Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (42 page)

Vespasian’s staff urged him to march directly on the Jewish capital, but the gruff, coarse Vespasian was a thoughtful, careful man by nature. He hadn’t survived in the service of three temperamental emperors by taking risks. He decided to let the Jews in Jerusalem exhaust themselves killing each other before he wasted any time, effort, or legionary blood trying to take the city. There was even a possibility that one or other of the factions might come over to the Roman side if he waited long enough. For the time being, Vespasian would concentrate on subjugating the countryside north of Jerusalem.

It was June by the time the Roman army moved out of Ptolemais. The 10th Legion marched in the vanguard of the column. We saw most of its legionaries on the sands of the Córdoba arena three years before when they were just raw recruits. The men of its senior cohorts had been recruited in a.d. 44; these were the men knocked into shape by Field Marshal Corbulo, the hardened troops who’d whipped the Parthians.

Vespasian turned left and swept inland, determined to methodically knock over the Jewish strongholds in Galilee one at a time. Gabara, in southwestern Galilee, just across the Syrian border from Ptolemais, was lightly defended and was stormed before the sun set on the first day of fighting.

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Jotapata, modern Jefat, was a different story. The Jewish resistance leader for the region was the thirty-year-old partisan Joseph, who later took the Roman name Josephus Flavius. It’s from his writing that we know most about the Jewish War. Originally given his regional command while at Jerusalem, where he’d left his parents, Josephus had first gone to Tiberias. Now, alerted to the Roman troop movements, he hurried down from Tiberias and slipped into Jefat late one afternoon in June, just before it was surrounded by Vespasian’s mounted advance force, joining more than forty thousand Jewish people sheltering there.

The town was well sited for defense, with sheer cliffs on three sides and a massive wall in the fourth. Vespasian himself soon came up with the main force and surrounded the hill with two lines of infantry and an outer ring of cavalry. Auxiliary archers and slingers continually cleared defenders from the city wall, but for five days in a row Josephus’s partisans ventured out from the fortress in assault groups to attack the Roman lines in hit-and-run raids before hastily withdrawing.

So Vespasian had a massive earthbank constructed in front of the wall as an artillery platform, then brought up 160 artillery pieces and sited them on the bank. Metal bolts, stones up to a hundred pounds in weight, firebrands, and arrows—all were hurled at Jefat for hours on end in methodical volleys. The front wall was eventually cleared of defenders by this barrage, as was a large area behind it. Still the Jews launched counterattacks, surging from the town unexpectedly and striking at the artillery platform, driving the artillerymen from their weapons. Roman counterattacks retook the bank. The Jews would again seize the bank, the Roman troops would regain it. But in the meantime, other partisans, working feverishly around the clock, added another sixty feet to the height of the town wall.

Because the wall offered only a limited front to operate against, Vespasian couldn’t use all his units at once, so for much of the siege he rested two of his legions. He’d carefully selected the units he summoned for this offensive. Before its Egyptian assignment, the 15th Legion had come from its longtime Pannonian station in the Balkans to serve under Field Marshal Corbulo in his second Armenian campaign, and the unit’s legionaries, men from Cisalpine Gaul, northern Italy, were solid and dependable.

The Syrian cutthroats of the 3rd Augusta were anxious to revenge themselves on the Jews, but their unit had been severely reduced by their casualties at the hands of the rebels in the early stages of the revolt, so Vespasian held them back for use as shock troops.

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the legion that had beaten Scipio’s elephants at Thapsus, and even though the current enlistment had been raised in Moesia, modern Bulgaria, the unit’s legionaries still carried the elephant symbol and the reputation that went with it. The Spaniards of the 10th still bore the reputation their forebears had earned the legion as Julius Caesar’s best troops, and since they’d been knocked into shape by Corbulo and savaged the Parthians, they’d once more earned their elite status. As a result, most of the hard work of the siege of Jefat fell to the 5th and 10th Legions.

Both legions built siege towers and mantlets—siege sheds on wheels—which were run up against the wall, and from the protection of these some legionaries set their battering rams to work while others tried to undermine the wall. At one point the constructions of the 5th were set alight by Jewish firebrands, so the siege buildings were dragged away, the fire extinguished, and their wooden roofs covered with earth to fireproof them before they were wheeled back into position and the siege works resumed.

Another time, the Jewish defenders poured boiling oil down on men of both the 5th and the 10th who were working at the wall face under the cover of
testudos
of raised shields, causing horrible burns to troops involved. This was history’s first recorded use of boiling oil by defenders of a besieged fortification, a tactic that would frequently be emulated in the Middle Ages. Not that the maimed men of the 10th would have appreciated the gruesome way they entered the history books. This was certainly not the sort of fate they would have imagined for themselves when they joined the legion at Córdoba a little over three years before.

Shortly after, General Vespasian was himself wounded in the foot by an arrow fired from the city wall. First on the scene was his son Titus, as the general’s officers and bodyguard crowded anxiously around. But to the relief of his troops, the general’s wound was only minor, and soon he was back on his feet.

Knowing the defenders had limited water, Vespasian halted the assault for several weeks in the hope they would be driven to capitulate by thirst, but when the Jews would not surrender, he resumed the attack. On the forty-seventh day of the siege, after a furious artillery bombardment lasting several hours, the legions launched a night assault. Led by Vespasian’s son Titus, legionaries swarmed over the town wall in the darkness and overwhelmed the defenders.

After Jefat fell, forty thousand Jewish bodies were found; twelve hundred prisoners were taken, among them the Jewish commander, Josephus.

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accompanied the army for the rest of the campaign, providing advice and information on his former comrades-in-arms.

Even though it was only mid-August, but probably assured by Josephus the collaborator that the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem was so rent by internal fighting that the different factions were likely to destroy themselves if given enough time, Vespasian now withdrew most of his troops to Caesarea, planning to winter there and restart the campaign the following spring. For three weeks he enjoyed the hospitality of his ally King Herod Agrippa II of Chalcis, great-grandson of the famous Herod the Great. With Rome’s consent and support, Herod Agrippa ran a small kingdom covering today’s northern Israel and part of Lebanon. It was at his capital, Caesarea Philippi, near the headwaters of the Jordan River, that news reached Vespasian of large numbers of partisans concentrating at Tiberias on the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee, and that nearby Tarichaeae had closed its gates. Vespasian ordered a resumption of military operations.

The Roman army descended on Tiberias, which quickly surrendered, but not before its defenders escaped to Tarichaeae, a little farther around the lake. As the legions marched on Tarichaeae, young Titus led a large cavalry force on ahead. He succeeded in capturing the town after bloody fighting, much of it actually on the Sea of Galilee in boats and on rafts.

While Titus then went north to Antioch on a secret mission to General Mucianus, Governor of Syria, Vespasian continued the advance, moving out into the Jordanian desert, east of the Sea of Galilee, to assault the town of Gamala, which clung to a steep hillside described by Josephus as being like a huge camel’s hump jutting from the desert. But progress was slow. One assault by the 3rd Augusta went awry when roofs the troops were climbing over caved in and buildings collapsed down the slope like houses of cards.

When Titus returned from Antioch he led a commando raid at night that removed Jewish sentries from a section of the town wall. Vespasian then brought the waiting legions hurrying on his son’s heels, and they took the city.

It was now December, and while Vespasian took most of the army back to the coast to wait out the winter, Titus led a cavalry force to deal with the town of Gischala, the last Jewish holdout in Galilee. It soon fell, as the Jewish commander, John of Gischala, escaped and fled to Jerusalem.

All of Galilee was once more under Roman control.

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By the spring of a.d. 68, with the Jews still fighting each other in Jerusalem but showing no signs of capitulating to him, General Vespasian ordered the offensive to resume. Over the winter his force had been reduced by the Palatium’s transfer of his six 3rd Augusta cohorts at Caesarea to Moesia, modern Bulgaria, to reinforce the two legions stationed there who were coming under increasing pressure from raiders from across the Danube—a thousand men from one of the resident legions, the 7th Claudia and 8th Augusta, were lost to enemy action during this period.

But as the 3rd Augusta cohorts marched away for the long journey overland to the Danube, Vespasian would have consoled himself that he still had more than enough troops at his disposal to finish the job in Judea.

In March he conducted the ceremonial lustration of the legions’ standards, then gave the order to move out. As he departed Caesarea and marched south down the coast with the 5th and 15th Legions, Vespasian received news that Julius Vindex, governor of one of the provinces of Gaul, had revolted against the emperor Nero. According to the sycophan-tic historian Josephus, this news spurred Vespasian to speed up his campaign so he could wrap it up quickly and relieve the empire of this worri-some situation in the East.

Maybe so, maybe not. It’s possible that Vindex had written to Vespasian prior to launching his rebellion, seeking his support, just as we know he wrote to Servius Galba, Governor of Nearer Spain, with the same intent. Young Titus’s secret mission to Antioch the previous year may have been spurred by such a letter. General Mucianus, Governor of Syria, hadn’t been on friendly terms with Vespasian for many years, but he liked Titus. According to Suetonius, Mucianus was homosexual, and he implied that he was attracted to the handsome young colonel and this was why Titus became an acceptable intermediary. Quite possibly, Mucianus, who commanded the four legions stationed in Syria, also had been contacted by Vindex, and Vespasian had sent his son to discuss whether Mucianus and he would support the rebel governor. If this was the case, they must have decided against throwing their legions behind Vindex, but a door had been set ajar that both generals would before long open wide. Whatever his thoughts about Vindex’s rebellion, Vespasian kept them to himself and pushed on south into Judea.

While the main force advanced down the coast, the 10th Legion took a different route. After spending the winter near the Jordan River at the friendly inland city of Scythopolis, a place inhabited by people of Greek heritage and described as oppressively hot in summer but tolerably mild in winter, the 10th Legion crossed the Jordan before General Trajan led it c22.qxd 12/5/01 5:44 PM Page 229

down the river’s eastern bank into the Peraea district. It then recrossed the river opposite Jericho, destroying towns and villages in its path. The 10th then lay siege to Jericho. The town had neither the situation nor the manpower to hold out as long as Jefat, and it and the nearby fortress of Cypros were stormed by the 10th Legion in May. Among the partisans who died in the assault was the Jewish commander for the Jericho region, John ben Simon.

The capture of Jericho and Cypros would have given the men of the 10th Legion particular satisfaction. On a dusty bluff overlooking Jericho, the old Herodian fortress of Cypros was where the rebels had massacred five hundred legionaries of the 3rd Augusta the year before. Rome’s vengeance was not necessarily always swift, but it was sure.

Vespasian’s main force quickly advanced down the coast to Antipatris, then to Lod and Jamnia, before swinging inland and marching up into the hills along the infamous Beth-horon road as far as Emmaus. There a major fortification was built, blocking the coastal approach to Jerusalem. Leaving the 5th Legion stationed at Emmaus, Vespasian took the remainder of his force and returned to the coast, ravaging the northern part of the Idumaea district.

Then he returned to the hills, passed through Emmaus, and overran a number of hill villages before marching down to Jericho, five miles from the Jordan River and sixteen from Jerusalem, where he linked up with General Trajan and the 10th Legion. As the 10th set up camp for the winter at Jericho, smaller forces of auxiliaries circled around through the hills and cut off escape routes to the south of Jerusalem. The Jewish capital was now effectively surrounded. Vespasian continued on to the Dead Sea, just a day’s march south of Jerusalem; not for any strategic reason, but to satisfy his curiosity. The lake, thirteen hundred feet below sea level and the lowest stretch of water on earth, was famed around the civ-ilized world.