[Footnote 2: We are reminded of the saying of Rabbi Akiba some half-century later. When asked where God was to be sought now that the Temple was destroyed, he replied, "In the great city of Rome" (Yer. Taanit, 69a). But the Rabbinical utterance had a very different meaning from the plea of Josephus.]
[Footnote 3: B.J. V. xiii. 7.]
[Footnote 4: B.J. V. x. and xiii.]
Famine and weariness were breaking down the strength of the Jews, and, after fierce resistance, the tower of Antonia was captured and razed to the ground. Josephus adds another chapter to detail the horrors of the famine, in which he recounts the story of the mother eating her child, which occurs also in the Midrash.[1] The Romans, he tells us, were filled with a religious loathing of their foes on account of their sins in violating the Temple and eating forbidden food, and Titus excused himself for the sufferings he caused, on the ground that, as he had given the Jews the chance of securing peace and liberty, they had brought the evil on themselves. Slowly but surely the Romans gained a footing within the Temple precinct; inch by inch John was driven back, and on the Ninth of Ab the sanctuary was stormed. A torch, hurled probably by the hand of Titus (see below, p. 128), set the cloisters alight, and the fire spread till the whole house was involved. The crowning catastrophe, the burning of the Holy of Holies, happened on the following day.
[Footnote 1: Ekah R. 65a.]
Josephus remained in the Roman camp throughout the siege, advising Titus at each step how he might proceed. After the fall of the Temple he witnessed the last desperate struggle, when a half-starved remnant of the defenders "looked straight into death without flinching." A great modern writer sees in this unquenchable passion of the Zealots for liberty a sublime type of steadfastness[1]; but Josephus, who after the fall of the Temple had made another unavailing effort to persuade them to lay down their arms, again pours forth his abuse upon those who fought against the sacred might of Rome. Over a million had perished in the siege, and less than one hundred thousand were captured, of whom only forty thousand were preserved. His favor with Titus enabled him to redeem from captivity his brother and a large number of his friends and acquaintances and one hundred and ninety women and children.[2] His own estates near Jerusalem having been taken for a military colony, he received liberal compensation in another part of Judea. From the victor he also obtained a scroll of the law.
[Footnote 1: George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such.]
[Footnote 2: Vita, 75.]
It is not certain whether he accompanied "the gentle Titus" through Syria after the fall of the city and the razing of its walls. The victor's progress was marked at each stopping-place by the celebration of games, where thousands of young Jewish captives were made to kill each other, "butchered to make a Roman holiday" and feast the eyes of the conqueror and the Herodian ally and his spouse. But he certainly witnessed at Rome the triumph of the Flavii, father and son, and gazed on the shame of his country, when its most holy monuments were carried by the noblest of the captives through the streets amid the applause and ribald jeers of a Roman crowd. Josephus enlarges with apparent apathy on the procession, which is commemorated and made vivid down to our own day by the arch in the Roman Forum, through which no Jew in the Middle Ages would pass. He records, too, that Vespasian built a Temple of Peace, in which he stored the golden vessels taken from the Jewish sanctuary, and put up the whole of Judea for sale as his private property.[1] Josephus himself was housed in the royal palace, and it does not appear that he ever returned to Palestine. The tenth legion had been left on the site of Jerusalem as a permanent Roman garrison, and a fortified camp was built for it on the northern hill. "The legions swallowed her up and idolaters possessed her." A chacun selon ses oeuvres is the comment of Salvador, the Franco-Jewish historian (fl. 1850), comparing the gilded servitude of Josephus with the fate of the patriots of Jerusalem; and another recent historian, Graetz, has contrasted the picture of Jeremiah uttering his touching laments over the ruins at the fall of the first Temple with the position of Josephus pouring out his fulsome adulation of the destroyer at the fall of the second.
[Footnote 1: B.J. VII. vi. 6.]