Jerusalem

The capital of Judaea, set on hills behind three walls, with the Temple and the Antonia fortress. In the spring of AD 66 Queen Berenice stood barefoot here before the tribunal of the procurator Florus, begging that the soldiers stop killing. In AD 70 Titus surrounded the city at Passover, when it was full of pilgrims, and in three days built a wall around it so that no one could get out. Inside, famine and plague raged. The Temple burned in August, the upper city fell in September. Josephus puts the dead at one million one hundred thousand, Tacitus speaks of six hundred thousand besieged, and modern estimates are many times lower. Titus ordered the city razed to the ground, leaving three of Herod’s towers and a stretch of wall. The place appears in the Vespasian episode, in the chapter “Jerusalem”.