Jerusalem — Vespasian: Money Doesn’t Stink

Let us go back four years. Spring of AD 66, Jerusalem. The Roman procurator Gessius Florus lets his soldiers loose on the city. A barefoot woman stands before his tribunal and begs them to stop killing. It is Berenice, sister of King Agrippa II. She came to Jerusalem to fulfill a vow made to God. Florus does not listen to her, and the soldiers nearly kill the queen herself. She flees to the palace.

Berenice is the daughter of Agrippa I, the one who helped Claudius become emperor in AD 41. Her first husband was Marcus, son of the steward of the estate of Antonia, Claudius’s mother. Marcus’s brother is Tiberius Julius Alexander: the very prefect of Egypt who was the first to have the troops swear to Vespasian. Rome is small, and the East smaller still. Tacitus adds a rumor: it was said that young Titus was not indifferent to the queen’s charms. That thread will return in the next episode.

In April AD 70 Titus arrives before Jerusalem. He comes at a bad moment for the city: during Passover, when pilgrims have gathered from all sides. Inside, the rebel leaders have long been fighting one another. Unity comes to them only with the Roman army at the walls.

Throughout the siege Josephus stands on the Roman side of the walls. Titus sends him to urge the defenders, in their native language, to surrender. To the defenders he is a traitor, to many Romans a suspect Jew. Once a stone from the walls hits him on the head. Josephus falls. A rumor spreads through the city that he is dead. His mother hears it in prison. Josephus survived. That is why we have this story.

Josephus also describes the most important scene himself. The day before the fire Titus convenes a council of six commanders. Among them sits Tiberius Julius Alexander, Berenice’s brother-in-law. Some want to demolish the Temple, because as long as it stands the Jews will keep rebelling. Others want to spare it if the defenders do not use it as a fortress. Titus, according to Josephus, says that he does not take vengeance on stones. A building like that should remain an ornament of the empire.

The next day a soldier, without orders, throws a firebrand through the golden window. Titus runs out of his tent, shouts, gestures with his hand, orders a centurion to beat the disobedient with a staff. No one listens. So Josephus writes. And Josephus wrote for Titus.

Josephus puts the victims of the siege at 1.1 million. He himself adds that most were not residents of the city but pilgrims trapped in it by Passover. His ninety-seven thousand prisoners are a figure for the whole war, not for Jerusalem alone. Tacitus heard of six hundred thousand besieged. Today’s scholars put the city’s permanent population in the tens of thousands. Even with the pilgrims, that is many times fewer than Josephus and Tacitus write. One thing is known without counting: disease and famine raged in the sealed-off city.

After the capture Titus orders the city razed to the ground. He leaves only the three towers of Herod and a stretch of wall, so that posterity would see what fortifications the Romans had taken. The Temple burned, by Josephus’s count, on the tenth day of the month of Lous, the anniversary of the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians. Jews to this day mourn both on a single day of mourning, Tisha B’Av.

At this point Tacitus falls silent. The surviving books of his “Histories” break off in AD 70, and of the siege of Jerusalem only the beginning remains in them. From now on our main sources on the Flavians are Josephus, Suetonius and the excerpts from Dio.

Titus returns with the spoils that you can see on the arch that still stands in Rome today.