On the morning after the arrival of the Roman army, with the marching camps on the northern and eastern heights overlooking Jerusalem undergoing further fortification, the leaders of the three rebel Jewish factions inside the city—Eleazar of the Zealots, John of Gischala, and Simon bar Giora—realized that the Romans meant business and it was time to put their differences to one side and put their heads together to defend their holy city.
As the Jewish leaders met, word arrived that Roman legionaries of the 10th Fretensis Legion had incautiously laid aside their weapons and were digging entrenchments below their camp on the Mount of Olives. Apparently these Romans believed that the deep valley that lay between the mount and the eastern walls of Jerusalem, the Kidron, would protect them. Seizing their opportunity, partisans donned their armor, took up their weapons, and flooded out gates on the northeastern side of the city.
Dashing across the Kidron, rebels fell on the digging Romans. Legionaries were required to wear their swords even when digging entrenchments but were permitted to stack their shields, javelins, and helmets nearby. As the Jews came running at them, some legionaries of the 10th dashed for their equipment, while others fled up the mount. Men of the guard cohort trotted from the camp to the assistance of their comrades, and a series of hand-to-hand struggles ensued on the slopes of the Mount of Olives.
When word of this reached Titus at his camp on Mount Scopus, he put together a relief force and hurried to the aid of the 10th. By the time that Titus and his reinforcements arrived on the Mount of Olives, legionaries of the 10th had succeeded in driving off Jewish attackers, only for even more partisans to be encouraged by a sentry on the city wall who waved his cloak at them. They came streaming out of the city and in turn drove the legionaries back up the slope. Titus and his men arrived just in time to drive into the left flank of this new partisan wave on the slope.
The mounted Titus, finding himself in the thick of the fighting, refused to give ground. Before long, he and a few of his friends and bodyguards were separated from the bulk of the Roman troops, who were withdrawing up the slope, and once more the young Roman general was in danger of being killed or injured. His friends begged him to disengage—he was not only their commander, he was their new emperor’s son and heir. But Titus ignored them. Parrying blows with his shield, he stabbed in the face those rebels who ran at him, then pushed them back down the slope with his horse and finished them off with a slashing blow. Singlehandedly, Titus stemmed the flow of the rebel assault, driving attackers back, until the entire 10th Legion, now called to arms, came down the hill to support him, forcing the Jews to flee. Dead partisans were left lying in heaps in the Kidron as the survivors ran back into the city, closing the gates behind them. Round two to the Romans.
Days later, with the coming of Passover’s Feast of the Unleavened Bread, Eleazar and the Zealots opened the Temple gates to admit all in Jerusalem who wished to carry out religious observances. Among the tens of thousands who crowded into the Temple were John of Gischala and his men, hiding their weapons and armor beneath their cloaks. On John’s command, his men drew their weapons. The Zealots, lulled into thinking that all factions were now working together, were totally unprepared for this treachery. Those Zealots who weren’t cut down fled to the subterranean passages of the Temple Mount, allowing John’s ten thousand men to occupy the Temple, which John made his headquarters.
Eleazar and his deputy, Simon ben Arinus, decided to throw their lot in with John, and they and 2,400 Zealots came over to his side and vowed to follow John’s commands. In one fell swoop, the factions in Jerusalem had been reduced to two—John’s and Simon’s. John, now controlling all of Jerusalem apart from the Upper City, sifted through the thousands of worshippers who had come into the Temple. Those with whom he had a grudge were separated from the rest, led out, and executed.
While Jew was killing Jew inside the city, outside on the northern and northwestern flanks of Jerusalem, Titus’s troops were busy. Titus wanted to move his camps closer to the city, so, on their general’s orders, legionaries demolished and filled in all the groves of trees, gardens, buildings, walls, and ditches that lay between Mount Scopus and Jerusalem’s Third Wall, creating a level space northwest and west of the city between the mountain and King Herod’s monuments and the Serpent’s Pool. All the while, a large force of auxiliary cavalry and infantry stood guard to prevent the Jews from attacking the workers. At the same time, Titus sent Josephus riding to the Third Wall to call an offer of terms of surrender to those inside the city. Josephus genuinely wanted the Jews to accept this offer, as his wife, brother, and parents were all trapped inside Jerusalem. He failed to receive a civil answer to the offer.
While this leveling activity was taking place, the partisans came up with a cunning plan. A large group of men emerged from the Women’s Gate in the northwest of the Third Wall and milled about below the wall, calling out to the Romans that they wanted peace and would open the gates to them. At the same time, other Jews on the wall called out insults to the men below and threw the occasional stone at them. The plan was to make Romans think the men outside the wall were Jewish deserters.
Although Titus was immediately suspicious of this display and sent orders for his men to all stay where they were, the order never reached some of his legionaries, who left their work, took up their arms, and hurried to the wall to collect the men of this supposed peace party. As soon as the Roman troops came within range, they were attacked from all sides and from the wall above. Only with difficulty, and with heavy casualties, were these legionaries able to extricate themselves. They were pursued by rebels all the way to Queen Helena’s monument on Mount Scopus before the partisans stood, rapped their shields, and jeered the Romans before retiring through the city gate, which closed protectively behind them. Another round to the Jews.78
In camp, Titus went to see the survivors of the party tricked by the rebels. Their officers had already upbraided them, and Titus now also told them that although the Jews had employed a sneaky trick, the legionaries had gone forward without the orders of their officers. “Even those of you who are victorious when you go to the attack without the orders of your officers act disgracefully in my eyes,” he told them.79
This led the troops involved to sink into despair, believing that they were going to be executed. As Titus was enlarging on this with his officers, his headquarters tent was surrounded by men of the legions, who beseeched him to spare their fellow legionaries. Titus agreed not to execute the men involved, but he put all under caution—he wouldn’t be so lenient if they acted without orders a second time.
The leveling of the ground north and west of the city took four days. On the fifth day, once that work was complete, three legions built two forward camps close to the city. Protected by a line of auxiliaries, cavalry, and archers seven ranks deep which faced the city, baggage trains then relocated equipment down off Mount Scopus to the new camps. One of those camps was located two hundred and fifty yards from the Psephinus Tower, which occupied the northwest corner of the Third Wall. Here the 12th and 15th would again be encamped together, along with Titus’s headquarters.
The second camp became the new home to the now rested 5th Macedonica, which leapfrogged the other two legions to sit two hundred and fifty yards from the Second Wall on the western side of the city, opposite the Hippicus Tower. This was one of the towers of Herod’s Palace where doomed men of the 3rd Gallica Legion had spent their last days close to four years earlier. The 10th Fretensis meanwhile remained in its camp on the Mount of Olives.
Looking for a weak spot in the Third Wall, which had been thrown up quickly, Titus now rode around the northern and western sides of the city, accompanied by his senior officers and Josephus. He found that weak spot on the western side of the city, where recent wall construction did not match the height of the old First Wall nearby. While on this reconnaissance, Titus and his party went a little too close to the wall, and an officer in the general’s entourage, Tribune Nicanor, former commander of the 3rd Gallica and friend of Josephus, was wounded in the shoulder by a Jewish dart thrown from the Third Wall, and needed attention from legion doctors. But once again, Fortune deemed that Titus would escape harm.
Titus now ordered artillery banks thrown up within range of the wall to the north, west, and east, and every tree in the city’s outermost suburbs cut down and every building there demolished to permit a clear field of fire. The artillery pieces built by the 10th Fretensis Legion and employed by it against the eastern walls of Jerusalem were markedly larger than those used by the other legions. On the western side of the city, the 5th, 12th, and 15th Legions also began construction of three wooden siege towers on Titus’s orders. One of those siege towers collapsed mysteriously at midnight one night while under construction, but the other two were completed and, covered by Roman artillery fire, rolled up to the Third Wall as Jewish darts and stones bounced off their iron-plate reinforced exteriors.
In the Upper City, Simon bar Giora, who commanded ten thousand peasant partisans and five thousand remaining Idumeans aided by fifty-eight deputy commanders, controlled all the rebel artillery—the weapons looted from Gallus’s column in the Beth Horon Valley, plus those artillery pieces captured from the Romans with the fall of the Antonia Fortress. But even though several Roman deserters had shown his men how to use these weapons, Simon’s gunners were inexpert, and their darts and stones did little to hamper Titus’s troops as they went against the Third Wall with their siege towers.80
The Romans, on the other hand, had expert gunners. To gauge the range from their firing banks to the wall, Roman artillery officers threw lengths of string attached to lead weights from the banks, after dark. The catapult balls that were now launched against the Third Wall to both keep defenders’ heads down and weaken the structure were sixty pounders, more roughly hewn than those used in the siege of Gamala, and cut from stark white stone. We know this because more than seventy of these balls were discovered alongside the foundations of the Third Wall in 2016, in today’s Russian Compound. These balls had fallen to the ground after smashing into the wall.
Later, once a breach was made here, Titus had the Third Wall demolished down to the foundations, with all the surroundings leveled. The legionaries doing this work didn’t even bother to salvage these seventy-plus ballista balls; they simply covered them over with rubble. Admittedly, some were cracked, but most were reusable. The Roman troops who covered them over clearly thought there were plenty more where they came from.
Once the Third Wall was breached, Jewish spotters learned to call a warning to their comrades when the stark white Roman ballista balls were coming their way: “Baby coming!” When this was reported back to Roman gunners by front line troops, they painted balls with black pitch, which was kept by the weapons to seal their ropes and coat the stones when incendiary balls were called for. Now, the gunners used the pitch to blacken the balls and make them more difficult to spot as they whistled toward their targets.81
Under cover of barrages from the more than two hundred Roman artillery pieces employed by the four legions, battering rams in the two towers’ bowels began to relentlessly pound the stones of the wall. It seems that the Roman siege towers and the rams inside them were not connected. The rams were attached to their own wheeled frames that could be rolled into the wheeled siege tower via its open rear end. Although all fighters retired come nightfall, each side suspected the other of getting up to tricks, and off-duty men of both sides slept in their armor. As the two rams continued their work, day in, day out, the Jewish defenders gave an ironic nickname to the larger of the rams—they called it Nico, meaning “conqueror.”
On May 25, the fifteenth day of the siege, a section of the Third Wall gave way to Nico, and Roman assault troops flooded through the breach it had created and opened gates in the Third Wall to thousands of comrades. Rebels defending this wall fled back to the safety of the First and Second Walls, abandoning the New City entirely. It was now that Titus had his troops pull down the Third Wall and destroy everything that still stood in the New City—many of the buildings destroyed here by Gallus’s troops in AD 66 had been rebuilt by the people of Jerusalem.
Of the million-plus Jews now trapped in the city, less than thirty thousand were armed fighters. Those fighters kept the bulk of the city’s food supply for themselves, claiming that the fighting men needed the sustenance. Some Zealots who knew the way down into the subterranean passages beneath the Temple Mount had secret stores of food down there, where they would cook and consume it, as indicated by cooking utensils discovered there in modern times.
Titus now transferred his largest camp from the northwest into the New City. There was a spot in the northwest corner of the New City that had long been called the Camp of the Assyrians. It was said that here, in 701 BC, an Assyrian army had encamped during an unsuccessful siege of Jerusalem. The campsite was quite near the small rocky hill called Golgotha, or the Skull, because of its shape, location of Jesus Christ’s cruci fixion. Here at the Camp of the Assyrians, out of bowshot of the Second Wall, Titus had his newest siege camp built.
Once this transfer was completed, Titus set those legions now encamped to the west of the city to work with three siege towers and rams against that part of the Second Wall that stood just to the north of the Palace of Herod, midway along the western side of Jerusalem. This was in Simon’s sector, but he surprised rival leader John by sending a message inviting him to send men to join his partisans defending the Second Wall. John, who had moved his headquarters to the lone remaining tower of the burned-out Antonia Fortress, whose western wall faced the now relocated Romans, didn’t entirely trust Simon, but he nonetheless warily sent numbers of his men to reinforce his faction, and they were soon fighting side by side.
Carrying burning torches, these combined forces rushed out to attack the siege towers and the mantlets that protected them, trying to pull apart the mantlets and burn the Roman towers even as the rams were at work. In response, Titus quickly stationed cavalry and archers on either side of the siege towers, and these succeeded in driving off successive Jewish raids.
The Second Wall was of much more solid construction than the Third. Sixty feet high, with foundations that went down another sixty feet underground, this wall, built by Herod the Great, was as thick as a house. Although no mortar held its stones in place, they had been fitted so precisely together that this wall proved much more resistant to ramming. After several days of nonstop pounding, with numerous shift changes of the ramming crews, the ram of the 15th Apollinaris could only manage to weaken a tower on the wall’s western corner. But otherwise, as Titus watched impatiently with his staff day after day, the Second Wall showed no signs of yielding to the trio of rams.
The Jews mounted yet another raid on the Roman siege works, bent on burning them. Emerging from a small gate, they attacked the siege tower that was operating against the Hippicus Tower. Killing a number of Romans at the tower, they forced others all the way back to the walls of their nearest camp. There, they were confronted by the four cohorts of the 18th Legion, which stood firm with shields fixed. Longinus the tribune, their commander, leapt from the Roman ranks with a javelin in hand. Singlehanded, he ran at a Jewish officer who, with a comrade, charged him with sword raised.
Sidestepping his two assailants, Tribune Longinus stabbed his javelin into the mouth of one opponent—with such force that the point apparently emerged from the back of his victim’s head. As the man went down, Longinus pulled the javelin from his skull and gave chase to the other rebel who, in sudden terror of him, had turned to run. Quickly overtaking the fleeing man, Longinus plunged the javelin into the man’s unprotected side. This double use was unusual; Roman javelins’ metal shafts were designed to bend on impact, so the enemy couldn’t easily throw them back.
As Longinus withdrew to the cheering men of the 18th, Titus arrived on the scene, leading cavalry reinforcements, and entered the fight. Personally killing twelve rebels, Titus, joined by his troopers, drove the raiders back to the gate from which they had come. A leader of the Idumean rebels named John was killed at this time by an arrow from an Arabian archer; he proved a great loss to the rebel cause, according to Josephus.
When Titus returned to his infantry after terminating this latest Jewish foray, he was far from happy. Instead of commending Tribune Longinus for his solo action, which Longinus would have argued was, under Roman military law, deserving of the coveted golden spear award, the general gave his men a short, sharp speech from the back of his horse, denouncing acts that exposed individuals to danger. In this sour mood, Titus ordered a Jewish rebel who had been captured in this fight to be crucified on the camp wall in full view of the occupants of the city.
When Titus subsequently relocated one ram-equipped siege tower to the north, at the Second Wall, rebels inevitably mounted a sally against it, again with the aim of setting it afire. As perspiring legionaries manning the ram in the base of the siege tower ceased operations to defend themselves, Arabian archers stationed on the upper levels of the tower drove off the partisans. When their comrades retreated, eleven rebels lay on the ground as if wounded, their torches still burning beside them. One of these Jews, a fellow named Castor, called out to Titus, who was watching proceedings, begging to be saved, as he wished to surrender. Five of his companions yelled that they had no intention of surrendering and then pretended to plunge their own swords into themselves. This was all a ploy to draw Roman troops to them.
As Castor was calling out, a Scorpio dart was unleashed at him from a Roman artillery mound. The dart hit him, lodging in his nose. Plucking out the bloodied dart, Castor held it up. “That’s unfair!” he cried.82
Titus, turning to the gunner responsible for the shot, rebuked him for firing at the man while he was conversing with him, then called forward Josephus, and instructed him to go the man, take his oath of surrender, and bring him back to Roman lines. Josephus refused point blank, suspecting that this was another Jewish ruse, telling Titus so. When several of the Jewish servants allocated to Josephus by Vespasian urged him to go their countryman, still Josephus refused.
“Somebody should come and take the money I have with me,” Castor now called, trying another ploy to lure Romans.83
One of Josephus’s bodyguards, a Jewish deserter named Eneas, now volunteered to go to Castor in Josephus’s place, as did one of Titus’s legionaries. In his enthusiasm, Eneas went without even taking a shield as protection. As the pair scuttled over the open ground toward Castor, with Eneas in the lead, Castor jumped up with a good-sized stone in his hand and threw it. Eneas was nimble enough to dodge the stone, but the soldier behind him failed to see it coming and took the stone fair in the face. As the “dead” men with Castor rose up with their weapons, Eneas helped the legionary to hurriedly withdraw, likely with the vocal encouragement of Roman troops. Titus turned to Josephus, no doubt with a wry smile in acknowledgment of the fact that Josephus had been right about Castor and his friends all along.
“Mercy in war is a ruinous thing,” Titus confessed with a sigh, before ordering missile fire to be directed at Castor and his companions and bidding the rammers to commence work again.84
The pause in Roman operations gave Castor and his men the opportunity to run to the nearest wooden siege tower with their torches and set it alight. As fire took hold, the eleven Jews appeared to jump into the flames at the front of the tower. They had in fact spotted a vault in front of that section of the wall, and into this they dived to take refuge. For a long while, the Romans thought that these Jews had committed suicide in the flames. The ultimate fate of Castor and his tricky friends is unknown, but the siege tower fire they ignited was soon extinguished. And ramming continued.