The Revolt Against Sabinus

But before these matters could be settled, Malthace, Archelaus’s mother, fell ill and died of it. Letters also came from Varus, the governor of Syria, informing Caesar of the revolt of the Jews; for after Archelaus had sailed, the whole nation was in an uproar. Varus, since he was there himself, had punished those who started the disturbance; and when he had for the most part put down this revolt, which was a great one, he left for Antioch, leaving one legion of his army at Jerusalem to keep the Jews quiet, since they were now very eager for revolt. Yet this did nothing at all to end their uprising. For after Varus had gone, Sabinus, Caesar’s procurator, stayed behind and greatly harassed the rebels, trusting that the troops left there, with their numbers, would let him get the better of them. He armed a great many of them and used them as his guards, and so pressed and unsettled the Jews that at last they rebelled. For he used force to seize the citadels, and he pressed eagerly on with the search for the king’s money, meaning to take it by force, out of his love of gain and his extraordinary greed. [a]

But as Pentecost approached, a festival of ours, so called from the days of our forefathers, many tens of thousands of people gathered. They did not come only to celebrate the festival, but out of their anger at the madness of Sabinus and the wrongs he was doing them. There was a great number of Galileans and Idumeans, and many men from Jericho, and others who had crossed the river Jordan and lived in those parts. A great number of the Jews themselves had joined all these, and they were far more eager than the others to attack Sabinus and take revenge on him. So they divided themselves into three bands and encamped in the following places. One band seized the hippodrome. Of the other two, some took the north side of the temple, facing south, and others held the eastern quarter; and the third band held the western part of the city, where the king’s palace was. Their whole aim was to besiege the Romans and shut them in on every side. Sabinus was afraid of their numbers and their determination, for they cared little for their lives and were very eager not to be beaten, thinking it a mark of strength to overcome their enemies. So he sent a letter at once to Varus, and, as he usually did, pressed him hard and begged him to come quickly to his help, because the troops he had left were in great danger and would probably be overwhelmed and cut to pieces before long. Meanwhile he himself went up to the highest tower of the fortress, the Phasaelus, which had been built in honor of Phasael, King Herod’s brother, and named after him when the Parthians had brought about his death. From there Sabinus gave the Romans the signal to attack the Jews, though he did not venture so much as to come down to his own men, and thought he could expect the others to be the first to die for his greed. The Romans, however, ventured to sally out of the place, and a terrible battle followed. In it the Romans did beat their opponents, yet the Jews were not shaken in their resolve, even when they saw the terrible slaughter made of them. Instead they went around and climbed onto the colonnades that surrounded the outer court of the temple, where a great fight still went on. They threw stones at the Romans, some by hand and some with slings, being well practiced in those skills. All their archers too, drawn up in order, did the Romans a great deal of harm, because they used their hands skillfully from higher ground, while the Romans were at a complete loss what to do; for when they tried to shoot their arrows upward at the Jews, the arrows could not reach them, so that the Jews easily got the better of their enemies. This kind of fighting went on a long while, until at last the Romans, who were hard pressed by what was happening, set fire to the colonnades so secretly that those who had climbed onto them did not notice it. The fire, fed by a great deal of material that would burn, caught at once on the roof of the colonnades. The timber, which was full of pitch and wax, and whose gilding had been laid on with wax, quickly gave way to the flames, and those vast works, of the highest value and renown, were utterly destroyed. Those on the roof perished at the same time, without expecting it; for as the roof fell in, some of them fell with it, and others were killed by the enemies who surrounded them. A great many more, in despair of saving their lives and stunned by the misery around them, either threw themselves into the fire or fell on their own swords, and so escaped their misery. As for those who went back down the way they had come up, and so got away, they were all killed by the Romans, since they were unarmed and their courage had failed them. Their wild fury could not help them now, for they had no armor; so that of those who went up onto the roof, not one escaped. The Romans also rushed through the fire where it left them room, and seized the treasury where the sacred money was kept. A great part of it was stolen by the soldiers, and Sabinus openly took four hundred talents. [d]

This disaster of the Jews’ friends who fell in that battle grieved them, as did this plundering of the money dedicated to God in the temple. So the body of them that held together best and was the most warlike surrounded the palace and threatened to set fire to it and kill everyone inside. Yet they still ordered those inside to come out at once, and promised that if they did so they would not harm them, nor Sabinus either. At this point the greater part of the king’s troops deserted to them, while Rufus and Gratus, who had with them three thousand of the most warlike men of Herod’s army, men of active bodies, went over to the Romans. There was also a body of cavalry under the command of Rufus, which itself went over to the Romans as well. The Jews, however, pressed on with the siege. They dug mines under the palace walls, and begged those who had gone over to the other side not to stand in their way, now that they had so fine an opportunity to recover their country’s ancient freedom. As for Sabinus, he truly wanted to leave with his soldiers, but he could not trust himself to the enemy because of the harm he had already done them; and he took this excessive mildness on their part as a reason not to give in to them. And so, because he expected Varus to come, he held out under the siege. [j]

At this time there were also countless other disorders in Judea, like riots, because a great many people took up arms, either in the hope of gain for themselves or out of hatred for the Jews. In particular, two thousand of Herod’s old soldiers, who had already been discharged, gathered in Judea itself and fought against the king’s troops, though Achiabus, Herod’s first cousin, opposed them. But since he was driven out of the plains into the mountains by these men’s skill in war, he kept to the strongholds there and saved what he could. [k] There was also Judas, the son of that Hezekiah who had been chief of the robbers. This Hezekiah had been a very strong man, and Herod had caught him only with great difficulty. This Judas gathered a crowd of reckless men around Sepphoris in Galilee and attacked the palace there. He seized all the weapons stored in it, armed every one of his followers with them, and carried off whatever money was left there. He became a terror to everyone, ravaging and plundering any who came near him; and all this was to raise himself up, out of an ambitious craving for royal rank. He hoped to win it as the reward, not of courage and skill in war, but of his outrageous violence. [l] There was also Simon, who had been a slave of King Herod, but was in other respects a handsome man, tall and strongly built. He stood far above others of his station and had been entrusted with great responsibilities. Elated by the disorder of the times, he was bold enough to put a diadem on his head. A number of the people gathered around him and in their madness proclaimed him king, and he thought himself more worthy of that rank than anyone else. He burned down the royal palace at Jericho and plundered what was left in it. He also set fire to many other royal houses in various parts of the country and utterly destroyed them, and let his followers take whatever was left in them as plunder. And he would have done still greater things, had steps not been taken to put him down at once. For Gratus, the commander of the king’s soldiers who had gone over to the Romans, went out with the force he had to meet Simon. After a great and long battle, the greater part of the men from Perea, who were a disorderly crowd and fought with more daring than skill, were destroyed. Simon himself escaped by fleeing through a certain ravine, but Gratus overtook him and cut off his head. The royal palace at Amathus, by the river Jordan, was also burned down by a band of men who had gathered there, much like Simon. In this way a great folly spread over the nation, because they had no king to keep the multitude in good order, and because the foreigners who came to bring the rebels back to their senses only inflamed them further, by the wrongs they did them and their greedy handling of their affairs. [m]

Then there was Athronges, a man distinguished neither by the rank of his ancestors nor by any outstanding merit or great wealth, but who had been nothing but a shepherd all his life and was not known to anyone. Yet because he was a tall man and surpassed others in the strength of his hands, he was bold enough to set himself up as king. This man thought it so sweet a thing to do more than ordinary harm to others that, even if he were to be killed, he did not much mind losing his life in so great an undertaking. He also had four brothers, who were tall men themselves and were thought to surpass others in strength of hand. They were encouraged by this to aim at great things, and thought that their strength would keep the kingdom in their hands. Each of them ruled a band of men of his own, for those who flocked to them were very numerous. Every one of them was a commander; but when it came to fighting they were under his orders and fought for him, while he put a diadem on his head, called a council to debate what should be done, and everything was done as he pleased. This man kept his power a long while. He was called king, and nothing stopped him from doing what he liked. He and his brothers killed a great many both of the Romans and of the king’s troops, and treated both with the same hatred. They attacked the king’s troops because of the licentious conduct they had been allowed under Herod’s rule, and the Romans because of the wrongs they had so lately suffered from them. But as time went on they grew more cruel to every kind of person, and no one could escape one or another of these risings, since they killed some in the hope of gain and others simply from the habit of killing. Once at Emmaus they attacked a company of Romans who were bringing grain and weapons to the army. They surrounded Arius, the centurion who commanded the whole company, and shot him down together with forty of the best of his foot soldiers. The rest were frightened at the slaughter, left their dead behind, and saved themselves only through Gratus, who came to their aid with the king’s troops he had with him. These four brothers kept up the war a long while by raids of this kind, and greatly troubled the Romans, though they did their own nation a great deal of harm as well. Yet they were afterward subdued: one of them in a battle with Gratus, another with Ptolemy. Archelaus also took the eldest of them prisoner. The last of them was so dejected at his brother’s misfortune, and saw so plainly that he had no way left to save himself, since he was left alone and long hardship had stripped him of his force, that he too gave himself up to Archelaus, on his promise and oath to God. But these things happened a good while later. [o] And now Judea was full of robbery. Whenever any of the rebel bands found someone to lead them, he was made king at once, to do harm to the public. They did some small harm to the Romans, and in small matters; but the murders they committed among their own people went on a long while.

As soon as Varus learned the state of Judea from Sabinus’s letter, he was afraid for the legion he had left there. So he took the two other legions (for there were three legions in all belonging to Syria), and four cavalry units, together with the various auxiliary forces that the kings or certain of the tetrarchs supplied him, and hurried as fast as he could to help those who were then under siege in Judea. He also ordered all who were sent out on this expedition to make haste to Ptolemais. The citizens of Berytus also gave him fifteen hundred auxiliaries as he passed through their city. Aretas too, the king of Arabia Petraea, out of hatred for Herod and to buy the favor of the Romans, sent him no small help in infantry and cavalry. When all his forces had gathered at Ptolemais, he put part of them under his son and a friend of his, and sent them on an expedition into Galilee, which lies next to Ptolemais. They attacked the enemy and put them to flight, took Sepphoris, enslaved its inhabitants, and burned the city. Varus himself marched on toward Samaria with his whole army. Yet he did not touch the city of that name, because it had not joined the rebels at all, but pitched his camp at a village that belonged to Ptolemy, called Arus. The Arabians burned it, out of their hatred for Herod and the hostility they bore his friends. From there they marched to another village called Sampho, which the Arabians plundered and burned, although it was a fortified and strong place. All along this march nothing escaped them; every place was full of fire and slaughter. Emmaus was also burned by Varus’s order, after its inhabitants had deserted it, to avenge those who had been killed there. From there he marched on to Jerusalem. At this the Jews whose camp lay there, and who had been besieging the Roman legion, could not face the coming of this army and left the siege unfinished. As for the Jews of Jerusalem, when Varus reproached them bitterly for what had been done, they cleared themselves of the charge. They claimed that the crowds had gathered because of the festival; that the war had not been made with their approval, but by the rashness of the outsiders; and that they had been on the side of the Romans and besieged along with them, rather than having any wish to besiege them. Joseph, King Herod’s first cousin, also came out ahead of time to meet Varus, as did Gratus and Rufus, bringing their soldiers with them, together with the Romans who had been besieged. But Sabinus did not come into Varus’s presence; he slipped out of the city secretly and went off to the coast. [q] Then Varus sent part of his army into the countryside to search out those who had been the authors of the revolt. When they were found, he punished some who were most guilty and let others go. The number of those crucified on this account was two thousand. After this he disbanded his army, which he found of no use to him in the business he had come for; for they behaved in a very disorderly way and disobeyed his orders and his wishes, for the sake of the gain they made by the harm they did. As for himself, when he was told that ten thousand Jews had gathered together, he hurried to catch them. But they did not go so far as to fight him; on the advice of Achiabus they came together and surrendered to him. Varus then pardoned the multitude for the crime of revolt, but sent their various commanders to Caesar. Caesar let many of them go; but the relatives of Herod who had been among these men in this war were the only ones he punished, because they had fought against their own kin without the least regard for justice.