György Spiró - Captivity

Meanwhile the Jewish war lingered on, with Vespasianus heading the legions in Galilee, but upon hearing about the commotion in Rome he refrained from the conflict.

Who, then, is this Vespasianus?

Well, the younger brother of Sabinus Flavius, the prefect of Rome.

When Uri heard this he thought he had misheard it. He reeled.

It was Kainis’s lover, Titus of the blade-like lips and broad cheekbones.

He laughed immoderately.

“There may be some reason to hope,” he spluttered, choking with laughter, “that I have some influence at court!”

He burst out in a fresh fit of laughing.

Salutius looked at him with a pitying stare: poor Gaius Theodorus was getting on in years; he too was beginning to lose his wits.

“The two of them,” whispered Uri, “are going to exterminate the entire Jewish race.”

“Which two?”

“Vespasianus and Tiberius Julius Alexander, that’s who! Vespasianus will be emperor… But don’t say a word to anybody! Let people believe that there is still an Eternal One!”

Salutius cast his eyes down and studied the floor.

It was uncomfortable to see a dearly loved person reduced to ruins.

Civil war was raging in Galilee, Samaria, and Judaea; anyone might become a military leader be he a priestly scion or one of the “people of the land,” an am ha’aretz; anyone could be robbed, anyone murdered — the Roman legions avoided getting involved. The more prosperous Jews fled to Italia or Babylon. Rome was not too keen to receive, but Babylon even less so: Jewish robber chiefs with residency in Parthia mustered armies of peasants there too, slew non-Jews and rich Jews alike and robbed them of their money until, with great difficulty, they had disposed of the last one. Like the Judaean gangs, they had started with hostage-taking but by the end they only killed.

New refugees from Alexandria said that Vespasianus had arrived there, leaving the command of Legio V and Legio X to his son, Titus, and that he had applied himself to the magic arts with great expertise: curing the blind and the crippled and even raising the dead by the laying-on of hands, a kiss, or fine words. Tiberius Julius Alexander was the other favorite of the Greeks, being heaped with gifts.

The two legions in Alexandria swore an oath of obedience to Vespasianus and acclaimed him as emperor; he brought in new taxes, purloined the treasures of the shrines, and halted grain shipments to Rome, threatening it with famine. Legio V and X waged war in Judaea, with Tiberius Julius Alexander becoming commander-in-chief of Titus’s forces, taking care of their support lines, their provisioning, their weaponry, mortars, and ballistics. Many Jews were anxious to side with the Romans, sending emissaries to meet them, but the Romans had more than enough Jewish fighters already and they were not after homage but a splendid victory and an even more splendid triumphal parade.

At Cremona the forces that were loyal to Vitellius clashed with those that had pledged their allegiance to Vespasianus, with his older brother, Sabinus, and the younger of his sons, Domitian, at their head. Rome went up in flames, with the opposing forces fighting on Capitoline Hill, which even the oldest historians could not recall as having happened before. The Temple of Jupiter and much else burned down. The dead on the field of battle included Sabinus, that hulking, ruddy-faced loudmouth, and fifty thousand more. Vitellius was seized and dragged along the Via Sacra, with people taunting him, especially for his huge paunch, then he was locked up in a dungeon deep down in Palatine Hill along with statues of him that had been hastily overturned and brought there. For all that he called out “And yet I was once your emperor,” he was mocked further, then he was tortured on the Stairs of Mourning and rolled down to the foot of them before being decapitated and dragged off to the Tiber. Vespasianus, who was still in Alexandria, was elected by the Senate as emperor, with Domitian governing on his behalf.

Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee were put to the torch, towns and villages being sacked; their defenders fought to the end before stabbing to death their wives and children and finally themselves. Jerusalem was laid siege to for a long time by Titus’s legions, among which were some Jewish detachments, just as in the time of Herod the Great. Toward the end of this Great Revolt one million people fled to the city from the surrounding countryside, defending it as long as they were able and even beyond. They died of hunger and thirst in the tens of thousands, opposing factions slaughtered one another in their tens of thousands, mothers ate their children, sons their fathers, until finally the Romans occupied the city and slew everyone, then ransacked and then demolished the Temple. The Ark of the Covenant, it was whispered, was still there, buried under the ashes, for it had come to light during the siege and it was now in the best possible place because no one would unearth it and that is how it would stay.

It was said that there had never been a war as momentous as this. On virtually every house wall in Rome the riff-raff had scrawled the tag “HEP,” an abbreviation for Hierolosyma est perduta , meaning “Jerusalem is lost”; also popular was the shorter “HC”: Hierolosyma est capta . Mobs of young men would disrobe old men in the street and if one was found to be circumcised, he would be beaten to death. The vigiles looked the other way.

Ninety-four thousand Jewish captives were driven through the streets of Rome in the triumphal procession that was held jointly by Vespasianus and Titus, the likes of which had never been seen by Rome’s inhabitants. The procession entered Rome by the Porta Triumphalis and snaked across the city, taking in all the jam-packed theaters en route. It stopped at the Forum, where the chief leaders of the Jews were tortured and then executed, and then continued to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, where Vespasianus and Titus made sacrifices, completing them with the customary prayers. Spoils in inconceivable abundance were carried along and also wheeled by were huge floats, some three or four stories high, bearing tableaux which gave the crowds of onlookers a good indication of the various aspects of what had happened. The gawkers of Rome had their fill of eating, drinking, and shouting their lungs off. Later on fifty thousand more Jewish captives arrived.

Vespasianus set to the construction of an enormous amphitheater on the site of Nero’s former palace, with the glittering gilded bronze colossus of that emperor of such unhappy memory left intact alongside it. With him the Julio-Claudian dynasty had come to an end; now it was the turn of the Flavian dynasty.

One hundred thousand Jewish slaves and forty thousand Roman plebs built the Colosseum, as the Flavian amphitheater was named by the people of Rome, after Nero’s statue; the construction was financed by the treasures that had been plundered from the Temple in Jerusalem. The plans were drawn up by the best Greek architects, to the chagrin of Roman builders, who were at best hired as subcontractors and suppliers.

A Jewish tax was introduced in Rome under which the didrachma, the annual tribute that all Jewish males between the ages of twenty and fifty had paid by ancestral custom to the Temple in Jerusalem was henceforth to be collected for the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, and it was made compulsory for all Jews between the ages of three and seventy, including children and women. Even so there was not enough money, and along with other measures Vespasianus introduced a tax upon urine. Even Titus, his son, found that excessive, in response to which the emperor held a sestertius coin to his son’s nose, wittily asking: “Why, does that stink?”

For the amphitheater a vast oval pit, with a circumference of almost one thousand six hundred feet, was dug up precisely on the spot where Nero’s artificial lakes had once been situated. Uri had not been sorry to see them go, as the fountains had never been allowed to make music.