The Feigned Surrender

When the war outside let up for a little while, faction stirred up the war inside again. The day of Unleavened Bread had come, the fourteenth of the month Xanthicus, the day on which the Jews believe they were first set free from the Egyptians. Eleazar and his men opened the gates partway and let in those of the people who wished to worship inside. But John made the feast a screen for his plot. He armed the less conspicuous of his own men, most of whom were not purified, with weapons hidden under their clothes, and hurried them in to seize the temple before the others could. Once inside, they threw off their outer garments and suddenly stood there in full armor. At once there was the greatest confusion and uproar around the sanctuary. The people who had no part in the faction thought the attack was aimed at everyone without distinction; the Zealots thought it was aimed at them alone. The Zealots gave up guarding the gates any longer, leaped down from the battlements before it came to blows, and fled into the underground passages of the temple. The people, cowering by the altar and huddled around the sanctuary, were trampled and beaten without mercy with clubs and with steel. Many quiet citizens were killed by their personal enemies out of private hatred, as if they belonged to the other side; and anyone who had ever offended one of the plotters was now recognized, called a Zealot, and dragged off to be tortured. [a]

When they had done many terrible things to the innocent, they granted a truce to the guilty and let them go when they came out of the passages. They themselves now held the inner temple and all the stores in it, and from then on they defied Simon. So the faction, which had been in three parts before, came down to two.

Titus meanwhile decided to move his camp from Scopus closer to the city. Against sallies he posted as many picked horsemen and foot soldiers as he thought would be enough, and ordered the whole army to level the ground all the way to the wall. Every fence and enclosure that the inhabitants had put up around their gardens and trees was thrown down, and all the fruit trees in between were cut down. The hollows and gullies of the ground were filled, and the rocky outcrops were broken up with iron tools, until the whole place was level from Scopus to Herod’s monuments, which lie next to the pool called the Serpents’ Pool.

During these days the Jews laid the following trap for the Romans. The boldest of the rebels went out beyond the towers called the Women’s Towers, as if they had been thrown out by those who wanted peace, and they milled about and cowered together, as though they dreaded an attack by the Romans. Meanwhile others, standing at intervals along the wall and posing as the common people, shouted for peace, begged for a guarantee of their safety, and called on the Romans, promising to open the gates. As they shouted, they also pelted their own men with stones, as though driving them away from the gates. The men outside pretended to try to force their way in and to beg those inside to let them in, and again and again they would start toward the Romans and then turn back, like men in a panic. [d]

The soldiers did not doubt that the trick was real. Thinking they had the one party in their hands, ready to be punished, and hoping the other would open the city to them, they set about the business. But Titus was suspicious of this unexpected invitation. Only the day before he had invited them to terms through Josephus and had met with nothing reasonable, so now he ordered the soldiers to stay where they were. Some of those posted in front of the works, however, had already snatched up their arms and run toward the gates.

At first the men who seemed to have been thrown out fell back before them. But once the soldiers were between the towers of the gate, the Jews ran out, surrounded them, and attacked them from behind, while the crowd on the wall poured down a mass of stones and missiles of every kind, so that they killed a good many and wounded a great many more. For it was not easy to get away from the wall with those behind them pressing forward; and besides, shame at their mistake and fear of their officers urged them to persist in their blunder. So they fought with their spears for a very long time, taking many blows from the Jews, though they certainly gave no fewer, and at last they pushed back the men who had surrounded them. As they withdrew, the Jews followed them, pelting them, as far as the monuments of Helena.

After this the Jews, insolent in their good fortune and with no sense of decency, jeered at the Romans for being taken in by a trick. They brandished their shields, leaped about, and shouted for joy. The soldiers, for their part, were met with threats from their officers and with anger from Caesar himself. The Jews, he said, who had nothing but desperation for a general, did everything with forethought and care: they planned their schemes and ambushes, and fortune followed their stratagems because they obeyed orders and kept goodwill and faith with one another. But Romans, whom fortune had always served because of their discipline and their obedience to their commanders, were now failing through the opposite, and were being caught because they could not keep their hands still; and, most shameful of all, they had fought without a general in Caesar’s own presence. “The laws of the service will groan aloud, he said, and so will my father, when he hears of this blow. He has grown old in wars and never blundered like this. The laws always punish with death even those who break ranks in the smallest way, and now they have seen a whole army abandon its post. Those who acted on their own will soon learn that among Romans even victory without orders is a disgrace.”

When he had spoken so strongly to the officers, it was plain that he meant to apply the law to every one of them. The men gave up hope, expecting to die, and to die justly, at any moment. But the legions crowded around Titus and pleaded for their fellow soldiers, imploring him to forgive the rashness of a few for the sake of the good obedience of all. They would make up for the present failure, they said, by their courage in the future.

Caesar gave way, both to their pleas and to what was in his own interest; for he thought that punishment of one man should be carried out in deed, but punishment of a multitude should go no further than words. So he made peace with the soldiers, after warning them sharply to be wiser in future, and he began to consider how to pay the Jews back for their trick. [e]

In four days the ground up to the walls had been leveled. Wanting to bring the baggage and the rest of the multitude up safely, Titus stretched the strongest part of his force along the wall opposite its northern and western stretches, drawing up his line seven deep: the infantry in front, the cavalry behind, three ranks of each, with the archers forming a seventh rank between them. With the Jews’ sallies blocked by so dense a body of men, the pack animals of the three legions and the camp crowd passed by without fear.

Titus himself camped about a quarter of a mile from the wall, at its corner opposite the tower called Psephinus, where the circuit of the wall comes down from the north and bends back toward the west. The other part of the army fortified itself opposite the tower called Hippicus, likewise about a quarter of a mile from the city. The tenth legion, however, stayed where it was, on the Mount of Olives.