The Siege of Jotapata

Vespasian marched on the city of Gadara and took it at the first assault, since he found it stripped of fighting men. He went in and killed everyone from youth upward, for the Romans showed mercy to no age at all, out of hatred for the nation and in memory of the lawless thing the Jews had done to Cestius. He burned not only the city itself but all the villages and small towns around it. Some of these he found entirely deserted; the people of others he carried off as slaves. [a]

As for Josephus, his flight filled with fear the very city he had chosen for his safety. The people of Tiberias thought he would never have fled unless he had given up all hope of the war. And on that point they did not mistake his mind. He saw where the affairs of the Jews would end, and he knew they had only one way to be saved: if they changed course. For himself, though he expected the Romans to pardon him, he would still rather have died many times over than betray his country, disgrace the command entrusted to him, and live in comfort among the people he had been sent to fight. So he decided to write to the authorities at Jerusalem an exact account of how things stood. He would not exaggerate the enemy’s strength, and afterward be blamed for cowardice; nor would he report it as less than it was, and so embolden men who were perhaps already changing their minds. If they chose to make terms, they were to write back to him quickly; if they were set on war with the Romans, they were to send him a force able to fight them. He wrote this, and sent the men carrying the letter to Jerusalem in haste. [c]

Vespasian was eager to destroy Jotapata. He had learned that most of the enemy had fled there, and that it was in any case their strong base. So he sent infantry and cavalry ahead to level the road, which was mountainous and rocky, hard going even for men on foot and impossible for horsemen. In four days they finished the work and opened a broad highway for the army. On the fifth day, which was the twenty-first of the month Artemisius, Josephus got there first. He came from Tiberias into Jotapata and raised the fallen spirits of the Jews. A deserter brought Vespasian the good news that Josephus had moved there, and Vespasian hurried toward the city, thinking that with it he would take all Judea, if only he could get Josephus into his hands. He seized on the news as the greatest stroke of fortune. He believed it was by the providence of God that the man who seemed the shrewdest of all his enemies had walked of his own accord into a prison of his own choosing. At once he sent Placidus with a thousand horsemen, together with Aebutius, a decurion distinguished both in action and in judgment, with orders to surround the city so that Josephus could not slip away unnoticed. [e]

The next day Vespasian himself took his whole force and followed. Marching until evening, he arrived at Jotapata. He led the army to the north side of the city and camped on a hill a little less than a mile from it, taking every care to be seen as plainly as possible by the enemy, to strike them with terror. And at once the terror so gripped the Jews that no one dared go out beyond the wall. The Romans held back from attacking right away, since they had marched all day. But they surrounded the city with a double line of infantry and set the cavalry around the outside as a third ring, blocking every way out. Leaving the Jews no hope of escape, this goaded them to daring; for nothing in war fights harder than necessity. [g]

The next day the Romans attacked. At first the Jews held their ground, facing the Romans from a camp they had made in front of the wall. But Vespasian set his archers and slingers and the whole mass of long-range troops against them and ordered them to shoot, while he himself pushed up the slope with the infantry toward the point where the wall was easiest to take. Then Josephus, afraid for the city, leaped out, and the whole Jewish force with him. They fell on the Romans in a mass and drove them back from the wall, doing many deeds of strength and daring. Yet they suffered no less than they inflicted. As much as despair of escape spurred on the Jews, shame spurred on the Romans. The Romans were armed with experience joined to strength; the Jews with daring, and their fury led them. They fought all day, and night parted them. The Jews had wounded a great many Romans and killed thirteen; of their own, seventeen fell and six hundred were wounded. The next day the Jews went out again against the Romans as they attacked, and fought far more stubbornly than before. They had grown bolder because they had held out the day before beyond all expectation; but they found the Romans fiercer too, for shame had kindled them to anger, and they counted it a defeat not to win quickly. Until the fifth day the Roman assaults never stopped, while the people of Jotapata sallied out and fought from the wall more fiercely than ever. The Jews did not shrink from the enemy’s strength, and the Romans did not grow weary at how hard the city was to take.

Jotapata is almost all precipice. On every side but one it is cut off by ravines so immensely deep that anyone who tries to look down finds his sight fails before it reaches the bottom. Only from the north can it be approached, where the city is built out against the sloping end of a mountain. Josephus had taken this mountain inside his wall when he fortified the city, so that the enemy could not seize the ridge above it. Hidden all around by other mountains, the city could not be seen at all until one was right upon it. Such was the strength of Jotapata. [h]

Vespasian, matching himself against both the nature of the place and the daring of the Jews, decided to press the siege harder. He called his officers together and took counsel with them about the assault. When they resolved to build an earthwork against the part of the wall that could be approached, he sent the whole army out to gather materials. They cut down every tree on the mountains around the city and heaped up a vast pile of stones along with the timber. Some of them stretched wicker screens over a framework of stakes as a shelter from the missiles shot down from above, and under cover of these they piled up the earthwork, taking little or no harm from what was thrown from the wall. Others tore apart the nearby mounds and brought them earth without a pause. Divided three ways like this, no one was idle. The Jews hurled great rocks from the walls onto the shelters, and every kind of missile besides; and even what did not get through made a great and fearful crash that hindered the workers.

Vespasian then set up his engines for hurling missiles all around the city, a hundred and sixty machines in all, and ordered them to shoot at the men on the wall. All at once the catapults sent their lances whizzing, and the stone-throwers hurled stones weighing about seventy-five pounds, with fire and showers of arrows. These made not only the wall impossible for the Jews to stand on but also as much of the ground inside as they could reach; for the crowd of Arab archers and all the javelin men and slingers were shooting along with the machines. Yet the Jews, though kept from fighting back from above, did not sit still. They ran out in small bands, like robbers, pulled the shelters off the workers and struck them down as they were left exposed, and wherever the workers gave way, they scattered the earthwork and set fire to the stakes and the wicker screens. This went on until Vespasian saw that the gaps between the works were the cause of the damage, since the spaces gave the Jews room to attack. So he joined the shelters together, and once the troops were joined up along with them, the Jews’ raids were stopped. [i]

As the earthwork rose and was all but reaching the battlements, Josephus thought it would be dreadful if he could devise nothing in return to save the city. He gathered builders and ordered them to raise the wall higher. When they said it was impossible to build while so many missiles were being shot at them, he devised this shelter for them. He had posts fixed in the ground and the fresh hides of newly slaughtered oxen stretched over them, so that the hides would sag and catch the stones from the engines, while the other missiles would glance off them and the fire would be quenched by their moisture. These he set up in front of the builders. Working safely behind them day and night, they raised the wall to a height of thirty feet, built many towers into it, and fitted it with a strong parapet. This plunged the Romans, who thought they were already inside the city, into deep discouragement, and they were astonished both at Josephus’s ingenuity and at the resolve of the men in the city. [l] Vespasian was stung both by the cunning of the stratagem and by the daring of the men of Jotapata. Taking heart again from their new wall, they kept sallying out against the Romans. Every day there were clashes between small bands, with every trick that robbers use, plundering of whatever came to hand, and burning of the rest of the works. At last Vespasian rested his army from fighting and decided to sit down before the city and take it by want of supplies. Either, he thought, they would be forced by their hardships to beg him for mercy, or, if they stubbornly held out to the end, they would perish of hunger. He reckoned he would find them much easier to deal with in battle if he waited and fell on them later, when they were worn down. So he ordered every way out of the city to be guarded.

Inside the city there was plenty of grain and of everything else except salt, but there was a shortage of water, since there was no spring in the city and its people made do with rainwater; and it is rare for that region to have any rain in summer. So at this season the besieged fell into a terrible despondency at the thought of thirst, and they were already distressed as though the water had run out entirely. For Josephus, seeing that the city was well supplied with everything else and that the men were in brave spirits, and wanting to drag the siege out longer than the Romans expected, at once had their drink given out by measure. But they took this rationing as harder than want itself. Not being free to drink as they pleased only sharpened their craving, and they lost heart as though they had already come to the last extremity of thirst. Nor was their condition hidden from the Romans. From the slope above they could see them over the wall, crowding to one place and having their water measured out, and they aimed their bolt-throwing engines at the spot and killed many of them. [m] Vespasian hoped that before long the cisterns would be emptied and the city would be surrendered to him by necessity. But Josephus, determined to break this hope, ordered a great many of the men to soak their cloaks and hang them over the battlements, so that suddenly the whole wall was streaming with water. At this the Romans were dismayed and dumbfounded, seeing men waste so much water for mockery whom they had supposed had not even enough to drink. So the general gave up hope of taking the city through want and turned again to arms and force. This was just what the Jews wanted. Having given up hope for themselves and for the city, they chose death in battle over death by hunger and thirst.

Besides this stratagem Josephus devised another to keep himself well supplied. There was a ravine on the west side of the valley, so hard to cross that the guards neglected it. Through it he sent men out with letters to whichever Jews outside he wished, and received letters back from them; and so he got plenty of everything that had run short in the city. He told those who went out to creep past the guards most of the way, covering their backs with fleeces, so that if anyone did catch sight of them by night they would look like dogs. This went on until the guards discovered the trick and closed off the ravine.

It was then that Josephus, seeing that the city could not hold out long and that their own safety would be in doubt if he stayed, began to plan an escape with the leading men. But the people found out, poured around him, and begged him not to abandon them when they depended on him alone. While he stayed, they said, the city still had hope of being saved, since everyone would fight eagerly for his sake; and even if they were taken, it would be some comfort. It was not fitting for him to run from his enemies or to desert his friends, or to leap out of the city as from a ship in a storm, when he had come aboard in a calm. By leaving he would sink the city, since no one would dare to resist the enemy any longer once the man who gave them courage was gone. [o] Josephus kept back that he was thinking of his own safety, and told them he meant to leave for their sakes. If he stayed, he said, he could do them little good while they were safe, and if they were taken he would only die with them to no purpose. But once out of the siege he could help them greatly from outside: he would quickly gather the Galileans from the countryside and draw the Romans away from their city with another war. He did not see what use he could be to them now by sitting there beside them, except to spur the Romans on harder in the siege, since they set the highest value on taking him; but if they heard he had escaped, they would slacken a great deal in their drive against the city.

This did not persuade the people; it only made them cling to him the more. Children and old men, and women with babies in their arms, threw themselves before him wailing, clutched his feet and held on to him, and begged him with loud laments to stay and share their fortune. They did this, I think, not because they grudged him his safety, but in hope of their own; for they believed no harm could come to them while Josephus stayed.

Josephus reckoned that what was only pleading while he gave way would become a guard over him if he tried to force his way out. Pity for their laments had also broken much of his eagerness to leave. So he decided to stay. Arming himself with the city’s common despair, he said: “Now is the time to begin the fight, when there is no hope of being saved. It is a fine thing to trade life for glory, and to fall having done some noble deed for later generations to remember.” With that he set to work. He went out with his best fighters, scattered the guards, and ran right up to the Roman camp. He tore down the hides on the earthworks under which the Romans sheltered and set fire to the works. He did the same the next day and the third, and kept up the fight for many days and nights without tiring. [p]

Vespasian saw that the Romans were suffering from these sallies. They were ashamed to be put to flight by Jews, and when they did rout the Jews, the weight of their armor made them slow in pursuit, while the Jews always struck before they could be hurt and then fled back into the city. So he ordered his heavy infantry to avoid their charges and not to grapple with men bent on death. Nothing, he said, is braver than despair; their fury would die down when they saw it come to nothing, as fire does for want of fuel; and it was right for Romans to win with safety too, since they were not fighting from necessity but to add to their empire. So he kept the Jews back mostly with the Arab archers, the Syrian slingers and the stone-throwers, and his great number of engines never rested either. The Jews gave way under these and suffered badly. But when they got inside the range of the long-distance missiles, they pressed the Romans hard and fought without sparing soul or body, each side relieving its exhausted men in turn. [q]

Vespasian felt that between the length of the siege and the sallies he was being besieged himself. Since his earthworks were now close to the walls, he decided to bring up the ram. This is an enormous beam like a ship’s mast, its end shod with a thick mass of iron shaped like a ram’s head, from which it takes its name. It is slung by ropes at its middle from a second beam, like the beam of a balance, and that beam is held up on both sides by firmly planted posts. Pulled back by a crowd of men and then driven forward again by the same men all together, it strikes the walls with the iron that juts out in front. No tower is so strong and no wall so thick that, even if it bears the first blows, it can hold out against the continual battering. This was the method the Roman general now turned to, in his haste to take the city by force, since sitting before it was costly while the Jews gave him no peace. The Romans brought the catapults and the other engines closer, so as to reach the men on the wall who tried to stop them, and shot at them; the archers and slingers likewise came closer. Since none of the defenders now dared to stand on the walls, other men brought up the ram, sheltered all along with wicker screens and covered on top with hides, to protect both themselves and the machine. At the first blow the wall shook, and a tremendous cry went up from those inside, as though the city were already taken. [r]

Seeing the Romans striking the same place again and again, and the wall about to be thrown down, Josephus thought of a way to blunt the force of the machine for a while. He had sacks filled with chaff and let down by ropes wherever they saw the ram coming, so that the blow would be turned aside, or the sacks would take the strokes and deaden them by their softness. This delayed the Romans a great deal. Wherever they turned the machine, the men above moved the sacks across to meet it and put them under its strokes, so that the wall took no harm from the impact. At last the Romans devised a counter: they tied sickles to the ends of long poles and cut the sacks loose. When the siege engine had regained its force in this way, and the wall, being newly built, was already giving way, Josephus and his men turned at last to defending themselves with fire. They lit all the dry wood they had, rushed out at three points, and set fire to the machines, the wicker screens, and the Romans’ earthworks. The Romans came to help, but poorly, both stunned at the Jews’ daring and outrun by the flames. For the dry wood, with bitumen and pitch and sulfur besides, let the fire fly faster than thought, and what had cost the Romans great labor was consumed in a single hour. [s]

Here a man of the Jews showed himself worth telling of and remembering. He was the son of Sameas, his name was Eleazar, and his home was Saba in Galilee. He lifted an enormous rock and hurled it from the wall onto the ram with such force that it broke off the machine’s head. Then he leaped down, picked up the head from the midst of the enemy, and with great coolness carried it up onto the wall. Now a target for every enemy, he took their blows on his unprotected body and was pierced by five missiles. He paid no attention to any of them until he had climbed the wall and stood there in full view of all for his daring. Then, writhing from his wounds, he fell, still holding the ram’s head. After him the bravest were two brothers, Netiras and Philip, from the village of Ruma, Galileans also. They leaped out against the men of the tenth legion and fell on the Romans with such a rush and force that they broke their ranks and put to flight everyone they charged. [t] After these men, Josephus and the rest of the people took up fire again and burned the machines and their sheds, along with the works of the fifth and the tenth legions, which had been put to flight. The other legions got in first and buried their engines and all their timber under earth. [u]

Toward evening the Romans set the ram up again and brought it against the part of the wall it had already weakened. There one of the defenders on the wall hit Vespasian with an arrow in the sole of his foot. The wound was slight, for the distance had spent the arrow’s force, but it threw the Romans into the greatest confusion. Those near him were alarmed at the sight of the blood, a report ran through the whole army, and most of them left the siege and came running to the general in astonishment and fear. Titus was there before them all, afraid for his father, so that the troops were thrown into disorder both by their devotion to their commander and by his son’s anguish. But the father quickly put an end both to his son’s fear and to the army’s confusion. Rising above his pain and making haste to show himself to all who had been frightened for him, he roused them to fight the Jews harder than before. Every man wanted to be first into danger as his general’s avenger, and cheering one another on with shouts, they rushed at the wall.

Josephus and his men, though they were falling one upon another under the catapults and the stone-throwers, still did not turn from the wall. They pelted with fire, iron and stones the men who were driving the ram under cover of the wicker screens. They achieved little or nothing, and fell without a pause themselves, for they were seen by men they could not see. Lit up by their own flames, they made a target as plain to the enemy as by day, while the engines could not be seen from a distance, so there was no guarding against what they shot. The force of the bolt-throwers and catapults ran through many men at once, and the rushing stones hurled by the engine swept away battlements and broke off the corners of towers. No body of men is so strong that it is not laid flat to the last rank by the force and size of the stone. What the engine could do may be learned from what happened that very night. One of the men standing beside Josephus on the wall was struck by a stone that tore off his head, and his skull was flung a third of a mile. By day, too, a pregnant woman who had just stepped out of her house was struck in the belly, and her unborn child was flung about three hundred feet. So great was the force of the stone-thrower. [v]

More terrible still was the whizzing of the engines, and the crash of what they hurled. The dead thudded one after another as they were thrown down from the wall. From inside a dreadful shrieking of women went up, and from outside the groans of the dying echoed with it. The whole ground before the battle ran with blood, and the wall could be climbed over the bodies. The mountains echoing around made the din more frightful still, and nothing that could terrify the ear or the eye was missing that night. Very many of those fighting for Jotapata fell nobly, and very many were wounded. Only about the morning watch did the wall, battered without a break, give way to the machines. But the defenders, fencing the breach with their own bodies and their weapons, blocked it up again before the Romans could lay their boarding bridges.

Toward dawn Vespasian gathered his army for the capture of the city, after letting them rest a little from the night’s labor. Wanting to draw the defenders away from the breach, he had the bravest of the horsemen dismount and drew them up in three divisions facing the fallen parts of the wall, armored on every side and holding their lances forward, so that they could lead the way in as soon as the boarding bridges were laid. Behind them he placed the flower of the infantry. The rest of the cavalry he stretched out along the wall across all the hill country, so that no one fleeing from the capture could slip away unnoticed. Behind these he set the archers in a ring, with orders to have their arrows ready to shoot, and the slingers and the men at the engines likewise. Others he ordered to pick up ladders and bring them against the undamaged parts of the wall, so that the defenders, trying to stop them, would abandon the guard at the breach, and the rest, overwhelmed by the massed missiles, would give way and let his men in. [x]

Josephus understood the plan. He set the old men, together with those who were worn out, on the sound part of the wall, expecting no harm there, and put his strongest men at the breach, with six men in front of them all; he himself took his place by lot among them, to bear the first danger. He ordered them to stop their ears against the war cry of the legions, so that it would not terrify them; against the mass of missiles to crouch down and cover themselves overhead with their shields; and to fall back a little until the archers had emptied their quivers. But when the Romans laid down their boarding bridges, they were to leap out and meet the enemy on the enemy’s own gangways. Each man was to fight, not as if to save his country, but as if to avenge one already lost. They were to set before their eyes their old men about to be butchered and their children and wives about to be killed by the enemy at any moment; and the fury stored up against the coming calamities they were to spend in advance on the men who would bring them. [y]

So he arranged both groups. But the useless part of the population, the women and children, saw the city ringed by a triple line, for none of the guards posted earlier had been moved to the fighting. They saw the enemy, swords drawn, at the broken walls, the hill country above gleaming with weapons, and the Arab archers with arrows raised. And together they raised a last wail of capture, as though the evils were no longer threatened but already there. Josephus shut the women up in their houses, so that they would not unman their menfolk with pity, and ordered them under threat to keep quiet. He himself went to the breach, to the place his lot had fallen on. He paid no attention to the men bringing ladders to other places, but waited intently for the storm of missiles.

All at once the trumpeters of all the legions sounded together, the army raised a terrible war cry, and the missiles, loosed from every side at a signal, blotted out the light. Josephus’s men, remembering his orders, shut their ears against the shout and covered their bodies against the volleys. As the boarding bridges were laid, they ran out over them before those who had laid them could get onto them. Grappling with the men climbing up, they showed every kind of feat of hand and spirit, trying in their utmost calamity not to seem worse men than those who were showing courage against them with nothing of their own in danger. They did not break away from the Romans until they had either fallen or killed their man. But the Jews were wearing out, fighting without a break and with no one to relieve their front ranks, while among the Romans fresh men took the places of the tired, and as soon as some were forced back, others climbed up in their stead. Cheering one another on, they locked their sides together, covered themselves overhead with their shields, and became a mass that could not be broken. Pushing back the Jews with the whole line as though it were one body, they were already mounting the wall.

Then Josephus, at his wits’ end, took necessity as his counselor; and necessity is clever at invention when despair goads it on. He ordered boiling oil to be poured on the men under the locked shields. His men had it ready, and quickly many of them poured a great deal of it on the Romans from every side, throwing down the vessels too, still seething from the heat. Burned by it, the Romans broke formation and tumbled from the wall in terrible agony. The oil easily ran under their armor over the whole body, from head to foot, and fed on their flesh no less than flame, since by its richness it heats quickly and cools slowly. Bound into their breastplates and helmets, they had no escape from the burning; leaping and writhing in their pain, they fell from the gangways. And those who turned back ran into their own comrades pressing forward, and were easy prey for the Jews striking them from behind. Yet in this misfortune the Romans’ strength did not fail them, nor did the Jews’ cleverness. The Romans, though they saw their comrades drenched with oil and suffering pitiably, still charged at the men pouring it, each cursing the man in front of him for standing in the way of his strength. The Jews tripped up their advance with a second trick, pouring boiled fenugreek onto the planks under their feet, so that they slid and were swept down. Neither those turning back nor those climbing up could stay upright. Some fell backward onto the very gangways and were trampled; many fell down onto the earthwork, and the fallen were struck down by the Jews. For once the Romans had lost their footing, the Jews were freed from fighting hand to hand and had leisure to shoot. Toward evening the general called back his soldiers, who had suffered heavily in the assault. Not a few of them had fallen, and more were wounded. Of the men of Jotapata, six were killed and more than three hundred were carried off wounded. The battle was fought on the twentieth of the month Desius. [z]

Vespasian comforted the army after what had happened. Seeing them angry and in need not of encouragement but of something to do, he ordered the earthworks raised still higher and three towers built, each fifty feet high and sheathed in iron on every side, so that their weight would keep them steady and fire would not easily take them. These he set on the earthworks and put on them javelin men and archers and the lighter engines, and the strongest of the slingers besides. Hidden by the height and by the towers’ breastworks, they shot down at the men on the wall, who were in plain view. The Jews could neither easily dodge missiles coming down on their heads nor strike back at men they could not see. The towers were too high to reach with a weapon thrown by hand, and the iron around them could not be taken by fire. So they left the wall and ran out against anyone who tried to attack. In this way the people of Jotapata held out, many of them killed every day, with no means of doing the enemy harm in return except to hold them off at their own peril.

During these same days Vespasian sent Trajan, the commander of the tenth legion, against a city near Jotapata called Japha, which was in revolt and was emboldened by the unexpected resistance of Jotapata. He gave him a thousand horsemen and two thousand foot soldiers. Trajan found the city hard to take, for besides being strong by nature it was fortified with a double wall. But when he saw its people coming out ready to fight him, he engaged them, and after a short resistance they fled and he pursued. As they fled inside the first wall, the Romans, pressing hard on their heels, burst in with them. But when they rushed on toward the second wall, their own people shut them out of the city, afraid that the enemy would rush in along with them. It was God, then, who was making the Romans a gift of the Galileans’ sufferings; and at that time he delivered up the people of the city, every man of them, shut out by their own people’s hands, to be destroyed by murderous enemies. They threw themselves in crowds against the gates, calling again and again to the guards on them by name, and had their throats cut in the very midst of their pleading. The enemy had shut the first wall on them, and their own people the second. Penned in between the two walls, many were run through by one another’s swords and many by their own, and countless numbers fell to the Romans, without even the heart to defend themselves. On top of their terror of the enemy, the betrayal by their own people had broken their spirits. In the end they died cursing not the Romans but their own people, until all of them had perished, twelve thousand in number. [aa]

Trajan reckoned the city was empty of fighting men, and that if any were left inside they would be too frightened to attempt anything. So he left the capture to his general: he sent messengers to Vespasian and asked him to send his son Titus to put the finishing touch to the victory. Vespasian, guessing that some work still remained, sent his son with a force of five hundred horsemen and a thousand foot soldiers. Titus came quickly to the city, drew up his army with Trajan on the left wing, and, taking the right himself, led the attack. When the soldiers brought ladders against the wall on every side, the Galileans resisted from above for a short time, then abandoned the wall. Titus’s men leaped in and quickly took the city. But the people inside rallied against them, and a fierce battle broke out. The men able to fight fell on them in the narrow lanes, while the women threw down from the houses whatever came to hand. They held out fighting for six hours. But when the fighting men were spent, the rest of the people had their throats cut, both in the open and in their houses, young and old together. No male was left except the infants, and these, with the women, were carried off as slaves. The number of those killed, in the city and in the earlier battle, came to fifteen thousand, and the captives to two thousand one hundred and thirty. This disaster struck the Galileans on the twenty-fifth of the month Desius.

Nor did the Samaritans go untouched by disaster. They had gathered on the mountain called Gerizim, which is holy to them, and they stayed there; but their gathering and their spirit carried a threat of war. Not even the troubles of their neighbors brought them to their senses. In the face of the Romans’ successes they senselessly puffed up their own weakness, and were poised for any disturbance. Vespasian decided to forestall the movement and cut off their attempts before they began. All of Samaria was held by garrisons, it is true, but the number of those who had come together, and their organization, were alarming. So he sent Cerealis, the commander of the fifth legion, with six hundred horsemen and three thousand foot soldiers. Cerealis did not think it safe to climb the mountain and give battle, since many of the enemy were above him. Instead he surrounded the whole foot of the mountain with his force and kept watch on them all that day. Now it happened that the Samaritans, who had no water, were also caught in a dreadful heat, for it was summer and the crowd had come with no supplies. Some of them died of thirst that very day, while many, preferring slavery to such a death, fled to the Romans. Learning from these that the ones still holding together were broken by their sufferings, Cerealis climbed the mountain and set his force in a ring around the enemy. First he invited them to accept his right hand and save themselves, assuring them of safety if they threw down their arms. When he could not persuade them, he fell on them and killed them all, eleven thousand six hundred in number. This was done on the twenty-seventh of the month Desius. Such were the disasters the Samaritans suffered. [ad]

Meanwhile the men of Jotapata held out and endured their sufferings beyond all hope. On the forty-seventh day the Romans’ earthworks rose higher than the wall. That same day a deserter came to Vespasian and told him how few were left in the city and how weak they were. Worn out by constant watching and fighting without a break, he said, they could no longer stand up to an assault, and they could be taken by a trick if anyone tried it. About the last watch of the night, when they thought they had some respite from their hardships, and when the morning sleep comes most heavily over men worn out, the guards, he said, fell asleep. He advised them to attack at that hour. Vespasian was suspicious of the deserter, knowing how loyal the Jews were to one another and how they despised punishment. Earlier one of the men of Jotapata had been captured and had held out against every kind of torture; though the enemy questioned him with fire, he told them nothing about things inside the city, and he was crucified smiling at death. But the likelihood of the story made the traitor believable. Thinking he might well be telling the truth, and that even if it was a trap he himself would suffer nothing much, Vespasian ordered the man kept under guard and prepared the army to take the city. [ag]

At the hour they had been told, they went quietly to the wall. Titus was the first up, with one of his tribunes, Domitius Sabinus, leading a few men of the fifteenth legion. They cut the throats of the guards and entered the city. After them a tribune named Sextus Calvarius and Placidus brought in the troops under their command. The citadel was taken, the enemy were moving about in the middle of the city, and it was already day; and still the captured had no idea of the capture. Most of them were overcome with weariness and sleep, and a thick mist, which happened to settle on the city just then, blinded those who got up, until the whole army had poured in. They were roused only to feel their misery, and they believed the city was taken only as they were being killed. The Romans, remembering what they had suffered in the siege, felt neither restraint nor pity for anyone. They drove the people down the steep slope from the citadel and slaughtered them. There the difficulty of the ground robbed even those still able to fight of any way to defend themselves. Crushed in the narrow lanes and slipping down the slope, they were overwhelmed by the war pouring down on them from the summit. This drove many even of Josephus’s picked men to die by their own hands. Seeing that they could not kill a single Roman, they at least forestalled falling at Roman hands: they gathered at the far edge of the city and killed themselves. [ah]

Those of the guards who managed to get away at the first sense of the capture climbed into one of the towers on the north side and defended themselves for a while. But surrounded by a host of enemies, they at last let their hands fall and cheerfully offered their throats to the men standing over them. The Romans could have boasted that the end of the siege had cost them no blood, had not one man fallen in the capture: a centurion named Antonius, who died by treachery. One of those who had fled into the caves, and there were many of them, begged Antonius to reach him his right hand as a pledge of safety and to help him climb out. Antonius held out his hand without a thought of danger, and the man, getting in first, stabbed him from below in the groin with a spear and killed him on the spot. [aj] That day the Romans killed all the people to be seen. In the days that followed they searched the hiding places and went after those in the underground passages and the caves, sparing no age except infants and women. Twelve hundred captives were gathered, and the dead, in the capture and in the earlier battles, were counted at forty thousand. Vespasian ordered the city razed and burned all its forts. So Jotapata was taken in the thirteenth year of Nero’s reign, on the first day of the month Panemus. [ak]