Two of the four new Roman ramps, those on the western side of the Temple Mount, were completed on the same day. They’d had the benefit of transfer of earth from the ramps built earlier at the nearby western wall of the Antonia Fortress. Titus ordered mantlets and rams rolled up the two completed ramps, and for six days these rams pounded away at the upper sections of the wall, with their monotonously regular thuds resounding around the Temple area. Yet the rams made not the slightest impression on the wall.
There was then a single gateway on the northern side of the Temple Mount, and while work had continued on the two rams on either side of the gate, a group of legionaries had labored with crowbars under the cover of shields to work loose the stones forming the gateway’s foundation. After six days, these men succeeded in removing the outer layer of stones that framed the gateway, but the inner layer in the immensely thick wall held firm, and the gate continued to stand strong.
Frustrated by this failure to make headway, these legionaries brought scaling ladders and climbed up to attack the rebels in the colonnade directly above them, some going up without shields. Jews met this impetuous attack in large numbers, led by an Eleazar, a cousin of Simon bar Giora. Some Romans were thrown off when they reached the top of the wall; others were killed on it. Partisans pushed the scaling ladders away, some laden with climbing troops. The remaining Romans finally gave up and fell back. Titus now decided that the ramps and rams were taking too long. The only way he was going to get his troops into the Temple quickly was by burning its massive gates, and he gave orders accordingly.
Despite the latest partisan successes, two of Simon bar Giora’s senior lieutenants, Ananus, a native of Emmaus, and Archelaus ben Magadatus, soon after defected to the Romans. When both were brought before Titus, he was acquainted with their reputations by Josephus, who had been told by other defectors that these two were among Simon’s most bloodthirsty and murderous followers. As per his earlier promise to all defectors, Titus set the pair free, but he sent them away without any of the privileges he’d granted other defectors, such as food and water.
Fires had been set at the Temple gates by Titus’s troops, and now they were ignited. The gates all had a decorative coating of pure silver that had been added by Herod the Great. But silver is susceptible to intense heat, with its melting point a little less than that of gold. As the flames grew more intense and rose higher, the silver melted, exposing the wood beneath, which also caught fire. Inside the Temple, the partisans could only stand and watch the gates burn, with neither the means nor the strength to douse the flames. Those flames rose up above the gates and ignited the rafters of the cloisters above. The gates themselves were massively thick, so these fires burned for the remainder of that day and well into the next, eerily illuminating the Temple Mount in the night. On the second day, as the gates continued to burn, Titus called another conference of his senior Roman commanders to decide the fate of the Temple.
Joining their general in Titus’s pavilion in the New City forward camp were his deputy, Alexander; the generals Cerialis, Lepidus, and Frigius; Tribune Fronto, commander of the 18th Legion cohorts; Tribune Sabinus of the 15th Apollinaris Legion; Tribune Nicanor, sporting a bandaged shoulder; the unidentified tribune commanding the 12th Fulminata Legion; the tribunes who were second-in-command of the 5th Macedonica and 10th Fretensis Legions; the procurator of Judea, Marcus Antonius Julianus, who had replaced the odious Florus; and the procurators of surrounding territories, who, like Julianus and the tribunes, were of Equestrian Order rank.
Some of these officers were all for totally destroying the Temple. Titus, on the other hand, was in favor of sparing the Temple as Pompey the Great had in 63 BC, which he hoped would reflect well on Rome, and favored restricting vengeance to the rebellious. When Alexander, Cerialis, and Fronto all agreed with his view, Titus ordered preparations made for a final assault on the Temple the next day, with his troops under orders not to damage the structure. Men were selected from every cohort of the legions for this final attack, and at dawn the next day they moved into position preparatory to extinguishing the burning gates and then going forward with the attack.
Between 5:00 and 6:00 that morning, before this force was fully in place, rebels came storming through what remained of the gate from the Antonia Fortress, even as it continued to burn. They ran straight into dismounted cavalry on guard in the Antonia courtyard, and as these troopers pushed forward to oppose the Jews, Titus, watching from the Antonia tower, ordered in more cavalrymen.
The tide of battle flowed this way and that in the Antonia courtyard, with the Jews driven back and then charging again. After three hours of toe-to-toe fighting, the troopers finally drove off the rebels, forcing them to retreat across the Temple’s Court of the Gentiles to the Inner Court, where they closed the Inner Court gates behind them. Seeing this, Titus gave orders for the final assault on the Temple to be postponed until dawn the next day and, leaving a large guard in the Antonia courtyard, retired to his tent.
In the evening, rebels suddenly emerged from the Inner Court and again came surging into the Antonia. But the Jews were by this time weak from lack of food and the continual fighting, and they were soon driven back by Roman cavalrymen on guard. This time, the Romans pursued the Jews through the blackened gateway, where the remnants of the double gates still burned, and into the Court of the Gentiles.
As one of those cavalrymen was passing through the gateway, he stooped to pick up a burning piece of wood before entering the courtyard. In front of him, across the courtyard, were the walls of the inner Temple building. The soldier ran to its northern wall, where there was a tall, ornate window whose framework rising above him was of gold-encrusted wood. With a comrade lifting him up, the trooper set the window alight with his firebrand. Beyond the window there was a corridor, off which opened all the rooms that surrounded the innermost sanctuary of the Temple. Soon the window was burning fiercely, with the flames rising up to the rafters of the corridor. From within came the cries of alarm of rebels and civilians quartered in the Inner Court, calling for help to extinguish the blaze. Despite Titus’s best intentions, Jerusalem’s famous Temple was alight.
Word of fire in the Temple was rushed to Titus as he lay in his bed. Rising up, he sent word to his officers, then ran through the growing darkness to the Antonia, and from there into the Court of the Gentiles. He was accompanied by panting bodyguards, led by a Centurion Liberalius, who came armed with clubs for riot control. Behind Titus ran his commanders, and behind them, in no organized order, came their legionaries in their thousands. Titus arrived to find that many cavalrymen had piled in through the burning window, helping each other up and in, intent on killing and pillaging. Some had been burned in the process. They were yelling, and inside, the Jews were yelling.
“Stop!” yelled Titus to the troops, raising his right hand in the universal stop sign. “Quench the fire!”91
In the noise and mayhem, the general was ignored. Legionaries rushed past him and clambered up through the window, intent on grabbing a share of the spoils and the blood. In their eagerness, some soldiers trampled over comrades who were trying to get in the window ahead of them. Titus sent Centurion Liberalius to also climb in and then open a gate to him from within, and this enabled Titus to gain entry to the inner Temple precinct. Inside, he found his men running riot all around him, slitting the throat of every Jew they found, whether armed on not, and yelling to each other to burn the place to the ground.
As the commander in chief’s bodyguards formed around their commanders to protect them from their own out-of-control troops, Titus ordered Liberalius and one of his men to lay into the soldiers with their clubs, to stop the orgy of destruction and get the men to extinguish the flames. But they were just two men against a greedy army, and their efforts were in vain. The Temple’s inner rooms were full of gold coin, clothing, and golden ornaments, the fittings of the Temple and the offerings of the faithful, and the Roman troops were intent on enriching themselves. They looted so much gold that once they sold it to the traders who followed the army and those traders flooded the market with it in Syria the following year, the price of gold in the province halved.
When Titus, accompanied by his senior commanders, reached the inner sanctum of the Temple, Jewish bodies lay heaped before the Temple’s altar, with blood running down the altar ramp like a river. When Titus entered the innermost chamber, the Holy of Holies, which, under Jewish law, was barred to all but the high priest, he found, as Pompey had found when he conquered Jerusalem after a three-month siege 133 years earlier, that the room was empty. While Titus and his commanders were in the inner sanctuary, one of their rampaging soldiers set fire to the doorframe around the brass doors to the Holy of Holies, and as fire rapidly took hold and rose into the rafters, Titus and his officers and bodyguards withdrew. There was no stopping the blaze now. This August day of AD 70—according to some authorities August 6, according to others August 30—the Temple was devoured by fire.
With the Roman troops focused on looting, many Jews inside the Temple precinct were able to escape the flames. Six thousand five hundred women and children fled out to the Court of the Gentiles. They would not be sold as slaves once the siege was at an end. So many Jews had already been sold into slavery during this war that Titus decided that only fighting men taken during the final stages of the siege of Jerusalem would be sent into slavery, and even these would be sold cheaply, for there were few buyers in the now glutted Eastern slave markets. More than forty thousand Jewish noncombatants captured at Jerusalem, mostly women and children, would be released by Titus.
Meanwhile, in the chaos of Roman looting, a number of rebel fighters made it to the Upper City and joined Simon’s men. John of Gischala and many of his lieutenants were among them, although Simon would remain in charge in the Upper City. As the burning inner Temple structure lit the night sky, the noise was horrific—the roar of the fire, the yelling of the Roman troops, the groans of their victims, the ritual wailing of the Jews in the Upper City as they watched their Temple burn.
Two priests of the Temple were so heartbroken they threw themselves into the flames. Other priests and servants of the Temple clambered up onto a wall of the inner Temple and clung to it, out of reach of the flames and Roman troops. All in all, Josephus would estimate that ten thousand Jews, rebel fighters, priests, and civilians died in the Temple that night, killed by sword or flame.92
The following day, as the collapsed Temple ruins smoked, order and sanity returned to the satiated legions, and Titus returned to the Temple Mount. The standards of the legions, for so long forbidden from Jerusalem, were raised at the Temple’s eastern gate. With the legions assembled before their general, sacrifices to the Roman gods were made in honor of their victory, and then the legionaries, with one voice and led by their officers, faced Titus and bellowed two words that echoed around the otherwise silent city:
“Hail imperator!”93
This ancient title of imperator was bestowed, but only rarely, on victorious Roman generals by their troops. In the days of the Roman Republic, Pompey the Great was hailed imperator by his soldiers, as was Julius Caesar, and his assassin, Marcus Brutus. The word imperator, which literally means “commander,” ultimately led to the title “emperor” and the word “imperial.” This was because, during the reigns of the emperors up to this time and later, only Rome’s sovereign was entitled to be hailed imperator. Titus’s troops were breaking that century-old tradition.
For days, the Jewish priests and their servants who had perched on the Temple wall remained there without food or water, with Roman guards posted below the wall to prevent their escape. One cherubic youth talked his way down, seeking water and promising to return. The Roman sentries let him go, only for the boy to scamper away and disappear. Finally, after five days, almost too weak to move, the Jews on the wall came down and begged Titus for their lives. But because they had defied him, Titus ordered all put to death.
As for Simon, John, and the rebels still holding out in the Upper City, they sent messages to Titus seeking a parley. Titus and his officers were unanimous in wanting to spare the city any further destruction, says Josephus, and, hopeful of a swift rebel capitulation, Titus agreed to talks.94 At the southern end of the Temple’s Western Wall, there was a bridge running along the top of the southern colonnade of the Xystus, a large market square also used by Jewish men for physical exercise. That bridge, running over today’s Robinson’s Arch, led to the Upper City, and this had been the escape route used by John and his men. Titus now came to stand at the Temple Mount end of this bridge, with his legions formed up in the Court of the Gentiles behind him. John and Simon stood at the other end of the bridge with their still thousands of freedom fighters massed behind them.
Titus sent an interpreter to deliver a message to the rebel leaders, a lengthy exhortation reminding the partisans of the might of Rome and of the numerous offers he had previously made to allow their surrender. The crux of Titus’s message was a proposal—of unconditional surrender.
“If you throw down your arms and deliver yourselves up to me, I grant you your lives and will be like the mild master of a family. What cannot be forgiven shall be punished. The others I will preserve to myself for my own use.”95
The Roman general’s intent was clear. Rebel leaders guilty of the betrayal and murder of Roman soldiers would receive prompt punishment. The remainder, their followers, would retain their lives, becoming imperial property. John and Simon replied with a counteroffer—if Titus let the rebels depart with their wives and children and go into the desert to the south, he could have Jerusalem without further ado. This infuriated Titus, who was indignant that the defeated should deign to offer terms to the victor. The rebel response hardened his attitude. He sent the interpreter back with a proclamation:
“No longer come to me as deserters or hope for any further leniency. Henceforth, I shall spare nobody, and will employ my entire army against you. Save yourselves as best you can, for from this moment forward I shall treat you according to the laws of war.”96
Titus then ordered his legions to plunder and burn all that continued to stand in Jerusalem, and at dawn the next day the legions descended from the Temple Mount into the Lower City. Methodically, they set fire to and destroyed the Council House in the Xystus and the city archives close by, then moved into the narrow lanes beyond the vast courtyard, setting alight houses filled with the rotting bodies of Jewish civilians who had died from starvation or at the hands of partisans. Individual house fires linked up and swept west through the Lower City and the remains of the Acra, an ancient fortress. Reaching a raised area called the Ophlas, or Ophel, in the City of David, Jerusalem’s original residential quarter, the flames consumed the Palace of Queen Helena of Adiabene and Edessa.
As fires raged, a group of prominent Jews in the Lower City who handed themselves over to Roman troops were brought before Titus. This group was headed by the sons and brothers of King Izates of Adiabene, who had been driven from the family palace in the City of David by the fires. The Adiabene royal family had contributed financially to the rebel Jewish cause, and at least one prince had fought the Romans. When they begged for their lives, Titus agreed to let the relatives of Izates live, but had them placed in chains and put under guard.
With much of the Lower City and City of David gutted by fire, partisans living there were forced into the crowded Upper City, which was protected both by the old city walls and the fact that it sat on a rise. Some 8,400 civilians who had taken refuge in Herod’s Palace in the Upper City were killed by this influx of rebel fighters, who also looted the refugees’ belongings. These partisans also took two legionaries captive, one a foot soldier, the other from a legion’s mounted squadron. The foot soldier had his throat cut by the rebels, with his body subsequently dragged through the Upper City and jeered by partisans as it passed. As the Roman cavalryman was about to be executed, he swore he possessed information of vital importance to rebel chief Simon.
When hauled before the rebel leader, the Roman had nothing to offer; his claim had been a desperate bid to prolong his life. So Simon handed the legionary over to his deputy Ardalas, who led him out, blindfolded and hands tied behind his back, to be decapitated in sight of Roman troops. But before Ardalas could draw his sword, the Roman bolted and ran into the arms of fellow Romans. Surviving the enemy was one thing, but, to Romans, surrendering to the enemy was more than dishonorable; it was traitorous. The legionary was brought before Titus, who contemplated ordering the man’s execution. But he relented, instead having the soldier stripped of his weapons and equipment and ejected from his legion and from the Roman camp. The man would have to try to survive as an outcast and somehow reach his homeland and family.
The following day, the legions cleared the last rebels from the Lower City and burned what buildings remained, lamenting that they found no hidden treasure; partisans had looted this part of the city ahead of them. Although the surviving rebels were now bottled up in the Upper City, some hid in the ruins of the Lower City to ambush any potential deserters from above. Those they caught were killed, with their bodies thrown to the wild “pariah” dogs roaming the city outskirts.
Titus had warned the rebels he would use his entire army against them for this final phase of the siege, and to conquer the Upper City he called for earth ramps to be erected against its walls by the legions and, unusually, also by the auxiliaries and allied troops. The legions were assigned the western side of the city. Their ramps were to go up opposite Herod’s Palace, near Simon’s headquarters in the Phasael Tower. The auxiliary units and allied troops were combined and put to work building ramps in the Upper City’s southeast corner, in the open space of the Xystus. This way, the much-depleted rebels would be forced to defend against assaults coming from two directions at once.
Seeing this activity, leaders of the Idumean rebels in Simon’s force secretly met and decided to surrender to Titus, even if that meant being sold into slavery. Five emissaries bearing this proposal slipped from the Upper City in the night. Despite having previously declared that he would no longer spare any Jews who surrendered, Titus appreciated that the Idumeans represented a sizable portion of Simon’s fighters, and feeling that Jewish resistance was likely to crumble if he acceded to the Idumean request, he sent the emissaries back with his agreement to the deal.
As all the Idumeans were preparing to desert the Upper City, Simon got wind of their plan and descended on their leadership with his men. The five emissaries to Titus were immediately executed, and Jacob ben Sosias and other Idumean commanders were seized and locked up. This left the Idumean rank and file in disarray, without leaders or direction. A number decided to attempt to defect to the Romans anyway. Some were caught and killed in the act after Simon doubled the guard on the walls. Others made it to the Romans, and, as fighting men, the majority of them were added to the growing number of Jews consigned to slavery. A few Idumeans identified by earlier defectors as responsible for heinous crimes were separated from the rest for later execution.
Two other prominent defectors provided Titus with rich trophies. The Temple priest Jesus ben Thebuthus received a full pardon from the Roman commander in chief when he delivered up Temple treasures that lay hidden inside the massively thick wall of the inner Temple. These included solid gold tables, bowls, and other vessels, as well as the two purple curtains of the inner sanctuary that had previously been the responsibility of Zealot leader Eleazar ben Ananias. This hoard included priestly garments and precious stones used in Temple worship. But the crowning glory of these trophies were two massive sacred golden candlesticks, the Menorah, each with seven branches, and each of which were so heavy that they required at least eight men to carry them on a platform borne on their shoulders.
When Phineas, treasurer of the Temple, was captured, he revealed the hiding places of the coats and golden girdles of the priests, with great quantities of expensive purple and scarlet coloring and vast stocks of cinnamon, cassia, and other sweet spices used in the manufacture of the incense burned daily in the Temple. All these treasures were placed under guard by Titus for eventual removal to Rome, and both Phineas and Jesus were set free to go wherever they chose outside Jerusalem.
After eighteen days, the new ramps against the Upper City walls, built for the most part from the material in earlier ramps, were completed, and siege towers and battering rams were rolled to them from their previous locations. When the rams set to work, many Jewish defenders stationed on the walls above them retreated to the Palace of Herod, which they called the Citadel, making no attempt to impede the rams’ operations—probably having run out of ammunition. That very day the legion ram pounding the wall near the Phasael Tower caused a breach at a wall tower, to the cheers of legionaries, whose spirits were high after the successes of the past weeks.
With their leaders Simon and John having melted away, Jewish defenders withdrew from the site of the breach, only to pour out a gate and rush the siege wall west of the city en masse, hoping to break through and escape. But the weakened partisans’ desultory attack was easily beaten off by legionaries on guard along the wall. Many of these rebels, leaderless and without the strength to carry on, simply lost the will to fight, and instead of retreating back into the city, they fell on their faces and lamented their fate.
In the city, meanwhile, defenders were in a panic. Those in Herod’s Palace fled its cloisters. Those in the three great towers, the Phasael, the Hippicus, and the Mariamne, even deserted their posts and fled into the city streets as all sought refuge in caverns and water tunnels beneath the city.
As legionaries poured into the Upper City via the western wall breach, they were amazed to meet no opposition. Even more surprising, the three great towers, whose defenders they’d expected to have to starve out, were theirs for the taking, and legionaries gleefully raised the standards of their maniples in the towers to denote their conquest. Rampaging through the streets of the Upper City, other Roman troops killed every Jew they encountered and forced their way into every house looking for rebels and booty. All they found inside the houses were recently dead occupants, while the upper floors were stacked with the rotting, stinking corpses of others who had died earlier in the siege.
Driven from the houses by the overpowering stench of death, legionaries gave up attempts to search for valuables and set each dwelling alight. The fires spread, and with nightfall the Roman troops withdrew from the Upper City, leaving the flames to complete the destruction and consume tens of thousands of bodies. It was September 25, and the siege of Jerusalem had reached its gory conclusion.
Two and half centuries later, Eusebius, the Christian Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, would write in his Church History, first published around AD 313, that the Jews had brought the fall of Jerusalem on themselves. “Seditions and wars and mischievous plots followed each other in quick succession, and never ceased in all of Judea until finally the siege of Vespasian overwhelmed them. Thus the divine vengeance overtook the Jews for the crimes which they dared to commit against Christ.” It had of course been the siege of Titus. As for Eusebius’s belief that the Jews had been responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, this would remain the view of the Catholic Church until the twenty-first century, when Benedict XVI (2005–2013), the so-called German Pope, would finally repudiate it.