Three Factions in Jerusalem

Titus crossed the desert between Egypt and Syria in the way I have described and came to Caesarea, having decided to set his forces in order there first. While he was still at Alexandria helping his father establish the empire that God had newly placed in their hands, it happened that the sedition in Jerusalem flared up again and split into three parts, and one part turned against itself. One might call this a good thing among evils, and a work of justice. The attack of the Zealots on the people, which began the city’s ruin, has already been described with care: where it came from and to how great evils it grew. Of this new one, a man would not be wrong to say that a sedition was born inside a sedition, and that it was like a wild beast gone mad, which for lack of food from outside at last turns on its own flesh. [a]

So it was with Eleazar son of Simon. It was he who had first drawn the Zealots away from the people into the sacred precinct. He claimed to be outraged at the crimes John dared every day, for John never stopped murdering; but the truth was that he could not bear to be subject to a tyrant who had risen after him. Longing for the whole power and wanting a rule of his own, he broke away, taking with him Judas son of Chelcias and Simon son of Esron, both men of power, and besides them Hezekiah son of Chobari, a man of some note. Each of these was followed by a good number of the Zealots. They seized the inner court of the sanctuary and set their weapons over the holy gates, on the sacred fronts of the building. Being well supplied with provisions, they were confident, for there was an abundance of sacred things for men who thought nothing impious. But they were afraid because they were so few, and for the most part they sat tight where they were. John, for his part, was as far behind in position as he was ahead in the number of his men. With his enemies over his head, he could not attack them without fear, yet his anger would not let him rest. He suffered more harm from Eleazar’s party than he did to them, but still he would not give up. There were constant sallies and volleys of missiles, and the temple was defiled everywhere with killing. [c]

Then there was Simon son of Gioras, whom the people in their helplessness had called in as a tyrant over themselves, hoping for his help. He held the upper city and a great part of the lower, and he now attacked John’s party more fiercely, since they were also being attacked from above. But he came at them from below, as they came at those above them. So John, attacked on two sides, both suffered and inflicted damage easily, and as much as he was at a disadvantage against Eleazar’s men because he was beneath them, so much he had the advantage of Simon because he was above him. So he beat off the attacks from below vigorously by hand, while he checked those who hurled down at him from the temple above with his engines. He had dart-throwers, catapults and stone-throwers in no small number, and with them he not only defended himself against his attackers but also killed many of those who were offering the sacrifices. For although they had gone mad with every kind of impiety, they still let in those who wished to sacrifice. Their own countrymen they admitted with suspicion and under guard, while the foreigners they searched. Yet these, though they had shamed the rebels’ cruelty into letting them pass at the entrances, became casualties of the sedition all the same. The missiles from the engines flew with such force that they carried over to the altar and the sanctuary and fell on the priests and those offering sacrifice. Many who had hurried from the ends of the earth to that famous place, holy to all mankind, fell themselves before their own sacrifices, and sprinkled with their own blood the altar revered by all Greeks and barbarians. Dead foreigners lay mixed with natives, the profane with priests, and the blood of all kinds of corpses stood in pools in the courts of God. Most wretched city, what did you suffer from the Romans to equal this? They came in to purge with fire the pollutions of your civil strife. You were no longer the place of God, and you could not survive, once you had become a grave for the bodies of your own people and had turned the sanctuary into a common burial ground of civil war. Yet you might become better again, if ever you appease the God who laid you waste. But the law of history requires me to restrain even my feelings, since this is not the time for private laments but for the narration of events. I go on, then, to the next deeds of the sedition. [d]

The plotters against the city were now divided three ways. Eleazar’s party, who had charge of the sacred first fruits, turned their drunkenness against John. John’s men plundered the citizens and were roused against Simon. And Simon, too, drew his supplies from the city against the rival factions. Whenever John was attacked from both sides, he turned his men about: from the porticoes he shot down at those coming up from the city, and with his engines he beat off those who hurled missiles from the temple. If he was ever freed from those pressing on him from above, and their drunkenness and weariness often gave him rest, he sallied out against Simon’s men with greater numbers and less fear. Always, as far into the city as he drove them, he set fire to the houses full of grain and provisions of every kind. When John fell back, Simon advanced and did the same. It was as if they were deliberately destroying, for the Romans’ benefit, what the city had prepared against a siege, and cutting the sinews of their own strength. So it came about that everything around the temple was burned down, and the city became a desolate no-man’s-land for their own battles. Almost all the grain was burned, which would have lasted them through a siege of not a few years. In the end they were taken by famine, which could hardly have happened if they had not prepared it for themselves.

With the city attacked from every side by these plotters and the rabble with them, the people in the middle were torn apart like a great body. The old men and the women, helpless before the evils within, prayed for the Romans to come and longed for the war outside to free them from the misery within. The true citizens were in terrible dismay and fear. There was no chance to take counsel for a change, no hope of terms, no escape for those who wanted it. Everything was guarded. The robber chiefs, who were at odds in everything else, killed as common enemies anyone who wanted peace with the Romans or was suspected of planning to desert. The one thing they agreed on was murdering those who deserved to live. The shouting of the fighters went on without pause day and night, and more dreadful still were the laments of the mourners, though fear held them in. Their disasters brought one cause for mourning after another, but terror shut in their wailing; muzzled by fear, they were tortured by the groans they could not let out. Their kin no longer showed any regard for the living, and no one took care to bury the dead. The cause of both was that each man despaired of himself. Those who were not in the sedition had let go of every desire, expecting to die at any moment. The rebels, meanwhile, fought each other trampling on the dead who lay heaped on one another, and they drew frenzy from the corpses under their feet and grew more savage still. Always inventing some new ruin against themselves, and carrying out without mercy whatever they had resolved, they left out no form of outrage or cruelty. John, indeed, misused the sacred timber to build engines of war. The people and the chief priests had once decided to underpin the sanctuary and raise it thirty feet higher, and King Agrippa, at enormous cost and labor, had brought down from Lebanon the timber needed for it, beams worth seeing for their straightness and size. When the war interrupted the work, John cut them up and built towers with them, finding them long enough to reach those who fought him from the temple above. He brought them up and set them behind the inner court, facing the western hall. That was the only place he could set them, for the other sides were kept at a distance by flights of steps. [g]

So John hoped to master his enemies with the engines his impiety had built, but God made his labor useless by bringing the Romans upon him before he had set up a single tower. For Titus, having gathered part of his force to himself and ordered the rest to meet him at Jerusalem, marched out of Caesarea. He had the three legions that had laid Judea waste with his father before, and the Twelfth, which had once been defeated with Cestius. This legion, famous for its courage in any case, now marched the more eagerly to take revenge, remembering what it had suffered. Of these he ordered the Fifth to meet him by way of Emmaus and the Tenth to go up by way of Jericho, while he himself set out with the rest. With him went the allied forces of the kings, far more numerous than before, and a good many auxiliaries from Syria. The gaps in the four legions, left by the men Vespasian had picked and sent with Mucianus to Italy, were filled from the troops who came with Titus. Two thousand picked men from the armies at Alexandria went with him, and three thousand from the guards on the Euphrates followed him. The most trusted of his friends, for loyalty and good sense, was Tiberius Alexander. He had formerly governed Egypt for them, and he was now commander of the armies. He had been judged worthy of this because he was the first to welcome their newly rising rule, and with splendid loyalty had joined its fortunes while they were still uncertain. He also went with Titus as an adviser in the conduct of the war, excelling both in age and in experience. [j]