Vespasian Lets Faction Work

Persuaded by this, the Idumeans first released those held in the prisons, about two thousand of the common people, who fled the city at once and went to Simon, of whom we will speak shortly. Then they withdrew from Jerusalem and went home. Their departure surprised both sides. The people, not knowing of their change of heart, took courage for a little while, as if relieved of enemies; the zealots grew bolder still, not as men abandoned by their allies but as men rid of those who shamed them and held them back from lawlessness. There was no more delay or deliberation in their crimes. They used the quickest schemes for everything, and what they decided they carried out faster than they had thought of it. Courage and noble birth above all they murdered, the one out of envy, the other out of fear, for they believed their only safety lay in leaving none of the powerful alive. So they killed, along with many others, Gurion, a man eminent in rank and family, yet a democrat and as full of a free spirit as any Jew; on top of his other advantages, it was above all his outspokenness that destroyed him. Not even Niger of Perea escaped their hands, a man who had shown the greatest courage in the battles against the Romans. Crying out again and again and showing his scars, he was dragged through the middle of the city. When he had been brought outside the gates, he gave up hope of life and begged for burial; but they had threatened beforehand that they would not give him the earth he most desired, and they carried out the murder. As he was dying, Niger called down on them the Romans as avengers, famine and plague on top of the war, and, after all that, each other’s hands. God ratified every one of these curses against the impious, and the most just of them too: that before long, in their own factions, they would taste one another’s madness. Niger’s death eased their fear of being overthrown, and there was no section of the people for whose destruction some pretext was not devised. Those who had ever quarreled with any of them were long since dead; against those who had given no offense in peacetime they found charges to suit the occasion. A man who did not approach them at all was suspected of pride; one who approached them freely, of contempt; one who courted them, of plotting. For the gravest charges and the slightest there was one punishment, death; and no one escaped unless he was very lowly, by birth or by fortune. [a]

All the other Roman commanders regarded the strife among the enemy as a godsend and were eager to march on the city. They pressed Vespasian, as master of all, saying: “The providence of God is fighting on our side by turning our enemies against each other. But the turn of the scale may be sudden, and the Jews may quickly come to agreement again, either worn out by their civil miseries or repenting of them.” Vespasian answered that they were far from seeing what was needed. They were like men eager to make a show of hands and weapons as if in a theater, at their own risk, without looking to what was advantageous and safe. “If I march on the city at once,” he said, “I will make the enemy unite, and turn their strength, now at its height, against myself. If I wait, I will have fewer to deal with, for they are being used up in faction. God is a better general than I am: he is handing the Jews over to the Romans without any effort, and granting the army a victory without danger. So, while the enemy are perishing by their own hands and suffering the greatest of evils, civil strife, we should sit back as spectators of their perils rather than come to grips with men who are in love with death and raging against one another. If anyone thinks the glory of victory will be staler without a battle, let him learn that success won quietly is more profitable than the hazards of arms. Those who achieve as much by self-control and good sense should be thought no less glorious than those who shine in combat. At the same time, as the enemy grow fewer, I will lead my own army, rested from its continual labors, with greater strength. Besides, even for those who aim at the splendor of victory, this is not the moment. The Jews are not busy making arms or building walls or gathering allies, in which case delay would cost those who allowed it. They are being strangled day by day by civil war and discord, and are suffering more pitiably than anything we could do to them if we attacked and took them. So whether one looks to safety, he should leave them to be consumed by their own hands; or to the greater glory of the success, he should not attack men who are sick at home. For it will rightly be said that the victory was not ours but their faction’s.” [d]

The commanders agreed with what Vespasian said, and the generalship of his judgment soon showed itself. Many deserted every day, slipping away from the zealots. But flight was hard, for the zealots had posted guards on every way out and killed anyone caught on them, for whatever reason, as one going over to the Romans. Yet a man who gave them money was let go, and only the one who gave nothing was a traitor; so in the end the rich bought their escape and only the poor were slaughtered. Along all the highways the dead lay piled in heaps, and many who had set out to desert chose instead to perish inside the city, for the hope of burial made death in their own country seem the milder. But the zealots drove on into such cruelty that they gave no earth either to those killed inside the city or to those on the roads. As if they had made a compact to abolish the laws of nature together with the laws of their country, and to defile the Deity along with their crimes against men, they left the dead to rot in the sun. Whoever buried one of his own kin incurred the same penalty as a deserter, death; and the man who granted a grave to another soon needed one himself. In a word, no decent feeling perished so completely in those calamities as pity. What should have moved them to pity only provoked these wretches; they turned their rage from the living onto the slain, and from the dead onto the living. Fear was so extreme that the survivor called those taken before him blessed, as already at rest, and men tortured in the prisons declared that by comparison even the unburied were happy. They trampled every human ordinance underfoot and laughed at divine things; the oracles of the prophets they mocked as the tales of charlatans. Yet these prophets had foretold much about virtue and vice, and by transgressing those teachings the zealots brought to fulfillment the prophecy against their own country. For there was an ancient saying of inspired men that the city would be taken and the most holy place burned by the law of war when faction should break out and their own hands should first defile the precinct of God. The zealots did not disbelieve it, yet they made themselves its servants. [f]