Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (46 page)

Inside the surrounded city, civilians now became even more depressed, and partisans turned on each other once more. John of Gischala murdered Eleazar the Zealot. On the wall, Simon the Zealot executed Mattathias, one of the chief priests, for the Romans to see, having first killed the priest’s three sons in front of him. When Jude, one of Simon’s lieutenants, began to talk of surrender, Simon killed him, too.

Seeing this disarray among the opposition, Titus sent Josephus to once more call for a Jewish surrender. According to Josephus, this time he was hit on the head by a stone thrown from the walls, and knocked out cold.

The rebels cheered with delight, thinking Josephus had been killed. A Jewish party was sent out to collect his body, but Titus had already sent a strong legionary detachment to his aid, and he was brought back to the Roman lines and revived. He returned to the wall to resume his peace efforts, but the Jews, disappointed that the traitor had survived after all, sent him away.

Titus now decided to concentrate all his offensive activities on taking the Antonia Fortress. All four legions began building new embankments against the Antonia’s northern walls. Work was hampered by lack of timber, and several times new embankments gave way for lack of wooden support. For the first time, the spirits of the legionaries began to sag. This hot, unrewarding work was now in its third month.

On July 20, all four siege towers were rolled up into position against the Antonia, their progress unimpeded by a hail of missiles from the fortress. John of Gischala led another sortie outside the walls with firebrands, hoping to repeat the fiery success of the attack on the earlier towers of the 10th and 15th Legions. But this time the legionaries were expecting the attack—compressed tightly together and with their shields locked, they created an impenetrable barrier around their towers. Meanwhile, accurate Roman close artillery support cut down attackers in droves.

The surviving partisans retreated inside the First Wall, and the battering rams began their pounding of the northern wall of the Antonia.

The massive fortress of the Antonia, which dominated the Temple the way the Temple in turn dominated the city, resisted the rams, so infantry came up under cover of their shields, in a
testudo,
and undermined part of the wall by hand, dislodging four massive stones with their crowbars.

Unbeknownst to the assault troops, this happened to be right over part of the tunnel built earlier by John of Gischala. In the night, the tunnel col-

c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 247

lapsed beneath the weakened section of wall. As if by a miracle, a breach appeared in the wall. But with the dawn the Roman troops saw that the Jews had built yet another wall, using piles of rubble, inside the First Wall.

The legions would have to start all over again.

Seeing his men dejected by the prospect, Titus called an assembly of his elite troops, telling his generals to send him the best legionaries from each legion. As the picked men sat on the dusty ground in front of him, he climbed onto a tribunal to address them. Josephus also was there, and he recorded Titus’s speech.

“My fellow soldiers,” the young general began, “it would be scandalous for men who are Romans and my soldiers, in peacetime trained for war, in war accustomed to victory, to be outshone by these Jews in strength or determination. And on the brink of success and with Jupiter to help us!”

He went on to say that death in battle was glorious, and that Roman soldiers who died in this battle could look forward to their souls being set free amid the stars. The taking of this wall was a dangerous enterprise, he conceded, but he would not insult Roman soldiers by asking them to take risks and expose themselves to danger—risks and danger were common-place to a legionary. This was just another job that had to be done. And for those who succeeded, he promised, the rewards would be great. Then he called for volunteers to attack the new wall.

A Syrian legionary named Sabinus, from the task force’s single cohort of the 3rd Augusta Legion, now came to his feet. His unit was famed as one of Rome’s fiercest, bravest legions. The six cohorts of the 3rd Augusta recently sent to Europe from Judea had immediately added to their reputation after their arrival in Moesia—on a single icy winter’s day they had wiped out an entire raiding party of ten thousand Sarmatian cavalrymen who had crossed the Danube, and with barely a casualty of their own.

These same cohorts of the 3rd Augusta had subsequently spearheaded the bloody, unrelenting drive through Italy that had taken Cremona and Rome and secured the Roman throne for Vespasian.

But according to Josephus, the little, shriveled, dark-skinned Syrian legionary who now stood before Titus looked like anything but a soldier.

Almost certainly a second-enlistment man, he would have been fifty years of age, having joined his legion in the 3rd Augusta’s enlistment of a.d. 40.

Inspired by his example, eleven other legionaries from various units now also came to their feet, volunteering to join the Syrian for what was likely to be a suicide mission.

“If I fail, General,” Josephus says Legionary Sabinus declared, “I have chosen death with my eyes open.”

c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 248

248

C A E S A R ’ S

l e g i o n

That morning at dawn, like all the men of the 3rd Augusta in all parts of the Roman world, Sabinus would have bowed down to the sun as it crested the eastern horizon, just as he had every day of his adult life, saluting and offering prayers to Baal, his patron deity. Tacitus describes how the Syrians of the six cohorts of the 3rd Augusta that took part in the Battle of Cremona the previous year broke off at dawn to salute the rising sun before returning to the fight. Their religious observances, it seems, came before all else. On this day, Legionary Sabinus would have asked the Syrian sun god to watch over him, as he did every day. No doubt now, as admiring 3rd Augusta friends helped him strap on his armor and handed him his shield, Sabinus offered another silent prayer to the heavens—a prayer for success in his mission, for the chance to greet great Baal again the next morning.

Perhaps a worried Syrian friend, less influenced by the heady excitement of the moment, might have voiced the age-old disdain that soldiers have for volunteering. To volunteer at any time was foolish, he might have said, but to volunteer for a mission like this was lunacy. He may have reminded Sabinus of the old Latin proverb “Wise men learn by other men’s mistakes, fools by their own.” And this mistake could well be fatal.

But the little legionary of the 3rd Augusta had set his mind to the task, and he was not going to be diverted from his chosen course.

A little before noon, as the men of the Roman army watched from their lines, Legionary Sabinus led the group of volunteers in a sudden rush at the new wall, shield raised, sword drawn. From the top of the wall above, defenders opened up with a barrage of missiles. While companions all around him were hit and tumbled back under a hail of javelins, arrows, and stones, Sabinus scrambled up the rubble unscathed. Josephus says that as the lone legionary kept coming, climbing the rubble like a veritable monkey and without a scratch, Jewish defenders thought the diminutive Syrian must be some kind of superman and fled, leaving him free to climb up onto the top of the wall.

From the uneven summit, turning back to his watching army, Legionary Sabinus, grinning, raised his shield and sword victoriously. The cheers of thousands of his comrades would have reached his ears. For this deed, for being the first to mount the wall of the enemy city, he could expect to be presented with the Corona Muralis, the Mural Crown, one of the most prestigious bravery awards available to a Roman soldier, equivalent to the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor, or Britain’s Victoria Cross.

The solid gold crown, crenellated in imitation of the walls of a city, singled out the holder as an exceptional soldier. Polybius tells us that the c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 249

holders of golden crowns—there also were crowns awarded for storming an entrenchment and for conspicuous gallantry in a sea battle, the Corona Vallaris and the Corona Navalis, respectively—were given place of precedence in religious parades when they went home after leaving the military, and they hung their crowns in a prominent place in their houses for all to see. He says that Romans of all classes had an almost obsessive concern with military rewards, attaching immense importance to them. So it wasn’t surprising, Polybius said, that Romans emerged “with brilliant success from every war in which they engage.”

This quest for glory had driven Legionary Sabinus to climb the Antonia wall. As he stood there, he would have pictured himself called to the front of an assembly of the entire army. General Titus Flavius Vespasianus, the emperor’s son, would read his citation, then personally place the heavy crown of gold on his head. Tens of thousands of Sabinus’s comrades would cheer and applaud. And how he would be received when he went home once his current enlistment expired in another ten years. Perhaps to Beirut, hometown of many men of the 3rd Augusta, so we gather from Josephus. Sabinus’s fame would precede him, of course. He would write home, perhaps paying a literate comrade to pen a note to his family, and sending the letter with a traveler plying the coastal road north, or slipping it, along with a bribe, into the hands of a bronze-badged rider of the
Cursus Publicus
courier service. How proud they would be in Beirut of their son, brother, cousin, and uncle Sabinus, winner of the Mural Crown.

But then, in that instant of success, the brave, daydreaming soldier lost his balance. To the horror of the watching Romans, Legionary Sabinus fell, landing with a crash of his segmented metal armor inside the wall. The noise alerted the fleeing partisans. They turned to see Sabinus, injured by the fall, raising himself up onto one knee. They swarmed back and surrounded him. Sabinus raised his shield to defend himself, but his arms were soon a mass of wounds. The shield dropped, and Sabinus was cut to pieces.

The Roman army didn’t make a habit of bestowing bravery awards posthumously. One of the rare instances on record was when Caesar buried Chief Centurion Crastinus of the 10th Legion after the Battle of Pharsalus. So it seems that Sabinus’s death robbed him of the glory that precipitated it.

Of Sabinus’s fellow volunteers, three were killed and eight wounded before they could even reach the top of the wall. As Jewish defenders reoccupied the wall, other legionaries dashed forward and brought the wounded men out and carried them away to the nearest field hospital behind the lines.

c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 250

250

C A E S A R ’ S

l e g i o n

Two nights later, another party of volunteers—twenty legionaries and the eagle-bearer from the 5th Legion, plus two cavalrymen and a trumpeter—quietly climbed the rubble in the darkness and overpowered the Jewish sentries on duty. The legion trumpeter then blew his instrument.

This signal sent panic through the other Jewish guards, who thought the entire Roman army had broken into the Antonia in the darkness, and they ran for it. In fact, the trumpet was merely the signal to summon more Roman troops waiting in the night. Titus and his officers were among those who flooded, unopposed, over the wall. The Jewish defenders withdrew to the Temple via a tunnel connecting it with the Antonia and dug by John of Gischala, presumably filling in the tunnel behind them.

The Roman army had secured the Antonia. In the end it was achieved much more easily than either side would have imagined weeks or even days earlier. The Roman success signaled the beginning of the end for the Jewish defenders. But a lot of blood was yet to be spilled. Legionaries surged through the Antonia and into the Sanctuary of the Temple. Here, warring Jewish factions combined to stand shoulder to shoulder against the invaders in the desperate hand-to-hand fighting that followed in the tight confines of the Sanctuary courtyard. From the moment the first Roman mounted the wall, the struggle lasted from the middle of the night until the afternoon of the next day.

Julianus, a centurion from Bithynia, in the north of present-day Turkey, tried to exhort the exhausted Roman troops as more and more Jews pressed forward. Single-handedly he drove the partisans back across the Temple forecourt. Then his feet went from under him, slipping on blood on the paving stones. He fell on his back with a crash of his armor. Jewish fighters sprang forward and surrounded him. Somehow, Centurion Julianus killed seven of his assailants before he was hacked to pieces. Inspired by this Pyrrhic success, the Jews rallied and drove the Romans back into the Antonia. Its walls became the new front line.

Titus ordered the fortress destroyed to create a broad entrance into the Temple from outside the First Wall. During the week that this demolition work was being carried out, Titus again sent Josephus to offer surrender terms. In tears, Josephus implored his fellow Jews to save themselves and the city. Again the resistance leaders refused.

Leading Jews, especially priests, who managed to escape the Temple and surrender were sent by Titus twelve miles north to the town of Gophna. Garrisoned by Vespasian early in the campaign, it now served as a POW camp for Jewish prisoners, with the inexperienced men of the four cohorts of the 18th Legion almost certainly acting as their guards. When c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 251

partisan leader John of Gischala spread the rumor around Jerusalem that these senior prisoners had been executed by their Roman guards, hoping to dissuade others from attempting to emulate their escape, Titus got wind of it and brought the prisoners back, parading them outside the walls for all to see that they were safe and well.

Once a path had been cleared through the Antonia, Titus gave Colonel Sextus Vettulenus the task of leading a surprise night attack in force, with the goal of penetrating as far as the forecourt of the Temple. But this time the Jewish sentries weren’t taken by surprise, and they summoned support as the Romans launched their assault. A bitter fight took place in the forecourt. Colonel Vettulenus and his troops charged in their maniples of up to 160 men at a time, closed up and with their shields locked together.