First Jewish-Roman War: Siege of Jerusalem

 | MHQ  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

In a.d. 67, Levantine Ptolemais looked seaward to the calm of the Roman Mediterranean and inland to the storms of a rebel Galilee. The year before, the province of Judea had flown to arms against a monstrous Roman governor. The hapless legate of Syria had descended with a legion to suppress the revolt but had been driven back with loss, abandoning his siege engines. Now Nero’s new general, Vespasian, marched south from Antioch with two of the legions of Syria, and his son Titus marched north to meet him at Ptolemais with a legion from the garrison of Egypt.

His army united, Vespasian marched inland into Galilee, the north of the Jewish realm, which was defended by a scratch force led by the Jewish notable Josephus. After the Romans captured him and he began to assist them, the flexible Josephus was eventually to chronicle the war, first in Aramaic, then in Greek. The Romans had fought many wars and countless battles since Caesar’s day — had captured Britain, completed the circuit of the Mediterranean, extended their power to the Danube, been thrown back from beyond the Rhine, and fenced with the kings of proud Parthia in the eastern wastes — but The Jewish War of Josephus is by far the most detailed written description of Roman fighting that survives from the first three centuries of the Roman Empire.

Josephus had striven mightily to organize and drill his Galileans, yet at the approach of the Romans most of his army deserted and fled to fortified places. This humiliation is significant because it, as well as the unruliness of the Jews throughout the war and their fierce internal battles, provides the context for Josephus’ one-dimensional evaluation of the Roman army. To Josephus — and he has convinced many of his modern readers — the army of the Roman Empire excelled because of its relentless, realistic training and the exact obedience to orders that that training inculcated:

To the Romans the beginning of war is not their introduction to arms….Instead, as if they had grown with weapons in their hands, they never have an armistice from training, never wait for crises to arrive. Their exercises lack none of the vigor of true war, but each soldier trains every day with his whole heart as if it were war indeed….He would not err who described their exercises as battles without blood, and their battles as bloody exercises.

Of this same training, the fourth-century Vegetius gives details, looking back longingly to an earlier day: marching in regular step and quick time; marching with kit, with three long route marches a month; running, jumping, and swimming; throwing javelins; endless attacks with mock shield and sword on a wooden post, which stood in for a flesh-and-blood enemy; mass drill in keeping ranks and formation; and finally, mock battles. When the weather was fine, the Romans trained out-of-doors; when foul, under roofs. Even veterans, Vegetius tells us, were expected to exercise with their arms every day. The reality of such training is confirmed by the excavation of drill grounds and cavalry riding areas, of catapult ranges, by the traces of countless ‘practice’ camps — sometimes many on the same plot of land — that Roman units built on maneuvers, and of elaborate practice siege works built around pre-Roman hill forts.

‘The Romans are unbeatably strong,’ Josephus wrote, ‘especially because of their obedience and practice at arms.’ In the Roman camp ‘there is nothing that happens without the word of command.’ In short, ‘no disorder disperses them from their usual formation, no fear confounds them, no labor exhausts them, and certain victory follows against those unequal in these respects.’

In fact, disorder, fear, and exhaustion were the Romans’ constant companions in the Jewish war, as the detailed narrative of Josephus reveals. Roman training and discipline were certainly admirable in comparison to that of Josephus’ countrymen, as he pointedly told them, and especially valuable in a world where many opponents undertook cursory training or none. But training and discipline alone do not account for Roman success, and training and discipline themselves present a puzzle: How did they fit into the wider culture of the Roman imperial army? In a professional army, what was the relationship between Rome’s two ancestral military values: virtus, or courage, manifested as aggressiveness on the battlefield, and disciplina, or discipline, which the Romans conceived as a brake on overly aggressive behavior?

Gabara was the first strong place in Galilee that Vespasian captured. Romans killed all the men and burned the city, and the villages and country towns round about. Next the Romans moved south to the well-protected town of Jotapata, as Josephus rushed to oversee its defense. The siege of Jotapata was bitter and lasted forty-seven days. Finally, the Romans built their earthworks up to the height of the walls. The Romans rushed the town before dawn, when they hoped the sentries would be drowsing. Vespasian’s son Titus and a military tribune were the first on the wall; others followed, and the city was captured before most of the inhabitants were awake. There was a general massacre. The dead were calculated at forty thousand. Josephus was captured.

After a pause to rest his troops, Vespasian turned his attention to eastern Galilee. After some indecision the town of Tiberias surrendered and so preserved itself from destruction. Tarichaeae, by the Sea of Galilee, was the center of what resistance remained, and Vespasian moved toward it. A body of Jews attempted to resist the Romans in the field outside the city, and Vespasian sent Titus with cavalry against them. Titus led the charge in person and killed many by his own hand during the pursuit. It may be in this battle that, as Suetonius records, Titus had a horse killed under him and mounted another in its stead. The survivors fled into the town, and the dispute about whether Tarichaeae should surrender soon became an uproar audible even to the Romans outside. Taking advantage of the chaos, Titus led his cavalry into the shallows of the lake and so into the town, which was not walled on the lakeward side. Thus Tarichaeae was captured.

Next came Gamala, on the other side of the lake and beyond. Soon the Roman rams had broken through the walls, and Roman columns were in the city, advancing without orders to the higher reaches of that steep place. But the Jews rallied and threw them back. The town was built on a precipitous incline: It was hard to retreat except onto the roofs of houses where they were flush with the slope, and these soon collapsed under the weight, killing many Romans in the resulting avalanche. In his anxiety at the crisis, Vespasian himself advanced heedlessly within the walls. Suddenly he found himself in the front lines and under attack. He formed those near him into a shield wall, stopped the Jewish onrush, and then retired slowly, front to the enemy, until he was outside the city.

There could be no doubt that Vespasian and Titus were father and son: Both looked as if a giant had seized them by the ears and stretched their faces broad, leaving deep creases in their brows from the pulling. But father and son had far different perceptions of their roles in battle. Vespasian fought like Caesar, close enough to the front to command and encourage — at Jotapata he had even been hit in the foot with an arrow — but not to fight. Titus, by contrast, fought at the head of his troops and cut down enemies with his own sword. And the contrast was not merely because one was a cautious fifty-eight-year-old supreme commander and the other a carefree twenty-seven-year-old: Titus too had grave responsibilities, as commander of the Fifteenth Legion.

After the setback at Gamala, Josephus depicts Vespasian giving a speech to correct and reassure his troops, carefully balancing the need for discipline with the need for courage. But if Vespasian gave such an address, his men paid it little heed. Soon after, three soldiers of the Fifteenth Legion crept by night to the base of one of the towers of Gamala and quietly dug out five great stones. They leaped back as the entire tower and the sentries atop it crashed to the ground. The Jews were in a panic. No less surprised were the Romans: No plans had been made to exploit the collapse and the chaos, and, remembering their previous failure, the Romans did not try to enter the city for a full day after. The digging appears to have been a private enterprise on the part of the three legionaries.

When the Romans did enter the city again, Titus led them (he had been away during the first attack), and he once again cut down those he met. Even women and infants were slaughtered in this sack, in revenge for the earlier defeat; nine thousand were killed or threw themselves from the walls into the ravine that bordered the town. Only two women survived.

After the capture of Gischala in the north, which surrendered to Titus after the warriors escaped by a ruse, all of Galilee was in Roman hands. It was now November and time to send the legions into winter quarters. In the new year, Vespasian’s strategy was to put down the revolt outside Jerusalem and drive all the surviving rebels into the seething city. While it was still winter he quickly seized the Jewish towns of the Peraea, to the east, across the Jordan River from Jerusalem. Those downstream learned of his coming when thousands of bodies floated down the river and washed up on the shores of the Dead Sea. In the spring Vespasian struck south into Idumaea, then north into Samaria. By June he had captured Jericho, completing his circuit of ravaging around Jerusalem. Vespasian was told that nothing sank in the nearby Dead Sea: He had prisoners cast in with their hands bound, and lo! They floated. Now all that remained was to march directly to Jerusalem and lay it under siege.

But then fate put a halt to the campaign. Far away in Rome, Nero was overthrown and the year of the four emperors cast Italy into confusion. In the East, Vespasian waited upon events, and so the summer of a.d. 68 passed into winter. In June of the next year he moved to reassert his hold on Judea outside Jerusalem, wasting the countryside and taking some towns he had neglected before. He rode with his cavalry even up to the walls of Jerusalem and then rode away again. He avoided a major campaign in a.d. 69 because he had his eye on higher things: On July 1 the carefully instructed garrison of Egypt proclaimed Vespasian emperor, and his own legions and the powerful Syrian army soon followed suit. Away went Vespasian to manage a civil war against his rival emperor Vitellius, and by December Vespasian’s lieutenants in Europe had made him master of the Roman world. Rome’s new emperor sailed for the capital and left Titus to bring the war against the Jews to an end.

Two years had now been squandered. Titus delayed no longer and ordered his legions, now reinforced to four by another from Syria, to advance on Jerusalem from both east and west. Approaching the city, he rode ahead with six hundred horse to reconnoiter, but, riding too close to the walls, he was cut off by a Jewish sally that broke the head of his cavalcade from the body. Titus could not go forward — garden walls and trenches blocked that path. The only way to safety was through the enemy, and through them he led his companions in a breathless, headlong charge, killing those who tried to block his onrush. Although unarmored, for this was no more than a reconnaissance expedition, Titus came through unscathed. Two of his companions were killed.

Then the legions came up, and Titus ordered them to camp around the city. The Tenth Fretensis was assigned the Mount of Olives. While the Tenth was fortifying its camp, the enemy unexpectedly struck against it from the city. After a confused struggle the legion was turned to flight. It was rallied by Titus, who took the Jews in the flank with his personal guard. Having restored the situation, Titus established a protective line nearer the city and sent the Tenth back to build its camp. But the Jews thought the legionaries were fleeing and attacked again, and the forward Roman line collapsed before them, leaving Titus isolated with his companions on the slope. Now, and not for the last time in this war, Titus’ friends and staff begged him to take care: He was the general-in-chief, not a soldier. Everything depended on him, and he should not risk himself. This was also the standard advice of Greek tactical writers and the principle to which Julius Caesar had adhered. But Titus was having none of it. He held his position, himself fighting by hand.

In their eagerness to chase those in flight, the Jews split around Titus’ small band like a torrent around a rock, and so Titus and his guard charged them in the flank. Once again the Tenth was in a panic — so much for Josephus’ ‘no disorder disperses them from their usual formation, no fear confounds them’ — and it began to flee. Then legionaries noticed Titus in the fight on the slope below, and (Josephus says) pure shame at having abandoned their general rallied them. They pushed the Jews back down the slope.

With the legions encamped, the Romans turned to clearing the ground before Jerusalem, shifting their camps closer to the walls, and bringing up the baggage. During this work, the defenders worked a ruse upon the besiegers. The Romans knew from defectors that the Jews inside the city were riven by religious and political faction and that some yearned to come to terms with Rome. So when a body of men appeared to have been ejected from the city amid a shower of stones and seemed to be trying to force their way back in while cowering from the Romans who looked on, and when those who had expelled them shouted ‘Peace’ and offered to open the gates to the enemy, many Romans were deceived.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: Ancient-Medieval, Historical Conflicts

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.