Titus suspected a trick and ordered his troops not to move, but the guards of the Roman works made a rush for the gates without orders. Now those who had pretended to be expelled attacked them in the rear, and those who had promised to open the gates shot them down with missiles from the ramparts. Only slowly and with great loss did the Romans fight their way free. The defenders jeered and capered on the walls.

Titus fumed and ranted — ‘among the Romans even victory without orders is a disgrace!’ Josephus has him insist. He terrified the disobedient soldiers by threatening the horrible penalty for fighting without orders: death. But then Titus allowed the pleas of the legions to soften his anger, and no one was punished. Like Vespasian at Gamala, Titus contented himself with a lecture. At the climax of the siege, he would have reason to rejoice that he did not bloodily stamp out his soldiers’ initiative.

Having selected what he hoped was a weak stretch of the fortifications, Titus ordered three siege ramps erected. With their throwing engines, towers, rams, and ramps, the Romans were fully up-to-date besiegers, but fully up to date in a technology of siege that had advanced hardly at all since Greeks had made a science of it in the Hellenistic period. An engineer employed by Demetrius Poliorcetes at his great siege of Rhodes (305-304 b.c.) would have been quite at home before Jerusalem with Titus, more than three and a half centuries later.

The Jews attacked the builders with engines, missiles, and sallies, but to no avail. Then rams were brought up on the ramps. The defenders charged out against them but were thrown back, Titus leading the relief in person. Again the Jews sallied against the rams, and again Titus led his cavalry in, killing with his own hand.

The Romans built towers to defend the rams. At night one of these, badly constructed, collapsed with an enormous crash. The Romans panicked, thinking the Jews were inside their camps, and confusion reigned until the truth became known. The Greeks had a saying they often applied to the blind and inexplicable panics that afflicted armies: ‘There are many empty things in war.’ Despite Josephus’ editorializing, the Romans of the empire were no less vulnerable to empty panic than any other ancient army.

With the towers brought up, the Romans swept the walls with missiles, so they could work the rams in safety. When a ram nicknamed ‘Victor’ made a breach, the Jews abandoned the wall; behind it, two city walls remained. The Romans established a camp inside the wall they had taken, and during their preparations to attack the next wall, there was skirmishing in the open between the Romans and the defenders.

During a combat at range with javelins, Longinus, a cavalryman, leaped out from the Roman lines and charged the mass of the enemy. He killed one, pulled his spear out, stabbed another in the side, and then made his way safely back to his comrades. Others subsequently emulated his deed. On one occasion a Jew challenged any Roman who dared. Pudens, another cavalryman, answered the challenge but tripped during the fight, and the Jewish challenger killed him, only to be shot down in the act of vaunting over the body by a Roman centurion with a bow.

In Josephus’ account, reckless bravery was primarily the province of the Roman army’s auxiliary soldiers. Pudens was certainly an auxiliary; Longinus probably was also. During a Jewish sally, an exceptionally strong auxiliary cavalryman reached down from his saddle, grabbed a fleeing enemy by the ankle, and then bore his armored captive off just as he was to be admired by Titus.

Such behavior is part of a wider trend: The Romans increasingly relied on auxiliaries to do their hand-to-hand fighting. This trend is most remarkably illustrated on Trajan’s Column, the enigmatic monument that depicts in astonishing detail on a huge spiral relief the Roman conquest of Dacia, in two wars of a.d. 101-102 and 105-106. So detailed and circumstantial is the sculpted narrative that it is nearly irresistible to suppose that it adapts to pictures a literary account of the war, perhaps that of Trajan himself.

In the standard type of battle scene on the column, auxiliaries and bare-chested barbarian allies fight at the front, while at the back legionaries stand or build or lurk in fortifications, cosseting their ballistas. Pointing up the contrast between the roles of auxiliary and legionary is a scene high on the column in which auxiliaries attack Dacians on top of a wall, while a party of legionaries, right beside them, attacks the wall itself with picks; just up the spiral more legionaries hew and stack wood for use in the siege.

On all of Trajan’s Column, legionary and nonlegionary infantry (auxiliary infantrymen, conical-helmeted Eastern archers, bare-chested barbarian allies) play very different roles. Put simply, legionaries parade, march, and work — and nonlegionaries fight. There are more than fifteen scenes in which legionaries build fortifications, sometimes with auxiliaries as sentries, or cut wood or clear forests or harvest grain or conduct supply wagons, fatigues that are depicted in seemingly demented detail over yard after yard of stone. However, legionaries are depicted fighting in only four scenes, while nonlegionary infantry fight in fourteen.

Moreover, nonlegionary infantry engage in fatigues in only a handful of scenes, and when they do so the depiction is far less elaborate, and what noncombat work they do is more aggressive than the legionaries’: They slaughter prisoners and burn Dacian villages.

The column strikingly conveys the wildness of Rome’s auxiliary soldiers. In several scenes auxiliaries, but never legionaries, are depicted as proudly presenting severed heads to the emperor, and one auxiliary who has taken a head but both of whose hands are occupied in fighting carries the severed head in his teeth, hanging by the hair.

At the same time art and archaeology reveal changes in legionary equipment that suggest a more specialized role: armor with exaggerated protection for the shoulders, and helmets with exaggerated protection for the face and back of the neck, protection against downward blows. Roman legionary armor evolved under the early empire to protect the Roman soldier against attacks from above — exactly the type of attacks he might expect when toiling beneath the walls of Jerusalem; exactly the type of attacks he suffered when assailing Dacian forts. The Roman legions were used increasingly as combat engineers, and their armor evolved along with the function of its wearers.

This increasing reliance on auxiliaries in battle reflects Roman patterns of recruitment. As the Roman Empire piled decade upon decade, the Roman army went farther and farther afield to find soldiers. Legionaries were supposed to be Roman citizens upon enlistment; auxiliaries were not required to be citizens. But to find both, recruiting officers struck out into the wild marches of the empire. By the end of the first century a.d., few legionaries were recruited in Italy, and even by the middle of that century the accents of legionaries from the northern borders sounded barbarous to soldiers stationed elsewhere. Such recruiting may have been driven by the reluctance of those in Rome’s more civilized dominions to serve or by their greater power to resist conscription, but it was certainly also driven by the sense that men from some of the empire’s less developed areas made excellent soldiers.

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