XXII
As General Vespasian left Antioch in the late spring of A.D. 67 to join his task force at Ptolemais, he knew from informants who’d escaped the Jewish capital that a power struggle among the Jewish leadership at Jerusalem had seen the partisans divide into three factions, which had occupied different parts of the city and which were now locked in bloody internecine conflict. And people who tried to leave Jerusalem to escape the madness either saved their skins with gold or were killed by members of any of the three factions.
Vespasian’s staff urged him to march directly on the Jewish capital, but the gruff, coarse Vespasian was a thoughtful, careful man by nature. He hadn’t survived in the service of three temperamental emperors by taking risks. He decided to let the Jews in Jerusalem exhaust themselves killing each other before he wasted any time, effort, or legionary blood trying to take the city. There was even a possibility that one or other of the factions might come over to the Roman side if he waited long enough. For the time being, Vespasian would concentrate on subjugating the countryside north of Jerusalem.
It was June by the time the Roman army moved out of Ptolemais. The 10th Legion marched in the vanguard of the column. We saw most of its legionaries on the sands of the Córdoba arena three years before when they were just raw recruits. The men of its senior cohorts had been recruited in A.D. 44; these were the men knocked into shape by Field Marshal Corbulo, the hardened troops who’d whipped the Parthians.
Vespasian turned left and swept inland, determined to methodically knock over the Jewish strongholds in Galilee one at a time. Gabara, in southwestern Galilee, just across the Syrian border from Ptolemais, was lightly defended and was stormed before the sun set on the first day of fighting.
Jotapata, modern Jefat, was a different story. The Jewish resistance leader for the region was the thirty-year-old partisan Joseph, who later took the Roman name Josephus Flavius. It’s from his writing that we know most about the Jewish War. Originally given his regional command while at Jerusalem, where he’d left his parents, Josephus had first gone to Tiberias. Now, alerted to the Roman troop movements, he hurried down from Tiberias and slipped into Jefat late one afternoon in June, just before it was surrounded by Vespasian’s mounted advance force, joining more than forty thousand Jewish people sheltering there.
The town was well sited for defense, with sheer cliffs on three sides and a massive wall in the fourth. Vespasian himself soon came up with the main force and surrounded the hill with two lines of infantry and an outer ring of cavalry. Auxiliary archers and slingers continually cleared defenders from the city wall, but for five days in a row Josephus’s partisans ventured out from the fortress in assault groups to attack the Roman lines in hit-and-run raids before hastily withdrawing.
So Vespasian had a massive earthbank constructed in front of the wall as an artillery platform, then brought up 160 artillery pieces and sited them on the bank. Metal bolts, stones up to a hundred pounds in weight, firebrands, and arrows—all were hurled at Jefat for hours on end in methodical volleys. The front wall was eventually cleared of defenders by this barrage, as was a large area behind it. Still the Jews launched counterattacks, surging from the town unexpectedly and striking at the artillery platform, driving the artillerymen from their weapons. Roman counterattacks retook the bank. The Jews would again seize the bank, the Roman troops would regain it. But in the meantime, other partisans, working feverishly around the clock, added another sixty feet to the height of the town wall.
Because the wall offered only a limited front to operate against, Vespasian couldn’t use all his units at once, so for much of the siege he rested two of his legions. He’d carefully selected the units he summoned for this offensive. Before its Egyptian assignment, the 15th Legion had come from its longtime Pannonian station in the Balkans to serve under Field Marshal Corbulo in his second Armenian campaign, and the unit’s legionaries, men from Cisalpine Gaul, northern Italy, were solid and dependable. The Syrian cutthroats of the 3rd Augusta were anxious to revenge themselves on the Jews, but their unit had been severely reduced by their casualties at the hands of the rebels in the early stages of the revolt, so Vespasian held them back for use as shock troops.
According to Josephus, both the 10th and the 5th Legions were “world-famous” at this time. The 5th was still known throughout the empire as the legion that had beaten Scipio’s elephants at Thapsus, and even though the current enlistment had been raised in Moesia, modern Bulgaria, the unit’s legionaries still carried the elephant symbol and the reputation that went with it. The Spaniards of the 10th still bore the reputation their forebears had earned the legion as Julius Caesar’s best troops, and since they’d been knocked into shape by Corbulo and savaged the Parthians, they’d once more earned their elite status. As a result, most of the hard work of the siege of Jefat fell to the 5th and 10th Legions.
Both legions built siege towers and mantlets—siege sheds on wheels— which were run up against the wall, and from the protection of these some legionaries set their battering rams to work while others tried to undermine the wall. At one point the constructions of the 5th were set alight by Jewish firebrands, so the siege buildings were dragged away, the fire extinguished, and their wooden roofs covered with earth to fireproof them before they were wheeled back into position and the siege works resumed.
Another time, the Jewish defenders poured boiling oil down on men of both the 5th and the 10th who were working at the wall face under the cover of testudos of raised shields, causing horrible burns to troops involved. This was history’s first recorded use of boiling oil by defenders of a besieged fortification, a tactic that would frequently be emulated in the Middle Ages. Not that the maimed men of the 10th would have appreciated the gruesome way they entered the history books. This was certainly not the sort of fate they would have imagined for themselves when they joined the legion at Córdoba a little over three years before.
Shortly after, General Vespasian was himself wounded in the foot by an arrow fired from the city wall. First on the scene was his son Titus, as the general’s officers and bodyguard crowded anxiously around. But to the relief of his troops, the general’s wound was only minor, and soon he was back on his feet.
Knowing the defenders had limited water, Vespasian halted the assault for several weeks in the hope they would be driven to capitulate by thirst, but when the Jews would not surrender, he resumed the attack. On the forty-seventh day of the siege, after a furious artillery bombardment lasting several hours, the legions launched a night assault. Led by Vespasian’s son Titus, legionaries swarmed over the town wall in the darkness and overwhelmed the defenders.
After Jefat fell, forty thousand Jewish bodies were found; twelve hundred prisoners were taken, among them the Jewish commander, Josephus. He was later to claim that he saved himself by prophesying to Vespasian that both he and his son Titus would become emperors of Rome. He accompanied the army for the rest of the campaign, providing advice and information on his former comrades-in-arms.
Even though it was only mid-August, but probably assured by Josephus the collaborator that the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem was so rent by internal fighting that the different factions were likely to destroy themselves if given enough time, Vespasian now withdrew most of his troops to Caesarea, planning to winter there and restart the campaign the following spring. For three weeks he enjoyed the hospitality of his ally King Herod Agrippa II of Chalcis, great-grandson of the famous Herod the Great. With Rome’s consent and support, Herod Agrippa ran a small kingdom covering today’s northern Israel and part of Lebanon. It was at his capital, Caesarea Philippi, near the headwaters of the Jordan River, that news reached Vespasian of large numbers of partisans concentrating at Tiberias on the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee, and that nearby Tarichaeae had closed its gates. Vespasian ordered a resumption of military operations.
The Roman army descended on Tiberias, which quickly surrendered, but not before its defenders escaped to Tarichaeae, a little farther around the lake. As the legions marched on Tarichaeae, young Titus led a large cavalry force on ahead. He succeeded in capturing the town after bloody fighting, much of it actually on the Sea of Galilee in boats and on rafts.
While Titus then went north to Antioch on a secret mission to General Mucianus, Governor of Syria, Vespasian continued the advance, moving out into the Jordanian desert, east of the Sea of Galilee, to assault the town of Gamala, which clung to a steep hillside described by Josephus as being like a huge camel’s hump jutting from the desert. But progress was slow. One assault by the 3rd Augusta went awry when roofs the troops were climbing over caved in and buildings collapsed down the slope like houses of cards.
When Titus returned from Antioch he led a commando raid at night that removed Jewish sentries from a section of the town wall. Vespasian then brought the waiting legions hurrying on his son’s heels, and they took the city.
It was now December, and while Vespasian took most of the army back to the coast to wait out the winter, Titus led a cavalry force to deal with the town of Gischala, the last Jewish holdout in Galilee. It soon fell, as the Jewish commander, John of Gischala, escaped and fled to Jerusalem. All of Galilee was once more under Roman control.
By the spring of A.D. 68, with the Jews still fighting each other in Jerusalem but showing no signs of capitulating to him, General Vespasian ordered the offensive to resume. Over the winter his force had been reduced by the Palatium’s transfer of his six 3rd Augusta cohorts at Caesarea to Moesia, modern Bulgaria, to reinforce the two legions stationed there who were coming under increasing pressure from raiders from across the Danube—a thousand men from one of the resident legions, the 7th Claudia and 8th Augusta, were lost to enemy action during this period. But as the 3rd Augusta cohorts marched away for the long journey overland to the Danube, Vespasian would have consoled himself that he still had more than enough troops at his disposal to finish the job in Judea.
In March he conducted the ceremonial lustration of the legions’ standards, then gave the order to move out. As he departed Caesarea and marched south down the coast with the 5th and 15th Legions, Vespasian received news that Julius Vindex, governor of one of the provinces of Gaul, had revolted against the emperor Nero. According to the sycophantic historian Josephus, this news spurred Vespasian to speed up his campaign so he could wrap it up quickly and relieve the empire of this worrisome situation in the East.
Maybe so, maybe not. It’s possible that Vindex had written to Vespasian prior to launching his rebellion, seeking his support, just as we know he wrote to Servius Galba, Governor of Nearer Spain, with the same intent. Young Titus’s secret mission to Antioch the previous year may have been spurred by such a letter. General Mucianus, Governor of Syria, hadn’t been on friendly terms with Vespasian for many years, but he liked Titus. According to Suetonius, Mucianus was homosexual, and he implied that he was attracted to the handsome young colonel and this was why Titus became an acceptable intermediary. Quite possibly, Mucianus, who commanded the four legions stationed in Syria, also had been contacted by Vindex, and Vespasian had sent his son to discuss whether Mucianus and he would support the rebel governor. If this was the case, they must have decided against throwing their legions behind Vindex, but a door had been set ajar that both generals would before long open wide. Whatever his thoughts about Vindex’s rebellion, Vespasian kept them to himself and pushed on south into Judea.
While the main force advanced down the coast, the 10th Legion took a different route. After spending the winter near the Jordan River at the friendly inland city of Scythopolis, a place inhabited by people of Greek heritage and described as oppressively hot in summer but tolerably mild in winter, the 10th Legion crossed the Jordan before General Trajan led it down the river’s eastern bank into the Peraea district. It then recrossed the river opposite Jericho, destroying towns and villages in its path. The 10th then lay siege to Jericho. The town had neither the situation nor the manpower to hold out as long as Jefat, and it and the nearby fortress of Cypros were stormed by the 10th Legion in May. Among the partisans who died in the assault was the Jewish commander for the Jericho region, John ben Simon.
The capture of Jericho and Cypros would have given the men of the 10th Legion particular satisfaction. On a dusty bluff overlooking Jericho, the old Herodian fortress of Cypros was where the rebels had massacred five hundred legionaries of the 3rd Augusta the year before. Rome’s vengeance was not necessarily always swift, but it was sure.
Vespasian’s main force quickly advanced down the coast to Antipatris, then to Lod and Jamnia, before swinging inland and marching up into the hills along the infamous Beth-horon road as far as Emmaus. There a major fortification was built, blocking the coastal approach to Jerusalem. Leaving the 5th Legion stationed at Emmaus, Vespasian took the remainder of his force and returned to the coast, ravaging the northern part of the Idumaea district.
Then he returned to the hills, passed through Emmaus, and overran a number of hill villages before marching down to Jericho, five miles from the Jordan River and sixteen from Jerusalem, where he linked up with General Trajan and the 10th Legion. As the 10th set up camp for the winter at Jericho, smaller forces of auxiliaries circled around through the hills and cut off escape routes to the south of Jerusalem. The Jewish capital was now effectively surrounded. Vespasian continued on to the Dead Sea, just a day’s march south of Jerusalem; not for any strategic reason, but to satisfy his curiosity. The lake, thirteen hundred feet below sea level and the lowest stretch of water on earth, was famed around the civilized world.
The taciturn general stood looking at the still, dark waters. To test its famous buoyancy, he had several Jewish prisoners tossed into deep water with their hands tied. He was suitably impressed when they floated. No doubt so were the prisoners involved. It’s not unlikely these prisoners came from the Essene community at Qumran, Jewish guardians of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls. The Qumran monastery, on a cliff above the lake, had only recently been overrun by Roman auxiliary cavalry, and the buildings burned. A small Roman military post was established among the ruins, garrisoned by auxiliaries. Nineteen centuries later, in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls would be discovered in eleven caves behind the Qumran settlement, where they’d been hidden by priests of the sect before Vespasian’s troopers swept into the monastery.
In that same month of May a dispatch arrived from Rome bearing the news that the rebel governor in Gaul, Vindex, was dead—his revolt had been quickly and ruthlessly terminated by the legions of the Rhine after just two months, and Vindex had committed suicide. On the heels of this news, Vespasian heard that despite Vindex’s fate, General Galba in Spain had declared himself emperor, even while Nero still ruled at Rome, and was levying Spanish troops in preparation for a march on Italy to seize the throne by force. Throughout the provinces, some officials and military officers were speaking up in favor of Galba and against Nero. A new civil war threatened the stability of Rome.
With the empire in turmoil, General Vespasian took stock of his situation. It was late spring, and only Jerusalem and a few out-of-the way fortifications such as Masada remained in Jewish hands. Jerusalem was surrounded, with, it was said, more than a million people behind its walls. This was a figure given by Josephus, who was on the scene at the time. Tacitus, who wasn’t there but was a more reliable historian in many ways, put the number at six hundred thousand. Either way, there were a lot of mouths to feed. Vespasian knew that many of the partisans were still fighting among themselves. Early heroes of the revolution had either been murdered or had fled south to the Zealots at Masada. New leaders vied for control in the Holy City while their people scrambled for food.
In comparison, Vespasian had supplies aplenty, and he had time. And patience. He could starve the citizens of Jerusalem into submission if he had to. Not that Jerusalem was his chief concern now. Vespasian’s mind was in Rome. Who would win in this contest between Nero and Galba? And where would Vespasian stand, depending on the outcome? Officially, Vespasian now decided to await further orders from Rome. Suspending offensive operations, he took the 15th Legion back to his operational headquarters at Caesarea and told the 10th and the 5th to sit tight in their forward bases at Jericho and Emmaus.
And then something happened that rocked Vespasian and the empire.
In the second half of June, a messenger arrived at General Vespasian’s headquarters at Caesarea with the astonishing news that the thirty-year-old emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was dead. It was said that on June 9 Nero had taken his own life at a villa owned by Pheon, one of his freedmen, four miles outside Rome. Officially, Nero had simply disappeared, but the story going around the capital and later repeated by Suetonius was that, with the help of his secretary Epaphroditus, Nero had stabbed himself in the throat after being deserted by the Senate and the Praetorian Guard, and that his Christian mistress Acte had performed burial rights and cremated his remains. Vespasian knew firsthand that Nero had long professed a desire to give up the reins of empire. Now, it seemed, he had done just that.
Before long, the elderly Galba arrived in Rome at the head of a legion newly raised in Spain, Galba’s 7th. A unit separate from and additional to the original 7th Legion, the 7th Claudia, but raised in the same recruiting grounds, Galba’s 7th Legion would within several years become the 7th Gemina, in combination with another of the civil war legions created by Galba. With legionary steel to back his claim, Galba took the throne, endorsed by the Senate and supported by the Praetorian Guard.
For months, Vespasian waited for orders from Rome, orders that never came. In the meantime, with the Roman army inactive behind the walls of its camps in Judea, one of the Jewish leaders at Masada, Simon ben Gioras, went on the offensive against the inhabitants of the region, leading a force of twenty thousand partisans as he raided villages and towns in southern Judea and Idumaea and occupying the ancient city of Hebron, just to the south of Jerusalem, driving off the small contingent of Roman auxiliaries in the vicinity. Reckoned even then to be twenty-three hundred years old, Hebron was by tradition the burial place of Abraham, a figure destined to be revered by three of the world’s great religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Simon then surrounded Jerusalem. Killing anyone who attempted to leave, he forced those in the city to elect him their new leader. He, and his partisans, then joined the multitude inside Jerusalem.
At Caesarea, Vespasian had tired of waiting for orders from new emperor Galba. So early in the new year, as soon as the seasonal winds were favorable, he dispatched his son Titus, and Herod Agrippa, king of Chalcis, to take his respects to Galba at Rome and seek the emperor’s direction. In February 69, while Vespasian’s two envoys were coasting past Greece in fast warships, they heard news when they put into port that Galba had been murdered in Rome in January, that thirty-six-year-old Marcus Otho had been put on the throne by the Praetorian Guard, and that the legions on the Rhine had declared not for Otho but for their own general, Aulus Vitellius. The forty-one-year-old Herod Agrippa decided to continue on to Rome anyway and pay his respects to Otho, but Titus turned his frigate around and headed back to Caesarea at full speed to convey the news of Galba’s death to his father.
Meanwhile, annoyed by the activities of Simon ben Gioras, Vespasian decided to tighten his grip on Jerusalem. With the arrival of the new spring he marched out of Caesarea with the 15th Legion and occupied several towns in the hills north of Jerusalem, then sent Brigadier General Sextus Cerialis from Emmaus with a detachment from his 5th Legion and cavalry support to circle around to the south of the Jewish capital. Burning one town and accepting the surrender of another, General Cerialis came to the city of Hebron. After his Moesian legionaries easily stormed the city and eliminated its Zealot defenders, he burned ancient Hebron to the ground. The noose around Jerusalem had once more been tightened.
Outside of Jerusalem, the rebels now held only Masada, Herodeum, and Machaerus, and each was cut off from the other. There would be no more exploits like Simon’s rampage through the countryside. As Vespasian hesitated to launch an all-out assault on Jerusalem, his son sailed back into Caesarea’s harbor with the news of Galba’s death, Otho’s accession, and Vitellius’s claim to the throne. According to Plutarch, both Vespasian and General Mucianus in Syria now sent letters to Rome vowing their allegiance to and support of Otho.
In that same spring of 69, General Vitellius sent two armies marching down from the Rhine to Italy, among them the retired veterans of the last 10th Legion discharge who were living on the great river. In mid-April, at Bedriacum, Vitellius’s forces defeated Otho, and the short-lived young emperor took his own life. Vitellius was now emperor, and in July he would triumphantly enter Rome.
Vespasian, who had deliberately stalled operations in Judea to see how affairs in Rome panned out, was being repeatedly urged to consider making a bid for the throne himself by those around him, including, now, his son Titus. All accounts suggest he resisted at first. As Dio says, Vespasian was never inclined to be rash. But then in the middle of the year, under the guise of a visit to a religious shrine, he held a secret meeting on Mount Carmel, just north of his headquarters at Caesarea, with General Mucianus, who came down from Antioch. The two men sealed an agreement, with Mucianus giving Vespasian his backing for a tilt at the ultimate prize.
Tiberius Alexander, Prefect of Egypt, also supported Vespasian. If he wasn’t at the Mount Carmel meeting he was certainly aware of it and the agreement that came out of it and was a party to both the meeting and the agreement. For the movement to make Vespasian emperor to appear to be spontaneous, the first step was taken by Alexander. On July 1, A.D. 69, he led the troops of his Egyptian garrison—the 17th Legion and four cohorts of the 18th—in hailing Vespasian as emperor of Rome.
The three legions in Judea followed suit several days later—first the 15th at Caesarea, then the 10th at Jericho and the 5th at Emmaus. By July 15, Mucianus had also sworn all four legions of his Syrian command for Vespasian. These were the 6th Victrix, the 12th, and as can be best ascertained, the 23rd and the 24th.
Vespasian hurried to Beirut, where he met with Mucianus and received deputations of potentates from throughout the East. With the nine legions of the East vowing their allegiance to Vespasian, plans were agreed for Mucianus, given the authority of a field marshal, to lead a task force to Italy to take the throne for Vespasian. That task force would consist of the 6th Victrix Legion as well as large numbers of auxiliaries and recalled militia veterans. While Vespasian headed south, Field Marshal Mucianus chaired a conference of officials at Beirut that set in motion all the necessary arrangements for the call-up of thirteen thousand retired legion veterans living in Syria and eligible for Evocati militia service, the production of arms and ammunition, the acquisition of baggage animals, and the coining of currency to pay for it all.
Vespasian gave command of the legions in Judea to his son Titus, with the brief to take Jerusalem in the coming spring, while he transferred his own headquarters to Alexandria, from where he could control the supply of grain going to Rome—the capital’s lifeblood.
Major General Trajan now parted company with the 10th at Jericho, probably after calling an assembly of the legion and thanking its men for their bravery and loyalty while serving under him. It seems Trajan journeyed south to Alexandria, to join Vespasian’s staff and to commence planning for a possible invasion of the province of Africa, modern Tunisia and part of Libya, using the one intact legion remaining in Egypt, the 17th, to gain control of the grain coming out of that province as well. That operation was soon made unnecessary by rapidly changing events in Europe. Once emperor, Vespasian would make Trajan his coconsul for A.D. 70, and within several years appoint him to govern Syria, then Asia. Major General Trajan was replaced as commander of the 10th Legion by Brigadier General Larcius Lepidus.
Vespasian’s son, and successor in Judea, twenty-nine-year-old Titus, until recently a mere colonel but now with the authority of a field marshal, accompanied his father to Alexandria for the moment. There, Vespasian appointed the Prefect of Egypt, Tiberius Alexander, as his son’s chief of staff. Alexander, probably in his fifties at this point, was intended as a mature and experienced adviser to the young general. Two decades earlier Alexander, a former Jew, had served as Procurator of Judea for several years. He’d also served on Field Marshal Corbulo’s staff during his Armenian offensives. So he had considerable regional knowledge and military experience to offer Titus.
Titus and Alexander marched back up to Caesarea from Alexandria. Tacitus tells us they brought with them reinforcements from the 18th and 3rd Augusta Legions. These were four cohorts of new African recruits for the 18th Legion that had been stranded in Egypt by the Jewish Revolt, and the lone cohort of the 3rd Augusta Legion, which had been holding Ascalon on the coast south of Jerusalem since A.D. 66. As can be deduced from Tactitus, in A.D. 66 the 18th Legion was transferred from its long-term assignment in Egypt to the Rhine. Since 42 B.C. the legion had been recruited in Illyricum, but Tacitus indicates that for the new enlistment of A.D. 67 the Palatium gave it two new recruiting grounds, Africa and Narbon Gaul. At the same time, its brother legion, the 17th, also from Illyricum, had its recruiting ground changed to Asia. Cohorts enrolled in Gaul reached the 18th Legion’s new Rhine station on schedule, but the recruits from Africa had only marched as far as Egypt by the time news of the Gallus disaster reached Alexandria in late A.D. 66, and they were held there pending further orders, probably on Vespasian’s instructions.
According to Josephus, these five cohorts from two legions were put under the command of Colonel Heternius Fronto, who would have been commanding either the 18th Legion cohorts or the 17th Legion in Egypt up to this time. Josephus says that Titus and Fronto were old friends, and it’s likely that both had commanded auxiliary units attached to the 2nd Augusta Legion in Britain at the same time earlier in their careers.
The buildup for the renewed Judean offensive continued in earnest. At the beginning of the new spring of A.D. 70, the 12th Legion marched down from its base at Raphanaeae in Syria, apparently led by its second-in-command, and three thousand legionaries based on the Euphrates, almost certainly from either the 23rd or the 24th Legion, or both, came down to perform rear-echelon duties out of Caesarea.
In April, Roman operations in Judea finally wound back into gear. Wearing the purple cloak of a Roman commander in chief that his father had worn before him, Titus led the 12th and 15th Legions and the 3rd Augusta and 18th Legion cohorts out of Caesarea and up into the Judean hills toward Jerusalem. At the same time, couriers rode to the 5th at Emmaus and the 10th Legion at Jericho. Both were ordered to march on Jerusalem.
Titus’s main body from Caesarea was the first to reach Jerusalem, camping in the hills just north of the city. Riding ahead of his legions and taking his staff and an escort of six hundred cavalry with him, Titus reached the summit of twenty-seven-hundred-foot Mount Scopus to the northeast of the city, which provided a panoramic view of the Jewish capital. From the mountain, where a university and a hospital stand today, Titus studied the rugged lay of the land—Jerusalem was and is located among several hills, twenty-five hundred feet above sea level, although today’s barren hills were then tree-covered.
He took particular note of the three walls surrounding the city, the outer walls twenty feet high, the inner thirty feet high and fifteen feet thick, with a number of defensive towers dotted along their length— ninety on the Third Wall, fourteen on the Second, and sixty on the First or Old Wall. Eerily, there was not a sign of Jewish defenders anywhere.
Seeing that the walls were deserted, Titus suddenly spurred his horse forward, planning to go down the slope to take a closer look. Most of his cavalry escort had halted on the reverse side of the hill, so that as he went down the slope, Titus was accompanied by just his staff and immediate bodyguard, leaving the surprised cavalry force behind. Reaching the bottom of the slope, Titus became caught up in gardens. At this moment, thousands of Jewish partisans rushed out the Women’s Gate in the outer Third Wall.
The wildly yelling partisans swiftly cut off Titus and his party, and almost ended the young general’s career in the dust there that spring day. Titus and most of those with him did manage to fight their way out and rejoin the cavalry, but a straggling bodyguard was hauled from his horse by partisans who cut his throat, and another who dismounted to fight was overwhelmed and killed. It was a lesson for young Titus not to take anything at face value at Jerusalem.
That night, the Moesians of the 5th Legion arrived from Emmaus. The next morning the 12th and 15th Legions set about building a camp on Mount Scopus, and, at Titus’s direction, the 5th built another for itself six hundred yards to the rear of that of the 12th and 15th. Later in the day, the 10th Legion marched in from Jericho, and Titus ordered it to build a camp on the Mount of Olives, due east of the city and separated from it by the Kidron valley.
General Lepidus, the 10th’s new commander, hadn’t witnessed his commander in chief’s brush with death the previous day and was unaware of the surprise tactics of the partisans. Without setting guard pickets down the slope, he put his legion to work building entrenchments on the Mount of Olives. During the afternoon, as his 10th Legion men wielded entrenching tools in the hot April sun, and with ramparts of the city walls deceptively empty, thousands of armed Jews suddenly swarmed out of the Lower City and across the Kidron, splashed through the stream flowing along the bottom of the mountain, then surged up the slope toward the toiling legionaries.
Taken by surprise and armed with just their swords and entrenching tools, the men of the 10th fell back up the mountain in disorder. It just so happened that Titus was nearby at the time, and he rushed to the spot and rallied the troops. Organizing them into their cohorts, he led them against the partisans, who were driven back into the city.
Titus instructed General Lepidus that in the future he was to deploy large numbers of fully armed legionaries to protect their comrades laboring on defenses. As Titus was standing with a group of officers discussing dispositions, the Jews suddenly burst out of the Lower City again and launched a second attack. Once more they swept up the slope unhindered, as again the men working on the incline hurriedly withdrew. But Titus didn’t budge. Drawing his sword, he ordered his colleagues to do the same.
The partisans quickly surrounded Titus and his party, but already the centurions of the 10th were arming their men with shields and forming them into their cohorts. As the legionaries came running down the hill to support their general, Titus led his party in a charge at their assailants. Again the partisans were put onto the back foot, and again they fled across the Kidron and into the city. It was another lesson for the 10th. These tricky partisans were unlike any adversary they’d ever faced before. As Boy Scouts were to learn in modern times, the legionaries had to be prepared. For anything.
Titus and his senior officers held a council of war. Some advocated a siege, to starve the Jews into submission. In times past, this is what Titus’s father would have done; it was the prudent course. But Titus wanted a quick victory, so he could turn his attention to his father’s campaign to win the throne. Time was all-important. After hearing his subordinates’ opinions, Titus announced to his generals and colonels that he intended to conduct a massive assault at several different parts of the city and overwhelm the defenders quickly.
Because of the lay of the land, armies assaulting Jerusalem in times gone by had been forced to do so from the north. Titus had his own ideas. But first he needed to break through the Third Wall, which the Jews had only recently completed. Choosing a place for an assault on the Third Wall thought by modern scholars to have been just to the north of the Jaffa Gate, Titus gave instructions for the ground leading up to it to be leveled, and for trees to be felled throughout the region to provide clear fields of fire for the artillery and to provide timber for siege equipment. Before they had finished, the legionaries would denude the Jerusalem area of all its trees.
At the same time, Titus set men to work improving the defenses on their own camps, because the Jews several times fought all the way to the camps in surprise raids from the city. He also moved his own headquarters several times, finally settling on a location west of the Old City, close to where the King David Hotel stands today.
Within the walls, two of the Jewish factions fighting each other in their protracted civil war agreed on a truce and combined to fight the Romans. The third faction, while fighting the Romans, continued to fight the other factions at every opportunity.
As Jewish bands unexpectedly sallied from this gate or that gate to fall on Roman work parties, or decoyed green Roman troops into ambushes under the wall, Titus was forced to deploy a large part of his army just defending his work parties. Several ranks of infantry and cavalry circled the city, and with them, archers to cover men digging and carting and felling and building.
The preparation took several weeks. Finally Titus brought up his artillery, and the assault troops prepared their heavy equipment. As the soldiers of the Roman army went to their beds on May 9, all was in readiness.