The Roman Siege of Jerusalem
By J.E. Lendon
Military History Quarterly
Summer 2005
In a.d. 67, Levantine Ptolemais looked seaward to
the calm of the Roman Mediterranean and inland
to the storms of a rebel Galilee. The year before,
the province of Judea had flown to arms against
a monstrous Roman governor. The hapless legate
of Syria had descended with a legion to suppress
the revolt but had been driven back with loss,
abandoning his siege engines. Now Nero's new
general, Vespasian, marched south from Antioch
with two of the legions of Syria, and his son Titus
marched north to meet him at Ptolemais with a
legion from the garrison of Egypt.
His army united, Vespasian marched inland into
Galilee, the north of the Jewish realm, which was
defended by a scratch force led by the Jewish
notable Josephus. After the Romans captured him
and he began to assist them, the flexible Josephus
was eventually to chronicle the war, first in Aramaic,
then in Greek. The Romans had fought many wars
and countless battles since Caesar's day: had captured
Britain, completed the circuit of the Mediterranean,
extended their power to the Danube, been thrown
back from beyond the Rhine, and fenced with the
kings of proud Parthia in the eastern wastes: but
The Jewish War of Josephus is by far the most
detailed written description of Roman fighting
that survives from the first three centuries of
the Roman Empire.
Josephus had striven mightily to organize and drill
his Galileans, yet at the approach of the Romans
most of his army deserted and fled to fortified places.
This humiliation is significant because it, as well as
the unruliness of the Jews throughout the war and
their fierce internal battles, provides the context for
Josephus' one-dimensional evaluation of the Roman
army. To Josephus -- and he has convinced many
of his modern readers -- the army of the Roman Empire
excelled because of its relentless, realistic training and
the exact obedience to orders that that training inculcated:
To the Romans the beginning of war is not their introduction
to arms....Instead, as if they had grown with weapons in
their hands, they never have an armistice from training,
never wait for crises to arrive. Their exercises lack none
of the vigor of true war, but each soldier trains every day
with his whole heart as if it were war indeed....He would
not err who described their exercises as battles without
blood, and their battles as bloody exercises.
Of this same training, the fourth-century Vegetius gives
details, looking back longingly to an earlier day: marching
in regular step and quick time; marching with kit, with
three long route marches a month; running, jumping,
and swimming; throwing javelins; endless attacks with
mock shield and sword on a wooden post, which stood
in for a flesh-and-blood enemy; mass drill in keeping
ranks and formation; and finally, mock battles. When
the weather was fine, the Romans trained out-of-doors;
when foul, under roofs. Even veterans, Vegetius tells us,
were expected to exercise with their arms every day. The
reality of such training is confirmed by the excavation of
drill grounds and cavalry riding areas, of catapult ranges,
by the traces of countless "practice" camps -- sometimes
many on the same plot of land -- that Roman units built
on maneuvers, and of elaborate practice siege works
built around pre-Roman hill forts.
"The Romans are unbeatably strong," Josephus wrote,
"especially because of their obedience and practice at
arms." In the Roman camp "there is nothing that happens
without the word of command." In short, "no disorder
disperses them from their usual formation, no fear confounds
them, no labor exhausts them, and certain victory follows
against those unequal in these respects."
In fact, disorder, fear, and exhaustion were the Romans'
constant companions in the Jewish war, as the detailed
narrative of Josephus reveals. Roman training and discipline
were certainly admirable in comparison to that of Josephus'
countrymen, as he pointedly told them, and especially
valuable in a world where many opponents undertook cursory
training or none. But training and discipline alone do not
account for Roman success, and training and discipline
themselves present a puzzle: How did they fit into the wider
culture of the Roman imperial army? In a professional army,
what was the relationship between Rome's two ancestral
military values: virtus, or courage, manifested as
aggressiveness on the battlefield, and disciplina, or
discipline, which the Romans conceived as a brake on overly
aggressive behavior?
Gabara was the first strong place in Galilee that Vespasian
captured. Romans killed all the men and burned the city, and
the villages and country towns round about. Next the Romans
moved south to the well-protected town of Jotapata, as
Josephus rushed to oversee its defense. The siege of
Jotapata was bitter and lasted forty-seven days. Finally,
the Romans built their earthworks up to the height of the
walls. The Romans rushed the town before dawn, when they
hoped the sentries would be drowsing. Vespasian's son Titus
and a military tribune were the first on the wall; others
followed, and the city was captured before most of the
inhabitants were awake. There was a general massacre. The
dead were calculated at forty thousand. Josephus was
captured.
After a pause to rest his troops, Vespasian turned his
attention to eastern Galilee. After some indecision the town
of Tiberias surrendered and so preserved itself from
destruction. Tarichaeae, by the Sea of Galilee, was the
center of what resistance remained, and Vespasian moved
toward it. A body of Jews attempted to resist the Romans in
the field outside the city, and Vespasian sent Titus with
cavalry against them. Titus led the charge in person and
killed many by his own hand during the pursuit. It may be in
this battle that, as Suetonius records, Titus had a horse
killed under him and mounted another in its stead. The
survivors fled into the town, and the dispute about whether
Tarichaeae should surrender soon became an uproar audible
even to the Romans outside. Taking advantage of the chaos,
Titus led his cavalry into the shallows of the lake and so
into the town, which was not walled on the lakeward side.
Thus Tarichaeae was captured.
Next came Gamala, on the other side of the lake and beyond.
Soon the Roman rams had broken through the walls, and Roman
columns were in the city, advancing without orders to the
higher reaches of that steep place. But the Jews rallied and
threw them back. The town was built on a precipitous
incline: It was hard to retreat except onto the roofs of
houses where they were flush with the slope, and these soon
collapsed under the weight, killing many Romans in the
resulting avalanche. In his anxiety at the crisis, Vespasian
himself advanced heedlessly within the walls. Suddenly he
found himself in the front lines and under attack. He formed
those near him into a shield wall, stopped the Jewish
onrush, and then retired slowly, front to the enemy, until
he was outside the city.
There could be no doubt that Vespasian and Titus were father
and son: Both looked as if a giant had seized them by the
ears and stretched their faces broad, leaving deep creases
in their brows from the pulling. But father and son had far
different perceptions of their roles in battle. Vespasian
fought like Caesar, close enough to the front to command and
encourage -- at Jotapata he had even been hit in the foot
with an arrow -- but not to fight. Titus, by contrast,
fought at the head of his troops and cut down enemies with
his own sword. And the contrast was not merely because one
was a cautious fifty-eight-year-old supreme commander and
the other a carefree twenty-seven-year-old: Titus too had
grave responsibilities, as commander of the Fifteenth
Legion.
After the setback at Gamala, Josephus depicts Vespasian
giving a speech to correct and reassure his troops,
carefully balancing the need for discipline with the need
for courage. But if Vespasian gave such an address, his men
paid it little heed. Soon after, three soldiers of the
Fifteenth Legion crept by night to the base of one of the
towers of Gamala and quietly dug out five great stones. They
leaped back as the entire tower and the sentries atop it
crashed to the ground. The Jews were in a panic. No less
surprised were the Romans: No plans had been made to exploit
the collapse and the chaos, and, remembering their previous
failure, the Romans did not try to enter the city for a full
day after. The digging appears to have been a private
enterprise on the part of the three legionaries.
When the Romans did enter the city again, Titus led them (he
had been away during the first attack), and he once again
cut down those he met. Even women and infants were
slaughtered in this sack, in revenge for the earlier defeat;
nine thousand were killed or threw themselves from the walls
into the ravine that bordered the town. Only two women
survived.
After the capture of Gischala in the north, which
surrendered to Titus after the warriors escaped by a ruse,
all of Galilee was in Roman hands. It was now November and
time to send the legions into winter quarters. In the new
year, Vespasian's strategy was to put down the revolt
outside Jerusalem and drive all the surviving rebels into
the seething city. While it was still winter he quickly
seized the Jewish towns of the Peraea, to the east, across
the Jordan River from Jerusalem. Those downstream learned of
his coming when thousands of bodies floated down the river
and washed up on the shores of the Dead Sea. In the spring
Vespasian struck south into Idumaea, then north into
Samaria. By June he had captured Jericho, completing his
circuit of ravaging around Jerusalem. Vespasian was told
that nothing sank in the nearby Dead Sea: He had prisoners
cast in with their hands bound, and lo! They floated. Now
all that remained was to march directly to Jerusalem and lay
it under siege.
But then fate put a halt to the campaign. Far away in Rome,
Nero was overthrown and the year of the four emperors cast
Italy into confusion. In the East, Vespasian waited upon
events, and so the summer of a.d. 68 passed into winter. In
June of the next year he moved to reassert his hold on Judea
outside Jerusalem, wasting the countryside and taking some
towns he had neglected before. He rode with his cavalry even
up to the walls of Jerusalem and then rode away again. He
avoided a major campaign in a.d. 69 because he had his eye
on higher things: On July 1 the carefully instructed
garrison of Egypt proclaimed Vespasian emperor, and his own
legions and the powerful Syrian army soon followed suit.
Away went Vespasian to manage a civil war against his rival
emperor Vitellius, and by December Vespasian's lieutenants
in Europe had made him master of the Roman world. Rome's new
emperor sailed for the capital and left Titus to bring the
war against the Jews to an end.
Two years had now been squandered. Titus delayed no longer
and ordered his legions, now reinforced to four by another
from Syria, to advance on Jerusalem from both east and west.
Approaching the city, he rode ahead with six hundred horse
to reconnoiter, but, riding too close to the walls, he was
cut off by a Jewish sally that broke the head of his
cavalcade from the body. Titus could not go forward --
garden walls and trenches blocked that path. The only way to
safety was through the enemy, and through them he led his
companions in a breathless, headlong charge, killing those
who tried to block his onrush. Although unarmored, for this
was no more than a reconnaissance expedition, Titus came
through unscathed. Two of his companions were killed.
Then the legions came up, and Titus ordered them to camp
around the city. The Tenth Fretensis was assigned the Mount
of Olives. While the Tenth was fortifying its camp, the
enemy unexpectedly struck against it from the city. After a
confused struggle the legion was turned to flight. It was
rallied by Titus, who took the Jews in the flank with his
personal guard. Having restored the situation, Titus
established a protective line nearer the city and sent the
Tenth back to build its camp. But the Jews thought the
legionaries were fleeing and attacked again, and the forward
Roman line collapsed before them, leaving Titus isolated
with his companions on the slope. Now, and not for the last
time in this war, Titus' friends and staff begged him to
take care: He was the general-in-chief, not a soldier.
Everything depended on him, and he should not risk himself.
This was also the standard advice of Greek tactical writers
and the principle to which Julius Caesar had adhered. But
Titus was having none of it. He held his position, himself
fighting by hand.
In their eagerness to chase those in flight, the Jews split
around Titus' small band like a torrent around a rock, and
so Titus and his guard charged them in the flank. Once again
the Tenth was in a panic -- so much for Josephus' "no
disorder disperses them from their usual formation, no fear
confounds them" -- and it began to flee. Then legionaries
noticed Titus in the fight on the slope below, and (Josephus
says) pure shame at having abandoned their general rallied
them. They pushed the Jews back down the slope.
With the legions encamped, the Romans turned to clearing the
ground before Jerusalem, shifting their camps closer to the
walls, and bringing up the baggage. During this work, the
defenders worked a ruse upon the besiegers. The Romans knew
from defectors that the Jews inside the city were riven by
religious and political faction and that some yearned to
come to terms with Rome. So when a body of men appeared to
have been ejected from the city amid a shower of stones and
seemed to be trying to force their way back in while
cowering from the Romans who looked on, and when those who
had expelled them shouted "Peace" and offered to open the
gates to the enemy, many Romans were deceived.
Titus suspected a trick and ordered his troops not to move,
but the guards of the Roman works made a rush for the gates
without orders. Now those who had pretended to be expelled
attacked them in the rear, and those who had promised to
open the gates shot them down with missiles from the
ramparts. Only slowly and with great loss did the Romans
fight their way free. The defenders jeered and capered on
the walls.
Titus fumed and ranted -- "among the Romans even victory
without orders is a disgrace!" Josephus has him insist. He
terrified the disobedient soldiers by threatening the
horrible penalty for fighting without orders: death. But
then Titus allowed the pleas of the legions to soften his
anger, and no one was punished. Like Vespasian at Gamala,
Titus contented himself with a lecture. At the climax of the
siege, he would have reason to rejoice that he did not
bloodily stamp out his soldiers' initiative.
Having selected what he hoped was a weak stretch of the
fortifications, Titus ordered three siege ramps erected.
With their throwing engines, towers, rams, and ramps, the
Romans were fully up-to-date besiegers, but fully up to date
in a technology of siege that had advanced hardly at all
since Greeks had made a science of it in the Hellenistic
period. An engineer employed by Demetrius Poliorcetes at his
great siege of Rhodes (305-304 b.c.) would have been quite
at home before Jerusalem with Titus, more than three and a
half centuries later.
The Jews attacked the builders with engines, missiles, and
sallies, but to no avail. Then rams were brought up on the
ramps. The defenders charged out against them but were
thrown back, Titus leading the relief in person. Again the
Jews sallied against the rams, and again Titus led his
cavalry in, killing with his own hand.
The Romans built towers to defend the rams. At night one of
these, badly constructed, collapsed with an enormous crash.
The Romans panicked, thinking the Jews were inside their
camps, and confusion reigned until the truth became known.
The Greeks had a saying they often applied to the blind and
inexplicable panics that afflicted armies: "There are many
empty things in war." Despite Josephus' editorializing, the
Romans of the empire were no less vulnerable to empty panic
than any other ancient army.
With the towers brought up, the Romans swept the walls with
missiles, so they could work the rams in safety. When a ram
nicknamed "Victor" made a breach, the Jews abandoned the
wall; behind it, two city walls remained. The Romans
established a camp inside the wall they had taken, and
during their preparations to attack the next wall, there was
skirmishing in the open between the Romans and the
defenders.
During a combat at range with javelins, Longinus, a
cavalryman, leaped out from the Roman lines and charged the
mass of the enemy. He killed one, pulled his spear out,
stabbed another in the side, and then made his way safely
back to his comrades. Others subsequently emulated his deed.
On one occasion a Jew challenged any Roman who dared.
Pudens, another cavalryman, answered the challenge but
tripped during the fight, and the Jewish challenger killed
him, only to be shot down in the act of vaunting over the
body by a Roman centurion with a bow.
In Josephus' account, reckless bravery was primarily the
province of the Roman army's auxiliary soldiers. Pudens was
certainly an auxiliary; Longinus probably was also. During a
Jewish sally, an exceptionally strong auxiliary cavalryman
reached down from his saddle, grabbed a fleeing enemy by the
ankle, and then bore his armored captive off just as he was
to be admired by Titus.
Such behavior is part of a wider trend: The Romans
increasingly relied on auxiliaries to do their hand-to-hand
fighting. This trend is most remarkably illustrated on
Trajan's Column, the enigmatic monument that depicts in
astonishing detail on a huge spiral relief the Roman
conquest of Dacia, in two wars of a.d. 101-102 and 105-106.
So detailed and circumstantial is the sculpted narrative
that it is nearly irresistible to suppose that it adapts to
pictures a literary account of the war, perhaps that of
Trajan himself.
In the standard type of battle scene on the column,
auxiliaries and bare-chested barbarian allies fight at the
front, while at the back legionaries stand or build or lurk
in fortifications, cosseting their ballistas. Pointing up
the contrast between the roles of auxiliary and legionary is
a scene high on the column in which auxiliaries attack
Dacians on top of a wall, while a party of legionaries,
right beside them, attacks the wall itself with picks; just
up the spiral more legionaries hew and stack wood for use in
the siege.
On all of Trajan's Column, legionary and nonlegionary
infantry (auxiliary infantrymen, conical-helmeted Eastern
archers, bare-chested barbarian allies) play very different
roles. Put simply, legionaries parade, march, and work --
and nonlegionaries fight. There are more than fifteen scenes
in which legionaries build fortifications, sometimes with
auxiliaries as sentries, or cut wood or clear forests or
harvest grain or conduct supply wagons, fatigues that are
depicted in seemingly demented detail over yard after yard
of stone. However, legionaries are depicted fighting in only
four scenes, while nonlegionary infantry fight in fourteen.
Moreover, nonlegionary infantry engage in fatigues in only a
handful of scenes, and when they do so the depiction is far
less elaborate, and what noncombat work they do is more
aggressive than the legionaries': They slaughter prisoners
and burn Dacian villages.
The column strikingly conveys the wildness of Rome's
auxiliary soldiers. In several scenes auxiliaries, but never
legionaries, are depicted as proudly presenting severed
heads to the emperor, and one auxiliary who has taken a head
but both of whose hands are occupied in fighting carries the
severed head in his teeth, hanging by the hair.
At the same time art and archaeology reveal changes in
legionary equipment that suggest a more specialized role:
armor with exaggerated protection for the shoulders, and
helmets with exaggerated protection for the face and back of
the neck, protection against downward blows. Roman legionary
armor evolved under the early empire to protect the Roman
soldier against attacks from above -- exactly the type of
attacks he might expect when toiling beneath the walls of
Jerusalem; exactly the type of attacks he suffered when
assailing Dacian forts. The Roman legions were used
increasingly as combat engineers, and their armor evolved
along with the function of its wearers.
This increasing reliance on auxiliaries in battle reflects
Roman patterns of recruitment. As the Roman Empire piled
decade upon decade, the Roman army went farther and farther
afield to find soldiers. Legionaries were supposed to be
Roman citizens upon enlistment; auxiliaries were not
required to be citizens. But to find both, recruiting
officers struck out into the wild marches of the empire. By
the end of the first century a.d., few legionaries were
recruited in Italy, and even by the middle of that century
the accents of legionaries from the northern borders sounded
barbarous to soldiers stationed elsewhere. Such recruiting
may have been driven by the reluctance of those in Rome's
more civilized dominions to serve or by their greater power
to resist conscription, but it was certainly also driven by
the sense that men from some of the empire's less developed
areas made excellent soldiers.
The Greeks and the Romans were comfortable with the idea
that some peoples were simply more warlike than others.
Possessed of a vast empire, the Romans naturally recruited
heavily from such warlike folk. Of the German tribes living
on the Roman side of the Rhine, "the Batavians are
outstanding in virtus," Tacitus says, and so are "set aside
for use in battle, like missiles and arms reserved for war."
Through the third century a.d., more than twenty-five
Thracian auxiliary units are known, and in the fourth
century the Thracians were still being recruited for their
special warrior qualities. It was in areas where the most
warlike recruits came from -- Thrace, Britain, and Batavia
-- that the Romans pushed conscription to the point of
inspiring revolts.
The Roman army of the empire went out of its way to recruit
virtus. And the army went out of its way to encourage virtus
in its ranks as well. At Jerusalem Longinus the brave
cavalryman had acted, Josephus says, in the hope of
attracting the eye of Titus, expecting a reward if he did
so. Hardly surprising; compared to the Republic, the Roman
Empire had regularized and elaborated the spurs to rivalry
in virtus among individual soldiers. The system of military
decorations, which Polybius had pointed out as so powerful a
motivating force in the Republic, was formalized and graded
for rank. Decorations were mentioned in soldiers' epitaphs,
sometimes noting that they were given ob virtutem (for
virtus) -- and were carved upon their tombstones.
Decorations were of enormous importance to soldiers.
The creation and elaboration of a permanent rank structure
for the imperial army also allowed promotion in that
structure to be used systematically as another form of
motivation. And no wonder, for not only did promotion bring
honor and easier duty, but the pay structure of the Roman
army was severely hierarchical -- a centurion was paid
fifteen times what a common legionary earned. The decision
of some soldiers, including a few never promoted to
centurion, to lay out in their epitaphs each posting in
their entire career shows how powerful a motivator rank was
to these soldiers.
Still, despite Longinus' expectation, Titus was not entirely
delighted by him and his emulators: The commander issued an
order telling them to prove their bravery without running
such risks. Given Titus' own behavior, his soldiers must
have chortled; they certainly do not seem to have paid him
much attention.
Five days after the capture of the first Jerusalem wall the
Romans penetrated the second, were thrown back -- Titus and
the tribune who had accompanied him over the wall at
Jotapata shot arrows to cover the retreat -- and four days
later pushed their way in again. The siege had now reached
its climax; two walls had fallen, but the last wall
stretched from the Temple Mount itself.
After giving the besieged in the city a respite to
surrender, Titus set each of his four legions to building
great ramps of wood and earth at opposite ends of the last
wall. They raised two ramps against the massif of the
Antonia Fortress, which rose from the corner of the Temple
Mount. Built as King Herod's high castle, it had afterward
been the sheer aerie of the city's Roman garrison. As the
Temple dominated the city of Jerusalem, so the Antonia
Fortress dominated the Temple, and unless the Temple were
taken, the city could not be held.
Once again the besieged harassed the builders with raids,
missiles, and projectiles from captured Roman engines. For
seventeen days the Romans toiled, but underneath them, the
defenders tunneled out from the Antonia and propped up the
Roman works with timbers. When they set the timbers alight,
the ramps collapsed with a tremendous crash. A fierce Jewish
sally destroyed the earthworks at the other end of the wall
where the Romans had already brought up their rams, and
drove the Romans back to their camps, which they defended
from the entrenchments. Once again Titus and his guard
charged the attackers in the flank, and the Jews were driven
back within the walls. But the Roman attack had been
resoundingly defeated. The Romans were despondent. Perhaps
Jerusalem could not be taken by assault. Perhaps it would
have to be starved out.
Titus decided to postpone his next attack until a wall had
been drawn about Jerusalem. He wanted to stop the smuggling
of provisions into the city, so that famine would press even
harder upon the defenders. They might even surrender.
Building a circuit of entrenchments around the whole of that
great city -- nearly four and a half miles, with thirteen
attached forts -- took the Romans only three days, a
striking credit to their training. But the achievement
reveals something else about the Roman army.
Josephus, to whom it seemed the soldiers labored as if
possessed, was astonished by the speed of the work, and he
reveals how they were motivated. Each section of the circuit
was assigned to a legion, each portion of a legionary span
to a cohort, each cohort's share was split between
centurions, each centurion's share split between his
subordinates. So at every level soldiers, units, and
officers competed with their neighbors under the watchful
eye of their superiors, and Titus, the supreme commander,
toured the works and was umpire over all.
If fighting in the Roman imperial army was competitive, so
too was Roman military building. "When I was assigning
shares of the work, so that each would know what part of the
tunneling was his, I arranged for competition between the
soldiers of the fleet and the infantry, and thus they
cooperated in drilling through the mountain together,"
records a Roman military engineer from the second century
a.d. Competition seems to have been the usual method by
which the Roman army carried out large projects, like
Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine Wall in Britain.
Suddenly the long stretches of Trajan's Column devoted to
legionary building make sense. These are not merely a
robotic transfer of material from a written account to
sculpture, but illustrate the competitive excellence of the
legionaries. Labor was the Latin word for such excellence in
hard work, and along with patientia (endurance), labor
formed part of the wider concept of disciplina. What seems
so puzzling -- the unheroic activities of legionaries on the
column, in contrast with the fighting of the auxiliaries --
is less puzzling if the legionaries' work is understood to
manifest disciplina, one of the two fundamental military
values of the Romans.
Another meaning of the Latin word disciplina was training.
Like fighting and building, Roman training too was fiercely
competitive. A particularly successful soldier recorded his
triumphs in training on his tombstone:
Once I was the most renowned on the
Pannonian shore
Amidst a thousand Batavians the
strongest.
With Hadrian watching I swam the
huge waters
Of Danube's deep in full arms.
While a bolt from my bow hung in the
air --
while it fell -- I hit and shattered it
with another arrow.
Neither Roman nor barbarian, no
soldier with his javelin,
no Parthian with his bow, could
defeat me.
Here I lie. I have entrusted my deeds
to the memory of this stone.
Whether another after me will
emulate my deeds has yet to be seen.
I am the first who did such things: I
emulated myself.
Swimming, archery, javelin throwing: This paragon excelled
in all. An extended description of auxiliary cavalry drill
also survives. Beneath standards and writhing serpent
banners, the cavalry competed in riding and charging,
wheeling and circling, in casting spears at targets and
blunted javelins at one another.
Disciplina, existing in counterpoint to virtus, included not
merely obedience and punishment but nearly every military
excellence that was not encompassed under virtus, including
training and building. Roman disciplina was at once
something imposed upon the Roman soldiers from above, and
something soldiers were expected to feel in their hearts.
Like virtus, disciplina was fiercely competitive: It was a
source of honor, something on which soldiers prided
themselves. When they failed in disciplina, soldiers
sometimes felt crippling shame, just as when they failed in
virtus. Neither disciplina nor virtus took precedence over
the other in the Roman military mind.
Under the empire, the opposition of virtus and disciplina
developed and flowered exotically into a tacit distinction
between the legionaries, among whom the stress was upon
disciplina, and the auxiliaries, among whom the stress was
upon virtus. It was the exemplars of virtus who were
increasingly used in battle, and the exemplars of disciplina
who were increasingly used in construction, to erect the
sophisticated engineering works that, as the Jerusalem siege
demonstrated, gave the Romans a considerable part of their
relative superiority in war. This was a matter of emphasis,
not a schism; the auxiliaries were not relieved of drill and
building, and the army did not cease to recruit and
encourage virtus in the legions. But the differing roles of
soldiers at Jerusalem and on Trajan's Column betray a degree
of matter-of-fact specialization.
After the wall around Jerusalem was complete, Titus ordered
four new ramps, larger than the old ones, to be raised
against the Antonia; presumably each ramp was assigned to a
legion, as the previous ramps had been. In twenty-one days
they were complete. The Romans threw back a badly
coordinated attack on the ramps by the besieged, and brought
up rams against the walls. The defenders cast down stones,
missiles, and fire, but the Romans held their positions at
the bottom of the walls, the rams did their work, and
legionaries even pried out four great stones by hand. In the
night, when fighting was suspended, the Roman efforts were
rewarded when the wall of the Antonia, undermined by the
countermines dug beneath the first ramps and weakened by the
rams, collapsed. But behind it loomed another wall, erected
in haste by the defenders against just such a development.
Now Titus appealed with promises of reward and promotion for
volunteers to lead the ascent up the rubble to this new
wall. The Roman commander found twelve volunteers, led by a
frail, shrunken Syrian auxiliary named Sabinus. The Syrian
led on bravely but tripped at the top of the wall. He was
overwhelmed, and the assault failed.
Two nights later the Romans captured the Antonia in an
unexpected way. Twenty legionaries on sentry duty banded
together and decided, apparently without informing their
officers, to make an attempt upon the wall in the dark. They
recruited a standard-bearer of the Fifth Legion (presumably
their own), a trumpeter, and two auxiliary cavalrymen for
their adventure. The first Titus knew of the assault was
when the Roman trumpet sang out from the top of the wall,
the attackers having climbed by stealth and killed the
sentries. The general called the sleeping Romans to arms and
hastened with his bodyguard and staff to reinforce the
lodgment. He found the Antonia empty of enemies. The
defenders, on hearing the same trumpet blast as he, fled in
panic into the neighboring Temple, thinking the Romans were
inside the Antonia in force.
The fact that there were no forces held in readiness to
exploit the ascent of the wall indicates that, like the
undermining of the tower at Gamala, the taking of the
Antonia was the independent project of common soldiers who
drew a more sen-ior man, the standard-bearer, in with them.
That so great an event should hang on the private initiative
of private soldiers would be surprising in any army. But it
is especially so in the Roman army, which had for centuries
-- in principle -- doomed to death sentries who left their
posts, a custom upon which Josephus remarks. To attack the
wall unordered was to risk death at the hands of both Jews
and Romans. Why did the Roman sentries attempt it?
The answer lies in the oddest detail of the ascent. Why, on
a night so dark as to allow climbing the wall unseen, take a
legionary standard? For the soldiers to take a trumpeter up
the wall made sense, because they used the trumpet to signal
their success from the top. But no one would be able to see
the standard of the Fifth Legion atop the Antonia. Yet they
carried the awkward object up the wall because, seen or
unseen, it symbolized the unit of the soldiers engaged in
the perilous ascent. Later in the siege, standards were
carried up the Temple wall in the heat of fighting -- and
lost in a Jewish counterattack. Taking the standard suggests
that the soldiers' brave, punishable, valuable initiative
was a product of the ferocious competition between units in
the Roman imperial army.
The rivalry between units of the Roman army was powerful. In
time of mutiny, three legions could agree to amalgamate, but
unit pride prevented them from extinguishing their identity
in another unit, so the standards of all had to be planted
together. In time of civil war, rivalry could lead to
fighting between units and influence which of the rival
leaders units chose to follow. Romans relied particularly on
unit rivalry to push forward military building projects,
like the wall around Jerusalem. Later in the siege, when the
Romans were trying to advance from the Antonia to the
Temple, access was narrow. Rather than simply assigning the
task to a limited number of units, Titus selected thirty of
the best centuries from many, so that the goad of unit
rivalry would not be lost and the Roman soldiers would "vie
man with man and unit with unit."
It is tempting to associate the rivalry between Roman
military units with the bonds of soldierly cohesion so
valued and encouraged in contemporary armies. No doubt many
years of living and fighting together did produce
connections of friendship and mutual loyalty among small
groups of Roman soldiers, and no doubt those bonds did
contribute, to a degree, to the effectiveness of the Roman
army in action. But ancient authors stress far more
frequently the fierce rivalry that existed between
individual Roman soldiers.
Thus the rivalry between units in the Roman army should
perhaps be understood as a form of outward-looking
solidarity, rather than inward-looking solidarity arising
from internal bonds of friendly sentiment. A Roman unit was
less like a modern family and more like a modern
professional sports team, whose members come together to
compete against other teams but whose members' feelings
toward teammates are often more rivalrous than affectionate.
The taking of the Antonia Fortress was the decisive moment
in the siege of Jerusalem, for now there was no question
that the city would fall. Yet there was much more savage
fighting, both for the Temple, which was burned, and for
what lay beyond. On the Roman side, the fighting followed
the same pattern as earlier in the siege: brave acts by
individual centurions and common soldiers, Roman masses
advancing without orders and suffering for it, and Titus
charging with his cavalry or wanting to fight but being
restrained by his staff.
As final victory came closer, the Roman soldiers became
increasingly uncontrollable. When Titus finally gave them
permission to sack and burn the city, he was merely giving
his official imprimatur to what was going to happen anyway.
When, after the destruction of the city, Titus paraded his
army, decorating and promoting and rewarding with booty
those who had distinguished themselves and thanking his
soldiers in general for their courage and obedience, we may
suspect more than a slight note of irony at the latter.
When the last resistance in the city failed, the Romans
slaughtered until their arms grew weary: Now devouring fire
and quenching blood fought their own battle for control of
the streets. The total Josephus gives for the dead in the
siege -- 1.1 million, or nearly half the Jews in Judea --
may be somewhat less unlikely than most such stratospheric
figures that survive from antiquity. The siege of Jerusalem
was probably the greatest single slaughter in ancient
history. Not only was the city sacked and burned, but Titus
gave directions that what remained should be wholly
demolished, except for a stretch of wall and some high
towers that were left as a symbol to the world of Roman
strength -- and as a warning to anyone who might again defy
the fury of the Romans.
Titus returned to Rome soon after the capture of Jerusalem,
leaving the final mopping-up operations in Judea to his
successors. The final drama played out at the fortress of
Masada, perched on a gaunt fourteen-hundred-foot prominence
and besieged by the Tenth Legion and several thousand
auxiliaries. In a massive engineering feat, the Romans built
an enormous ramp to the walls of the fortress and winched up
their siege engines. The end came in April of a.d. 73, when
more than nine hundred of Masada's defenders -- all but two
women and five children -- chose suicide over inevitable
defeat.
Bedazzled by the contrasts between the Romans, the chaotic
Galileans he commanded, and the Judeans whose fighting and
infighting he witnessed during the Jewish war, Josephus
pointed to discipline and training as the key qualities that
set the Roman army apart. Josephus' own narrative, however,
shows that his formulation was far too simple.
Roman soldiers of the empire remained highly volatile, not
only subject to panic (like all armies, in all generations)
but also to disobedience born of individual and mass
aggression. Roman generals understood that Roman victory
depended on maintaining a balance between competitive
disciplina and undisciplined virtus. Generals could preach
and rail against the heedless boldness of their troops, but
they did not execute them for it, knowing full well that the
success of their soldiers in battle depended on the
qualities of spirit that produced their disobedience and
being happy to profit from the initiative that spirit
produced, as when soldiers without orders undermined the
tower at Gamala or made their night ascent up the Antonia.
The Romans saw no contradiction between their training and
discipline on the one hand and recruiting and using in
battle men not brought up in Roman ways on the other. They
did not worry (as many modern commentators have) about the
increasing use of barbarian soldiers in the Roman army. To
the contrary, the army actively sought out wild soldiers,
confident that disciplina was easier to teach than virtus,
which came in the blood or had to be inculcated from birth
and could only be evoked, not created, by leadership. A
professional army with long terms of service needed to
recruit wilder soldiers to preserve the balance of
disciplina and virtus upon which victory depended.
The Romans in fact exploited the variations in degree of
virtus and disciplina that their recruiting and training
produced, the legions coming to be valued and used
especially for their competitive disciplina, the auxiliaries
for their competitive virtus. The vaunted discipline of the
Romans drew its strength from the ancient Roman culture of
competition, and even so, the Romans knew full well it was
of little use alone. Roman victory came from mixing
civilized competition in duty, training, and restraint with
savage courage, from joining the dark forest to the shining
city.
http://www.preteristarchive.com/Theo-Political_Empire/Roman/Articles/media_05_lendon.html
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