Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

order with which they would
     proceed with their gruesome plan. They then pulled out their daggers—the same daggers
     that had given them their identity, the daggers that had, with a swipe across the
     high priest’s throat, launched the ill-fated war with Rome—and began to kill their
     wives and their children, before turning the knives upon each other. The last ten
     men chose one among them to kill the remaining nine. The final man set the entire
     palace ablaze. Then he killed himself.
    The following morning, as the Romans stood triumphantly atop the hitherto impregnable
     fortress of Masada, all they encountered was a ghostly calm: nine hundred and sixty
     dead men, women, and children. The war was finally over.
    The question is why it took so long.
    News of the Jewish Revolt had traveled swiftly to EmperorNero, who immediately tapped one of his most trusted men, Titus Flavius Vespasianus—Vespasian,
     as he was known—to retake Jerusalem. Taking command of a massive army of more than
     sixty thousand fighting men, Vespasian set off at once for Syria, while his son Titus
     went to Egypt to collect the Roman legions stationed in Alexandria. Titus would lead
     his troops north through Idumea as Vespasian pushed south into Galilee. The plan was
     for father and son to squeeze the Jews between their two armies and choke the life
     out of the rebellion.
    One by one the rebellious cities gave way to the might of Rome as Titus and Vespasian
     carved a trail of destruction across the Holy Land. By 68 C.E ., all of Galilee, as well as Samaria, Idumea, Peraea, and the entire Dead Sea region,
     save for Masada, were firmly back under Roman control. All that remained was for Vespasian
     to send his armies into Judea to lay waste to the seat of the rebellion: Jerusalem.
    As he was preparing for the final assault, however, Vespasian received word that Nero
     had committed suicide. Rome was in turmoil. Civil war was tearing through the capital.
     In the span of a few short months, three different men—Galba, Otho, and Vitellius—declared
     themselves emperor, each in turn violently overthrown by his successor. There was
     a complete breakdown of law and order in Rome as thieves and hooligans plundered the
     population without fear of consequence. Not since the war between Octavian and Mark
     Antony a hundred years earlier had the Romans experienced such civil unrest. Tacitus
     described it as a period “rich in disasters, terrible with battles, torn by civil
     struggles, horrible even in peace.”
    Spurred by the legions under his command, Vespasian halted his campaign in Judea and
     hastened to Rome to stake his own claim to the throne. The haste, it seems, was unnecessary.
     Long before he reached the capital in the summer of 70 C.E ., his supporters had taken control of the city, murdered his rivals, and declared
     Vespasian sole emperor.
    Yet the Rome that Vespasian now found himself ruling had undergonea profound transformation. The mass civil unrest had given rise to a great deal of
     consternation about the decline of Roman power and influence. The situation in distant
     Judea was particularly galling. It was bad enough that the lowly Jews had rebelled
     in the first place; it was inconceivable that after three long years, the rebellion
     still had not been crushed. Other subject peoples revolted, of course. But these were
     not Gauls or Britons; they were superstitious peasants hurling rocks. The very scale
     of the Jewish Revolt, and the fact that it had come at a time of profound social and
     political distress in Rome, had created something akin to an identity crisis among
     the Roman citizenry.
    Vespasian knew that to consolidate his authority and address the malaise that had
     descended upon Rome, he needed to focus the people’s attention away from their domestic
     troubles and toward a spectacular foreign conquest. A small victory would not do.
     What the emperor required was an absolute pummeling of an enemy force. He needed a
     Triumph: a fabulous display of Roman might replete with captives, slaves, and spoils
     to win over his disgruntled citizens and strike terror into the hearts of his subjects.
     And so, immediately upon taking the throne, Vespasian set out to complete the task
     he had left unfinished in Judea. He would not simply quash the Jewish rebellion; that
     would be insufficient to make his point. He would utterly annihilate the Jews. He
     would wipe them from the earth. Devastate