Jerusalem. The Biography

circumvallation. In late June, the Romans stormed the hulking Antonia Fortress that commanded the Temple itself and then razed it, except for one tower where Titus set up his command-post.
    By mid-summer, as the blistered and jagged hills sprouted forests of fly-blown crucified cadavers, the city within was tormented by a sense of impending doom, intransigent fanaticism, whimsical sadism, and searing hunger. Armed gangs prowled for food. Children grabbed the morsels from their fathers’ hands; mothers stole the tidbits of their own babies. Locked doors suggested hidden provisions and the warriors broke in, driving stakes up their victims’ rectums to force them to reveal their caches of grain. If they found nothing, they were even more ‘barbarously cruel’ as if they had been ‘defrauded.’ Even though the fighters themselves still had food, they killed and tortured out of habit ‘to keep their madness in exercise’. Jerusalem was riven by witch-hunts as people denounced each other as hoarders and traitors. No other city, reflected the eyewitness Josephus, ‘did ever allow such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was, since the beginning of the world’. 4
    The young wandered the streets ‘like shadows, all swollen with famine, and fell down dead, wherever their misery seized them’. People died trying to bury their families while others were buried carelessly, still breathing. Famine devoured whole families in their homes. Jerusalemites saw their loved ones die ‘with dry eyes and open mouths. A deep silence and a kind of deadly night seized the city’ – yet those who perished did so ‘with their eyes fixed on the Temple’. The streets were heaped with dead bodies. Soon, despite Jewish law, no one buried the dead any more in this grandiose charnelhouse. Perhaps Jesus Christ had foreseen this when he predicted the coming Apocalypse, saying ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ Sometimes the rebels just heaved bodies over the walls. The Romans left them to rot in putrescent piles. Yet the rebels were still fighting.
    Titus himself, an unsqueamish Roman soldier, who had killed twelveJews with his own crossbow in his first skirmish, was horrified and amazed: he could only groan to the gods that this was not his doing. ‘The darling and delight of the human race’, he was known for his generosity. ‘Friends, I’ve lost a day,’ he would say when he had not found time to give presents to his comrades. Sturdy and bluff with a cleft chin, generous mouth and round face, Titus was proving to be a gifted commander and a popular son of the new emperor Vespasian: their unproven dynasty depended on Titus’ victory over the Jewish rebels.
    Titus’ entourage was filled with Jewish renegades including three Jerusalemites – a historian, a king and (it seems) a double-queen who was sharing the Caesar’s bed. The historian was Titus’ adviser Josephus, a rebel Jewish commander who had defected to the Romans and who is the sole source for this account. The king was Herod Agrippa II, a very Roman Jew, brought up at the court of the Emperor Claudius; he had been the supervisor of the Jewish Temple, built by his great-grandfather Herod the Great, and often resided in his Jerusalem palace, even though he ruled disparate territories across the north of modern Israel, Syria and Lebanon.
    The king was almost certainly accompanied by his sister, Berenice, daughter of a Jewish monarch, and twice a queen by marriage, who had recently become Titus’ mistress. Her Roman enemies later denounced her as ‘the Jewish Cleopatra’. She was around forty but ‘she was in her best years and at the height of her beauty’, noted Josephus. At the start of the rebellion, she and her brother, who lived together (incestuously, claimed their enemies), had attempted to face down the rebels in a last appeal to reason. Now these three Jews helplessly watched the ‘death-agony of a famous city’ – Berenice did so from the bed of its destroyer.
    Prisoners and defectors brought news from within the city that especially upset Josephus, whose own parents were trapped inside. Even the fighters started to run out of food, so they too probed and dissected the quick and the dead, for gold, for crumbs, for mere seeds, ‘stumbling and staggering like mad dogs’. They ate cow dung, leather, girdles, shoes and old hay. A rich woman named Mary, having lost all her money and food, became so