The Sanctuary Burns

By now two of the legions had completed their earthworks, on the eighth of the month Lous, and Titus ordered the battering rams brought up against the western hall of the outer temple. Before they came, the strongest of all the siege engines had pounded the wall for six days without stopping and achieved nothing: the size of the stones and the closeness of their fitting were too much for it, as for the other rams. Others undermined the foundations of the northern gate and, after great toil, rolled out the outer stones; but the gate was held up by the inner ones and stood firm. At last, giving up all attempts with engines and crowbars, they set ladders against the colonnades. The Jews were too late to prevent this, but when the Romans had climbed up they fell on them and fought. Some they pushed back and hurled down headlong; others they met and killed. Many, as they stepped off the ladders, they cut down with their swords before they could cover themselves with their shields; and some ladders, full of armed men, they tipped sideways from above and flung down. The slaughter on their own side was not small either. Those who had carried up the standards fought around them, thinking it a terrible thing and a disgrace if they were seized. But in the end the Jews captured the standards too and destroyed the men who had climbed up, and the rest, shaken by the fate of the fallen, withdrew. None of the Romans died without having done something worth doing. Among the rebels, those who had fought bravely in the earlier battles did so again, and so did Eleazar, nephew of the tyrant Simon. When Titus saw that his sparing of a foreign temple was bringing injury and death on his soldiers, he ordered the gates set on fire. [a]

Meanwhile Ananus of Emmaus, the most bloodthirsty of Simon’s bodyguards, and Archelaus son of Magaddatus deserted to Titus, hoping to be pardoned because they were leaving the Jews while the Jews had the upper hand. Titus threw this too in their faces as a piece of villainy; and having heard of their other cruelties toward their own people, he was on the point of having both put to death. They had been driven by necessity, he said, and had not come of their own choice; and men who leaped out of their country when it was already burning because of them did not deserve to be saved. Still, his pledged word overcame his anger, and he let the men go, though he did not rank them with the others. By now the soldiers were putting fire to the gates. The silver on them melted all around and quickly passed the flame to the woodwork, and from there it swept out all at once and caught the colonnades. When the Jews saw the fire all around them, their spirits failed along with their bodies. In their dismay no one moved to resist it or to put it out; they stood numb and looked on. Yet though they despaired over what was being consumed, they did not learn sense for what remained; as if the sanctuary itself were already burning, they whetted their rage against the Romans. All that day and the following night the fire prevailed, for the soldiers could set the colonnades alight only piece by piece, not on every side at once. [e]

The next day Titus ordered part of his army to put out the fire and to make a road by the gates so that the legions could climb up more easily, while he himself called his commanders together. Six of the highest assembled: Tiberius Alexander, prefect of all the forces; Sextus Cerealis, commander of the fifth legion; Larcius Lepidus, of the tenth; Titus Phrygius, of the fifteenth; with them Fronto Haterius, camp prefect of the two legions from Alexandria; and Marcus Antonius Julianus, procurator of Judea. When the rest of the procurators and tribunes had gathered after them, Titus put before them the question of the sanctuary. Some thought it best to apply the law of war: the Jews would never stop rebelling while the sanctuary stood, since it drew them together from everywhere. Others advised that if the Jews abandoned it and no one kept his weapons in it, he should save it; but if they climbed onto it and fought, he should burn it, for then it would be a fortress and no longer a sanctuary, and from then on the impiety would belong to those who had forced it, not to the Romans. But Titus declared that even if the Jews climbed onto it and fought from there, he would not take vengeance on lifeless things instead of men, nor would he ever burn down so great a work: the loss would be the Romans’ own, just as it would be an ornament of their empire if it stood. Fronto, Alexander and Cerealis now took courage and came over to his view. Then he dismissed the council. He ordered the commanders to rest the other forces, so that he might have them fresher for the battle, and ordered the picked men from the cohorts to clear a way through the ruins and put out the fire. [f]

That day weariness and dismay held the Jews back from any attack. But the next day they gathered their strength, took courage again, and about the second hour sallied out through the eastern gate against the guards of the outer temple. The guards met their charge stoutly and, locking their shields in front of them like a wall, closed up their ranks; but it was plain they could not hold together for long, overwhelmed by the numbers and the fury of those charging out. Caesar, who was watching from Antonia, got ahead of the turn of the battle and came to their help with the picked horsemen. The Jews could not stand the charge; their foremost fell, and most of the rest turned and fled. Whenever the Romans fell back, the Jews turned and pressed on them; whenever the Romans wheeled round, they fled again; until about the fifth hour of the day they were overpowered and shut up in the inner temple. [j]

Titus withdrew to Antonia, determined to attack at dawn the next day with his whole force and take the sanctuary on every side. But God had long since condemned it to the fire; and now, in the turning of the ages, the fated day had come, the tenth of the month Lous, the very day on which it had been burned before by the king of Babylon. The flames, however, took their start and their cause from the Jews themselves. When Titus withdrew, the rebels rested a little and then attacked the Romans again, and the guards of the sanctuary clashed with the men putting out the fire in the inner temple. These routed the Jews and pursued them as far as the sanctuary. Then one of the soldiers, without waiting for orders and without any dread of so great a deed, driven by some more than human impulse, snatched something from the burning material and, lifted up by a fellow soldier, thrust the fire through a golden window that gave entry, on the north side, to the chambers built around the sanctuary. As the flame rose, a cry went up from the Jews as great as the disaster, and they ran together to save it, no longer sparing their lives or holding back their strength, now that the thing they had been guarding was perishing. [k]

Someone ran and told Titus. He happened to be resting in his tent after the battle, and he jumped up just as he was and ran to the sanctuary to stop the fire. All his commanders followed behind him, and after them, in great excitement, the legions; there was shouting and uproar, as must happen when so great a force moves in disorder. Caesar, both by his voice and by waving his right hand, signaled to the men fighting to put out the fire. But they did not hear him shouting, their ears already filled with a louder din, and they paid no heed to the signals of his hand, some distracted by the fighting, others by rage. As the legions poured in, neither persuasion nor threat could check their rush; fury was general of them all. Crowding around the entrances, many were trampled by one another; many fell among the ruins of the colonnades, still hot and smoldering, and shared the fate of the defeated. When they came near the sanctuary they pretended not even to hear Caesar’s orders, and called on the men in front of them to throw in fire. The rebels were by now helpless to resist; there was slaughter and flight everywhere. Most of the dead were common people, weak and unarmed, butchered wherever each was caught. Around the altar the dead were piled in heaps, while down the steps of the sanctuary ran a stream of blood, and the bodies of those killed above slid down. [m]

Since Caesar could not restrain the frenzied rush of the soldiers and the fire was gaining, he went inside with his commanders and looked at the holy place of the sanctuary and what was in it. He found it far beyond the reports that circulated among foreigners, and no less than our own boasts and the glory it had among us. The flames had not yet reached the inside anywhere but were still feeding on the chambers around the sanctuary; and believing, as was true, that the building could still be saved, he rushed out. He himself tried to persuade the soldiers to put out the fire, and he ordered Liberalius, a centurion of the spearmen of his guard, to beat any who disobeyed with clubs and so keep them back. But their rage, their hatred of the Jews and a fiercer lust for battle overcame both their respect for Caesar and their fear of the man restraining them. Most of them were driven on by hope of plunder, believing everything inside was full of money and seeing that everything around them was made of gold. Then one of those who had gone inside got ahead of Caesar, as he rushed out to check the soldiers, and threw fire into the hinges of the door in the dark. Suddenly the flame showed from within; the commanders withdrew with Caesar, and no one any longer stopped those outside from setting it alight. So the sanctuary was burned, against Caesar’s will. [o]

One might well lament the destruction of a work more marvelous than any we have seen or heard of, for its structure and its size, the costliness of every detail, and the glory of its holy places. Yet one may find the greatest comfort in fate, which no living thing can escape, and no work or place either. And one may marvel at the exactness of its cycle: it kept, as I said, the very month and day on which the sanctuary had been burned before by the Babylonians. From its first foundation, laid by King Solomon, to its present destruction, which came in the second year of Vespasian’s reign, the years add up to 1,130, with seven months and fifteen days; and from the second building, which Haggai made in the second year of Cyrus’s reign, to its capture under Vespasian, 639 years and forty-five days. [p]