Jewish War — Book 3

Josephus · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

When Nero was told of the reverses in Judea, an anxiety and dread stole over him, as was natural, though openly he affected contempt and anger, saying that what had happened was due to the commanders' slackness rather than to any valor on the enemy's part, and thinking it fitting, given the weight of his office, to appear above every misfortune and to seem to hold a spirit superior to any disaster.

Yet the turmoil in his soul was betrayed by the anxious calculations he made over whom he could trust with the task of putting down the uprising in the East, since the Jewish revolt would need to be punished, and the neighboring nations, already infected with the same sickness, would have to be forestalled. Vespasian alone he found equal to the need, a man capable of shouldering a war of such magnitude, one grown old in campaigns since his youth, who had earlier pacified the West when it was troubled by the Germans,

and had won Britain for Rome by arms, a country till then scarcely known, thereby giving his father Claudius the honor of a triumph without exertion of his own. Reading all this as a good omen, and seeing in the man a maturity seasoned by experience, and holding as a great pledge of his loyalty his sons, hostages as it were, whose vigor of age would be an instrument of their father's wisdom — and perhaps too because God was already ordering the whole course of events —

Nero sent Vespasian to take command of the armies in Syria, first flattering and courting him at length with all the attentions that necessity dictates. Vespasian, who was then in Achaea in Nero's company, sent his son Titus ahead to Alexandria to bring up the fifteenth legion from there, while he himself crossed the Hellespont

and went overland into Syria, where he assembled the Roman forces together with a considerable body of allies furnished by the neighboring kings. The Jews, meanwhile, elated by their unexpected successes after the defeat of Cestius, could not restrain their impulse, and, as though fanned on by fortune, pushed the war further afield. At once they gathered every man among them fit for battle and set out against Ascalon, an ancient city

lying five hundred and twenty stadia from Jerusalem, one that had always been an object of hatred to the Jews; for this reason it seemed the nearest target for their first onset. Three men led the raid, foremost alike in courage and judgment: Niger the Peraite, Silas the Babylonian, and with them John the Essene. Ascalon was strongly walled but almost destitute of a garrison,

for it was defended by only one cohort of infantry and a single squadron of cavalry, commanded by Antonius. The Jews, marching with far greater speed than their impulse required, as men rushing on a target close at hand, soon arrived before the city; but Antonius, who was not unaware that their attack was still to come, led his horsemen out ahead of time and, undaunted by either the enemy's numbers or their daring, stoutly withstood their

first onset and drove back those who pressed toward the wall. The Jews, inexperienced men matched against veterans of war, foot soldiers against cavalry, an undisciplined mob against a unified force, carelessly armed against fully equipped heavy infantry, led more by passion than by strategy against an obedient army that executed every maneuver at a nod — pitted against such a foe, they suffered easily; for once their front ranks were thrown into confusion, they were routed by

the cavalry, and as they fell back on those behind them still pressing toward the wall, they became enemies to one another, until, giving way altogether before the charges of the horsemen, they scattered over the whole plain — and it was a broad plain, entirely suited to cavalry. This worked to the advantage of the Romans and caused the greatest slaughter of the Jews; for they overtook those who fled and turned them back, and cut down without number those

caught up in the confusion of the rout, while others they surrounded, driving them wherever they turned, and shot them down with ease. To the Jews their very numbers now seemed like solitude amid such helplessness, while the Romans, few as they were, felt themselves more than sufficient for the fighting even in their success. And while some persisted against their reverses in the hope of a quick escape and a change of fortune,

others, not yet weary in their success, prolonged the battle until late afternoon, until ten thousand Jews had been killed, along with two of their commanders, John and Silas; the rest, for the most part wounded, fled together with their remaining commander Niger to a small town of Idumea called Chaalis. Only a few of the

Romans were wounded in this engagement. Yet such a disaster did not break the Jews' spirit; rather it stirred their daring the more, for scorning the dead lying at their feet, they were lured by their earlier successes into a second blow. Without even pausing to let their wounds heal, and having gathered every man they had, angrier now and far more numerous, they marched again upon

Ascalon. But along with their inexperience and their other disadvantages for war, their earlier fortune still dogged them; for Antonius had set ambushes along the passes, and, falling unexpectedly into these traps and being surrounded by the cavalry before they could form up for battle, they lost more than eight thousand men, while all the rest fled, Niger among them, who displayed great feats of daring

in the flight, but was driven, with the enemy pressing close, into a strong tower at a village called Belzedek. Antonius and his men, unwilling either to wear themselves out around a tower so hard to take, or to let the enemy's commander, the bravest of their foes, escape alive, set fire to the wall. As the tower burned, the Romans withdrew rejoicing, thinking Niger destroyed along with it; but he leapt down from the tower into

the innermost cave of the stronghold and so survived, and three days later, when men searching for him with lamentation, to give him burial, called out, he answered from below. Coming forward, he filled all the Jews with unlooked-for joy, since he had been saved, as they believed, by God's providence to be their general for what lay ahead. Vespasian, meanwhile, gathering his forces from Antioch, the metropolis of Syria, which by size and other

good fortune holds unrivaled third place among the cities of the Roman world, made for Ptolemais, where King Agrippa, with the whole of his own strength, was already waiting to greet his arrival. Approaching this city, the people of Sepphoris in Galilee, the only ones in that region inclined to peace, came out to meet him; they, aware of

both their own safety and the strength of Rome, even before Vespasian arrived had given pledges and received guarantees from Cestius Gallus and had admitted a garrison. Now they received the commander warmly and eagerly offered themselves as allies against their own countrymen; and the general, granting their request, gave them for their immediate security as many cavalry and infantry as he judged sufficient to withstand any raids, should the Jews stir up trouble, for indeed

it seemed no small risk, with the war ahead, to leave Sepphoris exposed — the greatest city of Galilee, fortified on the strongest of sites, and destined to serve as a stronghold for the whole nation. Galilee, divided into two regions called Upper and Lower, is bounded on all sides by Phoenicia and Syria; to the west its limits are marked by Ptolemais with

its territory, and by Carmel, once a mountain of the Galileans, now of the Tyrians; adjoining it is Gaba, a city of horsemen, so called because the cavalrymen discharged by King Herod settled there; to the south lie Samaria and Scythopolis, as far as the waters of the Jordan; to the east it is cut off by Hippos and Gadara, and by Gaulanitis, which also marks

the boundary of Agrippa's kingdom; its northern side is bounded by Tyre and Tyrian territory. Lower Galilee, as it is called, stretches in length from Tiberias to Chabulon, near which on the coast lies Ptolemais its neighbor. In width it extends from the village of Xaloth, lying in the great plain, to Bersabe, which also marks the beginning of the width

of Upper Galilee, as far as the village of Baca, which forms the boundary with Tyrian land. Its length extends to Meroth, from the village of Thella near the Jordan. Though such in size, and surrounded on every side by so many foreign peoples, the Galileans have withstood every trial of war; for they are warlike from infancy and always numerous, and neither cowardice has ever gripped the men nor lack of manpower the land,

since it is entirely fertile, good for pasture, and planted with every kind of tree, so that by its very productivity it invites even those least inclined to labor the soil. Every part of it has accordingly been worked by its inhabitants, and none of it lies idle; rather its cities are close-set, and the multitude of villages everywhere is thick with people because of the land's abundance, so that even the smallest holds above fifteen thousand inhabitants.

In general, though one might judge Galilee inferior to Perea in size, one would prefer it for productive strength; for Galilee is wholly cultivated and continuously fruit-bearing, while Perea, though much larger, is for the most part desert and rugged, too wild for the growth of cultivated fruit; yet its softer parts are fertile in every kind of produce, and its plains are planted

with varied trees, chiefly worked for olive, vine, and palm, watered abundantly by winter streams from the mountains and by ever-flowing springs whenever those streams fail in the dog days. Its length runs from Machaerus to Pella, its width from Philadelphia to the Jordan. It is bounded on the north by Pella, already mentioned, on the west by the Jordan;

on the south its limit is Moabitis, and to the east it is cut off by Arabia and Silbonitis, and further by Philadelphia and Gerasa. Samaria lies between Galilee and Judea, for beginning at the village of Ginea in the plain it ends at the toparchy of Acrabatene, and in nature it is no different from Judea. Both regions

are alike hilly and plain-like, soft and productive for farming, wooded, and full of both wild and cultivated fruit; nowhere naturally lacking water, they receive abundant rain, and every stream in them is unusually sweet, and because of the abundance of good grazing their herds give more milk than elsewhere. The surest proof of their fertility and abundance is the great number of men

that each supports. On their border lies a village called Anuath Borcaeus, which marks the northern limit of Judea, while its southern boundary, measured along its length, is fixed by a village bordering on Arab territory, called by the Jews there Jordan. In width it stretches from the Jordan river to Joppa. In its very center lies the city of Jerusalem, for which reason

some have not inaptly called the city the navel of the land. Nor is Judea deprived of the pleasures of the sea, for it reaches to the coast as far as Ptolemais. It is divided into eleven districts, of which Jerusalem, the royal seat, holds the first place, rising above the whole surrounding region like the head over the body; the rest, after it, are divided by their toparchies: Gophna second, and after it

Acrabatta, then Thamna and Lydda, Emmaus and Pella, Idumea, Engaddi, Herodium, and Jericho; after these come Jamnia and Joppa, which govern their surrounding districts, and beyond these Gamalitica, Gaulanitis, Batanaea, and Trachonitis, which are also part of Agrippa's kingdom. This last region, beginning at Mount Lebanon and the sources of the Jordan, widens as far as

the lake at Tiberias, and extends in length from the village called Arpha to Julias. It is inhabited by a mixed population of Jews and Syrians. Such, then, in the briefest possible compass, is our account of Judea and the country around it. Now the force Vespasian sent to aid the people of Sepphoris — a thousand cavalry and six thousand infantry, under the command of the tribune Placidus —

encamped in the great plain and split in two, the infantry stationed in the city to guard it, the cavalry quartered in the camp outside. Advancing continually from both positions and overrunning the surrounding country, they inflicted great harm on Josephus's men, who remained inactive, plundering the towns from without and cutting down any who ventured out when they took courage. Josephus, however, set out toward the

city, hoping to capture it — the very city he himself had fortified before Galilee revolted, making it, he supposed, impregnable even to the Romans; and so he was disappointed of his hope, being found too weak either to force the Sepphorites or to win them over by persuasion. He only provoked the war against the countryside the more, and neither by night nor by day did the Romans relax the fury of their assault, ravaging the plains and plundering the

property in the countryside, always killing the fighting men and enslaving the weak. All Galilee was filled with fire and blood, and no suffering or calamity went untasted; the only refuge for those pursued were the cities Josephus had fortified. Titus, meanwhile, having crossed from Achaea to Alexandria more swiftly than the winter season allowed,

took over the force assigned to him, and, marching with all speed, arrived at Ptolemais. There he found his father with the two legions he had brought with him, the most distinguished, the fifth and the tenth, and he joined to them the fifteenth, which he himself had brought. Eighteen cohorts followed these; five more came from Caesarea, along with one squadron of cavalry, and five

other squadrons of Syrian cavalry. Of the cohorts, ten had a thousand infantry each, while the remaining thirteen had six hundred infantry and a hundred twenty cavalry apiece. A considerable body of allied troops was also gathered from the kings: Antiochus, Agrippa, and Sohaemus each supplied two thousand archers on foot and a thousand cavalry, while Malchus the Arab sent a thousand

cavalry along with five thousand infantry, most of them archers, so that, counting in the royal contingents, the whole force, cavalry and infantry together, amounted to sixty thousand, not including the camp servants, who followed in great numbers and, owing to their training for war, could hardly be set apart from the fighting men, since in peacetime they were constantly engaged in their masters' drills, and shared the dangers of war, so that not

in skill or in strength inferior to anyone but their own masters. Here one might well admire the Romans' foresight in equipping themselves with a body of household slaves useful not only for the services of daily life but for war as well. And if one looks also at the rest of the army's organization, he will recognize that they hold so vast an empire as the acquisition of their own discipline, not a gift of fortune.

For war is not the beginning of their acquaintance with arms, nor do they sit idle in peacetime and take up their weapons only when necessity strikes; rather, as though grown together with their arms, they never take a holiday from training, and never wait for occasion to force them to it. Their drills fall no short of the rigor of actual combat; each soldier, every single day, trains with the full eagerness of a man at war.

That is why they carry battles so lightly: no disorder scatters them from their accustomed formation, no fear unmans them, no exertion wears them down, and victory over less disciplined enemies follows them always, and surely. One would not be wrong to call their drills battles without bloodshed, and their battles drills with blood. They are not easily overrun even by surprise attack,

and wherever they invade an enemy's land, they never engage in battle before fortifying a camp. And they do not build it carelessly or unevenly, nor does the whole force pitch in haphazardly; if the ground happens to be uneven, they level it, and the camp is measured out for them as a square. A crowd of carpenters follows, along with the tools for construction. The interior they divide

into quarters for the tents, while on the outside the ring of the wall presents the look of a real fortification, adorned with towers set at equal intervals. In the spaces between the towers they place quick-firing bolt-throwers, catapults, stone-throwers, and every kind of missile engine, all kept ready for shooting. Four gates are built into the circuit, one to each quarter, wide enough for the pack animals to enter and, if urgency demands it, wide enough for the troops to sally out at speed.

They lay out the streets within the camp in good order, placing the commanders' tents in the middle, and at the very center of these the headquarters tent, which resembles a temple. It is as though a city were set up on the spot, complete with its own marketplace, a district for the craftsmen, and seats for the centurions and tribunes, where they may sit in judgment if any disputes arise. The whole enclosure, and everything within it, is fortified

faster than one would think possible, given the number and the skill of the workers; and if the need is urgent, a ditch is also thrown up outside, four cubits deep and equally wide. Once fenced in, they settle down to camp by units, each in quiet and good order. Everything else, too, is carried out with the same discipline and safety: gathering wood, foraging for supplies when needed, and drawing water, each unit by its own detail. For no one

eats dinner or breakfast whenever he pleases on his own authority — all eat together. Trumpets announce their hours of sleep, of watch, and of waking, and nothing at all happens without a command. At dawn the rank and file report to their centurions, the centurions in turn go to pay their respects to the tribunes, and with the tribunes all the officers go together to the commander-in-chief.

He gives them the watchword handed down by custom, along with the rest of his orders, to be passed on down to those beneath them. And this same practice they follow even in battle: they wheel about swiftly wherever it is needed, and in their advances and their retreats they fall back in close, unbroken order. When it is time to break camp, the trumpet gives the first signal, and no one stays idle; at a single nod they

strike the tents, and everything is made ready for departure. Then the trumpets sound a second signal that all is prepared. The men, having quickly loaded their gear onto mules and pack animals, stand as if at the starting line, ready to move out — and they set fire to the camp themselves, since it costs them nothing to build another one just like it, and so that it may never be of use to the enemy.

A third time, still, the trumpets signal the departure, hurrying along any who for some reason have been slow, so that no one is left behind out of formation. The herald, standing at the general's right hand, asks three times in their native tongue whether they are ready for war, and each time they shout back loudly and eagerly that they are ready, even anticipating the question, and, filled with a kind of martial spirit,

they raise their right hands together with the shout. Then they advance and march on quietly and in good order, each man keeping his own place just as in battle — the infantry protected by breastplates and helmets, and wearing swords on both sides. The sword on the left is much the longer of the two, for the one on the right is no more than a hand's span in length. The elite infantry stationed around the

general carry a spear and a shield, while the rest of the main body carry a long pike and an oblong shield, and besides these a saw, a basket, a mattock, an axe, a strap, a sickle, and a chain, along with three days' rations — so that the foot soldier falls little short of a pack mule in what he carries. The cavalrymen carry a long sword on the right side and a long lance in

hand, with a shield slung along the horse's flank, and in a quiver at their side hang three or more javelins with broad heads, not much smaller than spears; their helmets and breastplates match those of the infantry exactly. The elite cavalry stationed around the general are armed no differently from those serving in the regular squadrons. By lot, whichever unit is drawn always leads the march. Such, then,

are the marching order and encampments of the Romans, and the range of their weaponry. Nothing in their battles is left to chance or improvised: judgment always precedes every action, and action follows what has been decided. That is why they make so few mistakes, and why, even when they do stumble, they recover from their errors so easily. They consider a deliberate failure better than an accidental success,

reasoning that unearned good fortune tempts men into carelessness, while forethought, even when it fails once, provides good training against failing a second time; and that for goods that fall to a man by chance, the man himself deserves no credit, whereas for grim outcomes that come against his own judgment, at least having planned properly offers some comfort. So in the exercise of arms they train not only the body

but the spirit as well to be courageous, and they train it, too, by fear. For among them the laws punish with death not only desertion but even minor laxity, and their generals are more feared than the laws themselves; yet through the honors they grant to good soldiers they avoid seeming cruel toward those they punish. So great is their obedience to their commanders that in

peacetime the whole army is an ornament, and in the line of battle it acts as a single body. So secure are their formations, so smooth their wheeling maneuvers, so sharp their ears for orders, their eyes for signals, their hands for action, that they are always quick to strike and slowest to suffer harm. Nowhere have they stood their ground and been defeated, whether by numbers, by stratagems, by rough terrain, or even

by fortune itself — for their mastery over fortune, too, is more secure than most. Since, then, deliberation governs their battle order, and so vigorous an army follows what has been decided, what wonder is it that the empire's boundaries are the Euphrates to the east, the Ocean to the west, the richest part of Libya to the south, and the Danube and the Rhine to the north? One might fairly say that the possession is

smaller than the men who possess it. Now I have gone through all this not so much to praise the Romans, as to console those who have been conquered and to deter those inclined toward rebellion; and this account of the training of the Roman army may also serve, for those unfamiliar with it, as instruction for those who take pleasure in learning such things. I now return to the point from which I made this digression. Vespasian, meanwhile, was staying for the time being at Ptolemais with his son Titus, organizing

his forces, while Placidus, who was overrunning Galilee, had already killed a great number of those he caught — the weaker element of the Galileans, worn down by their flight — and, seeing that the fighting men kept escaping together to the cities Josephus had fortified, set out against the strongest of them, Jotapata, thinking he would take it easily by a sudden assault and win great glory for himself with

the high command, and be of use to them for the rest of the campaign — since, once its strongest city fell, the rest would surrender out of fear. But he was badly mistaken in his expectation. The people of Jotapata, sensing his approach, met him outside the city, and, closing unexpectedly with the Romans in large numbers, ready for battle and as eager as men fighting for an endangered homeland and for their wives and children, quickly put them

to flight. They wounded many of the Romans but killed only seven, because the Roman withdrawal was never disorderly and their wounds were superficial, their bodies being guarded on every side, while the Jews, being lightly armed, were bolder at hurling missiles from a distance than at closing with heavily armed men. Three of the Jews fell, and only a few were wounded. Placidus, then, finding himself too weak for his assault on the city, took flight.

Vespasian himself, eager now to invade Galilee in person, marched out from Ptolemais, having arranged the army to move in the customary Roman order. He ordered the light-armed auxiliaries and archers to go on ahead, to repel any sudden enemy attacks and to search out suspicious stretches of woodland that might conceal an ambush. Behind them followed a division of Roman heavy infantry, foot and

horse. With these came ten men from each century, carrying their own gear along with the instruments for surveying the camp, and after them the road-builders, whose task was to straighten the crooked stretches of the highway, level the rough ground, and clear away obstructing timber, so that the army would not be worn out by difficult terrain. Behind these he placed his own baggage and that of the officers under him,

and after that a substantial force to guard the cavalry's baggage. Behind these he himself rode out, with the elite infantry and cavalry and the lancers around him. His own legion's cavalry followed him — each legion has its own hundred and twenty horsemen. After these came the men carrying the siege engines on mules, along with the rest of the machinery. After them

came the legates and the prefects of the cohorts, together with the tribunes, each with elite soldiers around him. Then came the standards surrounding the eagle, which leads every Roman legion — king of all birds, and the most valiant of them — a symbol of empire to the Romans and an omen that whomever they attack, they will conquer. The trumpeters followed behind the sacred emblems, and behind them

came the main body, its column widened to six files. A centurion, as custom dictates, marched alongside them, keeping watch over their formation. The servants attached to each legion all followed together with the infantry, carrying the soldiers' baggage on mules and pack animals. Behind the whole force came the hired laborers, with a rearguard following for their protection — infantry, heavily armed troops, and

a good number of cavalry as well. Marching in this order, Vespasian arrived with his forces at the borders of Galilee, and there, having made camp, he held back his soldiers, who were eager for battle, displaying his army so as to strike terror into the enemy and to give them the chance to change their minds before the fighting began, while at the same time preparing for the siege of their strongholds. His mere appearance as general moved many to abandon their revolt,

and struck terror into all of them. Those camped with Josephus not far from Sepphoris, near the town called Garis, hearing that war was drawing close and that the Romans were all but ready to engage them, scattered in flight before the battle — indeed, before they had even seen the enemy. Josephus was left with only a few men, and, realizing that he lacked

sufficient force to hold off the enemy, and that the spirits of the Jews had collapsed, and that most of them, if they could be trusted to receive terms, would gladly go over to a truce, he had already begun to despair of the whole war, and at that point decided to remove himself as far as possible from the danger. Taking those who had stayed with him, he fled to Tiberias. Vespasian, meanwhile, advanced on the city of Gadara and took it at the first assault, finding it

empty of its fighting men, and, entering it, killed everyone regardless of age, the Romans showing no mercy to any generation, out of hatred for the nation and in memory of their outrages against Cestius. He burned not only the city itself but all the surrounding villages and small towns as well — some of them already entirely abandoned, others he enslaved himself. Josephus, meanwhile,

filled with terror the very city he had fled to for safety. The people of Tiberias would never have imagined he would take refuge there, unless he had utterly despaired of the whole war — and in this judgment of his state of mind they were not mistaken. For he could see where the fortunes of the Jews were heading, and he knew that their only hope of survival lay in changing sides. Yet he himself, though

he expected to be pardoned by the Romans, chose again and again to die rather than betray his homeland and, having disgraced the command entrusted to him, prosper among the very people he had been sent to fight. He therefore decided to write to the authorities in Jerusalem with a precise account of the situation, so that he would neither, by exaggerating the enemy's strength, later be branded a coward, nor, by understating it, perhaps embolden them into false confidence if they reconsidered their position —

so that they might either choose a truce and write back to him quickly, or, if resolved to fight the Romans, send him a force strong enough to match them. Having written this, he sent men in haste to Jerusalem to carry the letter. Vespasian, meanwhile, eager to take Jotapata — for he had learned that a great many of the enemy had taken refuge there, and that it was in any case a strong base of operations for them — sent infantry and

cavalry ahead to level the road, which was mountainous and rocky, difficult even for infantry and impassable for cavalry. In four days these men finished the work and opened a broad highway for the army. On the fifth day — it was the twenty-first of the month Artemisius — Josephus, arriving at Jotapata from Tiberias ahead of the army, revived the

fallen spirits of the Jews. To Vespasian, meanwhile, a deserter brought the welcome news of the man's move, and urged him to hurry against the city, since with its capture he would take all Judea, if only he got Josephus into his hands. Seizing on the report as the greatest stroke of good fortune, and reckoning that by the providence of God the man thought to be the shrewdest of the enemy had walked of his own accord into a prison, he at once sent Placidus with a thousand cavalry, together with the decurion Aebutius, a man distinguished for both action and judgment, with orders to ring the city so that Josephus could not slip away unnoticed.

Vespasian himself followed a day later with his whole force, and, marching until late afternoon, arrived before Jotapata. Bringing the army around to the northern side of the city, he pitched camp on a hill seven stadia away, taking care to be as conspicuous to the enemy as possible in order to overawe them; and such terror did in fact seize the Jews on the spot that not a man dared go outside the wall. The Romans put off an immediate assault, having marched the whole day, but they surrounded the city with a double line of infantry and stationed the cavalry as a third ring outside, blocking every way out. This, by cutting off all hope of escape, only spurred the Jews to daring; for nothing in war fights harder than necessity.

When the assault came the next day, the Jews at first stood their ground and resisted where they were, having camped opposite the Romans in front of the wall. But when Vespasian set his archers and slingers and the whole mass of his long-range troops against them with orders to shoot, while he himself pushed uphill with the infantry toward the point where the wall could be stormed, Josephus, fearing for the city, sprang out, and the whole body of the Jews with him. Falling on the Romans in a mass, they drove them back from the wall and gave proof of many feats of arms and daring. Yet they suffered no less than they inflicted; for as much as despair of survival drove on the Jews, so shame spurred the Romans, and the one side was armed with experience joined to strength, the other with boldness under the generalship of fury. The battle lasted the whole day and was broken off only by night; the Jews had wounded a great many Romans and killed thirteen, while of their own men seventeen fell and six hundred were wounded.

On the following day they sallied out and attacked the Romans again, and fought back far more stubbornly, having grown bolder from their unexpected success in holding out the day before; but they also found the Romans fiercer, for shame set them ablaze with anger, since they counted anything short of quick victory a defeat. Up to the fifth day the Roman assaults went on without pause, while the sallies of the men of Jotapata and the fighting from the walls grew ever more determined; the Jews were not cowed by the strength of the enemy, nor were the Romans discouraged by the difficulty of taking the city.

Jotapata is almost entirely a precipice. On every other side it is cut off by ravines so deep that the sight of those who try to look down fails before it reaches the bottom; it can be approached only from the north, where the city has been built out along the sloping end of the mountain. This side too Josephus had enclosed when he fortified the city, so that the crest above it could not be seized by an enemy. Screened all around by other mountains, the city was completely invisible until one actually arrived at it. Such was the strength of Jotapata.

Vespasian, contending against both the nature of the place and the daring of the Jews, resolved to press the siege more vigorously, and summoned his officers to plan the assault. It was decided to raise an embankment against the approachable part of the wall, and he sent his whole army out to gather material. The mountains around the city were stripped of timber, and along with the wood an immense quantity of stones was collected. Some of the men, to shield themselves against the missiles launched from above, stretched wicker screens over palisades and heaped up the embankment beneath them, suffering little or nothing from the shots off the wall; others tore up the neighboring mounds and brought them earth without pause; and with the work divided three ways, no one stood idle. The Jews for their part hurled great rocks down from the walls onto their shelters, and every kind of missile; even when these did not penetrate, the noise was loud and terrifying, and a hindrance to the workers.

Vespasian then set up his artillery in a circle — a hundred and sixty engines in all — and ordered them to fire on the defenders of the wall. In one great volley the catapults sent their lances whizzing, stones a talent in weight came from the stone-throwers, along with fire and massed showers of arrows, which made not only the wall impossible for the Jews to man but also all the ground within that the missiles could reach; for the crowd of Arab archers, and all the javelin-men and slingers, were shooting at the same time as the engines. Barred from defending themselves from above, the Jews still did not stay quiet. They ran out in raiding parties, like brigands, tore away the shelters of the workmen, struck the men so exposed, and, wherever the workers gave way, broke up the embankment and set fire to the palisades and screens — until Vespasian realized that the separation of the works was the cause of the damage, since the gaps gave the Jews a point of attack, and joined the shelters into one; and once the working parties had been united as well, the Jewish infiltrations were cut off.

With the embankment now rising and all but level with the battlements, Josephus judged it shameful to devise nothing that might save the city, and gathered masons with orders to raise the wall higher. When they declared it impossible to build under so many missiles, he contrived this protection for them: he ordered stout fences of stakes to be fixed up and the fresh-flayed hides of oxen stretched over them, so that the stones from the engines would be caught in their sagging folds, the other missiles would glance off, and the fire would be checked by the moisture. These he set up in front of the builders, and under them, working safely day and night, they raised the wall to a height of twenty cubits, built numerous towers into it, and fitted it with a strong battlement. At this the Romans, who had thought themselves practically inside the city, fell into deep despondency, struck by Josephus's ingenuity and the resolution of the defenders.

Vespasian was stung both by the cleverness of the stratagem and by the daring of the men of Jotapata; for, taking heart again from the new fortification, they were sallying out against the Romans, and every day there were skirmishes between raiding parties, every trick of banditry, plundering of whatever came to hand, and burning of the other works — until Vespasian withdrew his army from battle and resolved to sit down before the city and take it by want of supplies. Either, he reasoned, they would be forced by their privations to beg his mercy, or, if they stayed defiant to the end, they would perish of famine. And he expected to find them far easier to deal with in battle if he waited and then fell upon them again when they were worn out. He therefore gave orders to guard all the ways out of the city.

Those within had grain in abundance, and everything else except salt, but there was a shortage of water, since there is no spring in the city, and its people ordinarily make do with rain — and rain rarely if ever falls in that region in summer. As they were besieged in that very season, a dreadful despondency came over them at the mere thought of thirst, and they were already fretting as though water had failed entirely; for Josephus, seeing that the city was well supplied with everything else and that the men's spirit was high, and wishing to stretch the siege beyond the Romans' expectation, had rationed their drink from the first. They found this rationing harder to bear than actual want; not being free to drink at will only sharpened their craving, and they were as exhausted as if they had already reached the last stage of thirst. Their condition did not escape the Romans, for from the slope opposite they could see them streaming over the wall to one spot to receive their measured water, and, reaching the place with their quick-firing engines, they killed many.

Vespasian now expected that the cisterns would shortly be emptied and the city surrendered to him by necessity. But Josephus, determined to break this hope of his, ordered a large number of men to soak their clothes and hang them around the battlements, so that the whole wall suddenly streamed with water. At this the Romans fell into dejection and dismay, seeing men squander so much water in mockery whom they had supposed to have none even to drink; and the general himself, despairing of taking the city through want, turned back to arms and force. This was exactly what the Jews longed for; having given up hope for themselves and for the city, they preferred death in battle to famine and thirst.

Josephus, however, in addition to this stratagem devised another to keep himself supplied. Along a gully so difficult to cross that it was neglected by the sentries, on the western side of the ravine, he sent men out, and by them dispatched letters to those Jews outside with whom he wished to communicate, and received letters back; and he secured a plentiful stock of every provision that had run short in the city, instructing those who went out to creep past the guards for most of the way and to cover their backs with fleeces, so that if anyone did spot them at night, they would look like dogs. This went on until the sentries detected the trick and closed off the gully.

Then Josephus, seeing that the city could not hold out much longer and that his own survival was doubtful if he remained, began planning an escape together with the leading men. The people found out, and pouring around him in a crowd they implored him not to abandon them when they depended on him alone: if he stayed, there was hope of deliverance for the city, everyone fighting the more eagerly for his sake, and even if it were taken, he would be their consolation. It was not fitting, they said, for him to flee his enemies, or desert his friends, or leap overboard, as it were, from a ship in a storm which he had boarded in calm weather; for he would sink the city with him, since no one would dare stand against the enemy any longer once the man who gave them their courage was gone.

Josephus, suppressing any mention of his own safety, declared that it was for their sake he was planning to go out. If he stayed, he could be of no great use to them if they were saved, and if the city fell, he would merely perish along with them to no purpose; whereas if he slipped clear of the siege, he could help them from outside in the greatest ways: he would speedily gather the Galileans from the countryside and draw the Romans away from their city by a war on another front. He did not see, he said, how he was of any use to them by sitting there now — except to goad the Romans into pressing the siege harder, since they set the highest value on capturing him; but if they learned he had escaped, they would greatly relax their drive against the city. This did not persuade them; it only inflamed the people to cling to him the more. Children, old men, and women with their infants threw themselves down before him wailing; they all clutched his feet and held on, and with cries of lamentation begged him to stay and share their fortune — not, I think, because they grudged him his escape, but because they hoped for their own; for they expected to suffer nothing terrible so long as Josephus remained.

He judged that this would be supplication if he yielded, and a guard set over him if he tried force; and his resolve to leave was largely broken, besides, by pity for their weeping. So he decided to stay, and making a weapon of the city's common despair, he said: "Now is the time to begin the fight, when there is no hope of survival. It is a fine thing to trade life for glory, and to fall doing some noble deed that later generations will remember." And he turned to action. Sallying out with his best fighting men, he scattered the guards and raided as far as the Roman camp itself, tore apart the hide coverings under which the men on the earthworks sheltered, and set fire to the works. The next day he did the same, and the third, and for a good many days and nights after that he never wearied of the fighting.

Vespasian, seeing the Romans suffering from these sallies — for they were ashamed to flee before Jews, and, when the Jews turned, were too slow under the weight of their armor to pursue, while the Jews always did some damage before suffering any and then fled back into the city — ordered his legionaries to avoid these charges and not to engage men who sought death. Nothing, he said, is fiercer than despair, and their onsets would burn out when deprived of a target, as fire does for lack of fuel; and besides, even Romans ought to win with safety, since they were fighting not from necessity but to enlarge their empire. He now beat back the Jews mostly with his Arab archers and the slingers and stone-throwers from Syria, and the host of artillery never rested either. The Jews gave way under the damage these inflicted; but once they got inside the range of the long shots they pressed the Romans hard, fighting without sparing either life or limb, each side relieving its exhausted men with fresh relays.

Vespasian, considering that the length of time and these sallies had turned the siege back upon himself, decided, now that the embankments were nearing the walls, to bring up the ram. This is an immense beam, like the mast of a ship, tipped at its head with a heavy piece of iron shaped into the forepart of a ram, from which it takes its name. It is slung at its middle by ropes from a second beam, as if from the arm of a balance, this beam being supported at either end by fixed posts. Drawn back by a great crowd of men and then driven forward by the same men throwing their weight together, it batters the wall with its projecting iron. And no tower is so strong, no circuit-wall so thick, that even if it withstands the first blows it can hold out against repeated battering.

To this expedient the Roman general now turned, eager to take the city by storm, since sitting before it was costing him dearly with the Jews never quiet. The Romans brought the catapults and the rest of the artillery closer, within range of the men on the wall who were trying to hinder them, and opened fire; the archers and slingers moved up in the same way. With no one daring, for this reason, to mount the ramparts, other troops brought up the ram, protected by a continuous line of wicker screens with a hide covering above, to shield both the men and the machine. At the very first blow the wall was shaken, and a tremendous cry went up from those inside, as though the city had already been taken.

As the Romans kept striking the same spot, and Josephus saw that the wall would soon be brought down, he devised a countermeasure.

Little by little the ram's force weakened. Joseph ordered sacks stuffed with chaff let down by ropes to whatever spot they saw the ram about to strike, so that the blow would be deflected and its force dissipated as the sacks absorbed the impact. This cost the Romans a great deal of time, since whichever way they turned the machine, the men above shifted the sacks to meet it and cushioned the blows so that the wall suffered nothing from the collisions—until the Romans devised a counter-measure, tying sickles to the ends of long poles and cutting the sacks away. With the siege engine now working effectively and the wall, still newly built, already giving way, Joseph and his men turned at last to defense by fire. They lit whatever dry wood they had and rushed out from three sides, setting fire to the Romans' siege engines, their wicker screens, and their earthworks alike.

The Romans came to the rescue badly, both stunned by the defenders' daring and overtaken by the flames before they could act. The wood being dry, and fed further by pitch, bitumen, and sulfur, the fire flew faster than thought, and in a single hour consumed what had cost the Romans immense labor to build.

It was then that a man among the Jews showed himself worthy of mention and remembrance. He was the son of Sameas, called Eleazar, and his home was Saba in Galilee. Lifting an enormous stone, he hurled it from the wall down onto the battering ram with such force that he snapped off the head of the machine; then he leapt down, seized it from the midst of the enemy, and carried it back up to the wall with remarkable boldness. Becoming a target for every enemy soldier and taking their blows on an unprotected body, he was pierced by five arrows, yet paid no attention to any of them until he had climbed the wall and stood there in full view of all as a spectacle of courage—only then, writhing from his wounds, did he collapse together with the ram's head. After him the bravest to distinguish themselves were two brothers, Netiras and Philippus, from the village of Ruma, likewise Galileans, who charged so furiously and with such violent momentum against the men of the Tenth Legion that they broke through their ranks and routed everyone in their path.

After these two, Joseph himself and the rest of the people, taking up fire again, burned the siege engines and the covered approach-works along with the structures built around them, putting to flight both the Fifth and the Tenth Legions. The rest, arriving in time, buried both the engines and all the timber under earth. Toward evening the Romans raised the ram once more and brought it up to the spot on the wall it had already weakened. There one of the defenders shot Vespasian with an arrow in the sole of the foot, wounding him only slightly, since the force of the shot had already been spent by the distance—but it caused enormous panic among the Romans, for at the sight of the blood, those nearby were thrown into confusion, and word ran through the whole army, so that most abandoned the siege and rushed in terror and dread toward the general. Before all others, Titus, fearful for his father, hurried to him, so that the crowd was thrown into disorder both by their devotion to their commander and by the son's anguish. But the father very easily calmed both his frightened son and the army, for rising above his pain and eager to show himself before all who were alarmed on his account, he pressed the war against the Jews all the harder. Every soldier now wanted to risk himself first as if avenging his commander, and with shouts of encouragement to one another they charged the wall.

Joseph's men, though falling one upon another under the catapult bolts and stones, still would not be driven back from the wall, but with fire, iron, and stones struck at those who pressed the ram against the wicker screens. They accomplished little or nothing, however, and were themselves struck down without pause, seen by an enemy they could not see; for lit up all around by their own fire, they made an easy target for the enemy as if in broad daylight, while the enemy's engines, invisible from a distance, made the incoming missiles hard to guard against. The force of the arrow-shooters and catapults drove through many men at once, and the rush of stones hurled by the machine tore away battlements and shattered the corners of towers. No mass of men is so solid that it is not laid flat to its last rank by the force and weight of such a stone. One can judge the power of the machine from what happened that very night: a man standing on the wall among Joseph's followers was struck and his head torn off by the stone, the skull being flung a distance of three stadia. And a pregnant woman, struck in the belly in daylight as she was coming out of her house nearby, had her unborn child flung half a stadium away—such was the force of the stone-thrower.

The rushing sound of the machines was more terrifying than that of the missiles themselves, while the sound of what was actually struck was the corpses—one after another they made a thudding noise as they were flung from the wall, and a terrible wailing of women rose from within, answered from without by the groans of the dying. The whole open ground before the battle ran with blood, and the wall became passable to attackers because of the heaped bodies. The shouting, echoing off the mountains, made the din still more terrifying, and on that night nothing was left that could strike terror to either hearing or sight. A great many of those fighting for Jotapata fell nobly, and a great many more were wounded, and only with difficulty, around the morning watch, did the wall, struck without let-up, at last give way beneath the machines. The defenders barricaded the breach with their own bodies and weapons before the Romans could bring up the scaling engines.

At dawn, Vespasian gathered the army for the capture of the city, after giving them a brief rest from the night's exertions. Wishing to draw off the defenders from the breach, he dismounted his bravest cavalrymen and stationed them in three lines at the fallen section of the wall, fully armored and holding their pikes forward, so that when the scaling engines were brought up they would lead the way in. Behind them he stationed the strongest of the infantry, while the rest of the cavalry he spread out along the whole mountainside opposite the wall, so that none of those fleeing the capture might slip away unnoticed. Behind these he posted the archers in a ring, ordering them to hold their arrows ready to loose, and likewise the slingers and the men at the siege engines; still others he ordered to bring up ladders and carry them to the sections of the wall still intact, so that some defenders, trying to stop them there, would abandon the watch over the breach, while the rest, overwhelmed by the mass of missiles, would give way and let the enemy in.

Joseph, seeing through the plan, posted the elderly and the exhausted on the section of the wall still standing, since they would suffer nothing serious there, and stationed the strongest men at the broken parts of the wall—six men to each section—and cast lots to place himself among those facing the greatest danger. He ordered them to block their ears against the war-cry of the legions, so as not to be terrified by it, and against the hail of missiles to crouch down and cover themselves with their shields from above, falling back a little until the archers had emptied their quivers; but when the scaling engines were brought up, they were to spring forward and meet the enemy through their own gaps in the defenses, each man fighting not as though defending something that could still be saved, but as one avenging a fatherland already lost—picturing before his eyes the old men soon to be slaughtered, the children and wives about to be killed by the enemy, and pouring out in advance, upon those who would do these things, the fury owed to the disasters yet to come.

So he arranged each group. As for the useless crowd of the city—the women and children—when they saw the city girded by a triple line of soldiers (for none of the long-standing watch had been shifted for the assault), and, beyond the breached walls, the enemy with drawn swords, and the mountainside above gleaming with weapons, and the Arab archers with their bows already raised, they raised one last wail of capture, as though the disaster were no longer threatened but already upon them. Joseph, to keep the women from softening the resolve of his men with their lamenting, shut them up in their houses with threats to keep silent, and himself took his post at the breach where the lot had placed him. He paid no attention to those bringing ladders elsewhere, but kept watch, waiting tensely for the volley of missiles.

At once the trumpeters of every legion sounded together, the army raised its terrible war-cry, and as the missiles were loosed from every side on signal, the light itself was cut off. But Joseph's men, remembering his instructions, blocked their ears against the shouting and their bodies against the volleys, and when the engines fired, they dashed out through them before those who had launched them could mount the wall, grappling with the men climbing up and displaying every kind of feat of hand and spirit, striving even in this final extremity to show themselves no worse than men who play the hero when there is no danger to themselves—so that they did not break off from the Romans until either they fell or destroyed their man. But as they grew continually weary from unrelenting defense, with no fresh men to relieve their front-line fighters, while the Romans' exhausted men were replaced by unspent ones who quickly took the place of those driven back, and, urging one another on, closed shoulder to shoulder and locked their shields above into an unbroken mass, they became like a single body with the whole phalanx, and pushing the Jews back, began at last to mount the wall.

Then Joseph, taking necessity as his counselor in his helplessness—and necessity is a fearsome spur to invention when driven by desperation—ordered boiling oil poured down on those locked together under their shields. His men, having it ready at hand, quickly poured it in great quantity from every side onto the Romans, along with the vessels themselves, still seething with heat. This scalded the Romans and threw their ranks into disorder, and they went tumbling down from the wall in terrible agony; for the oil ran with the greatest ease from head to foot beneath their armor over the whole body and fed on their flesh no less fiercely than fire, since by its nature it heats quickly and cools slowly because of its thickness. Enclosed as they were in breastplates and helmets, there was no escaping the burning; leaping and writhing in their agony, they fell from the gangways, and as they turned back upon their own comrades still pressing forward, they were easy prey for the wounds inflicted by those behind them.

Neither did strength fail the Romans in their misfortune, nor cunning the Jews; rather, though the Romans saw the men doused in oil suffering pitifully, they still pressed on against those pouring it, each man reviling the one in front of him as an obstacle to his advance. The Jews, with a second trick, made the approach treacherous for them by pouring boiled fenugreek onto the planking, so that men slipped on it and were swept off their feet; and neither those retreating nor those still advancing could keep their footing, but some, thrown on their backs on the very scaling engines, were trampled by their own comrades, while many fell onto the earthworks below. Those who fell were then struck down by the Jews, for the Romans, having lost their footing for close combat, were now free to devote themselves to hurling missiles. Seeing his soldiers badly mauled in the assault, the general called them back toward evening. Not a few of them fell, and more still were wounded, while of the men of Jotapata six were killed and more than three hundred wounded were carried off. This engagement took place on the twentieth of the month Daisios.

Vespasian, consoling his army over what had happened, and seeing them enraged and in need not of encouragement but of results, ordered the earthworks raised still higher and three towers built, each fifty feet tall, entirely sheathed in iron so that they would stand firm under their own weight and be proof against fire. These he stationed on the earthworks, manning them with javelin-throwers, archers, and the lighter of the missile engines, together with his strongest slingers. Being out of sight because of the towers' height and their parapets, these could shoot down at the defenders on the wall who were plainly visible to them. The defenders, unable easily to dodge missiles falling on them from above nor to strike back at an enemy they could not see, and seeing the height of the towers beyond the reach of a hand-thrown missile and the iron sheathing around them proof against fire, fled from the wall and instead sallied out against those attempting to storm it. Thus the people of Jotapata held out, losing many men every day and unable to inflict any harm in return on the enemy, since they could not keep them off except at the cost of great danger to themselves.

During these same days Vespasian sent Trajan, commander of the Tenth Legion, with a thousand cavalry and two thousand infantry against a town neighboring Jotapata called Japha, which was in revolt and had been emboldened, against expectation, by Jotapata's continued resistance. Trajan found the town hard to take, since besides being naturally strong it was fortified with a double wall, and, seeing its people had come out ready to meet him in battle, engaged them at once and, after they held out only briefly, pursued them in flight. As they fled together into the first wall, the Romans, pressing close on their heels, forced their way in along with them. But when the fugitives tried to rush on into the second wall, their own people shut them out of the city, fearing the enemy would burst in together with them. It was God, it seems, who was granting the Romans the sufferings of the Galileans, for it was he who at that moment delivered up the whole population of the town, shut out by their own countrymen's hands, to destruction at the hands of a bloodthirsty enemy. Crowding in a mass against the gates and calling out by name to those guarding them, they were cut down in the very midst of their pleading. The enemy had closed off their first wall to them, and their own people had closed the second, so that, hemmed in tightly between the two rings of wall, many were run through by one another's swords and many by their own, while countless numbers fell to the Romans without even summoning the courage to defend themselves; for besides being terrified by the enemy, their spirit was broken by the betrayal of their own people. In the end they died cursing not the Romans but their own countrymen, until all perished, twelve thousand in number. Trajan, reckoning the city now empty of fighting men, though some perhaps still remained within...

Trajan, supposing the city held no more fighting men — or if a few remained, that fear would keep them from any daring — left the taking of it to be credited to the commander-in-chief. He sent messengers to Vespasian asking him to send his son Titus to put the finishing touch on the victory. Vespasian, judging that some work still remained, sent his son with five hundred cavalry and a thousand infantry. Titus came to the city with speed, drew up his army,

stationing Trajan on the left wing while he himself took the right and directed the siege. When the soldiers brought ladders against the wall from every side, the Galileans, defending from above, abandoned the rampart after only a brief resistance. Titus and his men leapt in and quickly mastered the city, but against those inside who rallied against them a fierce battle broke out.

In the narrow streets the strong men fell on them, and from the houses the women hurled down whatever came to hand. For six hours they held out fighting, but once the fighting men were used up, the rest of the population, young and old alike, were butchered in the open and in their houses; no male was left alive except infants, and these were enslaved along with the women. The total number killed, both in the city and in the earlier battle, came to fifteen thousand, and the captives to two thousand one hundred thirty. This disaster befell the Galileans on the twenty-fifth of the month Daisios.

Nor were the Samaritans spared their share of calamities. They had gathered on the mountain called Gerizim, which is sacred to them, and though they stayed in place, their assembly and their temper carried the threat of war. Not even the troubles of their neighbors brought them to their senses; against the run of Roman successes they inflated their own weakness in reckless fashion and were poised for an uprising. Vespasian decided to forestall the movement and cut off their impulses before they grew, since the whole of Samaria was already held down by garrisons,

and the number of those who had come together and the order of their array were formidable. He therefore sent Cerealius, prefect of the Fifth Legion, with six hundred cavalry and three thousand infantry. Cerealius judged it unsafe to climb the mountain and join battle, with so many of the enemy above him; instead he surrounded the whole base of the mountain with his force and kept watch over them the entire day. It happened that

the Samaritans, cut off from water, were then afflicted by a fierce heat as well — it was summer, and they were unprepared with supplies — so that some died that very day of thirst, while many, preferring slavery to such a death, deserted to the Romans. From this Cerealius understood that even those still holding together were broken by their sufferings, and he went up the mountain,

and drawing his force up in a ring around the enemy, at first invited them to come over to his side, urging them to save themselves and giving assurance of safety if they threw down their arms. When this failed to persuade them, he attacked and killed them all, eleven thousand six hundred in number. This was done on the twenty-seventh of the month Daisios. Such were the disasters the Samaritans suffered. Meanwhile those at Jotapata held firm, resisting the dangers beyond all expectation,

and on the forty-seventh day the Roman earthworks rose above the wall's height. That same day a deserter went to Vespasian, reporting how few and how weakened the defenders of the city were, worn out by continuous sleeplessness and unceasing fighting, no longer able to withstand a renewed assault, and that they could be taken by stratagem if anyone would attempt it. He said that toward the last watch, when they felt some relief from their hardships and the morning sleep, which grips the exhausted hardest, was upon them, the guards would be found asleep, and he advised attacking at that hour. Titus was suspicious of the deserter, knowing both the Jews' loyalty to one another and their contempt for punishments, since even before this

a man taken from Jotapata had held out under every form of torture and, revealing nothing to the enemy about those within despite their use of fire, had been crucified with a smile at death. Still, the likelihood of the story made the traitor believable, and Titus thought that perhaps the man was telling the truth, and in any case expected no great harm to himself from a trap, so he ordered the man kept under guard while he prepared the army for

the taking of the city. At the appointed hour they advanced quietly to the wall. Titus was the first to mount it, together with one of the tribunes, Domitius Sabinus, leading a few men from the Fifteenth Legion; they killed the guards and entered the city, and after them Sextus Calvarius, a tribune, and Placidus brought in the men under their command.

Once the citadel was taken and the enemy were milling about in the midst of it, and day had already come, still those overpowered had no sense that the city had fallen; for most were dissolved in exhaustion and sleep, and a thick mist that had by chance settled over the city at that hour dulled the sight of those who did rise, until the whole army had poured in, and they came awake to nothing but the realization

of their disaster, and understood, as they were being cut down, that the city had fallen. The Romans, remembering what they had suffered in the siege, showed neither pity nor mercy to anyone, but drove the people down the slope from the citadel, slaughtering them. There even those still able to fight were robbed of any defense by the difficult ground; crowded together in the narrow streets and slipping on the steep incline,

they were swept down and overwhelmed by the flood of war pouring from the heights. This drove many of Josephus's picked men to suicide; seeing that they could kill no Romans, they resolved at least to anticipate death at Roman hands, and gathering at the edge of the city, they killed themselves. As for those who managed to escape the guards' first notice of the capture and climbed

into one of the northern towers, they held out for a while, but surrounded by the mass of the enemy, they at last gave up their hands and cheerfully offered their throats to those standing over them. The Romans could have boasted of an end to the siege without bloodshed on their own side, had not one man fallen at the very moment of capture — a centurion, Antonius, who died by an ambush. Of those who had fled into the caves,

many — and they were a great number — one begged Antonius to give him his right hand as a pledge of safety and help him climb up. Antonius, unguarded, reached out his hand, but the man was quicker and stabbed him from below in the groin with a spear, killing him on the spot. On that day the Romans destroyed the visible mass of the population, but on the following days, searching out

the hiding places, they went after those in the underground passages and caves and dealt with every age except infants and women. The captives gathered numbered one thousand two hundred, and the dead, counting the capture together with the earlier battles, totaled forty thousand. Vespasian ordered the city razed and all its fortifications burned to the ground. Thus Jotapata

was taken, in the thirteenth year of Nero's reign, on the first of the month Panemos. The Romans searched for Josephus, driven both by their own anger and by the commander's own great ambition, since his capture would count as a major part of the war; they searched among the dead and in the hiding places. Josephus, however, when the city was being taken, made use of some divine aid to slip out from the midst of the enemy unnoticed, and let himself down into

a deep pit, off the side of which opened a broad cave invisible from above. There he found forty men of rank hiding, with a store of provisions sufficient to last many days. By day he kept concealed, since the enemy held every position, and by night he climbed up in search of a way to escape and studied the guard posts. But since every place was watched on his account, escape unseen was impossible, and

he went back down into the cave. For two days he remained undiscovered, but on the third a woman among those with him was captured and revealed his hiding place. Vespasian at once sent, with urgency, two tribunes, Paulinus and Gallicanus, ordering them to give Josephus their right hands as a pledge and to urge him to come up. They came and appealed to the man, offering assurances of his safety, but they did not persuade him;

for it was not from the natural gentleness of those making the appeal that he drew his suspicions, but from the likelihood that a man who had done so much would suffer accordingly, and he feared they were summoning him to punishment, until Vespasian sent a third officer, the tribune Nicanor, an old acquaintance and friend of Josephus. Nicanor, coming forward, set out at length the natural kindness the Romans show to those they have once taken, and how Josephus himself

would be admired rather than hated by the generals for his valor, and that the commander was eager not to bring him up for punishment — for that he could have even without his coming forward — but out of a wish to save a noble man. He added that Vespasian would never have sent a friend to entrap him, so as to dress up the vilest of acts, treachery, in the fairest of names, friendship, nor would Nicanor himself, meaning to deceive a friend, have agreed to come.

While Josephus still hesitated even before Nicanor, the soldiers in their fury were eager to burn out the cave, but the commander held them back, ambitious to take the man alive. When Nicanor pressed him further with entreaties, and Josephus learned of the threats of the hostile crowd of soldiers, the memory came back to him of his dreams in the night, through which God had foretold to him both

the disasters coming upon the Jews and what would befall the emperors of Rome. He was, in fact, skilled at interpreting the meaning of dreams and at working out what the divine said ambiguously, and he was not ignorant of the prophecies of the sacred books, being himself a priest and the descendant of priests. Inspired at that very hour by these things, and gathering up the terrifying images of

his recent dreams, he offered God a silent prayer, saying: Since it has pleased you, who created the Jewish nation, to bring it low, and since fortune has passed over entirely to the Romans, and since you have chosen my spirit to declare what is to come, I give myself into Roman hands willingly, and I live; but I call you to witness that I go not as a traitor, but as your servant. Having said this, he yielded to

Nicanor. But the Jews who had fled together with Josephus, when they understood that he was giving way to those urging him, gathered around him in a body and cried out — how bitterly they would have groaned! — "The laws of our fathers, which God who created us gave to the Jews, souls that scorn death! Are you so in love with life, Josephus, that you can bear to see the light as a slave? How quickly you have forgotten yourself! How many have you persuaded to die for freedom! False, then, was your reputation for courage,

and false too your reputation for wisdom, if you hope for safety from those against whom you fought so hard, and if, even should it be secure, you wish to be saved by them. But if the fortune of Rome has poured forgetfulness of yourself over you too, we must see to the honor of our fathers. We will lend you a right hand and a sword. If you die willingly, you die as general of the Jews; if unwillingly,

you will die as a traitor." As they spoke they raised their swords and threatened to kill him if he gave himself up to the Romans. Josephus, fearing their assault and reckoning it a betrayal of God's commands to die before he could deliver his message, began to reason with them on grounds of necessity: "Why," he said, "are we so set on murdering ourselves, comrades? Why do we set at war with each other what is dearest of all, body and

soul? Someone will say I have changed. Well, the Romans at least know this much: it is a fine thing to die in war, but by the law of war — that is, at the hands of the victors. If I turn away from Roman steel, I am truly worthy of my own sword and my own hand; but if mercy for an enemy enters into them, how much more justly ought it to enter into us for ourselves? And indeed it is folly to do this

to ourselves over the very matter for which we stand apart from them. It is a fine thing to die for freedom, I say so too — but fighting, and at the hands of those who take it from us. As things are, they neither meet us in battle nor kill us; equally cowardly is the man unwilling to die when he must, and the man willing to die when he need not. What is it we fear that keeps us from going up to the Romans?

Is it not death? Then shall we, of our own will, inflict on ourselves the very thing we suspect and fear from our enemies? 'But it is slavery,' someone will say. Indeed, we are very free now! 'It is noble to kill oneself,' another will say. No — most ignoble; I count it the act of the most cowardly helmsman, who, fearing a storm, deliberately sinks his ship before the squall arrives. And in truth self-slaughter is

alien to the common nature of all living things, and an act of impiety toward the God who made us. Of all living creatures there is not one that dies by design or by its own hand; for it is a strong law of nature in all of them to want to live — for which reason we count as enemies those who openly try to take this from us, and punish those who do it by stealth. Do you not think God

is angered when a man abuses his gift? For it is from him that we have received our being, and it is to him again that we give back our ceasing to be. Our bodies are mortal for all of us, and made of perishable matter, but the soul is forever immortal, a portion of God lodged within our bodies; and if a man destroys or misuses another man's deposit left in his keeping, he is thought

wicked and faithless — yet if someone casts out from his own body the deposit that is God's, does he think the one he wrongs will fail to notice? And it is judged right to punish slaves who run away, even from wicked masters — shall we, in running away from the best of masters, God himself, not be thought guilty of impiety? Do you not know that those who depart this life by the law of nature and

repay the debt they received from God, when the giver wishes to reclaim it, win eternal glory; their houses and their descendants stand secure; their souls remain pure and obedient, allotted the holiest region of heaven, whence, in the revolution of the ages, they are sent back again to inhabit pure bodies — while those whose own hands have run mad against themselves are received by a darker Hades,

"But God, who is father to all these, punishes for the fathers' outrages upon their children as well. That is why this act is hated by God and punished by our wisest lawgiver. Among us, those who kill themselves are cast out unburied until sunset, though we hold it right to bury even our enemies; among other peoples the law commands that the right hands of such corpses be cut off, the hands with which they made war on themselves, on the ground that as the body is foreign to the soul, so the hand is foreign to the body. It is well, comrades, to think justly, and not to add impiety toward our Creator to our human misfortunes. If it seems good to save ourselves, let us do so — for there is no disgrace in a rescue won by men who have shown their courage through so many exploits. If it seems good to die, it is honorable to die at the hands of our captors. I, for my part, will not go over to the enemy's ranks and become a traitor to myself — that would make me far more foolish than those who desert to the enemy, since they act for their own safety, while I would be acting for my own destruction, and destruction by my own hand. As for the Romans, I pray that they may set a trap for me; for if I die by their hand after receiving their pledge, I shall die cheerfully, carrying off a consolation greater than victory: that I was never taken in by their treachery."

Such were the many arguments Josephus urged to turn them from self-slaughter. But they, their ears barred by despair, since they had long since consecrated themselves to death, only grew more incensed against him, and rushing at him from every side with drawn swords they reviled him for cowardice, each one plainly ready to strike him down at once. He, calling one by name, fixing another with a general's stern gaze, seizing the right hand of a third, and shaming a fourth with entreaty, held the steel of every one of them back from the slaughter by playing on their many different feelings, turning always to face whoever attacked him, like a wild beast surrounded by hunters. Even in their extremity of misfortune, some still felt reverence for their general, and their right hands went slack, their swords slipped from their grip, and many who raised their blades against him let them fall of their own accord.

Yet even in this desperate strait he was not at a loss for a plan; trusting himself for safety to God, who watches over him, he ventured on this: "Since we are resolved to die," he said, "come, let us leave the killing of one another to the lot. Let the man drawn by lot fall by the one who comes after him, and so fortune will pass through us all in turn, and no one will die by his own hand — for it would be unjust for one of us to repent and save himself once the others are gone." This proposal won their trust, and he persuaded them and joined in the drawing of lots himself. Each man, as his lot was drawn, offered his throat readily to the one who followed, thinking that Josephus too would die directly after him — for they judged death together with Josephus sweeter than life. He, however — whether one should call it chance, or the providence of God — was left to the last, along with one other man, and, being anxious neither to be condemned by the lot nor, if left to the very end, to stain his hand with the blood of a kinsman, he persuaded that other man too to live, on pledge of good faith.

Having thus survived both the war against the Romans and the one within his own ranks, Josephus was brought before Vespasian by Nicanor. The Romans all ran together to see him, and as the crowd pressed around the general there arose a confused uproar — some rejoicing at his capture, some threatening him, others forcing their way close to get a look. Those farther off shouted for the enemy to be punished, but those nearer recalled his exploits and were struck with wonder at his changed fortune; and among the officers there was not one who, however angry he had been before, did not relent at the sight of him. Titus especially was moved, both by the man's fortitude amid his misfortunes and by pity for his youth; recalling the man who had fought so long ago and now seeing him lying in the hands of his enemies, he could not help reflecting how much power fortune has, how swift the turn of war, and how nothing human is secure. For this reason he brought over a great many at that time to share his own compassion for Josephus, and it was above all through him, and also with his father, that Josephus found the greatest measure of deliverance. Vespasian nonetheless ordered him kept under close guard, meaning to send him at once to Nero.

On hearing this, Josephus said he wished to speak with him alone. When Vespasian had sent everyone away except his son Titus and two friends, Josephus said: "You suppose, Vespasian, that you have taken merely a prisoner in Josephus; but I come to you as a messenger of greater things. Had I not been sent by God, I knew well the law of the Jews, and how it becomes a general to die. Do you send me to Nero? Why? Those who will succeed Nero will not last until you do. You, Vespasian, will be Caesar and emperor, you and this son of yours. Bind me now more securely, then, and keep me for yourself; for you, Caesar, are master not of me alone, but of land and sea and the whole human race, and I ask for a stronger guard, for my punishment, if I am speaking recklessly even of God." When he had said this, Vespasian at first seemed not to believe him, and supposed that Josephus was contriving this as a stratagem for his own safety; but little by little he was brought to trust it, since God was already rousing him toward supreme command and foreshadowing the sceptre through other signs as well. He also found Josephus truthful in other matters: one of the friends who had been present at that private conversation said he marveled that Josephus had foretold neither the fall of Jotapata to its people nor his own captivity to himself, unless this present talk was nonsense meant to deflect the anger now turned against him. But Josephus said that he had in fact told the people of Jotapata that the city would be taken on the forty-seventh day, and that he himself would be taken alive by the Romans. Vespasian, questioning the prisoners privately about this and finding it true, then began to believe what Josephus had said concerning himself. He did not release Josephus from guard and chains, but he made him gifts of clothing and other valuables, and continued to treat him with kindness and consideration, Titus joining eagerly in doing him honor.

On the fourth of the month Panemus, Vespasian broke camp for Ptolemais, and from there reached Caesarea on the coast, the greatest city of Judea, inhabited for the most part by Greeks. The people there welcomed the army and its general with every mark of goodwill and friendliness, moved partly by loyalty to Rome, but more by hatred of the people they had helped to overthrow; for this reason they gathered in a body clamoring for Josephus to be punished. Vespasian, however, treating this demand as coming from an unreasoning mob, quietly let it drop. Of the legions, he stationed two to winter at Caesarea, judging the city suitable, and sent the tenth and the fifth to Scythopolis, so as not to burden Caesarea with the whole army; for that city too was warm in winter, just as it was stifling with heat in summer, since it lies on the plain by the sea.

Meanwhile a considerable number of men had gathered — those driven from their cities by faction, and those who had escaped from the conquered towns — and they rebuilt Jaffa as a base for themselves, the town having earlier been laid waste by Cestius; and since the countryside had been ravaged by war and offered them no refuge, they resolved to take to the sea instead. Building a great many pirate craft, they preyed upon the shipping lanes of Syria, Phoenicia, and the route to Egypt, making the seas in that region unnavigable for everyone. When Vespasian learned of their combination, he sent infantry and cavalry against Jaffa, and these entered the unguarded city by night. Those inside had sensed the attack beforehand and, too frightened to try to keep the Romans out, fled instead to their ships and spent the night beyond bowshot from shore.

Jaffa has no natural harbor, for it ends in a rough shore, sheer for the most part but curving slightly inward at either extremity like the horns of a crescent; there are deep cliffs and jutting reefs running out into the sea, where the very marks of Andromeda's chains are still shown, testifying to the antiquity of the myth. A north wind beating straight against the shore, and throwing up a towering swell against the receiving rocks, makes the roadstead more treacherous than open sea; and it was against this shore that a violent gale — called by sailors in those parts the "black norther" — fell upon the men from Jaffa toward dawn as they rode at anchor there. It dashed some of the ships against one another where they lay, others against the rocks, and many, forced by fear of the rocky shore and the enemy waiting on it to struggle against the oncoming swell out into open water, were swamped as the towering waves rose over and engulfed them. There was no place to flee and no safety in staying — driven from the sea by the force of the wind, and from the land by the Romans. Loud was the wailing as the ships were smashed together, loud the crash as they broke apart. Some of the crowd were swallowed and destroyed by the waves; many became entangled in the wreckage; and some, thinking the sword a gentler death than the sea, took their own lives before the waters could reach them. Most, however, were swept out by the waves and torn to pieces on the reefs, so that the sea for a great distance ran with blood and the shore was littered with corpses; for even those carried up onto the beach were finished off by the Romans standing ready there. The number of bodies washed ashore came to four thousand two hundred. The Romans took the city without a fight and razed it to the ground. Thus Jaffa was captured by the Romans for the second time within a short span. To prevent the pirates from gathering there again, Vespasian raised a camp on the acropolis and left the cavalry there with a small force of infantry, so that the infantry might stay in place and guard the camp while the cavalry ranged the surrounding country and destroyed the villages and small towns around Jaffa. Following their orders, they overran the countryside day after day, cutting it down and laying it entirely waste.

When news of the disaster at Jotapata reached Jerusalem, most people at first refused to believe it, both because of the sheer magnitude of the calamity and because none of those said to have witnessed it were present — indeed not even a messenger had survived, but rumor of its own accord, true to its nature in matters of gloom, spread word of the city's fall unaided. Little by little, though, through neighboring districts the truth made its way, and it soon stood beyond doubt for everyone. To the actual events, however, false additions were tacked on: it was reported that Josephus too had died at the city's fall. This news filled Jerusalem with the deepest grief. In private houses and among kinship groups, each family mourned its own lost members, but the mourning for the general became a public affair; some wept for him as a friend, others as a kinsman, others as one dear to them, but all wept for Josephus, so that for thirty full days the lamentations in the city never ceased, and a great many flute players were hired to lead the dirges for the people.

But as time uncovered the truth, and it became known that what had happened at Jotapata was indeed as reported, while the report of Josephus's death was found to be fabricated, and that he was in fact alive and in Roman hands, being treated by the commanders with more consideration than a prisoner's fortune would warrant, the city's anger against him, now that he was known to be living, rose in proportion to the goodwill it had shown him before while it believed him dead. By some he was reviled as a coward, by others as a traitor, and the city was full of indignation and abuse against him. Their own reverses only sharpened and inflamed them further at his misfortunes; and failure, which in sensible men breeds caution and guards against repeating the same mistakes, became for them only a further goad to disaster; the end of one misfortune was always, for them, the beginning of the next. If anything, they threw themselves at the Romans with still greater fury, as though avenging themselves on Josephus in the persons of his captors. Such were the disturbances that gripped the people of Jerusalem.

Vespasian, meanwhile, out of regard for the kingdom of Agrippa — for the king himself was urging him to come, wishing at once to entertain the general and his army amid the splendor of his own house, and to use their presence to help quell the disorders troubling his realm — broke camp from Caesarea on the coast and moved to Caesarea Philippi. There he rested his army for as much as twenty days, himself sharing in the feasting and offering thanks to God for his successes.

But when he was informed that Tiberias was moving toward revolt and that Tarichaeae had already broken away — both cities forming part of Agrippa's kingdom — since he had resolved to subdue the Jews on every front, he judged a campaign against them timely, and welcome too for Agrippa's sake, as a way of repaying his hospitality by bringing his cities to order. He therefore sent his son Titus to Caesarea to transfer the army stationed there to Scythopolis, the largest city of the Decapolis and neighbor to Tiberias. There he himself joined his son, and advancing with three legions encamped some thirty stades from Tiberias, at a station in full view of the rebels, called Ennabris. He sent the decurion Valerianus ahead with fifty horsemen to offer the city terms of peace and urge it to come to an agreement, having heard that the populace wanted peace but was being coerced into war by a faction. Valerianus rode up close to the wall, then dismounted along with the horsemen accompanying him, so that they should not seem to be there merely to skirmish; but before they could enter into talks, the most powerful of the insurgents charged out against him in arms, led by a certain Jesus, son of Tuphas, the ringleader of the band of brigands. Valerianus, judging it unsafe to engage against his general's orders, even were victory assured, and reckoning it dangerous besides for a few unprepared men to fight against many who stood ready, and also alarmed by the unexpected boldness of the Jews, fled on foot, and five others likewise abandoned their horses, which Jesus and his men led off into the city in triumph, as though they had been taken in battle rather than by ambush.

Terrified by this, the elders of the people, men of standing, fled to the Roman camp, and bringing the king with them, fell as suppliants before Vespasian, begging him not to overlook them, nor to hold the whole city responsible for the madness of a few; they asked him to spare a populace that had always been well disposed toward Rome, and to punish only those responsible.

...to punish them for the revolt — the very men who had until then been eager to be granted pledges of safety, and had themselves guarded him. The general gave way to these entreaties, although he was furious with the whole city over the seizure of the horses; for he saw that Agrippa too was distressed on the city's account. Once the people had received pledges from him, Jesus and his companions, no longer thinking it safe to remain at Tiberias, fled to Tarichaeae. The next day Vespasian sent Trajan ahead with cavalry to the ridge above, to test the temper of the population and see whether all were disposed to peace. When he learned that the people agreed with the suppliants, he took his army and advanced on the city. The inhabitants opened the gates to him and came out to meet him with acclamations, hailing him as savior and benefactor. But since the army was being slowed by the narrowness of the entrances, Vespasian ordered a breach made in the south wall, and so widened the approach for his men.

He gave orders, however, to abstain from plunder and outrage, as a favor to the king; and for the king's sake he also spared the walls, once the leading citizens had pledged that they would remain loyal for the future. In this way he restored the city, which had suffered greatly from the sedition. He then advanced and pitched camp between Tiberias and Tarichaeae, fortifying the camp more strongly, since he suspected that the war would drag on there. For the whole revolutionary element was streaming together into Tarichaeae, trusting in the strength of the city and in the lake, which the local people call Gennesar. The city itself, like Tiberias, lay under the hillside, and wherever it was not washed on every side by the lake, Josephus had fortified it strongly — though less strongly than Tiberias, since he had strengthened the wall there at the outset of the revolt with an abundance of money and manpower, while Tarichaeae received only the remnants of that generosity. The people there had many boats ready on the lake, both to allow them to escape by water if defeated on land, and, if need be, to fight a naval battle.

While the Romans were building their camp, Jesus and his men, deterred neither by the enemy's numbers nor by their good order, rushed out; and at their first onset the wall-builders scattered, and they tore down a little of the construction. But when they saw the heavy infantry massing, they fled back to their own side before suffering any harm. The Romans pursued and drove them to their boats. Once launched, and as far out as they could still strike at the Romans with missiles, they cast their anchors, and packing their ships close together like a phalanx, they fought a naval battle against the enemy on land.

Vespasian, hearing that a great multitude of them had gathered on the plain before the city, sent his son with six hundred picked cavalry. Titus, finding the enemy's numbers overwhelming, sent to his father asking for a larger force. But seeing that most of the cavalry were eager to attack even before reinforcements arrived, while some were quietly cowed by the sheer numbers of the Jews, he stood where all could hear him and spoke as follows:

"Men, Romans — for it is well, at the start of a speech, to remind you of your race, so that you may know who you are and against whom we are about to fight. Our hands have never yet failed to reach any people on the inhabited earth; the Jews, to speak fairly even of them, have until now not tired of being defeated. And it would be shameful, while they stand firm in adversity, for us to grow slack in prosperity. I am glad to see your open eagerness, but I fear that the enemy's numbers may be working some hidden terror in some of you. Consider again, then, what kind of men will be arrayed against what kind of men: the Jews, however bold and however contemptuous of death, are undisciplined, inexperienced in war, and no more than a mob — they should not be called an army. Of our own skill and discipline, what need to speak? This alone is why we train under arms even in peacetime, so that in war we need not measure ourselves against our opponents' numbers. For what use is our continuous soldiering, if we set ourselves against untrained men as though we were equals? Consider too that you, heavy infantry, fight against light-armed men; you, cavalry, against infantry; you, under a general, against men with no general at all — and just as these advantages multiply your own strength many times over, so they strip away far more from the enemy's numbers. Wars are won not by a multitude of men, however warlike, but by courage, even if it is found among few. Numbers are easily arrayed and can defend themselves, but bloated forces are injured by their own weight more than by the enemy's.

"Among the Jews, then, boldness and rashness and desperation take the lead — passions that are strong in success but are extinguished by the smallest setback. Among us, valor, discipline, and that nobility of spirit which flourishes in good fortune and, even in failure, is never broken to the end, take the lead instead. And you will be fighting for greater stakes than the Jews: for even if for them the war is a risk to their freedom and their homeland, what is greater for us than glory, and the concern not to appear, after gaining mastery of the inhabited world, to set the Jews on equal terms with us as rivals? Consider too that we face no fear of suffering anything irreparable, for many are near at hand to help us; yet the victory is ours to seize, and we ought to act before the allies my father is sending us arrive, so that our success may be undivided, and all the greater. I believe that at this very hour my father, and I, and you as well, are all being judged — whether he is worthy of his past successes, whether I am worthy to be his son, and you worthy to be my soldiers. For victory is his habit, and I could not bear to return to him defeated. And how could you not be ashamed to be beaten while your commander risks danger before you? I will risk it, be assured, and I will be the first to charge the enemy. Do not fall behind me, confident that my onset is being backed by God as my ally, and know for certain that we shall achieve something greater than this battle alone."

As Titus was saying this, a superhuman eagerness fell upon the men; and when Trajan joined them with four hundred cavalry before the engagement began, they were vexed, thinking their victory would be diminished by having to share it. Vespasian also sent Antonius Silo with two thousand archers, ordering them to seize the hill opposite the city and hold back the men on the wall. These did as they were ordered and hemmed in those who tried to sally out from that side to help; Titus himself was the first to drive his horse against the enemy, and with a shout the rest followed him, spreading out to cover as much of the plain as the enemy occupied — so that they seemed far more numerous than they were.

The Jews, terrified by their onrush and good order, held out against the charges only briefly; then, pierced by lances and thrown down by the rush of the cavalry, they were trampled underfoot. As great numbers were slaughtered everywhere, they scattered and fled toward the city, each as fast as he could. Titus pressed on those behind and cut them down, drove his horse through clusters of them who tried to break away, rode down from in front those he outran, and trampled over many who had fallen upon one another in the crush; he cut off every line of flight to the wall and turned them back toward the plain, until, forcing their way through by sheer numbers, they broke through and fled together into the city.

There a bitter internal conflict awaited them once more: the local inhabitants, on account of their property and the city, had not wanted to make war from the start, and now, after the defeat, wanted it even less; but the newcomers, who were numerous, pressed all the more for resistance, and as the two factions raged against each other there was shouting and uproar, as though they were on the very point of turning to arms. Titus, hearing the disturbance — for he was not far from the wall — saw that this was the moment, and cried out: "Fellow soldiers, why do we delay, when God is handing the Jews over to us? Take the victory! Do you not hear the shouting? Those who escaped our hands are now fighting each other. We hold the city, if we act quickly; but speed must be joined with hard effort and resolve, for nothing great is ever won without risk. We must forestall not only the enemy's reconciliation — which necessity will soon bring about between them — but also the arrival of our own reinforcements, so that with so great a multitude defeated, we, so few, may take the city by ourselves alone."

With these words he leaped onto his horse and led the way to the lake, riding through it he was the first to enter the city, and the rest followed after him. Terror at his daring fell upon the men on the walls, and no one held his ground to fight or to block him; abandoning their posts, some of Jesus's men fled through the countryside, while others ran down to the lake and ran straight into the enemy. Some were killed as they boarded boats, others as they tried to reach the boats that had already put out. There was great slaughter throughout the city — of the newcomers, all who had not managed to escape resisted and were killed, but the local inhabitants offered no resistance at all; for in hope of pardon, and conscious that they had not chosen to make war, they held back from fighting, until Titus, having killed those responsible, took pity on the local people and put a stop to the killing.

Those who had taken refuge on the lake, once they saw the city captured, rowed out as far as possible from the enemy. Titus sent one of the cavalry to bring his father the good news of the deed. Vespasian, as was natural, was overjoyed at his son's valor and his success — for it seemed that a very great part of the war had been brought down — and he came at once and ordered the city surrounded and guarded, so that no one should slip out of it unnoticed, and commanded that they be killed. The next day he went down to the lake and ordered rafts built against those who had taken refuge there; these were made quickly, thanks to the abundance of timber and the great number of craftsmen.

The lake is called Gennesar after the region adjoining it. It is forty stades in width and a hundred and twenty more in length, yet its water is sweet and very good to drink; for it is finer than the thick water of marshes, and it is clear throughout, bordered everywhere by beaches and sand. It is also pleasantly tempered for drawing water — milder than a river or a spring, yet colder than one would expect a standing body of water to remain. Its water is no less cold than snow when left exposed overnight — which the local people are in the habit of doing in summer. There are various kinds of fish in it, differing in taste and shape from those found elsewhere. It is divided down the middle by the Jordan.

The Jordan appears to rise at Panium, but in fact it flows underground to that point, hidden, from the place called Phiale. This lies on the road to Trachonitis, a hundred and twenty stades from Caesarea as one goes up, not far off to the right. It is aptly named Phiale — "bowl" — from its round shape, being a circular lake; the water always remains level with its rim, neither receding nor overflowing. That the Jordan actually begins here, though this was long unknown, was proved by Philip, who once ruled as tetrarch of Trachonitis: he threw chaff into Phiale at Panium, where the ancients believed the river was born, and found it carried through and brought up again there. The natural beauty of Panium has since been enhanced by royal extravagance, adorned at Agrippa's expense; and from this cave, where the Jordan's visible stream begins, it cuts through the marshes and pools of Lake Semechonitis, and after traversing a further hundred and twenty stades, passing the city of Julias, it crosses through the middle of Gennesar; then, after running through a long stretch of wilderness, it empties into the Lake Asphaltitis.

Bordering Lake Gennesar is a region of the same name, wonderful in its nature and beauty. Its richness of soil refuses no plant, and the inhabitants have planted every kind, for the mildness of its air suits even the most varied species. Walnut trees, the hardiest of all against winter cold, flourish there in abundance, alongside palms, which thrive on heat, and fig trees and olives close by them, for which a gentler air is required. One might call it an act of ambition on nature's part, forcing together things naturally at odds, and a healthy rivalry among the seasons, each as though laying claim to the region for itself; for it not only nourishes, against all expectation, the different fruits, but preserves them as well. The choicest fruits, the grape and the fig, it supplies without interruption for ten months, while the rest ripen through the whole year on their own trees; for besides the mildness of its climate, it is watered by a spring of great fertility, which the local people call Capernaum. Some have taken it for a branch of the Nile, since it produces a fish resembling the coracinus found in the lake at Alexandria. The region stretches along the shore of the lake of the same name for thirty stades, and is twenty stades in width. Such, then, is the nature of the place.

Once the rafts were ready, Vespasian embarked as much of his force as he judged sufficient against those on the lake, and put out. Those hemmed in had no way to escape to land, since the whole country was now hostile, nor could they fight on equal terms at sea; for their boats, small and built for piracy, were weak against the rafts, and the few men crowded into each one were afraid to come close to the massed ranks of Romans standing on the larger craft. Even so, they circled around the rafts, and sometimes came near them, hurling stones at the Romans from a distance and striking at them at close range as they grazed past. But they suffered far the worse in both kinds of fighting: with their stones they accomplished nothing against men protected by armor except a repeated clatter, for they were throwing at men who were shielded, while they themselves were within range of Roman missiles; and whenever they dared to close in, they suffered harm before they could do any, and went down together with their boats. Of those who tried to break through, the Romans speared many with lances as they came within reach, leaped sword in hand into the boats of others, and caught some, trapped between converging rafts, along with their skiffs. Of those thrown into the water, any who tried to come up again were forestalled either by a missile or by a raft closing in on them;

and those who, in their desperation, tried to climb aboard among the enemy had their heads or hands cut off by the Romans. Their destruction was great and took many forms, everywhere alike, until the survivors, turned back, were driven onto land, hemmed in on every side by the boats. Many, pouring out into the water, were struck down by javelins there in the lake itself, and many others who leaped ashore were killed by the Romans on land.

One could see the whole lake stained with blood and filled with corpses, for not a single man escaped alive. In the days that followed a terrible stench and sight hung over the region: the shores were littered with wrecks and with swollen bodies, and the corpses, rotting and bursting in the heat, fouled the air, so that the disaster was not only pitiable to the Jews but loathsome even to those who had caused it.

Such was the end of that sea battle. The dead, counting those who had fallen earlier in the city, numbered six thousand seven hundred.

After the battle Vespasian took his seat on the tribunal at Tarichaeae and separated the local inhabitants from the foreign rabble, since it was this latter group that seemed to have started the war. He deliberated with his officers whether these people too should be spared.

The officers said that releasing them would prove harmful, since men set free, having lost their homelands, would not stay quiet: they were capable of forcing even those to whom they fled for refuge into war. Vespasian recognized that they did not deserve to be saved and that, if released, they would only turn against those who had freed them, yet he still had to decide how they should be put to death. For he suspected that killing them on the spot would provoke the local people to war, since they would not tolerate the slaughter of so many suppliants in their midst; and he could not bring himself to attack men who had come forward under a pledge of safety.

His friends won him over, arguing that nothing was impious in acting against Jews, and that when honor and expediency cannot both be served, the advantageous course must be chosen. So he nodded his assent and granted them an ambiguous kind of safe-conduct, allowing them to leave, but only by the single road leading to Tiberias.

They quickly believed what they wished to believe and set out along the permitted route with their goods openly displayed as if in safety. But the Romans occupied the whole road as far as Tiberias, so that no one could turn aside, and shut them up inside the city. Vespasian then came in and had them all assembled in the stadium. The old men, together with those judged useless, numbering twelve hundred, he ordered killed. Of the young men he picked out the strongest, six thousand of them, and sent them to Nero at the isthmus. The remaining crowd, some thirty-four thousand in number, he sold as slaves, apart from those he granted to Agrippa -- for he allowed the king to do as he wished with those who came from his own kingdom, and the king likewise sold them.

The rest of the throng, drawn from Trachonitis, Gaulanitis, Hippos, and for the most part from the territory of Gadara, were mostly rebels and fugitives, men for whom the disgrace of peace had made war seem preferable. They were captured on the eighth of the month Gorpiaeus.

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