The Jewish Revolt under Trajan

The teaching and the Church of our Savior flourished day by day and went on to greater growth, while the misfortune of the Jews reached its height in one disaster after another. As the emperor was entering his eighteenth year, another uprising of the Jews broke out and destroyed a vast number of them. [a] In Alexandria and the rest of Egypt, and in Cyrene as well, as though fanned into flame by some terrible spirit of faction, they rushed into open faction against the Greeks who lived among them. When they had swelled the faction to a great size, in the following year, when Lupus was governor of all Egypt, they joined in a war of no small size. [b]

In the first encounter they happened to get the better of the Greeks. The Greeks fled to Alexandria, where they seized the Jews in the city and killed them. The Jews of Cyrene, cut off from their help, went on plundering the land of Egypt and ravaging its districts under their leader Lucuas. Against them the emperor sent Marcius Turbo with land and naval forces, and with cavalry as well. [c] Turbo carried on the war against them for no short time and in many battles, and he killed many tens of thousands of Jews, not only those from Cyrene but also those from Egypt who had joined forces with Lucuas, their king. [d] The emperor suspected that the Jews in Mesopotamia too would attack the people there, and he ordered Lusius Quietus to clear them out of the province. Quietus drew up his army against them and slaughtered a vast number of those who lived there, and for this success the emperor appointed him governor of Judea. The Greek historians who have written about those times record these same events in these very words. [e]