The Colonnade Trap and the Famine

The rebels in the temple went on openly fighting off the soldiers on the earthworks every day, and on the twenty-seventh of the same month they devised the following trick. They filled the part of the western colonnade between the beams and the ceiling beneath them with dry wood, and with bitumen and pitch besides; then they fell back, as if worn out. At this many of the rash, carried away by their impulses, pressed hard on the retreating men, set ladders against the colonnade and sprang up onto it; but the more prudent, suspicious of this senseless retreat of the Jews, stayed where they were. The colonnade, however, was soon packed with those who had climbed up, and at that moment the Jews set the whole of it on fire. As the flames shot up suddenly on every side, a terrible dismay seized the Romans who were out of danger, and helpless despair those who were trapped. Surrounded by the flames, some threw themselves backward into the city, some down among the enemy; many, hoping to save themselves, leaped down among their own men and broke their limbs. Most were overtaken by the fire before they could act, and some forestalled the fire with their own swords. The fire, spreading far, at once caught even those who were dying in other ways. Caesar was angry with the men who were perishing, since they had climbed up without orders; yet he felt pity for them. No one could get to them to help, but this at least was some comfort to the dying: to see the man for whom each was giving his life grieving for him. For he was plainly seen shouting to them, springing forward, and urging those around him to help them by any means they had. Each man carried away those cries and that concern of his like a splendid funeral honor, and died content. Some retreated onto the wall of the colonnade, which was broad, and escaped the fire; but they were surrounded by the Jews, and though they held out for a long time, wounded over and over, at last they all fell. [a]

Last of all, one young man among them, named Longus, crowned the whole tragedy; and though every one of those who died deserved to be remembered, he showed himself the bravest of all. The Jews, admiring his prowess, and in any case unable to kill him, urged him to come down to them under a pledge of safety; but his brother Cornelius, from the other side, urged him not to disgrace his own glory and the Roman army. He was persuaded by his brother, and, raising his sword where both armies could see, he killed himself. Among those trapped by the fire one Artorius saved himself by a trick. He called out in a loud voice to Lucius, one of the soldiers who shared his tent: “I leave you heir to everything I own, if you will come and catch me.” Lucius ran up readily. Artorius threw himself down on him and lived; but the man who caught him was dashed against the stone pavement by the weight and died on the spot. This disaster disheartened the Romans for the moment; but for the future it made them deaf to such appeals and more careful, and it helped them against the tricks of the Jews, by which they had suffered most because they did not know the ground or the character of the men. The colonnade burned as far as the tower of John, which he had built during his war with Simon, over the gates leading out to the Xystus; the rest of it the Jews cut away, now that those who had climbed onto it were destroyed. The next day the Romans burned the whole northern colonnade as far as the eastern one. The corner where the two met was built out over the ravine called Kidron, so that the drop there was terrifying. Such was the state of things at the temple. [e]

The number of those who perished in the city from famine was beyond counting, and their sufferings beyond telling. In every house, if the mere shadow of food appeared anywhere, there was war, and the dearest of kin came to blows, snatching from one another the wretched means of life. No one would believe that even the dying had nothing: the robbers searched people as they breathed their last, in case anyone was hiding food in the fold of his clothes and pretending to die. Gaping with hunger, they stumbled about like mad dogs and reeled along, battering at the doors like drunken men, and in their helplessness bursting into the same houses two or three times in a single hour. Need put everything between their teeth. They gathered things the filthiest of beasts would not touch and brought themselves to eat them; in the end they did not keep their hands off belts and shoes, and they stripped the leather from their shields and chewed it. Some even lived on scraps of old hay, for some gathered the stalks and sold the smallest weight of them for four Attic drachmas. But why should I speak of the famine’s shamelessness toward lifeless things? I am about to tell a deed of it such as has never been recorded among Greeks or barbarians, horrible to speak of and unbelievable to hear. For my part, so as not to seem to later generations a teller of marvels, I would gladly have passed over this calamity, if I did not have countless witnesses among my own contemporaries. Besides, I would be paying my country a cold kindness if I toned down the account of what it suffered. [g]

There was a woman named Mary, daughter of Eleazar, who lived beyond the Jordan, from the village of Bethezuba, which means House of Hyssop. She was distinguished for her family and her wealth. She had fled to Jerusalem with the rest of the multitude and was shut up there in the siege. The tyrants had plundered the rest of her property, everything she had packed up and brought into the city from Perea; and what was left of her valuables, and whatever food she managed to think of, their bodyguards carried off, bursting in every day. A terrible rage came over the poor woman, and by constantly abusing and cursing the plunderers she tried to provoke them against herself. But no one killed her, either in anger or in pity. If she found any food, she was laboring for others; and now there was no finding any anywhere. The famine was eating through her bowels and marrow, and her rage burned hotter than the famine. Taking anger and necessity as her counselors, she turned against nature itself. She seized her child, a baby still at the breast, and said: “Poor little one, in war and famine and civil strife, for whom shall I keep you? With the Romans there is slavery, even if we live to come under them; famine is outrunning slavery; and the rebels are crueler than both. Come, be food for me, an avenging fury to the rebels, and to the world a tale, the one thing still lacking to the calamities of the Jews.” As she said this she killed her son. Then she roasted him, ate half, and covered up the rest and kept it. At once the rebels were there. Catching the smell of that unholy cooking, they threatened to cut her throat on the spot if she did not show them what she had prepared. She told them she had saved a fine portion for them too, and uncovered what was left of her child. Horror and stupefaction seized them at once, and they stood rooted at the sight. She said: “This is my own child, and the deed is mine. Eat, for I have eaten. Do not be softer than a woman or more tender-hearted than a mother. But if you are so pious, and turn away from my sacrifice, then I have eaten your share, and let the rest stay for me too.” At that they went out trembling, cowards for this once, and barely willing to leave even this food to the mother. The whole city was immediately filled with the horror of it. Each man pictured the deed before his eyes and shuddered as though he had dared it himself. The starving longed for death, and counted those happy who had gone before they could hear or see such evils. [j]

News of the horror quickly reached the Romans too. Some disbelieved it, others pitied the Jews, but in most it bred a fiercer hatred of the nation. Caesar defended himself before God in this matter as well. He had offered the Jews peace, self-government and an amnesty for everything they had dared, he said; but they had chosen faction instead of concord, war instead of peace, and famine before plenty and abundance. With their own hands they had begun to burn the temple that we were preserving for them; and so they deserved even such food as this. But he would bury the abomination of eating children under the very ruins of their country, and would not leave on the face of the earth, for the sun to look upon, a city in which mothers were fed in such a way. Such food, however, was fitter for fathers than for mothers, since even after such sufferings they still stayed in arms. As he went through these things he also reflected on the desperation of the men: those who had already suffered everything that might have been expected to change their minds, if they had been spared it, would never now come to their senses. [m]