CHAPTER VII.
THE DARKNESS THICKENS.
Azariah had read the signs of the times aright. The darker days had come, days so full of trouble that the unhappy people looked back to the past that had seemed so sad and gloomy as to a time of rest. Things had not been going well with King Antiochus, for the Romans had driven him out of Egypt, and in his rage and fear he turned against his Jewish subjects with greater ferocity than ever. One of his motives was the brutal desire to wreak upon the feeble the vengeance which he could not exact from the strong; the other was a genuine fear lest he should lose another province as he had already lost Egypt. He saw that the policy of Rome was to stir up against him the national spirit of subject peoples, and he knew well enough that in the Jews, crushed though they had been by oppression and massacre, this national spirit was not by any means dead. Accordingly he set himself with relentless ferocity to extinguish it. Everything distinctive [pg 91]of the people was to be rooted out; that done they might become really submissive; there would be no more a land of the Jews, but simply a province of Southern Syria.
The first thing, he conceived, would be to strike such terror into the hearts of the people that there should be no thought among them of resistance. For such a purpose nothing could be more effective than another massacre such as that which had already been perpetrated two years before under his own eyes: only this, he determined, should be more complete. He perceived with a devilish ingenuity that his orders would be more relentlessly carried out if he entrusted their execution to some one else, than if he were personally present. Appeals might be made to him to which he might yield out of sheer weariness, whereas a lieutenant, if he were only hard-hearted enough, would simply fall back upon the orders which he had received, and refuse all responsibility save that of seeing that these were fully carried out.
Such a lieutenant he knew that he possessed in the person of a certain Apollonius, a Cretan mercenary, who had already given proofs enough that he was about as little troubled as any man could be with a conscience or with feelings of compassion. To Apollonius, accordingly, the commission was entrusted, and he proceeded to execute it in a particularly brutal and treacherous way.
He marched to Jerusalem, taking with him a picked force of some five thousand men—picked, it may be said, quite as much for their unscrupulous and ferocious character, as for their strength and skill in arms. There would have been, in any case, little chance of resistance, but, to make his task the easier of accomplishment, he had so timed his coming that he approached the city two or three hours before the end of the Sabbath. Secret orders had been sent to Philip, the Phrygian, that he was to relax the severity of his rule; and the people had begun to breathe again after a long period of repression. The Temple was still shut, or virtually shut, but the synagogues were open, and were indeed frequented by throngs of fervent worshippers.
It wanted a couple of hours to sunset when the news ran through the city that an armed force was approaching the walls. The first feeling aroused by the tidings was naturally one of alarm. The appearance of the soldiers, however, was such as to disarm all apprehensions. In the first place they were more like a crowd of men who happened to be carrying arms than an army. They were not marching in ranks, or indeed keeping any kind of order. A multitude of country-folk could be seen mingled among them, soldiers and civilians walking side by side in the most friendly and unconstrained fashion. Some of the new comers recognized old acquaintances among the townsfolk, and introduced their [pg 93]comrades to them; and though some of the sterner sort stood rigidly aloof, there were quite enough among the inhabitants of Jerusalem to give the visitors a general welcome. Apollonius himself, a conspicuous figure as he rode on his white charger up and down the streets of the city, was noticeably busy in renewing old acquaintanceships and making new ones.
And then in a moment the whole scene was changed. A soldier and a citizen were standing on the wall, talking and laughing together, and that in a place where they could be seen by all observers. Suddenly, without there having been even the slightest sign of a quarrel, the soldier was seen to plunge his sword into the side of his companion. It was a preconcerted signal. The wretched inhabitants, who would have been defenceless in any case, were taken absolutely off their guard, and had but slender chances of escape. How many hundreds, possibly thousands, perished cannot be guessed. But the massacre was more general, more pitiless than that which had devastated the city two years before. Apollonius’s “picked” men showed themselves altogether worthy of his choice, so brutal and bloodthirsty were they. And Apollonius himself was to be seen everywhere urging his men to make short work with these “pestilent Jews,” as he called them, and not unfrequently striking a blow himself. He earned on that day such hatred that thereafter [pg 94]there was not to be found a Jew, save among the vilest renegades and traitors, but uttered a curse when his name was mentioned.
Of course the soldiers had to be paid for their bloody day’s work, and they were paid by the plunder of the city. The houses were stripped, and the plunderers, when they had carried away everything that had roused their cupidity, often, out of sheer wantonness, completed the work of devastation, by setting fire to the desolated houses. Altogether Jerusalem presented such a spectacle as had not been seen since the days of the Babylonian conquest.
The spirit of the people having been, as it would seem, thus effectually broken for the present, it remained to provide against its possible revival in the future.