Titus was resting in his tent after the engagement, when a messenger rushed in with the tidings. Starting up just as he was, he ran to the Temple to arrest the conflagration, followed by all his generals, while in their train came the excited legionaries, with the clamour and confused noise arising from the movement in irregular order of so large an army. Cæsar, both by word of mouth and by a wave of his hand, signalled to the combatants to extinguish the fire; but they neither heard his shouts, drowned in the louder din which filled their ears, nor, distracted as they were by the fever of battle or rage, did they heed his beckoning hand. The impetuosity of the legionaries, when they joined the fray, neither exhortation nor threat could restrain; passion was for all the one officer in command. Crushed together about the entrances, many were trampled down by their companions; while many, stumbling on the still hot and smouldering ruins of the porticoes, suffered the same fate as the vanquished.[[313]] As they came nearer the sanctuary they pretended not even to hear Cæsar’s orders and shouted to those in front of them to throw in the firebrands.
The (Jewish) insurgents were now powerless to rescue (the Temple). On all sides was carnage and flight. Most of the slain were civilians, a weak and unarmed mob, each butchered where he was caught. Around the altar a pile of corpses was accumulating; down the sanctuary steps flowed a stream of blood; and down the same decline slid the bodies of the victims killed above.
Cæsar, finding himself unable to restrain the impetuosity of his frenzied soldiers and that the fire was gaining the mastery, passed with his generals within the building and beheld the holy place of the sanctuary and all that it contained—things far exceeding the reports current among foreigners and not inferior to their proud reputation among our own nation. As the flames had nowhere yet penetrated to the interior, but were consuming the outbuildings of the sanctuary, Titus, rightly supposing that the structure might still be preserved, rushed out and endeavoured by personal appeals to induce the soldiers to quench the fire; at the same time directing Liberalius, a centurion of his bodyguard of lancers, to restrain, by resort to clubs, any who disobeyed orders. But their respect for Cæsar and their fear of the officer who was endeavouring to check them were overpowered by their rage, their hatred of the Jews and the lust of battle, an even mightier master. Most of them were further stimulated by the hope of plunder, believing that the interior was full of money and actually seeing that all the surroundings were made of gold.
Moreover, when Cæsar rushed out to restrain the soldiers, even one of those who had entered with him baulked his purpose by thrusting a firebrand, in the darkness,[[314]] into the sockets of the gate. At once a flame shot up from the interior, whereupon Cæsar and his generals withdrew, and there was none left to prevent those on the outside from kindling a blaze. Thus, then, against Cæsar’s wishes, was the sanctuary set on fire.
Deeply as one must mourn for the most marvellous edifice which we have ever seen or heard of, whether we consider its structure, its magnitude, the richness of every detail or the reputation of its Holy Places,[[315]] yet may we draw very great consolation from the thought that there is no escape from Fate, for works of art and places any more than for living beings. And one may well marvel at the exactness of the cycle of Destiny; for, as I said, she waited until the very month and the very day on which in bygone times the Temple had been burnt by the Babylonians.—B.J. VI. 4. 4-8 (244-268).
(50) Portents and Oracles[[316]]
Thus it happened that the wretched people were deluded at that time by charlatans and pretended messengers of God;[[317]] while they paid no heed to or discredited the manifest portents that foretold the coming desolation, but, as if thunderstruck and bereft of eyes and mind, disregarded God’s plain proclamations (of disaster). So it was when a star, resembling a sword, stood over the city, and a comet which continued for a year. So again when, before the revolt and the outbreak of war, at the time when the people were assembling for the Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the eighth of the month Xanthicus,[[318]] at the ninth hour of the night, so brilliant a light shone round the altar and the sanctuary that it seemed to be broad daylight; and this continued for half an hour. By the inexperienced this was regarded as a good omen, but by the sacred scribes it was at once interpreted in accordance with after events.
At that same feast a cow that had been led by some one[[319]] to the sacrifice gave birth to a lamb in the midst of the Temple. Moreover, the eastern gate of the inner court, which it took twenty men to close with difficulty at even—it was of brass and very massive, and was secured by bars shod with iron, and had bolts which were sunk to a great depth into a threshold consisting of a solid block of stone—this gate was observed at the sixth hour of the night to have opened of its own accord. The watchmen of the Temple ran and reported the matter to the captain,[[320]] and he came up and with difficulty succeeded in shutting it. This again to the uninitiated seemed the best of omens, as they supposed that God had opened to them the gate of blessings; but the learned understood that the security of the Temple was dissolving of its own accord and that the opening of the gate indicated a present to the enemy, interpreting the portent in their own minds[[321]] as a symbol of desolation.