On the Destruction of Jerusalem 5.20–5.23

So the son of King Antiochus of Commagene gave way, recognizing that the carefully weighed moderation of the Roman army was a matter not of fear but of caution, so that they attacked the wall with earthworks and sheds, rams too and other machines. Earthworks were built, the work divided among the units; four principal ones rose up, of which one, opposite the fortress named Antonia, had been carried through the middle of the pool they called Struthion. Another earthwork, thirty cubits high, the fifth legion had made near the tomb of John. Against these John, the leader of the seditions, dug a mine and undermined the Roman works. The Romans did not know what the Jews had contrived in the hidden mine; because they had supported the upper parts of the mines on props of timber placed beneath them, the whole fraud lay hidden. So when the opportunity seemed right, they set fire to it; the fire, fed by sulphur and pitch with which the timber that propped the mine had been smeared, easily consumed all the wood, and the collapse of what was above followed. So the Roman works suddenly fell with a tremendous noise. Everything was filled with dust and smoke, which had brought on great darkness, and the hidden cause had brought on greater terror. Then, when the fire, having consumed the other fuel by which it was at first covered, afterward broke out freely, it betrayed the trick; and for the Romans the fear of danger was indeed lessened for the moment, but a heavy weariness at their labor emptied followed; at the same time no small shame tormented them because the Jews were jeering, and for the future the hope of preparing an assault grew cold. But in another part, two days later, when the wall was already being shaken by the ram, Tephthaeus of Galilee, Megassarus, and Abdinadabus, and Aras snatched up torches and leapt out against the siege engines at the wall. Nothing more daring than these men, nothing more terrible, came out of the city against the enemy in that war. For rushing into the middle of the enemy they did not tremble, they did not draw back, but as though lingering in the company of their friends, they did not think they should return, although javelins, arrows and spears were hurled at them from all sides, before they had set fire to the instruments of the siege engines. There was a great rush of the Roman army to put out the fire, and the Jews too shouted and strove to put obstacles in the way, so that the Romans could not be helped. The Romans hastened to draw the rams away from the flames; the Jews kept scattering fires. Hence, with everything that could burn caught, the flames would have surrounded the Romans had they not taken counsel in time. For the Jews pressed fiercely, and the very fact that their attempts had not been in vain in that part fed their daring with success. Indeed, no longer content with the wall defenses, they went farther and attacked the very guards of the Romans, and had advanced as far as the fort where the Romans were stationed, to overthrow it. And had not the glory of the Roman name and the ancient discipline of soldiering, which by fear of severer punishment forbade the deserting of such posts, resisted those raging men, the stormers of cities would themselves have yielded their own fortifications. So the appearance of the war and the practice of the siege were reversed: the Romans defended themselves with catapults and swifter kinds of missiles, to drive back the Jews, by the same kind by which they had before been resisted. Meanwhile Titus arrived, roused by the clamor and summoned to remedy it; at once strength was added to the Romans by Caesar's presence, and shame fed their daring. Titus cried out that it would be a grave reproach to the Roman name if, the tables turned, they lost their own walls, they for whom the enemy's walls to be torn down had run out; the Jews, distrusting their fortifications, relied on rashness alone; if only the Romans stood firm, victory would not fail. So by encouraging as well as fighting Titus steadied his men and turned back the Jews, who were not only ready for death in spirit but bore down with the very effort of their bodies to move the Romans from their ground. Nor was Caesar's danger small amid the general confusion, when ally could not be told from enemy; yet Titus moved about in the midst, daring in youth and keener to fight through desire for glory, setting the care of his safety, so that victory might be completed more quickly, after the triumph.

When the enemy had been driven back, however, the counsel was divided: some thought the earthworks should be rebuilt and the wall engines repaired; others suggested that the dangers of the siege should be given up, that material for repairing was lacking, that the danger was shared with many; they judged it more advisable to shut the city in with a wall, so that famine would finish them, once the supplies of food had been cut off. This opinion prevailed: that they should be shut in, so that they would have no free sallies, and would be worn down the more both by despair of flight and by lack of food. So, with portions divided among the units, a wall quickly rose, by which the city was enclosed along its whole circuit. Caesar distributed duties to his men, so that they would not neglect their turns of guard even at night. The first watch he himself took charge of, the duty of going round each line of guards; the second watch he assigned to Alexander; then in order to the tribunes, as each one's skill was known, the turns were entrusted. Along the wall forts were set at intervals, in which a band of soldiers stood guard; the watchmen drew lots fairly among themselves for sleep and times of watch. At every moment they went around the wall, each over the stretch assigned to his duty, from fort to fort; the night was kept busy in order and in turns of duty. The hope of the Jews was cut off on every side; famine had poured itself in on those shut in and had sunk into the very marrow of the people. Everything resounded with the groans of those lamenting the torments of a pitiable death. Everything was full of half-dead bodies and corpses; if you waited a little, those you had found alive died within a moment. Even those who still breathed, wasted by emaciation, bore the image of death. Exhausted by hunger and livid with decay, they could not easily even raise their eyes, because their substance, consumed by fasting, gave no vigor of natural movement. Only the figure of a man remained; the use had perished. You would have seen images; you would have looked in vain for functions. Dry skin clung to dry bones. If a slight movement betrayed a living man, the stench refuted it: thin limbs and a color so black that you would think it a shadow. Nor did the wretched have strength for the duties of burial, since all were first exhausted and soon about to die. And if a fresher bit of food gave anyone some strength, the heap of corpses had taken away hope and struck him with impossibility. Many even died while burying their own, and by their own death left unfinished the duties of the last office. They fell on the dead whom they had taken up to bury, so that the one who had come to lighten the burden himself added to the burden, needing the same ministry that he was bringing to another. Nor was there any room for grief in the common calamity of all, except that the authors of so great a misery survived; nor time for complaint, even with voices now free, had they been able to speak. For what could the dying still fear for themselves? Yet with senses already mute they looked to the temple, as though vengeance for so dreadful an end were being demanded from there. The tears of the last duties had dried up, because the force of evil had shut off all feeling. The mind had grown stiff, every sense was stuck fast in those enduring more than can be wept. There was no more earth for graves, every place within the city that could give the use of a tomb having been dug up. Some tried to go out in the silence of the night between the two walls, the new and the old of the city; though dangerous, pious thefts persuaded them. So instead of one, more lay unburied, and they were cheated of the very office of honor they had longed to bring to one; and even where the enemy was absent, famine did its work. The burier often died before the one to be buried, and, suddenly lifeless, was shut in the tomb he had prepared for another; and when he fell as he dug, he claimed the right to it as if by a kind of zeal for his own work. And where earth was lacking, planks were fastened together so that the bodies of the dead might be shut in coffins. Many prepared these for themselves with their own hands, lest such a ministry fail them; and they often laid themselves in them of their own accord, fearing that death would forestall them and there would be no one to bury them. All was silent with fear; starvation had taken away voice; the city was full of death, and there was no wailing at the funeral of a whole city; and though the sense of grief had perished, the injury did not cease. Even in such great evils there were not lacking men worse than all, violators even of tombs. What shall I say, that they did not shudder when they mocked the dead and tested the edge of their swords on the corpses of the dead? Some even tested on the bodies of the still living whether their weapons were sharp; and yet this service was refused to many who begged for it, so that famine might feed on the wretched for greater torments. Yet vengeance did not fail the dying: for what they could not do alive, the dead avenged themselves, creating the stench as their avenger, by which they took vengeance on the robbers. Those men, raging grievously and seeking a remedy, put on a certain appearance of piety, even those who were robbing, so as to order them to be buried at the expense of the public treasury. But when that could not keep pace, they threw the remains of the dead from the wall into the deep ravines. So Titus, seeing the steep hollows full of corpses and the putrid matter from the torn entrails floating on top, groaned deeply and, raising his hands to heaven, called to witness that this was by no means to be ascribed to him, who had wished to grant pardon if surrender went forward; he had waited for them to ask for peace; he was ready to keep them unharmed if they had laid down the war. So he ordered the earthworks to be thrown up again, even though the woods were no longer near, because all the forest groves near the city had been cut down. The soldiers carried the material, consoling their labor with the hope of victory. Yet the leaders of the sedition were not broken in spirit. Simon raged, and, not sated with the deaths of so many, did not yield; and because enemies had begun to run short, he turned on his allies.

In the end he did not even spare Matthias, on whose authority he had been received into the city, but tortured and killed him, a man convicted before him of no crime, but accused of treason and suspected for counsel which he had earnestly and without any guile believed should be urged, as to a friend, for the good of the people. Simon kept this deeply impressed for some time, and no longer trusted him as a friend, but nursed his indignation, concealing his opinion. So, having had him accused before him of agreeing and colluding with the Romans, he ordered him to be seized with his sons. He was summoned, and no opportunity of defense was given: he was sentenced to punishment before any examination, nor were his offspring spared; they were joined to the penalty. He asked not for the enjoyment of life but for speed of death, the order of nature: that he should be killed first, so that he would not watch the murders of his sons nor survive the funerals of his children, he who was himself about to become a funeral. He did not obtain what piety itself would choose even if he had not asked. He asked that this be given him in return for the service of having opened the city to him: guilty indeed toward his homeland, but Simon's benefactor. He might owe this punishment to the citizens, but Simon owed him gratitude. The crueler, then, he who neither spared a friend nor remitted the penalty for the patron of his reception. The father was led to punishment with three sons; for the fourth had escaped by flight. He was set in sight of the Roman army by way of insult, so that those to whom he had wished to go out might see his punishment: “So let your friends free you, if they can.” His sons were led out too, and he was not permitted to give his children last kisses nor to receive his sons in a final embrace; yet he was not cheated of the freedom of a father's voice, and he addressed his sons with a pitiable speech: “It was I, my sons, who brought the enemy in upon you; I who called in the executioners, when I asked Simon to enter the city. That day was the cause of this death for us, the cause of this murderous spectacle. I deserved it, I confess, nor do I excuse the fault: while I was eager to restrain one, I summoned a worse. Simon was sought for help, and was turned to the murder of his homeland; he turned earnest counsels into a crime. We were guilty toward our homeland, we who sought a defender. And rightly do we pay the penalty for imprudence, but not for treachery. Simon himself acquits us while he kills us, he who declares that it was not given him by me as a gift but asked for in view of the homeland, that he should come as soon as possible to help against John's savagery and bring in the Idumaeans. We thought that, with the two contending against each other, the people would be free. Who would believe me that I did not bring this to you out of zeal for you, but judged it more bearable than evils, unless you were killing me? But why do I speak so, as if excusing a crime? I could certainly have done nothing graver by my counsel than to set you on our necks. But in that I was guilty toward the homeland, not toward you. I owed death to the citizens, but you owed me gratitude. I owed the homeland the penalty of treason for having brought you in. When did I begin to be a traitor to you? If I had thought I should flee, I would have looked to myself; I would not have violated the bond of my homeland. For who does not flee an enemy, and an enemy within? But we thought you a citizen and found you an enemy. Sought for help, what did you repay? What did you promise beforehand, and to what did you turn afterward? You had come in to drive out an enemy, not to play the enemy; to restrain his fierce attack, not to provoke war; to prevent the murders of citizens, not to add to them yourself; to drive back robbery, not to rob yourself, but to come to the help of an innocent people. Why have you turned your arms against it? Before, people were attacked by robbery; you brought war. Before, fewer were dragged to death; you made a slaughter of peoples. Who is the traitor of the homeland, who has helped Roman arms more, than the one who destroyed the champions of the homeland? Than the one who took away the defense of so many citizens? Than the one who turned the sword from the enemy against allies? The enemy outside the walls offered peace; you fought inside the walls. He wished to raise the siege; you hastened the storming. He forbade the burning of our city; you hurled flames on the very roofs of the temple. He gave truces out of regard for our sacred rites; you, on the very days of the holy rites, quenched the altars of God with the final destruction of the city, even with the blood of priests. He besieged the walls, you the temple. I will heap up my own crimes: I laid hands on my homeland, I armed your fury, I set the beginning of all this through a kind of senile madness. I acknowledge the imprudence of a foolish age. Let us lighten the shame by confession, since we cannot shed the sin by denial. We two above the rest hastened the destruction of the homeland: I by an error of counsel, you by a purpose of parricide. So I pay you, my homeland, the penalties due; and for this very thing I give thanks to Simon, that I shall not survive your ashes. And would that I were not surviving my children! But, to the bitterness of your crime, Simon, I stand by as a spectator of my sons' murder. I deserved it, I confess, because I could not bear to see John painted, and chose you armed. O headlong old age! We feared an image; we sought a tyrant. I was your surety, I your advocate; I carried the embassy. I begged you as master; I brought in a murderer. Let us look, then, at what we have done: John's wax terrified us, Simon's robberies delighted us. So let the funeral procession be hastened: let the executioner come, let him cut down the sons before their father's face, and the father on the corpses of his sons. Let me, a pitiable old man, take the executioner's stroke over the bodies of my children as he swings the axe. Than this spectacle nothing is more deadly, except the one who orders it. Cruel, wicked man, I do what you command; I will do it, but unwillingly. Yet I have a consolation in so great a calamity. I suffer whatever is most wretched since you have ordered it; whatever is most monstrous I undergo gladly, with you as judge. You have filled up the measure of the most savage crimes: let it at least be allowed to address my children, to say a last farewell to my dear ones. Let there be a last place for kisses, which we share even with wild beasts. Let the pitiable embrace of nature not be forbidden, which chance can grant even to the dead. What you have commanded for punishment, then, let it serve me for piety. I will fall upon my dead and cover them, still unburied, as if with a sod of my own body, so that birds may not tear them nor beasts devour them. I will lick with a father's tongue the blood of my children and wash away my own, so that beasts may not lick it; and perhaps piety and the pity of nature itself will add this, that dying I may clasp my children in the tightest embrace, so that you cannot separate us when you wish. Certainly, if you separate our bodies, you will not separate our souls. But we have taken enough provision of tears for the journey. Go before, my sons, and prepare the way for your father who will follow. If I can catch up, I will go with you, and there old age will be a hindrance, so that I shall be less able to keep up with you, living youths. Go ahead to the lodging, so that you may receive your weary father for a long stay. I wished indeed to go first myself, and asked, but did not obtain it; yet because you are innocent, better lodgings will be given you than if I, the one who summoned Simon, had gone before. That embassy weighs on me, though entrusted to me by the citizens, at the people's request, suspect as it was. So go before, my sons, treading the upward road with cleaner step. The sons of the Maccabean mother too went before her: but they to reward, you to punishment. Yet that devout mother watched her sons dying and, rolling herself in the blood of her own, saw the brothers embracing one another in the bond of nature; and she rejoiced in her triumph and could complain of the tyrant. The merits of the sufferers differ indeed, but the savagery of each who commanded is the same. Antiochus devised this with Persian savagery, for among them are the inventions of new punishments; you have carried it out. Yet he kept the mother for last to persuade her to the king's will; you have ordered the father kept to torture him with a father's grief. Take comfort, my dearest sons: we suffer what the martyrs suffered. Simon has decreed what a barbarian persecutor invented, what a tyrant commanded. Let us set out, then, willingly, and flee the assembly of robbers. Indeed, when we have departed to that everlasting home, if any come to us who ask what that once people of God is doing, what shall we answer them? Especially if Jonathan, unblemished in age, meets you, being younger, and Saul meets me, being a sinner. What, I say, shall we say, except that that people of Judah, the newly beloved, from whom the sea fled, for whom the sun stood still, before whom the Jordan gave way; that people, I say, for whom the deep became a path, the air fruitful, the earth heavenly, which did not, like this land of yours, put on the appearance of corruption but took on the grace of resurrection, now serves the Idumaeans and is subject to Simon, the chief of robbers, and has neither secure servitude nor danger with liberty? What do we think they will answer to this, who chose to perish in war rather than outlive the liberty of their homeland? What will Mattathias, the founder of the Maccabees, answer, who chose to keep the law and die resting on the sabbath rather than fight and live, if he hears how Simon not only carried out countless murders of citizens on the sabbath but compelled the very priests of the Lord to be butchered on the new moons and all the holy days of festal celebration? How much will Jeconiah groan when he hears that Simon, who first overthrew the city by seditions and violated the ancient religion of the temple by the slaughter of citizens, though so often entreated to save the city from fire by his surrender, prefers that everything perish in destruction, the city and temple be burned, the whole people be killed, rather than bend the summit of the domination he has seized! How much, I say, will Jeconiah grieve, who, though less fortunate in his reign in a time of pressing evils, was better than his son? For the father, though wretchedly, yet devotedly, preferred to be less fortunate for himself than for his homeland. So, going out of the city with his family, he gave himself into servitude to the besieging Babylonians, so as not to see his homeland overthrown nor the people of God captive. But the son, equal in misfortune but unequal in affection, while he feared for himself, led both himself into exile and the city into destruction. This one, then, was unhappy for his homeland and not happy for himself, who lost both his children and his eyes; but the other was wiser, who redeemed the captivity of the citizens by his own captivity. In the end the outcome showed it: the one, older, failed in his kingdom; the other, younger, in servitude, although afterward the Babylonian king set up a royal throne for him beside his own and granted him the privilege of counsel, as a consolation for his wretched calamity. Indeed my lot is now more bearable, to die after the murder of my children than to live: so that you may know how cruel is he who butchers sons before their father's face, whose royal gifts are worse than the wounds of piety. For either he ought not to have inflicted such impious things in the first place, or not to have substituted such honors afterward, as if any dignity could be bought by the loss of sons, or the murder of offspring made up for by any use of honor. No dignity, surely, none, relieves so great a grief. No honor heals this wound, except death alone, which takes away feeling and removes memory. Hasten then, slayer; yet wait, while I see my children, while I look on them before they die, lest one of them, perhaps troubled by the immaturity of his age, fear death when he is escaping a crueler tyrant. It is a benefit, my sons, to die, so that we may not see the captivity of our homeland: wounds of the body are more bearable than wounds of the mind. Now I look more bearably on your deaths, which I was shrinking from, so that I may not see the deaths of all in common, may not see the grief of the homeland and the whole city their tomb. Yet happier is he who has died than he who is kept alive. Most high God, let Simon not be laid low with his children among the flocks of the innocent; let him see, a captive, what he has brought on others. Nay, not so, not so, I say; for what he can think of, he can bear, and yet I do not call these things down on him. Let him consider how great a crime it is, which he who suffers it cannot turn back even by a prayer; how bitter the vengeance, how savage the monstrousness of the crime committed, which a captive surviving his homeland desires, because the mockeries of life are worse than the punishments of death. But now let there be an end of words. Hasten, executioner, while you hold the sword bloodied with my sons' blood; strike the father, so that no one may let it cool. This alone is a medicine for one about to die; by this alone the blow of the blade, the pain of the wound, is not felt. Strike in the sight of the Roman army, as has been ordered, so that those who will avenge may watch. Let the enemy pity, since the ally does not; let the Romans judge whom Simon has killed without judgment. They themselves are witnesses, who saw me fighting, not deserting, that I was not a traitor to the homeland but its defender. For my children I would, if I could, have turned the enemy away, not summoned an enemy: and would that I had not summoned Simon!” Nor was any end put to such great cruelty. The sons still lay unburied with their father; sacrilege was added to the murderous spectacle. Ananias the priest was slain, born of a famous family, though no one is more famous by the splendor of his family than by the office of religion. For nobility is affected by the one; by the other it is not desired. Let ancient lineage have for itself the fasces of various honors; priesthoods too have their fasces, which are raised not on the shoulders but by conduct, and lifted not by the length of rods but by the perseverance of labors, the height of faith, the summit of piety. Aristeus the scribe too was struck down, himself of famous origin, and with them fifteen others of the people, more eminent than the rest; though it is not nobility but innocence that makes a death unjust. Eleven men too were forestalled, who had conspired together because of the atrocity of his crimes; each feared for himself what he saw done to others, since Simon was faithless even to friends, and hope had been taken away, with famine ravaging all and the Romans now on the point of breaking in. Simon was distracted from the work of defense and running riot in the workshop of cruelty, and the lure of betrayal was easy, because Judas, one of them, had taken on the guarding of a tower. So when he called the Romans, promising to hand over the tower, some disdained it because the betrayal came so late, others doubted because he had often prepared a trick after promising surrender; Simon forestalled them and exacted the penalty from all the partners in the conspiracy; their bodies too were thrown down from the wall.

Josephus's father was kept shut up, and no access to him lay open to anyone. All the more eagerly did Josephus invite the Jews to surrender, and he went up to the wall rather incautiously, so as to free his homeland together with his father. There, struck on the head by a stone, he fell, and would almost have been overwhelmed by weapons hurled from above, had not men been sent at Caesar's order to protect him with shields and snatch him from death. His mother, learning of her son's wound and dismayed by the jeering voices of the robbers, put on both fear and belief in his death, and began to lament pitiably: that she had been kept for these fruits of her fruitfulness, that she could neither enjoy the service of a living son nor bury him dead. It had been her own prayer that he should rather give burial to his mother, that she should breathe her last spirit in his hands, that he should warm the cold limbs of her as she failed, he gather her last breaths with his mouth, he close the eyes of the dying, he compose her mouth while it still breathed. But since she had fallen short of her prayer, it would have been a comfort if she could at least have been present at the last moments of her dying son: a pitiable lot indeed, but still bearable, that she should hold the funeral of him whom she had wished to survive her. “Yet let me at least,” she said, “watch my dead from the wall; and if I may not touch him, would that no one prevented me! But whom should I fear, bereft of such a son? What should I dread, for whom it is a benefit to die? Would that all would hurl their weapons at me, all pierce me with the sword! What I could not do living, dead at least I would cover my son's body with my garment. One person's garment is enough for the burial of two; and perhaps some one of the enemy will have pity, so as to cover the mother's eyes with the son's cloak, and join eyes to eyes, hands to hands, mouth to mouth.” So rushing to the walls, she filled heaven itself with her pitiable complaint. Her own people jeered, the Romans wept: cruelty among the allies, mercy among the enemies. “Pierce me,” she said, “if there is any pity: I bore him whom you think must be hunted down. I gave him my unhappy breasts: destroy me, if you seek vengeance on him.”