“Cestius Gallus, the governor of Syria, set his forces in motion, with the forces of Agrippa, who had now openly taken the Roman side, and other allies, added to his Roman legions. He advanced upon Jerusalem through the pass of Bethhoron, at the season of the Feast of Tabernacles, A.D. 66, with an army of 25,000 men. Regardless alike of the feast and of the Sabbath, the Jews rushed out to meet the enemy on the spot consecrated by the victories of Joshua and Judas Maccabeus; crushed the Roman van with the slaughter of more than 500 men, and with a loss of only 22. A charge of light troops on the Jewish rear saved the army of Cestius from destruction, and gave him time to entrench his camp, and the Jews were obliged to retire to Jerusalem.” Cestius then advanced and encamped at Scopus, a mile to the north of the city. After five days of irregular attacks, he advanced against the northern wall of the Temple and began the work of mining; but, notwithstanding encouragements from the factions in the city, he suddenly and unaccountably withdrew, and, after a night’s rest on Scopus, “commenced his retreat with the hostile population gathering round him at every step, and reached Gabas with loss. Here the beasts of burden were killed and the baggage abandoned. As soon as the Romans had entered the pass of Bethhoron, they were assailed in flank and rear and the passage blocked in front. Night alone saved them from utter destruction; and Cestius, displaying the standards and leaving 400 men, to make a show of defending the empty camp, fled with the remnant of his army, pursued by the Jews as far as Antipatris. He lost 5,300 foot and 380 horses; and the engines of war, which he had carried up for the siege of Jerusalem, became an invaluable help to its defense. Having secured this prize, and collected the immense booty, the Jews returned to the city with hymns of triumph, fancying that the days of the Maccabees had returned, and forgetting that the power they had defied wielded the resources of the whole civilized world, while they had forfeited the aid of Omnipotence.”—Philip Smith.
[37]—page 276.] It was during this interval, in which the Jews were without competent leadership, that the Romans made and carried forward their plans for conquering Judea. The news of the revolt and the defeat of Cestius reached Nero when he was on his theatrical tour of Greece. He at once entrusted Vespasian (afterward Emperor) with the command of all the forces of Syria and the East. Vespasian immediately “sent his son Titus to Alexandria, to lead the fifteenth legion into Palestine, while he hastened through Asia Minor and Syria, collecting troops and engines as he advanced. In the spring of the following year, three legions, with a large force of allies, were assembled at Ptolemais (Acre). The sense of being committed to so great a conflict, and the six-months’ interval for preparation, had restored some order among the still divided Jews. The avowed friends of Rome had either taken refuge with her armies or been compelled to join the insurgents.” So writes the historian. In the interval the moderate party, who would have been content to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome if their liberties were secured, had, by their numbers and character, obtained the ascendency over the zealots.
[38]—page 280.] Jubal appears in this strange manner, after two years had been passed in the dungeon, and rehearses the story of the war. The attack of Vespasian fell first upon Galilee, which lay in his way to Jerusalem. The moderate party had placed Joseph, the son of Matthias—better known as the author of “Jewish Antiquities,” and by his Roman name, Flavius Josephus, which he later assumed, as the client of Vespasian in command in Galilee. His account given in “The Jewish War” proves that the horrors of the conflict in Galilee were not overdrawn by Jubal. Josephus, who was undoubtedly possessed of military genius of no mean order, was driven at last to stake the fate of Galilee on the defense of Jotapata. Before it Vespasian was wounded, but the hill-fortress was finally stormed. The story of the marvelous escape of the Jewish leader and of his recapture is related by himself. He was thereafter attached to the suite of Vespasian “in a character between a prisoner and a companion; and, after acting throughout the war as a mediator between his countrymen and the Romans, he was rewarded with a grant of land in Judea, together with a pension and the Roman franchise.” Some of the most interesting features in Dr. Croly’s romance would seem to have been suggested by experiences in the life of Josephus. The horrors of the war were indescribable. Toward the close of the Galilean campaign, Trajan was despatched by Vespasian to seize Joppa, the only port held by the Jews. “Here the unfortunate inhabitants took to their ships, which were dashed to pieces by a storm, and the few survivors killed by the Romans as they gained the land. At the other captured cities (Tiberias, Taricheia, Gamala, Itabyrium, and Gischala) all the elder inhabitants were massacred and the younger sold as slaves. Never was a war marked by greater atrocities on both sides than that which now desolated the Holy Land.”
[39]—page 284.] The numerous caves, owing to the chalky limestone of which the rocks of Syria and Palestine chiefly consist, are one of the marked features of this region. The Scriptures are full of references to them, as they were used for dwelling-places, burial-places, places of refuge, and other purposes. The bold shores of the Mediterranean, affording as they do so little good harborage, are well suited to furnish caverns, approachable from the sea only, in which the robber band is represented as holding its orgies.
[40]—page 291.] Such a robber group was not uncommon in that age, made up as it was of such diverse races and dispositions. The corruption of the Roman rule under Nero brought an approach to anarchy in many of the provinces. Owing to the favorable character of its topography and the strange mixture of its population, Palestine, and indeed the whole Syrian shore of the Mediterranean, was at the worst in this regard. Robbery, by sea and by land, was so widely practised as to gather to itself a degree of respectability not usually associated with it. German, Chiote, Syrian, Arab, Egyptian, and Ethiopian, all develop here in the most marked way, under the influence of over-much wine, their national idiosyncrasies and their natural quarrelsomeness.
[41]—page 328.] This chance meeting with Naomi, the granddaughter of Ananus, the late High Priest, furnishes the key to many of the situations and strange adventures of the closing volume of this romance. It was during the period of Salathiel’s incarceration in the dungeon, and while Vespasian was pushing on to Jerusalem, that the death of Ananus occurred. Josephus represents Ananus, or Annus, as a man who might have saved the nation from destruction. At this time he shared the supreme power in Jerusalem, under the Sanhedrin, with Simon, the son of Garion, the bravest of the zealots, the moderate party being thus the controlling power in the city. Later, however, when the tide of devastation directed by Vespasian had entirely swept over Galilee and Perea, the death of Nero brought a brief respite until Vespasian himself had been chosen Emperor. Meanwhile the efforts of Ananus to make preparation for defense were paralyzed by the zealots. The historian relates how “Jerusalem became the refuge and sink of the fugitives from every quarter. Crowds brought fresh confusion, and added to the fatal power of the zealots. At length John of Giscala arrived, with his panting men and horses, from the fall of the last Galilean fortress. In spite of the tale which their appearance told, the crafty leader announced that the Romans were exhausted, and pointed to the long resistance of the northern cities as a presage of their failure before Jerusalem. His arrival animated the zealots; and the robbers and assassins who had come into the city from every quarter enacted scenes which are only paralleled by the September massacres of Paris in 1792.” Ananus set himself against this sacrilegious reign of terror, but the zealots prevailed, and he was put to death, and his naked corpse “thrown out to the dogs and vultures, in a land where it was a sacred custom to bury even the worst malefactors before sunset. The moderate party was crushed, and the zealots followed up their triumph, first by a series of massacres, in which, says Josephus, ‘they slaughtered the people like a herd of unclean animals,’ to the number of 12,000, and then by murders under the form of law.” Faction then ran riot as the doomed city awaited the coming of Titus, who succeeded his father Vespasian, for its final destruction.
[42]—page 347.] When Vespasian was made Emperor, he departed for Rome, leaving Titus to work the wrath of God upon the doomed city—doomed because of unfaithfulness to its covenant with Jehovah. Early in the year 70, Titus, having collected his forces at Cæsarea, moved upon Jerusalem with not less than 80,000 men, arriving before the city when, at the last Passover ever celebrated, it was crammed, as Josephus relates, with a million persons keeping that feast and without any provision having been made for their sustenance. The garrison of the Holy City was made up of three principal factions, as ready to fight with one another as with the Roman. Eleazar, the leader of one faction of the zealots, with 2,400 men, held the Temple and four strong towers that had been erected at its corners. John of Giscala, leader of a mediating party, had succeeded to the position of Ananus in the Temple courts and the lower city, and with 6,000 men besieged Eleazar’s forces. Simon, son of Gioras, occupied the hill of Zion with 10,000 Jews and 5,000 Idumeans, and confronted both the other leaders. Titus found these factions carrying on an incessant fight with one another by means of the war-engines left behind by Cestius in his flight. With such a state of things existing, there could be little hope of defense against the conquerors of the world.
[43]—page 353.] The Prince arrived after Titus had pushed the siege far on toward completion. The historian records that on the first day of the feast, the Jewish leaders for a moment suspended their mutual hostilities to make a combined attack upon the single legion stationed on the Mount of Olives. The Romans, at work on their entrenchments, were suddenly beset by hosts that kept pouring out of the city, and were driven back to the summit of the hill; but by a desperate effort they at last succeeded in beating them back. On the next day, the second of the feast, the factions renewed the internal conflict, and the party of John gained possession of the Temple; and thus the factions were reduced to two.
[44]—page 356.] The Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem alone formed an exception to the judicial blindness that had fallen upon Israel. Warned by the prophecy of Jesus (Luke xxi. 20, 21), they had departed in a body, before the city was surrounded, to Pella, a village of Decapolis, beyond the Jordan.
[45]—page 360.] When the siege at length shut in the city, it was no longer possible to furnish the priests or the offerings for the daily sacrifice twice a day for the sins of the people; hence when it ceased, on the 17th of the month Tamuz, the universal horror of a people undone expressing itself in a universal outcry. Concerning the cessation of the daily sacrifice, Whiston, the translator and editor of Josephus, has the following note: “This was a remarkable day indeed, the 17th of Panemus (Tamuz), A.D. 70, when, according to Daniel’s prediction, six hundred and six years before, the Romans, in half a week, caused the sacrifice and oblation to cease (Dan. ix. 27). For from the month of February A.D. 66, about which time Vespasian entered on this war, to this very time, was just three years and a half.”