Fire in the Lower City

The rebels rushed on the royal palace, where many people had stored their possessions because it was so strong. They drove the Romans away from it, slaughtered all the people who had gathered there, about 8,400 of them, and looted their property. They also took two Romans alive, one a horseman and the other a foot soldier. The foot soldier they butchered at once and dragged around the city, as though taking vengeance on all the Romans in that one body. The horseman said he had something to suggest to them that would help them to safety, and he was brought up to Simon. But when he had nothing to say there, he was handed over to Ardalas, one of the commanders, to be punished. Ardalas tied his hands behind him, bound a band over his eyes, and led him out in full view of the Romans as if to cut off his head. But while the Jew was drawing his sword, the man got away first and escaped to the Romans. Titus could not bring himself to put to death a man who had escaped from the enemy. But he judged him unworthy to be a Roman soldier, because he had been taken alive, and so he took away his arms and expelled him from the legion—to a man with any sense of shame, a punishment worse than death. [a]

The next day the Romans drove the robbers out of the lower city and burned everything as far as Siloam. They were glad to see the town consumed, but they missed the plunder, because the rebels had emptied everything out before falling back into the upper city. The rebels felt no remorse at all for the evil they had done, but boasted as if of good deeds. Looking at the burning city, they said with cheerful faces that they awaited the end gladly: the people were murdered, the sanctuary burned, the town in flames, and they were leaving nothing for the enemy. Yet even at the last Josephus did not tire of pleading with them for what was left of the city. He said much about their cruelty and their impiety, and gave much advice for their safety, but he got nothing for it except mockery. [b]

They could not bring themselves to surrender, because of their oath, and they were no longer able to fight the Romans on equal terms, shut in as they were as in a prison. And the habit of killing kept their right hands moving. So they scattered among the ruins in front of the city and lay in ambush for anyone setting out to desert. Many were caught, and the rebels cut all their throats—for want of food left them too weak even to run—and threw their bodies to the dogs. Yet every other kind of death seemed lighter than famine, so that even though people had given up hope of mercy from the Romans, they still fled to them, and walked of their own accord into the hands of the murderous rebels. There was not a bare spot anywhere in the city: every place held a body, a victim of famine or of faction.

The last hope that kept the tyrants and their gang of robbers warm lay in the underground passages. If they could escape into them, they expected that no search would be made; and after the city had been completely taken and the Romans had marched away, they meant to come out and slip off. But this was only a dream. They were not going to hide from God or from the Romans. For the time being, though, trusting in their underground hiding places, they set more fires than the Romans did. Those who fled from the burning buildings into the trenches they killed without restraint and stripped, and if they found food on anyone, they snatched it and gulped it down, soaked in blood as it was. By now they were even fighting one another over the plunder. And I believe that if the city’s capture had not come first, they would in the excess of their cruelty have tasted even the corpses. [d]