In Judea, the temper of the nation had long given warning of approaching revolt. It broke out at length when Gessius Florus was appointed procurator through the influence of his wife, who was a friend of Poppæa’s. His vexatious measures and rapacity wore out the patience of the Jews; on this point Tacitus is at one with Josephus. Disorders first occurred at Cæsarea on the occasion of Nero’s decree; then the action of Florus in taking seventeen talents out of the temple treasury provoked a riot at Jerusalem. The soldiery spread through the streets, plundering the houses and massacring the peaceable inhabitants, not sparing even women and children; after which the procurator withdrew to Cæsarea, leaving only one cohort in the tower of Antonia. The Zealots promptly occupied the temple precincts. When a government flees before the mob it may safely be predicted that the most excited and violent party will impose its will on the rest. In vain did Agrippa II and his sister Berenice, who happened to be at Jerusalem at the time, endeavour to allay the popular frenzy. They could gain nothing, in spite of the respect felt for the last descendants of the ancient kings. A band of men left the city, seized the fortress of Masada, and massacred the garrison.
The moderate party, composed of the wealthier classes and the priests, would have recoiled from an insensate struggle against the power of Rome, but Eleazar, the leader of the party of action, made the rupture final by refusing to offer in the temple the victims which were wont to be sacrificed there by the emperor’s command for the prosperity of Rome and of the empire. The friends of order sent to entreat Agrippa and Florus to come with all speed to protect them against the rebels. Agrippa sent three thousand horsemen, who took possession of the upper city, while the Zealots, robbers, and sicarii occupied the temple and the lower city. Florus returned no answer. According to Josephus, he wished the insurrection to grow to a head, and, when it was exhausted by its own violence, to extinguish it in blood. Such are the habitual tactics of military leaders in time of revolution. Such deliverers deserve, as Lamennais says, to be execrated in the present and in the future.
The insurgents, who were masters of the temple, refused entrance to the partisans of peace, made their way into the upper city, and set fire to the palace of Agrippa and Berenice. They also burnt the archives, in order to destroy all vouchers of credit and so bring over the debtors to their side. They were commanded by Manahem, the son of Judas the Gaulonite, and by Eleazar, the son of the high priest Ananias, who was one of the principal leaders of the opposite party, for civil war had set division even between members of the same family. The tower of Antonia was taken and burnt by the revolutionaries, who allowed Agrippa’s horsemen to depart unmolested. The Romans, for their part, took refuge in the three towers of the old wall. Ananias, who, with his brother Hezekiah, was found hidden in an aqueduct, was slaughtered by Manahem. Then Eleazar, enraged at the assassination of his father and uncle, stirred up the people against Manahem, who now gave himself the airs of a tyrant. “It was not worth while,” he said to them, “to cast off the yoke of Rome in order to stoop to that of the least among yourselves.” Manahem was stoned in the court of the temple. Such of his partisans as could make their escape took refuge in the fortress of Masada. The Romans asked for terms of capitulation. They were promised their lives, but they had no sooner given up their arms than Eleazar and the Zealots fell upon them and slew them all but one, who consented to be circumcised. The rest died, to a man, without asking for mercy, only crying out upon the sanctity of their oaths. These imprecations filled the people with dire forebodings, all the more so because this perjury had been committed on the Sabbath day.
The same day and hour, as if by the working of divine vengeance, says Josephus, a massacre of the Jews took place at Cæsarea; of twenty thousand men not one was left, for those who escaped were captured by Florus and sent to the galleys. This massacre roused the whole nation to such a pitch of fury that they ravaged the towns and villages of the Syrian frontier, Philadelphia, Heshbon, Gerasa, Pella, and Scythopolis, with fire and sword. They then sacked Gadara, Hippos, and Gaulonitis, burned Sebaste and Askalon, and demolished Anthedon and Gaza. They slew all that were not Jews. Then, as was to be expected, terrible reprisals followed. An epidemic of carnage raged all over southern Syria and extended to Egypt. Every mixed city became a battle-ground. If we are to trust Josephus, the Jews were never the aggressors. That is hard to believe. It is possible that the rabble, seeing Judea rebel against Rome, concluded that they might massacre the Jews with impunity. But it is also very probable that the insurrection had roused to the highest pitch the fanaticism of Jews settled elsewhere than in Judea, and that they were desirous of imitating the exploits of their brethren at Jerusalem. In Alexandria, as a sequel to a discussion in the theatre, the Jews armed themselves with torches and threatened to burn all the Greeks alive. The governor of the city was Tiberius Alexander, the Jewish convert to Hellenism who had formerly been procurator of Judea. He tried to make his compatriots listen to reason, but without success. He was obliged to send for the Roman legions. The Jewish quarter, known as the Delta, was heaped with corpses; Josephus speaks of fifty thousand slain. At Damascus the Syrians cooped the Jews up in the gymnasium and slew ten thousand of them. They had carefully concealed their design from their wives, nearly all of whom professed the Jewish religion.
After they had succeeded in retaking Jerusalem, the Zealots occupied the fortresses of the Dead Sea district. They massacred the Roman garrison of the castle of Cypros, which commanded Jericho; that of Macherus capitulated. At length Cestius Gallus, governor of Syria, determined to take up arms against the insurrection. He started from Antioch with his legions and some auxiliary troops furnished by Agrippa, who accompanied him on this expedition, and by the kings of Commagene and Ituræa. Galilee and the seaboard were subdued, and Cestius advanced to Gabao, two leagues from Jerusalem. The city was full of pilgrims who had come up to the Feast of Tabernacles. Although it was the Sabbath day, an immense multitude marched forth, and the irresistible onset of this troop of anarchists triumphed over Roman discipline. Simon, the son of Giora, one of the bravest leaders of the Zealots, pursued the fugitives and dispersed the Roman rear-guard. Agrippa endeavoured to induce the insurgents to submit by promising them an amnesty in the name of Cestius; one party among the people was desirous of accepting terms, but the anarchists killed the ambassadors. Cestius again advanced upon Jerusalem and took possession of the outskirts of the city. The insurgents had abandoned the new city and fallen back upon the temple. If he had attacked immediately, the war would have come to an end. A member of the family of Ananus, who was at the head of the party of order, offered to open the gates to the Romans; the Zealots flung him from the walls. For five days Cestius endeavoured to storm the temple precincts. The soldiers were at work sapping the walls, sheltering themselves under their shields, in the formation known as the “tortoise” (testudo). The anarchists, losing heart, began to take to flight, and the moderate party were about to open the gates, when Cestius, deceived by false reports, or perhaps seduced by bribery, sounded the retreat, withdrew to Gabao, and—pursued and harassed by the Jews, who killed six thousand of his men—escaped under cover of night, leaving his baggage and engines of war behind.
The partisans of peace, seeing that in spite of their efforts they were embarked upon the conflict, resolved to set themselves at the head of the movement, so as to keep it within bounds if that were still possible. “Ananus,” says Renan, “took more and more the position of head of the moderate party. He still had hopes of bringing the mass of the people over to peaceful counsels; he endeavoured secretly to check the manufacture of arms, and to paralyse resistance while seeming to organise it. This is the most dangerous of all games to play in time of revolution; Ananus was, no doubt, what revolutionaries call a traitor. In the eyes of the enthusiasts he was guilty of the crime of seeing clearly; in those of history he cannot be absolved from the guilt of having accepted the falsest of false positions, that which consists of making war without conviction, merely under pressure from ignorant fanatics.” Among the peace party were some who held aloof lest they should be involved in a destruction which they regarded as inevitable. Such, for example, were some of the Pharisees, and certain doctors, careless of politics and absorbed in the study of the law, the adherents of the Herod family, and the members of the Christian church, who, since the death of James, had begun more and more to regard their cause as distinct from that of the Jews.
Munk, though he says nothing of the rabbis who emigrated to Jabneh before the final struggle, deals somewhat harshly with the Herodians and Christians. “Only such,” he says, “as rated their personal interests above those of their country, or sought the melancholy satisfaction of seeing in its ruin the triumph of their political or religious opinions, fled in the hour of peril. The friends of Agrippa openly betrayed their country by going over to the Roman side and paying court to Cestius and the emperor Nero. Among the fugitives were also the Christian Jews, following the advice given by Jesus Christ to his disciples (Matthew xxiv. 16). Preoccupied with the kingdom of Heaven, which they then seriously looked for, the Christians did not feel it their duty to meddle with earthly matters nor to take part in the defence of their unhappy country; led by Simeon, their bishop, they withdrew beyond Jordan, far from the clash of arms, and sought a refuge in the city of Pella.”
Cestius died, of disease or grief, shortly after his defeat. Nero handed over the command to Vespasian, an experienced general, who had given proof of his military capacity in Germania and Brittany. Vespasian proceeded to Syria by way of Asia Minor, while his son Titus went to Alexandria to fetch two legions and lead them into Palestine. Agrippa and some other petty kings from the country round about, Antiochus of Commagene, Sohemus, and Malchus the Arab, brought auxiliary troops to Vespasian, and at the end of the winter of the year 67, an army of sixty thousand men marched into Galilee. The government of that province had been committed by his fellow-countrymen to Josephus, the historian to whom we owe the account of the whole war; and though he was one of the peace party, he had neglected no measures for putting the country in a state of defence. The defence, which he relates in detail, was heroic. The little city of Jotapata held out with amazing resolution against arms and engines of war. Forty thousand men succumbed during the siege.[c]
Both as a vivid narrative and as a type of the ferocity of assault, resistance and revenge marking the battles of that time, the account by Josephus of his own ingenious and desperate defence of Jotapata is well worth citing at length. He speaks of himself, like Cæsar, in the third person.[a]