteen feet high, offered views from its top as far as the Mediterranean to the west and the mountains of Arabia to the southeast.
Titus’s diversion had left many of the men of his escort strung out behind him, with some still on the Damascus Road. Seeing this, partisans gathered quickly, and a gate near the wall’s Women’s Gate suddenly opened. Out streamed thousands of yelling Jewish rebels, running to cut off the Roman commander. Titus was taken by surprise. Finding himself hemmed in by garden trenches and tall hedges to his front, he saw only one way out.
“Follow me!” he yelled to the cavalrymen closest to him.76
Turning his horse around, Titus drew his sword and charged directly at the Jews. Cutting and barging his way through the mob, using his horse as a weapon, he managed at the same time to avoid a cloud of missiles that flew his way, later telling Josephus that he heard darts whistle past his ears. Miraculously, he escaped the trap he had made for himself without a scratch.
Several cavalrymen who had closed around their general to protect him took darts in the back and side but also succeeded in escaping alive, but two troopers of his escort weren’t so lucky. Partisans rained darts on one man, and both he and his horse went down, never to arise. Another cavalryman had his horse killed under him. As the horse dropped, the soldier jumped to the ground, sword in hand. Rebels gleefully surrounded him and cut him to pieces. Round one to the Jews, who stripped the Roman dead and celebrated long and hard back behind their city’s walls. After that narrow escape, Titus returned to the camp at Gibeah. How different would the fate of Jerusalem have been had the Roman commander in chief been killed on this reconnaissance of the city?
That night, Cerialis and the 5th Macedonica arrived at Gibeah after a forced march, making camp alongside Titus’s main force. The following day, May 10, Titus advanced on Jerusalem with his now enlarged force. Halting at Mount Scopus, he ordered the 12th and 15th to fortify Gallus’s old Mount Scopus camp for their use and for Titus’s headquarters. He had the march-weary men of the 5th Macedonica build a new camp for themselves, a little behind and shielded by this larger camp.
That afternoon, as Roman camp construction was well underway at the two Mount Scopus sites, with auxiliaries and allied troops out foraging, General Lepidus and the 10th Fretensis arrived atop the Mount of Olives to the northeast after marching along the Jericho Road. Titus sent orders for the 10th to build their camp there on the Mount of Olives. This camp would rise not far from the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus Christ had been arrested some thirty-seven years earlier. The garden sat lower down the western slope of the mount, closer to the city.
Almost all the troops assigned to the Roman assault on Jerusalem had now arrived. Below them, the city stood with its gates closed, with Jewish sentries on its walls and in its towers, and with as many as 1.2 million Jewish men, women, and children behind its walls. The siege of Jerusalem had begun.77