Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (43 page)

The taciturn general stood looking at the still, dark waters. To test its famous buoyancy, he had several Jewish prisoners tossed into deep water with their hands tied. He was suitably impressed when they floated. No doubt so were the prisoners involved. It’s not unlikely these prisoners came from the Essene community at Qumran, Jewish guardians of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls. The Qumran monastery, on a cliff above the lake, had only recently been overrun by Roman auxiliary cavalry, and the buildings burned. A small Roman military post was established among the ruins, garrisoned by auxiliaries. Nineteen centuries later, in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls would be discovered in eleven caves behind the Qumran settlement, c22.qxd 12/5/01 5:44 PM Page 230

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where they’d been hidden by priests of the sect before Vespasian’s troopers swept into the monastery.

In that same month of May a dispatch arrived from Rome bearing the news that the rebel governor in Gaul, Vindex, was dead—his revolt had been quickly and ruthlessly terminated by the legions of the Rhine after just two months, and Vindex had committed suicide. On the heels of this news, Vespasian heard that despite Vindex’s fate, General Galba in Spain had declared himself emperor, even while Nero still ruled at Rome, and was levying Spanish troops in preparation for a march on Italy to seize the throne by force. Throughout the provinces, some officials and military officers were speaking up in favor of Galba and against Nero. A new civil war threatened the stability of Rome.

With the empire in turmoil, General Vespasian took stock of his situation. It was late spring, and only Jerusalem and a few out-of-the way fortifications such as Masada remained in Jewish hands. Jerusalem was surrounded, with, it was said, more than a million people behind its walls.

This was a figure given by Josephus, who was on the scene at the time.

Tacitus, who wasn’t there but was a more reliable historian in many ways, put the number at six hundred thousand. Either way, there were a lot of mouths to feed. Vespasian knew that many of the partisans were still fighting among themselves. Early heroes of the revolution had either been murdered or had fled south to the Zealots at Masada. New leaders vied for control in the Holy City while their people scrambled for food.

In comparison, Vespasian had supplies aplenty, and he had time. And patience. He could starve the citizens of Jerusalem into submission if he had to. Not that Jerusalem was his chief concern now. Vespasian’s mind was in Rome. Who would win in this contest between Nero and Galba?

And where would Vespasian stand, depending on the outcome? Officially, Vespasian now decided to await further orders from Rome. Suspending offensive operations, he took the 15th Legion back to his operational headquarters at Caesarea and told the 10th and the 5th to sit tight in their forward bases at Jericho and Emmaus.

And then something happened that rocked Vespasian and the empire.

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In the second half of June, a messenger arrived at General Vespasian’s headquarters at Caesarea with the astonishing news that the thirty-year-old emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was dead. It was said that on June 9 Nero had taken his own life at a villa owned by Pheon, c22.qxd 12/5/01 5:44 PM Page 231

one of his freedmen, four miles outside Rome. Officially, Nero had simply disappeared, but the story going around the capital and later repeated by Suetonius was that, with the help of his secretary Epaphroditus, Nero had stabbed himself in the throat after being deserted by the Senate and the Praetorian Guard, and that his Christian mistress Acte had performed burial rights and cremated his remains. Vespasian knew firsthand that Nero had long professed a desire to give up the reins of empire. Now, it seemed, he had done just that.

Before long, the elderly Galba arrived in Rome at the head of a legion newly raised in Spain, Galba’s 7th. A unit separate from and additional to the original 7th Legion, the 7th Claudia, but raised in the same recruiting grounds, Galba’s 7th Legion would within several years become the 7th Gemina, in combination with another of the civil war legions created by Galba. With legionary steel to back his claim, Galba took the throne, en-dorsed by the Senate and supported by the Praetorian Guard.

For months, Vespasian waited for orders from Rome, orders that never came. In the meantime, with the Roman army inactive behind the walls of its camps in Judea, one of the Jewish leaders at Masada, Simon ben Gioras, went on the offensive against the inhabitants of the region, leading a force of twenty thousand partisans as he raided villages and towns in southern Judea and Idumaea and occupying the ancient city of Hebron, just to the south of Jerusalem, driving off the small contingent of Roman auxiliaries in the vicinity. Reckoned even then to be twenty-three hundred years old, Hebron was by tradition the burial place of Abraham, a figure destined to be revered by three of the world’s great religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Simon then surrounded Jerusalem. Killing anyone who attempted to leave, he forced those in the city to elect him their new leader. He, and his partisans, then joined the multitude inside Jerusalem.

At Caesarea, Vespasian had tired of waiting for orders from new emperor Galba. So early in the new year, as soon as the seasonal winds were favorable, he dispatched his son Titus, and Herod Agrippa, king of Chalcis, to take his respects to Galba at Rome and seek the emperor’s direction. In February 69, while Vespasian’s two envoys were coasting past Greece in fast warships, they heard news when they put into port that Galba had been murdered in Rome in January, that thirty-six-year-old Marcus Otho had been put on the throne by the Praetorian Guard, and that the legions on the Rhine had declared not for Otho but for their own general, Aulus Vitellius. The forty-one-year-old Herod Agrippa decided to continue on to Rome anyway and pay his respects to Otho, but Titus turned his frigate c22.qxd 12/5/01 5:44 PM Page 232

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around and headed back to Caesarea at full speed to convey the news of Galba’s death to his father.

Meanwhile, annoyed by the activities of Simon ben Gioras, Vespasian decided to tighten his grip on Jerusalem. With the arrival of the new spring he marched out of Caesarea with the 15th Legion and occupied several towns in the hills north of Jerusalem, then sent Brigadier General Sextus Cerialis from Emmaus with a detachment from his 5th Legion and cavalry support to circle around to the south of the Jewish capital. Burning one town and accepting the surrender of another, General Cerialis came to the city of Hebron. After his Moesian legionaries easily stormed the city and eliminated its Zealot defenders, he burned ancient Hebron to the ground. The noose around Jerusalem had once more been tightened.

Outside of Jerusalem, the rebels now held only Masada, Herodeum, and Machaerus, and each was cut off from the other. There would be no more exploits like Simon’s rampage through the countryside. As Vespasian hesitated to launch an all-out assault on Jerusalem, his son sailed back into Caesarea’s harbor with the news of Galba’s death, Otho’s accession, and Vitellius’s claim to the throne. According to Plutarch, both Vespasian and General Mucianus in Syria now sent letters to Rome vowing their allegiance to and support of Otho.

In that same spring of 69, General Vitellius sent two armies marching down from the Rhine to Italy, among them the retired veterans of the last 10th Legion discharge who were living on the great river. In mid-April, at Bedriacum, Vitellius’s forces defeated Otho, and the short-lived young emperor took his own life. Vitellius was now emperor, and in July he would triumphantly enter Rome.

Vespasian, who had deliberately stalled operations in Judea to see how affairs in Rome panned out, was being repeatedly urged to consider making a bid for the throne himself by those around him, including, now, his son Titus. All accounts suggest he resisted at first. As Dio says, Vespasian was never inclined to be rash. But then in the middle of the year, under the guise of a visit to a religious shrine, he held a secret meeting on Mount Carmel, just north of his headquarters at Caesarea, with General Mucianus, who came down from Antioch. The two men sealed an agreement, with Mucianus giving Vespasian his backing for a tilt at the ultimate prize.

Tiberius Alexander, Prefect of Egypt, also supported Vespasian. If he wasn’t at the Mount Carmel meeting he was certainly aware of it and the agreement that came out of it and was a party to both the meeting and the agreement. For the movement to make Vespasian emperor to appear to c22.qxd 12/5/01 5:44 PM Page 233

be spontaneous, the first step was taken by Alexander. On July 1, a.d. 69, he led the troops of his Egyptian garrison—the 17th Legion and four cohorts of the 18th—in hailing Vespasian as emperor of Rome.

The three legions in Judea followed suit several days later—first the 15th at Caesarea, then the 10th at Jericho and the 5th at Emmaus. By July 15, Mucianus had also sworn all four legions of his Syrian command for Vespasian. These were the 6th Victrix, the 12th, and as can be best ascertained, the 23rd and the 24th.

Vespasian hurried to Beirut, where he met with Mucianus and received deputations of potentates from throughout the East. With the nine legions of the East vowing their allegiance to Vespasian, plans were agreed for Mucianus, given the authority of a field marshal, to lead a task force to Italy to take the throne for Vespasian. That task force would consist of the 6th Victrix Legion as well as large numbers of auxiliaries and recalled militia veterans. While Vespasian headed south, Field Marshal Mucianus chaired a conference of officials at Beirut that set in motion all the necessary arrangements for the call-up of thirteen thousand retired legion veterans living in Syria and eligible for Evocati militia service, the production of arms and ammunition, the acquisition of baggage animals, and the coining of currency to pay for it all.

Vespasian gave command of the legions in Judea to his son Titus, with the brief to take Jerusalem in the coming spring, while he transferred his own headquarters to Alexandria, from where he could control the supply of grain going to Rome—the capital’s lifeblood.

Major General Trajan now parted company with the 10th at Jericho, probably after calling an assembly of the legion and thanking its men for their bravery and loyalty while serving under him. It seems Trajan journeyed south to Alexandria, to join Vespasian’s staff and to commence planning for a possible invasion of the province of Africa, modern Tunisia and part of Libya, using the one intact legion remaining in Egypt, the 17th, to gain control of the grain coming out of that province as well.

That operation was soon made unnecessary by rapidly changing events in Europe. Once emperor, Vespasian would make Trajan his coconsul for a.d.

70, and within several years appoint him to govern Syria, then Asia.

Major General Trajan was replaced as commander of the 10th Legion by Brigadier General Larcius Lepidus.

Vespasian’s son, and successor in Judea, twenty-nine-year-old Titus, until recently a mere colonel but now with the authority of a field marshal, accompanied his father to Alexandria for the moment. There, Vespasian appointed the Prefect of Egypt, Tiberius Alexander, as his son’s c22.qxd 12/5/01 5:44 PM Page 234

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chief of staff. Alexander, probably in his fifties at this point, was intended as a mature and experienced adviser to the young general. Two decades earlier Alexander, a former Jew, had served as Procurator of Judea for several years. He’d also served on Field Marshal Corbulo’s staff during his Armenian offensives. So he had considerable regional knowledge and military experience to offer Titus.

Titus and Alexander marched back up to Caesarea from Alexandria.

Tacitus tells us they brought with them reinforcements from the 18th and 3rd Augusta Legions. These were four cohorts of new African recruits for the 18th Legion that had been stranded in Egypt by the Jewish Revolt, and the lone cohort of the 3rd Augusta Legion, which had been holding Ascalon on the coast south of Jerusalem since a.d. 66. As can be deduced from Tactitus, in a.d. 66 the 18th Legion was transferred from its long-term assignment in Egypt to the Rhine. Since 42 b.c. the legion had been recruited in Illyricum, but Tacitus indicates that for the new enlistment of a.d. 67 the Palatium gave it two new recruiting grounds, Africa and Narbon Gaul. At the same time, its brother legion, the 17th, also from Illyricum, had its recruiting ground changed to Asia. Cohorts enrolled in Gaul reached the 18th Legion’s new Rhine station on schedule, but the recruits from Africa had only marched as far as Egypt by the time news of the Gallus disaster reached Alexandria in late a.d. 66, and they were held there pending further orders, probably on Vespasian’s instructions.

According to Josephus, these five cohorts from two legions were put under the command of Colonel Heternius Fronto, who would have been commanding either the 18th Legion cohorts or the 17th Legion in Egypt up to this time. Josephus says that Titus and Fronto were old friends, and it’s likely that both had commanded auxiliary units attached to the 2nd Augusta Legion in Britain at the same time earlier in their careers.

The buildup for the renewed Judean offensive continued in earnest. At the beginning of the new spring of a.d. 70, the 12th Legion marched down from its base at Raphanaeae in Syria, apparently led by its second-in-command, and three thousand legionaries based on the Euphrates, almost certainly from either the 23rd or the 24th Legion, or both, came down to perform rear-echelon duties out of Caesarea.

In April, Roman operations in Judea finally wound back into gear.

Wearing the purple cloak of a Roman commander in chief that his father had worn before him, Titus led the 12th and 15th Legions and the 3rd Augusta and 18th Legion cohorts out of Caesarea and up into the Judean hills toward Jerusalem. At the same time, couriers rode to the 5th at Emmaus and the 10th Legion at Jericho. Both were ordered to march on Jerusalem.