The Captives and the Dead

When Titus came inside the city, he marveled at its strongholds, and above all at the towers the tyrants had abandoned in their madness. He saw how solid and tall they were, how large each stone, how exactly they were joined, how broad and how high they stood, and he said, “We have fought with God on our side. It was God who brought the Jews down from these strongholds. For what could human hands or machines do against these towers?” He said much more of this kind to his friends at the time, and he set free the prisoners of the tyrants who were found in the forts. Later, when he razed the rest of the city and pulled down its walls, he left these towers standing as a monument to his own fortune, which had fought on his side and let him master what could not be taken. [a]

The soldiers were now weary of killing, and yet a great multitude of survivors was still coming to light. So Caesar ordered them to kill only those who were armed and resisted, and to take the rest alive. But along with those they had been ordered to kill, the soldiers killed the old and the feeble. The able-bodied and useful they drove into the temple and shut up inside the walls of the Court of the Women. Caesar put one of his freedmen in charge of them as guard, and Fronto, one of his friends, to decide the fate each one deserved. Fronto put to death all the rebels and robbers, who informed on one another. He picked out the tallest and handsomest of the young men and kept them for the triumph. Of the rest, those over seventeen years old he sent in chains to the works in Egypt, and a great many Titus gave away as presents to the provinces, to be destroyed in their theaters by the sword and by wild beasts. Those under seventeen were sold as slaves. During the days when Fronto was sorting them, 11,000 of them died of want. Some got no food because their guards hated them; others would not take it when it was given. And for so great a multitude there was not even enough grain. [b]

The number of all the prisoners taken in the whole war came to 97,000, and of those who perished during the whole siege, 1,100,000. Most of these were Jews by race but not natives of the city. They had come together from the whole country for the feast of Unleavened Bread and were suddenly trapped by the war, so that first the overcrowding brought on them a deadly plague, and afterward famine, which killed even faster. That the city could hold so many is clear from the count taken under Cestius. He wished to show Nero, who looked down on the nation, how flourishing the city was, and he asked the high priests whether it might somehow be possible to count the population. When the feast called Passover came, they counted the victims. At this feast they sacrifice from the ninth hour to the eleventh, and a company of not fewer than ten men gathers around each sacrifice, since it is not lawful to feast alone, and many gather twenty together. They counted 255,600 victims. Allowing ten diners to each, that makes 2,700,000 people, all of them pure and holy. For neither lepers, nor men with a discharge, nor women in their monthly period, nor others defiled in any way may share in this sacrifice, nor may the foreigners who come here to worship. [c]

A great multitude of these gathers from abroad. But at this time the whole nation had been shut up by fate as in a prison, and the war closed in on a city packed with people. So the number of those who perished exceeds every destruction ever brought by man or by God. Of those in the open, the Romans killed some and took others captive; those in the tunnels they hunted down, breaking up the ground and killing everyone they came upon. There too more than 2,000 were found dead, some by their own hands, some by one another’s, but most destroyed by the famine. A dreadful stench of bodies met those who broke in, so that many drew back at once; but others, out of greed, went on in, treading over the heaped corpses. For many treasures were found in the passages, and gain made every way seem lawful. Many prisoners of the tyrants were brought up as well, for not even at the very end did the tyrants give up their cruelty. [f]

But God punished them both as they deserved. John, starving with his brothers in the tunnels, begged the Romans for the right hand he had so often scornfully refused. Simon, after a long struggle against necessity, gave himself up, as I shall tell further on. Simon was kept to be slaughtered at the triumph, and John was kept in chains for life. And the Romans burned the outlying parts of the town and razed its walls.