XVIII

DESTRUCTION, RETRIBUTION, AND CELEBRATION

On the morning of September 26, AD 70, Titus entered what was left of Jerusalem’s Upper City. With his officers and staff, he surveyed the ruins and admired the three towers of Herod’s Palace, which had escaped damage and continued to stand strong and firm.

“We certainly have had Jove as our assistant in this war,” Titus remarked, referring to Jupiter, Rome’s principal god, as he surveyed the impressive trio of towers, “and it was none other than Jove who ejected the Jews out of these fortifications.”⁹⁷

Those Jews who had been imprisoned by the rebels in the Upper City’s subterranean cells were freed on the orders of Titus, who also stipulated that his troops kill no more Jews. All survivors were to be assembled in the Women’s Court on the Temple Mount, where the guilty were to be separated from the innocent. Elderly and infirm Jews among these survivors failed to make it that far; impatient legionaries who saw them as being of no service to Rome disobeyed their general’s order and put them to the sword in the Upper City.

At the Women’s Court, Tribune Fronto, assisted by a senior freedman of Titus’s who acted as his clerk, had the task of examining every prisoner to distinguish rebel from innocent civilian—mainly on the say-so of defectors. On Fronto’s orders, Jews identified as leaders of the uprising were set aside for crucifixion. Out of the remainder, Fronto chose seven hundred of the tallest, most well-built younger Jewish men and had them set aside for Titus’s Triumph in Rome, after which they would be made to entertain the Roman populace by fighting to the death in the amphitheater.

Vespasian and Titus seem to have agreed before the Jerusalem siege that each would celebrate a Triumph in recognition of their Judean War victories, although Vespasian was on record saying he’d never had the ambition for one. A Triumph was traditionally a victory parade through the streets of Rome, granted by the Senate to a Roman general who killed more than ten thousand enemy fighting men in a victorious campaign. Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar had both celebrated several Triumphs each, although the majority of Caesar’s were questionable because he celebrated them for civil war victories over fellow Romans. The last celebrant of a military Triumph had been the emperor Claudius for his AD 43 invasion of Britain. His generals actually won that victory for him while Claudius was back in Rome; he did go to Britain but only for sixteen days and only after the campaign was wrapped up. Nonetheless, Claudius still took the credit for the British victory and took the Triumph.

Vespasian and Titus certainly qualified for a Triumph. An accurate number of actual partisan fighting men who were killed over three years of Roman campaigning has not been established, but the total probably exceeded one hundred thousand. Encouraged by his friends, Vespasian duly petitioned the Senate for Triumphs for his son and himself, and the Senate quickly passed the necessary resolution, with dates set for AD 71, when Titus was expected back in Rome.

Fronto also separated other prisoners into groups according to their physical stature and state of health. The least healthy were consigned to the region’s amphitheaters to be pitted against wild beasts, the fate of common criminals under Roman law. Healthier specimens were earmarked for the Egyptian mines, whose output included gold, copper, and beryl. There, these men would die, sooner or later, as they labored in chains. The fitter remaining prisoners were set aside to compete in local amphitheaters as gladiators, fighting each other.

Josephus successfully petitioned Titus for the lives of relatives and friends among the prisoners. He first succeeded in saving 190 women and children he was acquainted with. They were among those herded together on the Temple Mount. He learned that his wife had perished, so too his parents, but he found his brother Matthias and fifty male friends among the prisoners and also had them freed. Then, riding with Cerialis, commander of the 5th Macedonica Legion, to find a site for a military camp at a village called Thecoa six miles south of Bethlehem, he saw partisans freshly crucified along the roadside and recognized three of the victims as old friends. On his return to Jerusalem, Josephus applied in tears to Titus for the lives of the trio, and Titus ordered the men taken down. Two of the three were too far gone to survive and subsequently died.

Meanwhile, legionaries were searching every underground hiding place for the last rebels and for treasure. Any partisan they came upon who resisted was immediately killed, although most of the two thousand Jews they found underground were already dead. These Jews had perished from starvation, had been killed by fellow Jews, or had taken their own lives rather than surrender. Some legionaries couldn’t take the overpowering stench of the dead in these confined spaces and quickly resurfaced for fresh air. Others had stronger stomachs and scrambled over the dead in search of booty, of which much had been secreted away underground.

Graphic evidence of the occupation of these subterranean vaults by rebels from the Upper City was discovered near the Western Wall in 2013. Three cooking pots and a small oil lamp were found in the cramped drainage channel of a small underground water cistern that originated in the Siloam Pool on the southern edge of the City of David. None of these items would have been considered valuable by the searching Romans, who would have ignored them.

The surviving rebel commanders, Eleazar, John of Gischala, and Simon bar Giora, had yet to be located, but, driven by hunger and thirst, John soon identified himself from his underground refuge and offered to surrender if Titus granted him his life. Titus agreed, and John was brought out and loaded with chains on wrists and ankles. His ultimate fate would be decided in Rome. Simon bar Giora seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. He was in fact beneath it. As the fate of the Upper City had become clear to him, he’d identified an underground cave system that could not be seen from above ground. Taking lieutenants, a party of men who had formerly been stonecutters, and the last of their supplies, Simon went underground just before the Romans stormed the Upper City.

Simon and his companions were down there still, quietly cutting through earth and chipping through rock as they dug an escape tunnel in an easterly direction beneath Jerusalem. They intended that this tunnel would emerge beyond the Roman siege wall east of the city, from where they would make their great escape. As for Zealot leader Eleazar, no sign of him was ever seen again. He was absent from the record of the last weeks of the siege, and as there is no account of his dying in battle, it’s to be presumed he was among the many who starved to death.

According to Josephus, 1.1 million Jews died during the siege of Jerusalem and just 97,000 survived to be processed by Fronto. This processing lasted many days, during which 11,000 prisoners died from starvation—there was barely enough Roman grain to go around, but some Jews were deprived of food by Roman guards who took a dislike to them, while other prisoners stubbornly refused to accept food from Romans.

Debate has raged through the centuries about the fate of the small Christian community that continued to live in Jerusalem following the death of Jesus Christ. Some scholars believe they escaped before Titus’s siege, while others postulate that they were among the victims of the siege. Certainly, all the apostles, including the thirteenth apostle, Matthias, who was chosen by lot to replace the dead betrayer Judas, had left Jerusalem prior to AD 70. Most had died by the time of the siege of Jerusalem, in most cases in distant lands. The only ones believed to have lived well past AD 70 were Matthias, who died circa AD 80, and John, the apostle said to be Jesus’s cousin. According to Christian tradition, John took Mary mother of Jesus to Ephesus in Asia, from where Roman authorities sent him into exile on the island of Patmos, apparently for preaching the teachings of Jesus. He later returned to Ephesus, where he is believed to have died of old age during the reign of Vespasian’s son Domitian.

According to several fourth-century Christian writers, not long before Titus began his siege of the city the Christian community at Jerusalem received a warning from an oracle, who urged them to leave as Jerusalem was going to be destroyed. The Christian community was said to have heeded the warning, even though oracles were a pagan creation and anathema to Christians, and fled to Pella in Perea, one of the cities of the Greek Decapolis, where they settled. English twentieth-century theologian S. G. F. Brandon argued that the Christians would have remained at Jerusalem and perished there during the siege because they were allied to the rebel Zealot movement. The apostle Simon the Zealot was part of that movement, and Brandon felt that Jesus himself had Zealot leanings. There is no firm proof of whether the Christians stayed or went.⁹⁸

With all Jewish resistance in Jerusalem at an end, Titus climbed a large, specially built tribunal in his camp and addressed his assembled troops, congratulating them on their victory. Individual soldiers cited for bravery awards during the campaign were then called forward by the announcer of each legion and presented with their awards by Titus.

Josephus was with the group of officers and foreign dignitaries who witnessed these award presentations. He saw Titus place golden crowns on the heads of several men, place golden torques around the necks of others, and hand over golden spear and silver standard awards to even more men. The decorated men were also promoted and received silver, gold, and rich garments from the Jewish treasure trove. Among these recipients was the highly decorated Chief Centurion Gaius Velius Rufus of the 12th Fulminata Legion. Before long, he would be sent on an important mission to the king of Parthia by Titus’s father. In later years, unusually for a man from the ranks, Velius Rufus would be made a member of the Equestrian Order, promoted to prefect in command of large numbers of legion vexillations, then made a tribune of the City Guard at Rome. He ended his career as a procurator in three provinces under Vespasian’s youngest son, Domitian, who would become emperor in AD 81 upon the death of Titus.⁹⁹

At this Jerusalem awards ceremony, Titus announced the future postings of the legions that had taken part in the siege of Jerusalem, postings decided by Vespasian in Alexandria. The 10th Fretensis Legion would remain at Jerusalem as Judea’s resident legion, accompanied by several thousand auxiliaries. Titus appointed the senator Terentius Rufus new commander of the 10th and military governor of Judea. The legion’s former commander, Larcius Lepidus, seems to have died suddenly or been in poor health, because there is no record of him receiving any further appointments following his successful command of the 10th Fretensis during the Jerusalem siege.

Terentius Rufus and the 10th Fretensis were tasked by Titus with knocking down most of the now ruined, fire-blackened city of Jerusalem and covering the site with plowed earth. Titus’s intent was that Jerusalem be wiped from the map. Several structures were excepted from the destruction—the Phasael, Hippicus, and Mariamne Towers, and the western wall of the Upper City, which Titus ordered to be incorporated into a new base for the 10th Fretensis in the southwest of what had been Jerusalem.

The 5th Macedonica Legion was to march to its old post at Oescus in Moesia to again guard the Danube frontier. Their commander of the past few years, Lucius Cerialis, would before long renew his relationship with these troops with his appointment as governor of Moesia by Vespasian. The 12th Fulminata Legion was ordered to a new posting, Melitine in Cappadocia, a critical road junction, where it was to build a new permanent camp for itself. The 15th Apollinaris Legion was also to march to the Danube, returning to its earlier posting of Carnuntum in Pannonia, where it would build a new base and replace the new 7th Gemina Legion, which was being posted to Spain.

The six cohorts of the 3rd Gallica Legion that had marched on Rome to help make Vespasian emperor were already on their way overland on a return march to Syria. They were to become the resident legion at Raphanaea in southern Syria, previously the posting of the 12th Fulminata. These men of the 3rd Gallica had made themselves unpopular in Rome as arrogant bullies, so they had initially been sent by Mucianus to the town of Capua, outside Rome, where they’d proceeded to loot the houses of the elite. In returning them to the East, Mucianus was getting the troublesome Syrians out of his hair. The legion’s cohort currently at Caesarea would march north to rejoin their comrades at Raphanaea, where, the following decade, future noted writer Pliny the Younger would serve for six months as a junior tribune with the legion.

The 18th Legion was abolished by Vespasian—one of several legions he disbanded in Europe following the Civilis Revolt. The 18th’s six cohorts in Europe would apparently be combined with the 7th Galbiana Legion, which had suffered heavy casualties in the Year of the Four Emperors, to create the new 7th Gemini Legion—the Gemini title signified the “twinning,” or combination, of two legions. The four cohorts of the 18th now in Judea with Titus would apparently be folded into the 3rd Gallica to replace the three cohorts wiped out early in the Jewish Revolt and to fill the depleted ranks of its other cohorts. The cohorts of the 3rd Cyrenaica Legion currently at Jerusalem would rejoin their legion in Egypt.

Two of the departing legions accompanied Titus when he left the ruined city. They would form his escort until he sailed from Egypt for Rome the following year. But for the three days following the announcement of these new postings, Titus, his officers, and his men all enjoyed a series of victory feasts in their Jerusalem camps. A vast number of oxen sacrificed to Mars, the god of war, in thanks for the Roman success were distributed for the feasting.

Titus then left Jerusalem and proceeded down to Caesarea on the coast, with the allied troops and his two accompanying legions herding the thousands of surviving Jewish prisoners in a column that stretched for miles. Many a captive Jew would have looked back in tears at the ruins of Jerusalem as he tramped up and over Mount Scopus in chains, and many a legionary would have looked back with a smile as he took in the vision of the site of his legion’s hard-fought victory. Also in the column were thousands of mules and carts carrying the spoils of that victory. Titus would temporarily leave these spoils and a number of prisoners at Caesarea.

As Titus was arriving in Caesarea at the beginning of October, his father was finally bound for Rome in a fleet of warships of the Roman navy. The new emperor’s route took him to the Greek island of Rhodes, then to several port cities of Greece itself, before touching at Korkyra on the island of Corfu. He would then land in Apulia on the boot of Italy, apparently at Taranto, before proceeding up the Appian Way to the capital. He was greeted by joyous crowds everywhere he went, and as he approached Rome, the population thronged out of the city to cheer his arrival.

When, in October of AD 70, Vespasian reached Rome, his deputy, Licinius Mucianus, who’d been running Rome with an iron fist for ten months, loyally stepped aside and handed over the reins of power. Made a consul for the third time by Vespasian two years after this, Mucianus would otherwise go into quiet retirement and write several well-regarded books, including a collection of the letters and speeches of leading Romans of the Republican period as well as a natural history of the East, neither of which survive to modern day.

Vespasian came to Rome knowing that three times the annual income of the empire had been expended on the civil war that had brought him to the throne, and tight fiscal measures were required to rebalance the books of state. He had already abolished Nero’s grant of immunity from taxes to Greek cities. Progressively, he would introduce a range of new fees and taxes that would apply across the empire, and would encourage his procurators to soak up as much income as they could from their provinces. Vespasian even sold pardons for citizens convicted of crimes.

One of the new charges Vespasian imposed was a fee on the use of public urinals at Rome. Titus, after his return to Rome in AD 71, complained to his father about this tax, in response to which Vespasian handed Titus a coin from the first proceeds of the urinal tax, asking him, “Does it smell bad?”

“No,” Titus replied, sniffing the coin.

“Yet it comes from urine,” said Vespasian.¹⁰⁰

Not long after Vespasian’s arrival in Rome, he was approached at one of his regular Palatium audiences by Phoebus, the former freedman of Nero who, in Greece four years earlier, had told him to go to Morbia. When Phoebus asked for Vespasian’s forgiveness and an imperial appointment, Vespasian showed him the door, saying, “Go to Morbia!” Phoebus would be neither punished for his earlier rudeness to Vespasian nor offered employment by him.¹⁰¹

In October of AD 70, it was too late for Titus to sail back to Italy to join his father. The sailing season was closing, and while impatient by nature, Titus had no intention of risking the ships that would carry the treasure from Jerusalem, and the prisoners, to the seasonal storms that would soon sweep the eastern Mediterranean.

Still at Caesarea on October 24, he celebrated the nineteenth birthday of his younger brother, Domitian, with a show in the city’s amphitheater where 2,500 Jewish prisoners were put to death in front of a packed audience. Some were burned alive; some were pitted against wild animals. Others were required to fight each other, with the winner of each contest having to fight for his life again, until just one Jew remained to fight and die another day.

From Caesarea Maritima, Titus, still accompanied by two legions, traveled inland with Agrippa to Caesarea Philippi, which had dropped the name Neronias and reverted to its original name. A number of Jewish prisoners were in Titus’s column, and while spending several weeks with the king at Caesarea Philippi, Titus celebrated a series of games in the city, the most lavish being on November 17 for the birthday of his father, with the prisoners being sent into the arena to die.

While Titus was in Caesarea Philippi, he received word that the last Jewish rebel leader, Simon bar Giora, had been captured at Jerusalem in surprising circumstances. Simon and his companions had slowly dug their tunnel east, with their food supply dwindling to a paltry daily ration and then running out altogether. Their tunnel had finally broken through into one of the tunnels beneath the Temple Mount, and one fall day a thoroughly weakened Simon had emerged on the Temple Mount via this tunnel, wearing a white gown and a rich purple cloak.

Men of the 10th Fretensis Legion were working on the Temple Mount at the time, leveling the ruins of the Temple. Stopping work, the legionaries stared at Simon in amazement, with some no doubt thinking he must be a ghost. When asked who he was, he refused to identify himself, only telling the troops to fetch their commander. Legionaries ran to find the legion’s new legate, Terentius Rufus, and when he appeared on the scene Simon revealed his identity and told of how he’d come to be there. Rufus had Simon and his surviving companions, who emerged from underground behind him, put in chains, then sent a messenger to Titus informing him of Simon’s capture.

In the new year, Titus returned to Caesarea, and from there, with his escort and the men of the 3rd Cyrenaica Legion, set off for Egypt via Jerusalem. As Titus passed through Jerusalem he was amused to find men of the 10th Fretensis digging for Jewish treasure where once the city had stood. From Alexandria, once the sailing season opened in March, Titus sailed to Rome, taking with him representative groups of troops from his legions, his Jerusalem spoils, the seven hundred selected young Jewish prisoners, and prize captives Simon bar Giora and John of Gischala.

Later that year, Titus and his father celebrated a joint Triumph through the streets of Rome—Vespasian had combined the two Senate-approved Triumphs into one to save money. Titus and his father rode in the traditional golden chariot of the Triumphant, and Titus’s younger brother, Domitian, rode behind them on a horse. The parade was led by all the senators of Rome, on foot, and included the selected seven hundred Jewish prisoners, in chains and wearing the Temple’s rich priestly garments, but looking scrawny because of lack of food. They would soon be sent to the arena, but at the head of them walked the royal relatives of King Izates of Adiabene, whose fate is unrecorded. Behind the two triumphing generals marched troops detached from Vespasian’s and Titus’s legions, chanting bawdy ditties about their two commanders as the laws governing Triumphs permitted.

There was a long procession of painted dioramas, some four stories high, depicting the battles of the Judean War, and wagons carrying representative spoils from the Temple, including the golden table. Eight selected centurions, wearing white robes as required in Roman religious parades—which the Triumph was considered—bore a platform on which was perched one of the two golden Menorahs taken from the Temple. Last of all came Jewish rebel leader Simon bar Giora, with his hands in chains and being led by a rope around his neck.

The Triumph followed the traditional route, in through the Triumphal Gate, along the Via Sacra, or Sacred Way, around the Circus Maximus, which was packed with spectators. All of Rome and much of central Italy had come to see and cheer the Triumph, and the streets were so packed with people that the procession’s path was narrow and its pace so painfully slow that Vespasian tired of it.

“What an old fool I was to demand a Triumph,” he later remarked.¹⁰²

Once the parade eventually ended, Simon bar Giora was ceremonially executed in the Forum. It was customary for an enemy commander to be dispatched at the end of a Triumph by garroting, although it was usually carried out in the Carcer, the prison of Rome. Because Titus had given John of Gischala his word that his life would be spared if he surrendered, John would spend the rest of his days in chains, apparently in the Carcer. We don’t know where or when he died. Following Simon’s public execution, dignitaries and Vespasian’s troops enjoyed an open-air feast.

Representative items from the Judean spoils were set aside for display in a new Temple of Peace that Vespasian commissioned in the city, also known as the Flavian Forum in honor of Vespasian’s family, the Flavians. Spoils from the campaign and the state’s share from the sale of prisoners into slavery—after the legion’s troops and commanders received their share—were used by Vespasian to build the Temple of Peace and a grand new fifty-thousand-seat amphitheater on the site of a drained lake in the center of Rome. He also restored a giant statue of Nero, called the Colossus, which had been vandalized following Nero’s death. The new stadium was officially named the Flavian Amphitheater, but after later emperor Hadrian moved the Colossus to stand outside it, it became known as the Colosseum.

Vespasian would turn the first sod on the Colosseum project by AD 72. It was still under construction when he died in AD 79. Titus, who served as his father’s prefect of the Praetorian Guard, succeeded him as emperor, but only lived another two years. During his reign he opened the Colosseum and directed assistance for the cities on the Bay of Naples affected by the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. After Titus died from a fever, his brother, Domitian, succeeded him. Domitian dedicated two triumphal arches at Rome to Titus and the conquest of Jerusalem. One of these arches, at the entrance of the Flaminian Amphitheatre on the Field of Mars, no longer survives. The single Arch of Titus, built just southeast of the Forum on the summit of the Sacred Way, still stands today and has been the model for other triumphal arches since, including Paris’s Arc de Triomphe and New York City’s Washington Square Arch.

Josephus, the former Jewish rebel commander, journeyed to Rome with Titus, and as a client of Vespasian was permitted by the emperor to live in an apartment in Vespasian’s family home on Pomegranate Street in Rome, a house which Domitian later turned into a shrine to the Flavians. A farm in Judea owned by Josephus was turned into a Roman guard post, so, in exchange, Vespasian granted him several other Judean properties. “He also honored me with the privilege of a Roman citizen and gave me an annual pension,” Josephus later wrote.¹⁰³

During Vespasian’s reign, Josephus began researching and writing his Jewish War. Given access to Roman war diaries, he also spoke with Roman commanders and Jewish survivors, and he received thirty-four letters from King Herod Agrippa II, who, granted additional territories by Titus following the revolt and living until at least AD 93, told his side of the story. Josephus’s book was read and approved by Titus before it was published in his reign with his imprimatur. A dozen years later, during the reign of Domitian, Josephus published his Jewish Antiquities, a detailed history of the Jewish peoples that began with Adam and Eve. Remaining faithful to his Jewish religion, Josephus lived well into old age, through the later years of his life fighting published accusations from other Jews that he was a despicable Jewish betrayer and turncoat.