Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (45 page)

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with a legionary escort, to parley, Castor threw a stone at Aeneas, missing him and wounding one of the legionaries of the escort. As Aeneas and his party hastily withdrew, and Castor and his companions yelled mocking comments at the Romans, Titus ordered the ram to resume work against the tower. The tower collapsed from the pounding of the ram shortly after.

Castor and his men set fire to the ruins and then committed suicide by jumping into the flames.

From dawn till dusk the legionaries continued to pound away at the Second Wall. Like all Romans, the men of the legions rose before dawn, the Roman day being dictated by whatever could be achieved in daylight hours. The troops slept in their uniforms and frequently in their armor, being summoned from their tents by the trumpets sounding reveille and ending the last watch of the night at the camps.

Five days after battering operations had begun against the Second Wall, on May 30, a section of the wall adjacent to the ruined tower collapsed. The Jewish defenders retreated to the First Wall, ignoring Titus’s suggestion that they come out and fight in the open like soldiers, or surrender. All who capitulated would be treated honorably, Titus had assured them, and would even be allowed to retain their property. In response, the armed defenders threatened death to the hundreds of thousands of refugees still sheltering within the remaining sections of the city if they dared attempt to surrender.

Ordered into the attack, legionaries went climbing over the rubble at the breach in the Second Wall. Surging triumphantly into the city, they found themselves in a maze of narrow lanes flanked by the walls and barred doors of houses. Suddenly gates opened in the First Wall and thousands of partisans rushed into the streets. The leading legionaries were overwhelmed and cut down. Their comrades hurriedly retreated to the gap in the Second Wall, but in the frantic crush few could squeeze out at any one time. There were numerous Roman casualties before the legionaries were able to withdraw. The gleeful Jews regained control of the Second Wall, convinced God was on their side and that the Romans were fated never to penetrate any farther.

Titus launched new, sustained ramming operations on the Second Wall. Three days later, on June 2, legionaries poured through several new breaches, and the defenders were again forced to retreat to the First Wall.

This time Titus had his troops demolish every building between the two walls. Soon a clear, dusty space was opened.

Now Titus suspended the siege. In an attempt to awe the defenders, he paraded his legions in full-dress uniform, and over the next four days cer-emoniously doled out the pay of every legionary, in full view of the people c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 242

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of Jerusalem who crowded the walls and windows of the city to watch the process. One at a time, every man had to come forward in parade dress and full equipment and sign for his pay. Cavalrymen were required to lead up their horses adorned with full decorations.

When this didn’t have any visible effect on the morale of the partisans, the young Roman general sent Josephus to attempt to negotiate a surrender from the defenders. Josephus had a very personal reason for wanting the city to capitulate—both his mother and his father were among the refugees still inside Jerusalem. Standing behind cover near the First Wall, Josephus called out to his fellow Jews that Rome would treat well all who surrendered.

There was no immediate response. But over the succeeding days many people did manage to escape from the city and reach the Roman lines. As the days passed, some Jews inside the city secretly bargained with Roman soldiers outside to buy food. In the night they lowered baskets containing gold to legionaries below the wall. When they hauled the baskets back up again, expecting to receive food, all they found was straw. It would have been highly amusing to the legionaries, but a bitter disappointment to the starving people on the wall. The rate of Jewish desertion rapidly increased, to five hundred a day. But even at that rate it would have taken years for the city to be cleared.

To speed defections, Roman troops even roasted goats under the walls.

As the aroma of cooking meat was carried into the city on the breeze, some starving refugees inside apparently went crazy. One demented Jewish woman was said to have even cooked and eaten her own baby. Armed bands roved the city searching for hidden reserves of food, killing anyone who resisted. Families fought each other over scraps; parents supposedly took food from the mouths of their children. When the widow of former high priest Jonathan couldn’t buy food despite her wealth, she threw her gold into the street in disgust. People died from hunger even as they were attending the funerals of friends and relatives.

Jews caught by Roman troops foraging for food outside the walls were whipped, then crucified. Soon there weren’t enough crosses to accommodate all the victims, so instead of crucifixion, many prisoners had their hands lopped off before being sent back to the city.

Once his surrender terms were rebuffed by the Jewish leadership, Titus set in motion the third phase of the assault. He assigned a different sector to each of his four main legions, no doubt conscious of the poet Ovid’s observation that a horse never runs so fast as when he has other horses to catch and outpace. The young general intended to use the spirit of com-

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petition that always existed among the legions as a spur to a rapid completion of the assault.

From officers such as Colonel Alexander, who knew Jerusalem well as a former administrator of Judea, Titus would have learned the city’s strong points, those key bastions he would have to take if the city was to fall. He also would have been able to draw on the firsthand knowledge of 3rd Augusta men who had been stationed in the city in the past. From the advice he received, Titus knew that he had to concentrate on the Antonia Fortress and the adjacent Temple, and, on the western side of the city, the massive castle that was Herod’s Palace.

The 10th Legion was assigned a section at the northeastern corner of the First Wall near the Amygdalon, the Almond Pool, next to Herod’s Palace. The 15th’s sector was forty-five feet away, opposite the High Priest’s Monument. The 5th was assigned the northwestern tower of the Antonia Fortress. The men of the 12th were just 30 feet away. Each legion was instructed to build an embankment of earth against the sixty-foot wall. With a gentle slope from base to top, each embankment would be just wide enough for a siege tower to be rolled along it to the wall. The rams would then go into action against the upper works of the wall.

It took fifteen days to build the embankments. All four competing legions finished work at much the same time. But the defenders hadn’t been idle all this time. One of the their commanders, John, who had escaped to Jerusalem from Gischala, led a team that dug a tunnel out under the First Wall from the Antonia Fortress, using a natural underground water conduit as a starting point. The miners supported the walls and roof of their tunnel with wooden uprights. As the Romans finished work on the two embankments above, the partisans coated the tunnel supports with pitch and bitumen, then withdrew, setting fire to the timbers. Once the fire had consumed the wooden supports, the tunnel roof caved in, and the embankments above collapsed, to the horror of the troops about to push their siege engines up the slopes.

There was consternation in Roman ranks at the embankment collapse over by the Antonia, but at their sector the men of the 10th and the 15th were able to push their siege towers up their ramps all the way to the wall.

Just as the legionaries were congratulating themselves on their efforts, a Jewish raiding party dashed out a nearby gate, overwhelmed men at the two towers, then set fire to wicker palisades around the towers.

Reinforcements were urgently summoned from both legions to save the towers from the flames, but even as legionaries of the 10th strained to drag their massive metal-sheathed tower free of the burning palisades, c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 244

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partisans pulled in the other direction, ignoring the heat and fire, even grasping hold of red-hot metal. Determined to see the towers destroyed, the Jews won the day. The legionaries had no choice but back off as flames roared up inside the pair of wooden structures, and both towers were consumed.

Then the jubilant Jews went on the offensive, chasing the Roman troops all the way back to the camp walls at the Camp of the Assyrians.

There the legionary pickets held the attackers until reinforced, and the legions drove the partisans back to the First Wall. Just the same, the day’s work was a morale-boosting success for the defenders of Jerusalem and a crushing blow for Titus and his troops.

The quick victory that had been on the cards up till now had eluded Titus, and he called a meeting of his commanders and staff to discuss a revision of tactics. As mime writer Publius Syrus had noted a century before, it is a bad plan that admits of no modification. And Titus was open to suggestions. Some of his officers advocated an all-out frontal attack from one end of the First Wall to the other. Others advocated settling in for a long siege, to wait for the Jews to either starve or surrender. Titus’s cautious father would have chosen the latter, and now Titus was inclined the same way. He decided to prepare for a long siege, without giving up on the idea of breaching the First Wall in several places simultaneously.

Titus now ordered his legionaries to surround Jerusalem with a wall of their own, a so-called wall of circumvallation. One of the factors that set the Roman military apart from its opponents over many centuries was its engineering skill. Caesar had been as much an engineer as a soldier, and the men who inherited his empire inherited his practices. This Roman wall was designed to seal the Jews within their city. Their daring raids outside the city walls before now had been more than a hindrance—several times they had driven all the way to the Roman camps.

Titus had no idea how many fighting men the Jews actually possessed inside the city, and how many they could therefore throw into a major sally outside the walls. He’d been told there were 600,000 to 1.2 million people in the city. Most were refugees, but even refugees can throw stones.

They were starving, but supposedly starving men had just dug a tunnel and burned his siege towers, so he could never be sure whether the Jewish fighters hadn’t maintained food reserves for themselves while they let the rest of the city starve. Throughout the siege, even though he did extract information from prisoners and defectors, Titus would never have been entirely sure what he was up against in Jerusalem.

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Then there were his lines of communication. Titus had to bring everything to his siege camps from miles away. His troops had already cut down every tree within a twelve-mile radius, so even wood for the legionaries’

cooking fires had to be brought in from far off. Water was of prime importance. There was plenty of water inside the city—that was why it had been built in this desolate location in the first place, its fresh-water cis-terns keeping the occupants supplied. Outside the walls, there was no water for many miles. So Titus had to bring in fresh water for sixty thousand troops and perhaps as many noncombatants in hundreds of water wagons every day. As well as food and ammunition.

The principal supply base for the offensive was back at Caesarea on the Mediterranean, so the road that clawed up into the hills from the maritime plain must have been one constant sea of wagons and mule trains during the months of the siege, bringing in supplies and ammunition and taking out wounded. In quarries somewhere behind the lines, workers were chipping out massive white Judean rocks, rounding them to the satisfaction of their supervisors, who would then have them swung onto waiting wagons for the lurching journey to the front lines, to feed the insatiable Roman artillery pieces.

All this made Titus and his task force vulnerable. The Jews had proven themselves masters of guerrilla warfare. If they managed to get a large force out of Jerusalem that could cut his supply route to the north, Titus would be in trouble. All the more reason to seal in the Jews.

His troops quickly began work building the wall of circumvallation.

They astonished the Jews by completing the five miles of trench and wall, inclusive of thirteen forts built along its length, in just three days. This construction feat was a record for the Roman army. Not even Julius Caesar had built so much so rapidly. Erection of Titus’s wall at Jerusalem would become legendary within the Roman military. To achieve these results, Titus had again treated the project as a competition, with each legion assigned its own section of wall to construct and with Titus making nightly inspections to praise, encourage, and reward his troops.

The breached Third Wall would have come in handy as legionaries cast about the barren, dusty landscape for building materials. Today there is little trace of the Third Wall. Without doubt, the toiling legionaries would have plundered it for building material. The wall of circumvallation ran within about two hundred yards of the First and Second Walls, following the Valley of Hinnon to the south, running along the bottom slope of the Mount of Olives to the east, and inside the Third Wall in the north, c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 246

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cleaving through the middle of the Betheza district, the so-called New City. On the western side of the city, Titus’s wall ran down past the Ser-pent’s Pool, at the foot of his headquarters at the Camp of the Assyrians.