Kolbe Home
Kolbe Library
Charles Dickens Preface
BUT THE SIEGE THAT SEEMS to epitomise all the horrors of such contests, forming, as it were, the last crowning scene of a nation's tragedy, was the siege of Jerusalem by Titus, A.d. 70. The city then contained, according to Tacitus, six hundred thousand inhabitants. Josephus has well narrated the sufferings of his countrymen, not merely from the Romans, but also from the savage factions of the two rival chiefs, Simon and John—the former of whom held the upper city, the latter the Temple. Their followers tore each other to pieces up to the very moment that the Romans broke through the walls. The mode in which Titus conducted this memorable siege furnishes a good example of the manner in which the Romans conducted such operations. His legionaries, having established their camps on Scopas and the Mount of Olives, began to burn the suburbs of Jerusalem, cut down the trees, and raise banks of earth and timber against the walls. On these works were placed archers and hurlers of javelins, and before them the catapults and balistas that threw darts and huge stones.
The Jews replied from the engines which they had taken from Roman detachments, but they used them awkwardly and ineffectually. They, however, were very daring in their sorties, endeavouring to burn the Roman military engines and the hurdles with which the Roman pioneers covered themselves when at work. The Romans also built towers fifty cubits high, plated with iron, in which they placed archers and slingers, to drive the Jews from the walls. At last, about the fifteenth day of the siege, the greatest of the Roman battering-rams began to shake the outer wall, and the Jews yielded up the first line of defence. Five days after, Titus broke through the second wall, into a place full of narrow streets crowded with braziers', clothiers', and wool-merchants' shops; but the Jews rallying drove out the Romans, who not having made the breach sufficiently large, were with difficulty rescued by their archers. Four days later, however, Titus retook the second wall, and then waited for famine to do its work within the city. The Jews began now to desert to the enemy in great numbers, and all these wretches the Romans tortured and crucified before the walls (at one time five hundred a day), so that, as Josephus says, " room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the bodies."
At this crisis of the siege the Jews, undermining one of the Roman towers, set it on fire, and did their best to destroy all the besiegers' works. Titus now determined to slowly starve out his stubborn enemies, and began to build a wall round the whole city. This wall, with thirteen forts, the Roman soldiers completed in three days. Famine, in the mean time, was ravaging the unhappy city. Whole families perished daily, and the streets were strewn with dead bodies that no one cared to bury. Thieves plundered the half-deserted homes, and murdered any who showed signs of resistance, or who still lingered in the last agonies of starvation. The dead the Jews threw down from the walls into the valleys below. In the mean time, the Roman soldiers, abundantly supplied with corn from Syria, mocked the starving men on the walls, by showing them food. The palm- trees and olive-trees round Jerusalem had been all destroyed, but Titus, sending to the Jordan for timber, again raised banks round the castle of Antonia. Inside the city the seditions grew more violent, the partisans of John and Simon murdering each other daily, and plundering the Temple of the sacred vessels. A rumour spreading in the Roman camp that the Jewish deserters swallowed their money before they left Jerusalem, led to the murder, in one night, Josephus says, of nearly two thousand of these unhappy creatures. Again a part of the wall fell before the battering-rams, but only to discover to the Romans a fresh rampart built behind it. In one attack a brave Syrian soldier of the cohorts, with eleven other men, succeeded in reaching the top of the wall, but they were there overpowered by the Jews. A few days after, twelve Roman soldiers scrambled up by night through a breach in the tower of Antonia, killed the guards, and, sounding trumpets, summoned the rest of the army to their aid- The tower once carried, the Romans tried to force their way into the Temple, and a hand- to-hand fight ensued, which terminated in the Romans being driven back to the tower of Antonia. The Jews, now seeing the Temple in danger, and the assault recommencing, set fire to the cloister that joined the Temple and the castle of Antonia, and prepared for a desperate resistance in their last stronghold. In this conflagration, many of the Romans, advancing too eagerly, perished.
During all this fighting, the famine within the city grew worse and worse. The wretched people ate their shoes, belts, and even the leather thongs of their shields.
Friends fought for food, and robbers broke into every house where it was known that corn was hidden. Josephus even mentions a well-known case of a woman of wealth from beyond Jordan who ate her own child. The walls of the Temple were so massive as to resist the battering-rams for six days, so Titus at last gave orders to burn down the gates. At last, after a desperate resistance, the Jews were driven into the inner court, and the Temple was set on fire and destroyed, in spite of all the efforts of Titus to save it. When the Jews first saw the flames spring up, Josephus says, they raised a great shout of despair, and sixteen thousand of the defenders perished in the fire. The Romans, in the fury of the assault, burnt down the treasury chambers, filled with gold and other riches, and all the cloisters, into which multitudes of Jews had fled, expecting something miraculous, as their false prophet had predicted. Titus now attacked the upper city, and raised banks against it, at which about forty thousand of the inhabitants deserted to the Roman camp. The final resistance was very feeble, for the Jews were now utterly disheartened. The Romans, once masters of the walls, spread like a deluge over the city, slew all the Jews they met in the narrow lanes, and set fire to the houses. In many of these they found entire families dead of hunger, and these places, in their horror, the soldiers left unplundered. The Romans, weary at last of slaying, Titus gave orders that no Jew, unless found with arms in his hand, should be killed. But some soldiers still went on butchering the old and infirm, and driving the youths and women into the court of the Temple. The males under seventeen were sent to the Egyptian mines; several thousands were given to provincial amphitheatres to fight with the gladiators and wild beasts ; but before all could be sent away, eleven thousand of them perished from famine. Altogether, in this cruel siege, there perished eleven hundred thousand Jews. This enormous multitude is accounted for by the fact, that when Titus sat down before Jerusalem, the city was full of people from all parts of Judaea, come up to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread."
“ALL THE YEAR ROUND: A Weekly Journal”
December 3, 1870 – May 27, 1871
No. 26 Wellington Street
London, England
(pp 57-58)
|
