Jerusalem: The Biography Read Online Free PDF Page B

weakness in the Year of the Four Emperors and aided by Jerusalem’s precipitous heights, her fortifications and the labyrinthine Temple itself, had confronted Titus with overweening confidence. After all, they had defied Rome for almost five years. However, Titus possessed the authority, the ambition, the resources and the talent necessary for the task. He set about reducing Jerusalem with systematic efficiency and overwhelming force. Ballistae stones, probably fired by Titus, have been found in the tunnels beside the Temple’s western wall, testament to the intensity of Roman bombardment. The Jews fought for every inch with almost suicidal abandon. Yet Titus, commanding the full arsenal of siege engines, catapults and the ingenuity of Roman engineering, overcame the first wall within fifteen days. He led a thousand legionaries into the maze of Jerusalem’s markets and stormed the second wall. But the Jews sortied out and retook it. The wall had to be stormed all over again. Titus next tried to overawe the city with a parade of his army – cuirasses, helmets, blades flashing, flags fluttering, eagles glinting, ‘horses richly caparisoned’. Thousands of Jerusalemites gathered on the battlements to gawp at this show, admiring ‘the beauty of their armour and admirable order of the men’. The Jews remained defiant, or too afraid of their warlords to disobey their orders: no surrender.
    Finally, Titus decided to encircle and seal the entire city by building a wall of circumvallation. In late June, the Romans stormed the hulking Antonia Fortress that commanded the Temple itself and then razed it, except for one tower where Titus set up his command-post.
    By mid-summer, as the blistered and jagged hills sprouted forests of fly-blown crucified cadavers, the city within was tormented by a sense of impending doom, intransigent fanaticism, whimsical sadism, and searing hunger. Armed gangs prowled for food. Children grabbed the morsels from their fathers’ hands; mothers stole the tidbits of their own babies. Locked doors suggested hidden provisions and the warriors broke in, driving stakes up their victims’ rectums to force them to reveal their caches of grain. If they found nothing, they were even more ‘barbarously cruel’ as if they had been ‘defrauded.’ Even though the fighters themselves still had food, they killed and tortured out of habit ‘to keep their madness in exercise’. Jerusalem was riven by witch-hunts as people denounced each other as hoarders and traitors. No other city, reflected the eyewitness Josephus, ‘did ever allow such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was, since the beginning of the world’. 4
    The young wandered the streets ‘like shadows, all swollen with famine, and fell down dead, wherever their misery seized them’. People died trying to bury their families while others were buried carelessly, still breathing. Famine devoured whole families in their homes. Jerusalemites saw their loved ones die ‘with dry eyes and open mouths. A deep silence and a kind of deadly night seized the city’ – yet those who perished did so ‘with their eyes fixed on the Temple’. The streets were heaped with dead bodies. Soon, despite Jewish law, no one buried the dead any more in this grandiose charnelhouse. Perhaps Jesus Christ had foreseen this when he predicted the coming Apocalypse, saying ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ Sometimes the rebels just heaved bodies over the walls. The Romans left them to rot in putrescent piles. Yet the rebels were still fighting.
    Titus himself, an unsqueamish Roman soldier, who had killed twelve Jews with his own crossbow in his first skirmish, was horrified and amazed: he could only groan to the gods that this was not his doing. ‘The darling and delight of the human race’, he was known for his generosity. ‘Friends, I’ve lost a day,’ he would say when he had not found time to give presents to his