Slaughter and Sacrilege in the City

Simon did not put even Matthias to death without torture, though it was through him that he had got possession of the city. This Matthias was the son of Boethus, one of the high priests, and a man the people trusted and honored above most. When the people were suffering at the hands of the zealots, whom John had by then joined, he persuaded them to let Simon in to help them, though he made no terms with him beforehand and expected no harm from him. But once Simon was in and master of the city, he counted the man who had advised letting him in an enemy like the rest, as though the advice had come from mere simple-mindedness. [a]

He now had him brought in, accused of siding with the Romans, and condemned him to death without allowing him a defense, together with three of his sons; the fourth had escaped to Titus beforehand. Matthias begged to be killed before his children, asking this favor in return for having opened the city to him; Simon ordered him killed last. So he was butchered after his sons, who were slain before his eyes, and he was brought out in full view of the Romans for it. Such were the orders Simon gave Ananus son of Bagadates, the most savage of his bodyguards, mocking Matthias by asking whether the people he had chosen to go over to would help him now. Simon also forbade the bodies to be buried.

After these, a priest named Ananias son of Masbalus, a man of note, and Aristeus the secretary of the council, a native of Emmaus, were put to death, and fifteen leading men of the people with them. They kept Josephus’s father shut up under guard, and proclaimed that no one in the city was to talk with anyone else or gather together in one place, for fear of treason. Those who joined in mourning the dead they killed without any inquiry.

When Judas son of Judas, one of Simon’s officers, who had been entrusted with guarding one of the towers, saw these things, he called together the ten men under him whom he trusted most. Perhaps he acted partly out of pity for those so cruelly put to death, but more out of concern for himself. “How long are we going to hold out under these evils? What hope of rescue do we have if we stay loyal to a wicked man? Is the famine not already upon us? Are the Romans not all but inside? Has Simon not proved faithless even to his benefactors? From him we already have punishment to fear, while the Romans’ pledge is sure. Come, let us hand over the wall, and save ourselves and the city. Simon will suffer nothing terrible if, since he has given up hope for himself, he pays the penalty a little sooner.” [e]

The ten were won over by these words. Toward dawn he sent the rest of his men off in different directions, so that nothing of their plan would be discovered, and about the third hour he called to the Romans from the tower. Some of them scorned him, others did not believe him, and most held back, thinking they would shortly take the city without any risk. While Titus was coming up to the wall with heavy infantry, Simon learned of it first. He quickly seized the tower before them, arrested the men, and killed them in sight of the Romans; then he mutilated their bodies and threw them down in front of the wall.

Meanwhile Josephus, going round the city, for he never stopped appealing to the people, was struck on the head by a stone and at once fell stunned. The Jews made a sally toward where he had fallen, and he would have been dragged into the city if Caesar had not quickly sent men to cover him. While they fought, Josephus was carried off, hardly aware of what was happening. The rebels, thinking they had killed the man they most wanted dead, raised a shout of joy. The news was spread through the city, and the people who were left fell into despair, convinced that he was really gone, the man on whose account they had found the courage to desert. [f]

When Josephus’s mother heard in prison that her son was dead, she told her guards that she had believed it ever since Jotapata, for even while he lived she had no joy of him. But in private, mourning with her maidservants, she said that this was all the harvest she had of her fine children: she could not even bury the son by whom she had expected to be buried herself. The false report did not grieve her long, however, nor cheer the robbers long. Josephus quickly recovered from the blow and came forward, shouting to the rebels that before long they would pay him for his wound, and he called on the people once more to trust the Romans’ pledge. At the sight of him the people took heart, and the rebels were dismayed.

Some of the deserters, having no other way, leaped down from the wall at once; others went out with stones as if to fight, and then fled to the Romans. But a fate harder than the one inside went with them, and they found the plenty among the Romans more swiftly deadly than the famine at home. They arrived bloated from want, swollen as if with dropsy; then they stuffed their empty bodies all at once and burst, except those who knew enough to ration their appetite and add food little by little to a body that had lost the habit of it. [g]

Even those who were saved this way met another blow. One of the deserters who had gone over to the Syrians was caught picking gold coins out of the filth from his belly. As we said before, the deserters swallowed gold coins before they came out, because the rebels searched everyone; and there was a great deal of gold in the city, so much that coins once worth twenty-five Attic drachmas were now bought for twelve. When this one man’s trick was found out, a rumor filled the camps that the deserters were coming over full of gold. Then the crowd of Arabs, and the Syrians with them, cut open the suppliants and searched their bellies. I do not think any suffering that befell the Jews was more terrible than this: in a single night about two thousand were ripped open.

When Titus learned of this outrage, he came close to surrounding the guilty with his cavalry and shooting them all down with javelins. He would have done it, had not so great a number been involved; those to be punished would have been many times more than those they had killed. Instead he called together the commanders of the allied troops and of the legions, for some of his own soldiers were also accused, and told them both that he was angry. “Are some of those who serve with me doing such things for the sake of an uncertain gain, with no respect even for their own weapons, which are made of silver and gold? And are the Arabs and Syrians, in a war that is not their own, first indulging their passions as they please, and then putting their savage murders and their hatred of the Jews down to the Romans’ account? For even now some of my own soldiers share in the infamy.”

He threatened these men with death if any of them was found daring the same thing again, and he ordered the legions to search out suspects and bring them to him. But the love of money, it seems, despised every punishment. A terrible lust for gain is rooted in human beings, and no passion compares with greed. At other times these passions have limits and give way to fear; but it was God who had condemned the whole people, and who turned every way of rescue toward their destruction.

So what Caesar had forbidden under threat was dared in secret against the deserters. The barbarians would go out to meet those who were escaping before anyone else saw them, look around to make sure no Roman was watching, cut them open, and pull the foul gain out of their entrails. It was found in only a few of them; the mere hope destroyed most. This treatment drove many deserters back into the city.

John, when plundering the people no longer yielded anything, turned to sacrilege. He melted down many of the temple’s dedicated gifts, and many of the vessels needed for the services, bowls and dishes and tables; he did not keep his hands even off the wine jars sent by Augustus and his wife. The Roman emperors had always honored the temple and added to its adornment, but now a Jew pulled down even the gifts of foreigners. He told those with him that they should make free use of the sacred things on behalf of the Deity, and that those who fought for the temple should be fed from it. For this reason he emptied out the sacred wine and oil that the priests kept to pour on the burnt offerings, which were stored in the inner temple, and handed it out to the crowd; and they anointed themselves with it and drank it without a shudder. [i]

I cannot keep back what my grief bids me say. I believe that if the Romans had been slow to come against these criminals, the city would have been swallowed up by a chasm in the earth, or overwhelmed by a flood, or would have shared the thunderbolts of the land of Sodom. For it had produced a generation far more godless than those who suffered such things; it was by their madness that the whole people perished with them.

But why should I tell these disasters one by one? In those very days Manneus son of Lazarus fled to Titus and told him that through the one gate entrusted to him a hundred and fifteen thousand eight hundred and eighty corpses had been carried out, from the day the Romans pitched camp by the city, the fourteenth of the month Xanthicus, to the first day of Panemus. These were all of them the bodies of the poor. He had not been in charge of the gate himself, but he paid out the public wage for carrying the dead and so had to count them. The rest were buried by their own relatives, and burial meant carrying them out of the city and throwing them away. [k]

After him many of the leading citizens escaped, and reported that in all six hundred thousand of the poor had been thrown out through the gates; the number of the rest could not be found out. When they no longer had the strength to carry out the poor, they said, they piled the corpses up in the largest houses and shut them in. A measure of wheat had sold for a talent. Later, when the city had been walled in and it was no longer possible even to gather greens, some were driven to such need that they searched the sewers and old cattle dung and ate the refuse they found in them; what once they could not bear even to look at had become their food.

When the Romans heard these things, they pitied them. The rebels saw them and did not repent, but let the same distress come upon themselves; for they had been blinded by the fate that was already upon the city and upon them.