The Wall Around the City

Titus now took counsel with his commanders. The more hot-blooded of them thought he should bring up his whole force and try to take the wall by storm. Until now, they said, only a part of the army had come to grips with the Jews; if the whole of it came on at once, the Jews would not withstand even the onset, but would be buried under the missiles. Of the more cautious, some advised building the earthworks again; others advised leaving the earthworks alone and simply sitting down before the city, guarding against the Jews’ coming out and the carrying in of provisions, and so leaving the city to the famine without coming to blows with the enemy at all. There was no fighting despair, they said, in men whose prayer was to fall by the sword, and for whom a harsher suffering than that was in store even without it. [a]

Titus himself did not think it fitting for so great an army to sit wholly idle, nor yet worth fighting men who would destroy one another anyway. He pointed out that building earthworks was hard for lack of timber, and that guarding the ways out was harder still. To ring the city with the army was not easy, because of its size and the difficulty of the ground, and it was dangerous besides, because of the sallies the Jews might make. Even if the known ways out were guarded, the Jews would contrive hidden ones, both because they were driven to it and because they knew the ground; and if any provisions were smuggled in, the siege would drag on longer. He also admitted he was afraid that the length of time would lessen the glory of his success. Time, he said, can accomplish anything, but it is speed that wins renown.

If he wanted speed and safety together, then, he must build a wall around the whole city. Only so could every way out be stopped up, and then the Jews would either despair of rescue altogether and hand over the city, or be easily overcome as the famine wore them down. Nor would he sit still in the meantime: he would turn to the earthworks again once those who resisted them had grown weaker. And if anyone thought the work too great and too hard to finish, he should consider that it did not befit Romans to undertake anything small, and that no one can easily achieve anything great without toil.

These arguments won over the commanders, and Titus ordered the forces to be divided up for the work. A kind of superhuman eagerness came over the soldiers. Once the circuit had been parceled out among them, the rivalry was not only legion against legion but among the units within each legion. The soldier was eager to please his decurion, the decurion his centurion, the centurion his tribune; the tribunes’ ambition reached up to the generals, and Caesar himself judged the contest among the generals, for he went round and inspected the work many times every day. [b]

Titus began the wall at the Camp of the Assyrians, where his own camp stood, and carried it down to the lower New City, and from there across the Kidron to the Mount of Olives. Then, bending south, it took in the mountain as far as the rock called Peristereon, together with the hill next to it, which overhangs the ravine at Siloam. From there it turned west and went down into the Valley of the Spring. Beyond that it climbed again past the tomb of Ananus the high priest, took in the hill where Pompey had camped, and turned toward the north. It ran on as far as a village called the House of Chickpeas, and after that it enclosed Herod’s tomb and joined Titus’s own camp on the east, where it had begun.

The wall was nearly five miles long, and on its outside thirteen forts were built, whose circuits together came to about a mile and a quarter. The whole was built in three days, so that a work worth months was done with a speed past belief. Having closed the city in with the wall and put garrisons in the forts, Titus went round in person and inspected the first watch of the night. The second he entrusted to Alexander; the third fell by lot to the commanders of the legions. The guards drew lots for their turns of sleep, and all night long they went round the intervals between the forts.

With the ways out, every hope of rescue was cut off from the Jews. The famine deepened and devoured the people house by house and family by family. The upper rooms were full of women and babies worn out by hunger, and the lanes were full of the corpses of old men. Children and young men, swollen with hunger, wandered about the marketplaces like ghosts and fell wherever their suffering overtook them. The sick had no strength to bury their kin, and those still sound shrank from it, both because of the number of the dead and because they did not know how soon their own turn would come. Many fell dead on top of those they were burying, and many went out to the tombs before their fated hour had come. There was no lamenting in these disasters and no wailing: the famine overpowered every feeling. With dry eyes and grinning mouths, those slow in dying gazed at those who had gone to their rest before them. A deep silence held the city, and a night full of death.

Yet the robbers were worse than all this. They broke into the houses, now no more than tombs, and plundered the dead; they tore the coverings off the bodies and went out laughing. They tried the points of their swords on the corpses, and to test their steel they ran through some who had been thrown down still alive. Those who begged them for the loan of a hand and a sword to finish them they scornfully left to the famine. Every one of the dying breathed his last with his eyes fixed on the temple, leaving the rebels alive behind him. At first the rebels ordered the dead to be buried at the cost of the public treasury, since they could not bear the stench. Afterward, when they could not keep up, they threw them from the walls into the ravines.

As Titus went his rounds and saw the ravines full of the dead, and the thick putrid matter oozing from the rotting bodies, he groaned; and lifting up his hands, he called God to witness that this was not his doing. [f]

So matters stood in the city. The Romans, meanwhile, were in good spirits. None of the rebels sallied out any longer, for despondency and famine had now taken hold of them too, while the Romans had plenty of grain and other supplies from Syria and the neighboring provinces. Many of them would stand near the wall and show off great quantities of food, inflaming the enemy’s hunger with their own abundance. But when the rebels still would not give way, Titus, pitying what was left of the people and eager to snatch at least the survivors from ruin, began building earthworks again, though timber was hard to come by. All the trees around the city had been cut down for the earlier works, and the soldiers had to carry in more from about eleven miles away. They raised earthworks in four places, much larger than before, but only against the Antonia. Caesar went round the legions, hurrying the work on and showing the robbers that they were in his hands.

But these men alone had lost all remorse for their crimes. As though they had separated their souls from their bodies, they used both as if they belonged to someone else. No gentle feeling touched their souls and no pain touched their bodies: they went on tearing at the people, dead as they were, like dogs, and filling the prisons with the sick.