[14] During his tenure of office, an impostor named Theudas, who claimed to be a prophet, raised a formidable insurrection. But Fadus, a man of action, arrested and executed him. He is mentioned in Acts v. 36.
[15] This was Agrippa II., son of Agrippa I. It was before him that St. Paul pleaded (Acts xxvi.). Suet. (Vesp. 4).
[16] According to Suetonius, Florus was slain by the Jews in a tumultuous outbreak. Josephus has been thought to contradict him. But his language may be interpreted so as to harmonize with Suetonius.
CHAPTER II.
A.D. 71, 72.
SIEGE OF JERUSALEM BY TITUS.
War was now openly declared, and Cestius marched on Jerusalem with 10,000 Roman soldiers, and a still larger force of allies, to put down the rebellion and avenge the murder of his countrymen. The result was the most terrible disaster to the Roman arms which they had sustained since the defeat of Varus. Unsuccessful in some preliminary skirmishing, Gallus assaulted the city, and after five days of indecisive fighting, forced his way on the sixth to the wall on the north side of the Temple. Every effort to scale this having failed, he ordered the legionaries to lock their shields together and form the testudo, their usual mode of obtaining a cover, under which they undermined fortifications which they could not surmount. The manœuvre was successful. The wall was all but pierced through, and the garrison on the point of flight, when Gallus suddenly, without any apparent reason, ordered a retreat,[17] withdrew in haste, first to his camp, and afterwards to Antipatris, losing in his retreat his whole battering train and 6,000 soldiers.
The Jews had now offended beyond hope of forgiveness, and both parties braced themselves for the fierce and deadly struggle which had become inevitable. The rebels recruited their comparatively scanty numbers by securing the support of the inhabitants of Idumæa (of whom 20,000 were enlisted), Peræa, and Galilee. On the other side, Rome summoned into the field a formidable force, which was placed under the command of T. Flavius Vespasian, the greatest soldier of his day. In the hope, apparently, that the Jews, when they learned the strength of the force sent against them, would submit without further resistance, Vespasian delayed the attack on Jerusalem for more than two years, choosing first to reduce the cities of Galilee—Gadara, Jotapata, Gischala, and others; which, indeed, no prudent general could leave unsubdued in his rear. The whole of this province, which had been placed under the government of the celebrated historian, Josephus,[18] remained throughout this period in a state of internal dissension, fomented in a great measure by the notorious John of Gischala, giving but little hope of a successful resistance to Rome when the actual struggle should begin. Yet some of these cities, notably Gamala Tarichæa, above all Jotapata, where Josephus commanded in person, offered a protracted and desperate resistance.[19]
When the road to Jerusalem had been laid fully open, the civil strife, by which the empire had been distracted, had come to an end. Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, one after another, had succeeded to the Imperial sceptre, only to have it snatched from their grasp; and, finally, Vespasian had been advanced to the throne of the Cæsars. Leaving to his son Titus the task of reducing to obedience the rebellious city, Vespasian set sail for Italy; and the Roman army, 60,000 strong,[20] advanced under its new leader to the final encounter in the spring of A.D. 70.
Jerusalem was at that time one of the strongest, as well as one of the most picturesque, cities in the world. It stands upon a rocky plateau about 2,600 feet above the level of the sea. On all sides except one it is surrounded by mountains; which do not, however, rise to a much greater altitude than the city itself. The plateau consists of two principal eminences, Zion and Acra, on the former of which stood the Upper City, or the City of David, and on the latter what was called the Lower City. A third—a smaller and somewhat lower hill, called Moriah—was anciently divided from Mount Acra by the Tyropœon, or Valley of the Cheesemongers, which was filled up by the Maccabees, who raised Moriah to the same level as the neighbouring hill. It was on the summit of Moriah that the Temple stood. In later times the suburb called Bezetha was added to the city, and the whole environed by walls.
Of these there were three—one inside another. The first began on the north side at the tower called Hippicus, terminating at the western cloister of the Temple. The second wall began at the gate called Gennath, enclosing the northern quarter of the city only, and ending at the Tower of Antonia. The third, which was designed to protect Bezetha, was incomplete at the time of the outbreak of the Jewish war, but was then completed, in anticipation of the approaching siege. These walls were strengthened by towers of solid masonry—some of the stones being of enormous size—and rose to a great height above the level of the walls. The Tower of Antonia stood on a rock ninety feet high, the fortress itself being fully seventy feet higher; and at the portions not defended by these walls, the platform of rock itself, sinking down, as it did almost with a sheer descent, into the ravines below, formed an impregnable defence. In times when the use of gunpowder was unknown, it could be captured only by blockade, or after the most frightful waste of human life.
Meanwhile the city was distracted by factions, which appeared to be more likely to destroy one another than to maintain a successful defence against an enemy. After the massacre of the Roman troops, Ananus the High Priest, a wise and good man, gained some authority in the city, and endeavoured to counteract the influence of the Zealots. He might have succeeded in averting the war. But Eleazar, the leader of the Zealots, and John of Gischala,[21] the chief of the Galilæans, conspired against him, and by night introduced the Idumæans, in overwhelming force, into the city. By them Ananus and his friends were murdered, and Jerusalem thenceforth was given up to hopeless anarchy.