Five days after the breach of the Third Wall, Titus’s unrelenting rams finally created a slender gap in the Second Wall. This was in Simon bar Giora’s Upper City sector and opened onto narrow streets where Jerusalem’s wool merchants, cloth marketers, and braziers had their stores. Titus, rather than waiting for the gap to be widened, chose his bodyguards and another thousand legionaries to form an assault group that would go in through the breach with him at once. As his deputy for the assault he chose Tribune Domitius Sabinus of the 15th Apollinaris Legion. A likely client of his father or himself, Sabinus had acquired a reputation for unequalled bravery.
Before they entered the city, Titus ordered his men to take prisoner all Jews who offered to surrender. He also instructed them to not set buildings alight. This liberality was intended as a signal to the rest of Jerusalem, a signal that the Roman commander was prepared to spare the city and its residents if they gave up the fight. Once Titus and his men poured in through the narrow breach, they found the constricted streets that extended in front of them forbidding, with heavily armed partisans ready to oppose them. Slowly, Titus and his troops fought their way along the alleys, where just two men could fight side by side, forcing defenders back step-by-step, only to be attacked from houses they passed. Behind them, more partisans suddenly burst from several city gates. Running outside the city, these men came around behind the Roman assault group, sealing off their exit and isolating the siege towers before turning to face more Roman troops sent from the siege wall to deal with them.
Titus again found himself in a trap, with many of the men with him soon wounded. Retreat proved the only option. To cover that retreat, Titus sent out instructions for archers to mount the wall directly above the alleys where he and his men were boxed in. Once the archers were in position, they were able to fire down into the alleys, and with Titus and Tribune Sabinus acting as a rearguard, the legionaries, helping wounded comrades, made their escape back through the opening via which they had entered the city. Titus and Sabinus then followed, and once again Titus emerged from a tight situation unscathed.
Creating a wall of their own dead opposite the hole in the Second Wall, the partisans rejoiced that they had driven the Romans out of their city and told themselves that they would do it time and again. Titus, meanwhile, having learned the lesson of his impetuosity, had the rams much enlarge the breach in the wall. On the fourth day following the creation of the initial breach, Titus led a larger assault force in through a much broader gap. Coming over the wall of Jewish dead, they surged into this part of the city, overwhelming and driving back defenders by sheer weight of numbers. After taking the entire length of this section of the wall, the Romans demolished it, then placed garrisons in the wall’s southern towers, which they’d deliberately left standing.
Titus now surprised his own troops and rebels alike by calling a halt to Roman offensive operations. He was in no hurry. He had learned from prisoners that the people trapped in the city were verging on starvation. Many sick and elderly Jews had already died. Importantly, Titus’s own men were in need of a respite. Plus, he had been reminded that his troops’ pay day had arrived. Legionaries of Rome during this era were paid their then salary of nine hundred sesterces a year in installments of three hundred sesterces three times a year. The centurion’s base annual salary was twenty thousand sesterces. Chief centurions received one hundred thousand sesterces a year, then the value of a small farm in Italy. Auxiliaries, who were noncitizens, were paid a meager three hundred sesterces a year, although they did receive a recruitment bounty of three hundred sesterces on enlistment.85
So, Titus now called an official assembly of his army. In preparation, legionaries fitted crests to their helmets. These crests, only used at parades by this time, were made of horsehair. The color is disputed. Hollywood has traditionally depicted them as red, but the only examples of Roman helmet crests ever found were yellow. Now, too, the legionaries donned their bravery decorations. Auxiliary cavalrymen attached their bravery decorations to the harnesses of their horses, then led their steeds to the parade, glittering with gold. Summoned by legion trumpets, the men of one of the legions and their associated auxiliary units formed up on the leveled ground north of the city. Silently, they stood in neat ranks, cohort by cohort, behind their standards, as Titus and his officers reviewed them.
As Titus had hoped, much of the entrapped population of Jerusalem came out to witness this glittering martial spectacle, with hundreds of thousands lining the northern wall and clambering onto the roofs of houses and public buildings to be able to see it. In stony silence, the Jews watched Roman troops march forward when summoned by name by their officers, accept their pay, then march back to the ranks. The legionaries kept their money in a legion bank administered by their standard bearers, drawing on savings to send money to loved ones and for their annual furloughs, but otherwise keeping most of their cash for their retirement. Sometimes they did invest a portion of their pay in local business enterprises. We know, for example, that centurions of the 10th Fretensis Legion had invested in businesses in Cyrrhus while the unit was based there earlier that century.
The cash for this payday had been minted in Syria and delivered to Titus’s camp in pay chests. Each legion had its own minting of coins. One side of each new coin bore the profile image of the emperor—Vespasian by this time. The AD 70 minting and subsequent issues were inscribed with the new emperor’s now official name, Caesar Vespasianus Augustus. Prior to this, Caesar had been the name of the ruling imperial family, of whom Nero had been the last survivor. In taking Caesar as his praenomen, Vespasian had now turned it into a title, which his sons would also adopt. On the reverse of these legion coins the images varied, but it was usually each individual legion’s emblem and name. The coins to pay the men of the 5th Macedonica Legion, for example, were inscribed LEGVMAC.
The day following the first pay distribution, there was another parade, and another legion received its pay. And so it went for four days, as the men of the four legions and those of the four cohorts of the 18th Legion and all the auxiliaries were paid. By the last day, the Jewish spectators had dejectedly melted away. Josephus, who witnessed all this from the Roman side, said that it was obvious that the ordinary people in Jerusalem were awed by what they saw and were depressed by it. For the first time, many Jews fully realized the size, power, and discipline of the army that Vespasian had sent against them, as well as the astonishing organization behind the legions, and realized the hopelessness of their cause.
Those ordinary people would have willingly surrendered, Josephus was to say, but the leaders of the rebellion knew that they themselves had committed such heinous crimes in the eyes of Rome, from massacring legionaries to breaking their word and using low-down trickery that went well beyond the accepted rules of war, they could only look forward to a painful death should they fall into Roman hands. So it was that, despite the inevitability of the fate of Jerusalem that became patently obvious on these days of the Roman pay parades, the partisan leaders ordered the slitting of the throat of any Jew who even spoke of surrender.
When, the day after the last pay parade, the Jewish leadership still failed to send him emissaries seeking surrender terms, Titus resumed the siege with vigor. While his men had enjoyed four days’ rest, he had planned his next move in detail. Now, he divided his legions into two groups, assigning the 5th Macedonica and 12th Fulminata Legions to an assault against the west wall of the Antonia Fortress, while sending the other two legions, the 10th and 15th, against the northern wall close to the tomb of John Hyrcanus, second-century BC Jewish king and high priest. The legions were under orders to raise two earth assault ramps at each site for the subsequent use of siege towers.
As this work proceeded, Simon led his men out on sallies against the southern ramps, and John led his men against the more northerly ramps, as their men also bombarded the Roman work parties with darts from three hundred Scorpios they had just constructed to Roman design and forty stone-throwing ballistas. These harassment tactics were a great annoyance to the legions, so, to save further loss of life, Jewish as well as Roman, Titus sent Josephus to again attempt to negotiate a Jewish surrender and put an end to this business that had now lasted many exhausting weeks.
Josephus’s family members were of course among the people trapped in the city whose lives he was desperate to save. His father and mother had in fact by this time been imprisoned by the rebel leadership, together with their servants, with all others in Jerusalem warned not to communicate with them on pain of death. As for Josephus’s wife and brother, we hear nothing of them. His wife seems to have already died, while the brother was likely to be bearing arms for the rebel cause. Going to a section of the wall where he was out of range of missile throwers, but could still be heard within, Josephus called to his fellow Jews in Aramaic.
“Spare yourselves, spare your country, spare your Temple,” he implored them, as he embarked on a long speech aimed at convincing his listeners to capitulate to the all-powerful Romans, even telling them that it seemed to him that God had departed Jerusalem, had now taken up residence in Italy, and was content to allow the Romans to take his holy city. In response, Jews jeered him from the walls and tried to land their missiles on him. In the end, Josephus withdrew, again without success.86
The food situation grew even graver inside the city. The rich gave their all for a small supply of corn or barley, sometimes eating the grain rather than turning it into bread and risking the smell of baking drawing others bent in taking it from them. The poor stole morsels from the mouths of their children. Old men with food in their mouths were choked by neighbors to force them to spit it out, after which the neighbors ate it. In this atmosphere of dog-eat-dog, some people decided to risk sneaking out of Jerusalem at night to find food.
The Romans were accustomed to seeing many corpses of Jewish dead being carried out in the night and deposited in the valleys outside the city, and made no attempt to stop this. Those Jews who chose to risk going in search of food hoped to slip out with these burial parties and go unnoticed. But Titus was expecting this. Those Jews seeking food who succeeded in evading Roman sentinels in the darkness and escaping into the countryside beyond the city ran straight into Roman cavalry patrols stationed there by Titus for this very purpose. An average of five hundred Jews of all ages and both sexes were caught in this net every night.
Titus’s legionaries were hell-bent on punishing these runaways, and the general let them have their head. First they whipped their captives, and then they crucified them, tying them to crosses that soon lined the top of the wall of the forward Roman camp, where they could be seen from the city as they died slowly and painfully. Legionaries had callous fun with these victims, vying with each other for the most creative form of crucifixion. Some victims were crucified on standard T-shaped crosses, others on X-shaped crosses. Some were crucified upside down.
The rebel leaders inside the city used the sight of these crucified Jews to their advantage. Bringing relatives of the victims to the city walls, they pointed them out and declared that this was what the Romans did to anyone from the city who attempted to surrender. When the crucifixions failed to bring the city’s capitulation, Titus had the hands of the next batch of captives chopped off, then sent them back into Jerusalem with the message that this would be the fate of all who failed to surrender. This only caused the rebels to line the walls. Making a great clamor, they yelled insults about Titus and Vespasian and declared that they would rather die than surrender.
Titus resolved to press on with the siege and personally went around the slowly growing siege ramps, urging the men working on them to toil harder and faster. At the same time, Roman reinforcements arrived in the form of Epiphanes, son of King Antiochus of Commagene, leading a large unit made up of Macedonian mercenaries. Epiphanes considered himself a fine soldier, and he chided Titus for the tardiness of his troops in the siege so far. Titus smiled and said he would join with Epiphanes in any attack he cared to launch with his Macedonians. But Epiphanes ignored him and promptly led a surprise attack against a city wall with his mercenaries. While the prince of Commagene indeed proved a valiant fighter, his Macedonians made no progress against the wall and its defenders, and retired with numerous casualties. Epiphanes’s only wound was to his all-consuming pride.
While the Roman legionaries were busy building their ramps, rebel commander John of Gischala and his men were equally busy moving earth. Inside the Antonia Fortress, they had covertly burrowed west under the wall and under the ramp built by the 5th Macedonica Legion, shoring up the mine they dug as they went, using timber that had been kept in the Temple for planned extensions.
Seventeen days after work had begun on raising the ramps, just as four Roman siege towers were being moved into position at the base of the ramps in readiness for the completion of the earthworks, John set fire to materials coated in pitch and bitumen that had been stacked in his underground mine. These created a fire that consumed the timber shoring. With a roar and a cloud of dust and smoke, the ramp of the 5th Macedonica collapsed into the mine beneath it, and a mighty fire billowed up from the hole. As a result, the legionaries of the 5th found their siege tower sidelined from the wall offensive. This rebel success cheered the people in the city, giving them a flicker of new hope of perhaps repelling the siege.
Two days later, the siege towers of the other three legions were rolled into place, and their rams began to make the walls shudder in three different places. In response, just three rebel fighters from Simon’s force in the Upper City ran out with burning torches. Like modern-day suicide bombers, they were bent on causing maximum damage while having no thought of returning alive. These men were of varying backgrounds. One, Tephtheus, came from Galilee. Another, Megassarus, was the descendant of the servants of one of Herod the Great’s wives. The third, Chagiras, who hailed from Adiabene, even had a limp. All would be remembered for their suicidal bravery, and their identities would later be passed on to Josephus.
Because they were just three individuals, these men dodged every missile that came their way and avoided every sword swung at them. To the consternation of watching Romans, all three men reached their targets, and all three Roman siege towers were set alight before the trio was killed. With the alarm raised in the Roman camps, off-duty legionaries came running to extinguish the fires. They came without pausing to strap on their armor, which was a time-consuming process, one that also required the assistance of a second man. The Romans knew that every second’s delay gave the flames more opportunity to take hold.
But the Jews had not finished. To capitalize on the success of their three fire-bearing comrades, thousands of exultant, fully armed rebels from both Simon’s force and John’s force had been waiting for the right moment, and they now came surging out of the city via several different gates in a coordinated movement to attack the firefighters. Some rebels ran up the ramps to the now burning towers. Others ran toward the Roman camp. At the camp, the duty cohort of one of the legions hurried to stand firm in several ranks before its walls, their shields locked together. Although greatly outnumbered, they held their ground, even as other unarmored legionaries came fleeing back from the burning towers, pursued by wild-eyed rebels.
At one burning tower after another, a tug-of-war was underway. Legionaries were pulling the ram from the tower on its own wheels to preserve it from the fire. Meanwhile, partisans tried to drag the rams back into the flames, some even grabbing the red-hot iron head of a ram with their bare hands. In the end, the rebels and the flames prevailed. The wooden supports of the ramps even caught alight, and soon the ramps themselves were collapsing. As the flames rose high, legionaries were forced to retire to their camps, leaving towers, rams, and ramps to burn.
When this fiery assault had commenced, Titus had been surveying the Antonia’s walls, aiming to find a location for a new ramp to replace the one built by the 5th Macedonica that John had so successfully sabotaged with his mine. Titus had upbraided the Moesians of the legion for allowing the Jews to dig their mine undetected. Now, he saw the men of his other legions on the retreat, with their siege towers and rams going up in flames. Running to the attack with the select troops of his bodyguard, Titus swept into one flank of the Jews, forcing them to turn and face him. This allowed other Roman troops to press home the attack from in front of the rebels. With both sides standing their ground, after a brief stalemate, the Jews, now assaulted on two sides, wheeled and ran back into the city, and the gates were quickly opened to admit them and then closed behind them with equal speed.
The Romans held the field, but Titus, surveying the damage, with all four ramps now out of service and three ram-equipped siege towers burned to a crisp, lamented that his army’s work of weeks had been destroyed in an hour. The Roman commander in chief now called a council of war of his senior officers—but excluding his royal affiliates—and put a simple question to them: Now that the ramps had been negated, what did they do?
The bolder among Titus’s colleagues counseled him to use all their troops in one mass assault. The counterargument to this was that, in the confined spaces of Jerusalem, so many men would only get in each other’s way. Others advised rebuilding the ramps and rams, concentrating the legions’ efforts against the Antonia Fortress. The problem with this option was that there was no timber readily available for new construction work. Every tree for miles around Jerusalem had been lopped by the Romans, including, on the Mount of Olives, the now denuded Garden of Gethsemane—literally Garden of the Olive Press in Aramaic—whose olive trees had been among those cut down. (The olive trees that today stand in the garden have been dated to the more recent eleventh and twelfth centuries.) Others among Titus’s subordinates counseled ceasing all offensive operations, sealing off the city to prevent supplies being brought in, and starving the Jews into submission.
In the end, Titus decided to combine options two and three. He began by ordering Jerusalem surrounded by a “wall of circumvallation,” right around the city. A deep trench backed by a high earth wall, this was designed to cut off Jerusalem from the outside world. Slicing through the former New City to the north, this Roman wall was to roughly parallel the old city walls to the south and southwest of the city, and run up the rim of the Kidron to the east. Josephus stated that Titus felt his reputation was on the line with this siege, and the longer it took to complete, the less satisfied Titus would be with the result. So, Titus drove his men to dig this earth wall as quickly as possible.
Commencing at the Camp of the Assyrians base and first pushing south, work proceeded around the clock. To beg, cajole, and demand the best from his men, Titus himself constantly went around all the workers during the first watch of each night. His deputy, Tiberius Alexander, did the same during the second watch, and the commanders of the legions followed suit during the third watch. The result was a five-mile-long wall of circumvallation, completed in just three days. No longer could Jews slip from the city to gather food. The noose had been closed around the neck of Jerusalem and her people.
All the while, civilians in Jerusalem were dying in droves. One Jewish gatekeeper who escaped to the Romans informed Titus that he had counted more than one hundred thousand dead being carried out of his gate alone, to be left in the valleys to rot. Josephus was to estimate that six hundred thousand Jewish bodies had been carried from the city. Once the wall of circumvallation went up, fresh Jewish dead were piled in houses and in the streets. Even the city prisons became mortuaries. To taunt the population, some Roman troops, whose food supplies were being regularly topped up with deliveries from Syria and other nearby provinces such as Egypt, would take their daily ration of fresh-baked bread and olive oil and eat it within sight of the city walls.
While the wall of circumvallation was being dug by legionaries, some Roman auxiliaries had been ranging far and wide, going eleven to twelve miles in search of trees to cut and shape, leaving the surrounds of Jerusalem looking like a desert for miles around. This was in readiness for the building of new ramps and siege machinery, which would signal the next stage of the campaign, Titus’s planned assault on the Antonia Fortress.