György Spiró - Captivity

The Jewish slave laborers working on the Colosseum spent their nights chained up next to it in unheated military tents, which, with them sleeping on four racks and on the ground, were dark inside and stank so badly that they found it hard to breathe. Uri went among them every day, handing out blankets and clothes he had bought and taking them evening meals; the slave drivers raised no objection as he had softened them with money.

The prisoners received the gifts with gratitude and told stories in return.

Uri found it hard to order in his mind all that had happened, and when and how it had happened, with each person telling his own story and not knowing too precisely about other events.

Vespasianus had spared Gadara because it surrendered to him.

But then Vespasianus had also wiped out the entire population of cities which had sent emissaries to him to surrender.

Vespasianus had sent six thousand handpicked young captives to the city of Achaea when Nero had driven chariots and sung in the Isthmaean Games; some five hundred of these where thrown into work on building the Colosseum, the rest sold in Greek cities. These young men were despised by the other prisoners because they had fallen into captivity at a good time, when the war had only just begun, and so had managed to steer clear of torture.

In Jerusalem during the siege there had been two factions, later three, with self-appointed dictators and their supporters firing catapults and ballistae at one another and setting fire to each other’s camps. The Zealots, led by Johanan, were in the upper camp, raising towers in three corners of Temple Square and setting up their catapults on the roof of the Temple; Eleazar set up camp in Temple Square; while Simon occupied the Upper City, attacking from there. No, not the Romans who were besieging the city but the others, and no, it was not Johanan but Eleazar. But how could it have been Eleazar, as he arrived later on at the head of the Idumaes?

More Jews were killed by Jews than by Romans. Anyone who wanted to invite the Romans to enter the city for the sake of restoring peace was cut down by the Jews; anyone who managed to get out because he had paid off the Zealots guarding the gates was cut down by the Romans. There was no escape and they were not even buried. Even Ananias, the high priest, was slain by the Jews for wanting peace.

Izates of Adiabene fought against Rome but he obtained none of the assistance from the Parthian Empire on which he had counted; in truth, the Parthian Empire was in no position to render assistance because much the same sort of Jewish robber chieftains were pillaging there as in Judaea and Galilee, funded by the Romans. Well, no, there was no need to fund them: the lead shown by Judaea was enough. All the same, a lot of Babylonian Jews flooded into Galilee to fight against Rome, and all fell in the struggles like Silas, a former deputy to Agrippa II. The treacherous king took Rome’s side all along, while his sister, that whore Berenice, the three-time widow, became the lover of Titus.

Samaria was ravaged by the Romans just the same as if it had been Judaea or Galilee: the Romans had no clue as to who was a true Jew and who not. The Romans also staged a bloodbath at Mount Gerizim, where at least ten thousand lost their lives; the Samaritans, the swine, must have deserved it as their holy mountain offered them no protection.

It was a war of everyone against everyone; pity and sympathy was extinguished in them all. Victims were shot from the roof of the Temple, with countless priests and pilgrims dying, having been admitted even while the fighting was in progress; even the altar was smashed by the Jewish catapults.

The way it started was that the high priests had filched the tithe from the threshing-floors for themselves, leaving the priests hungry. That was the cause of the civil strife.

The way it started was when construction work on the Temple was finished; thirty thousand men were left unemployed. It was they who started the unruliness.

Corpses floated down the river as far as the Dead Sea, and there they have lain ever since in the thousands, among the blocks of pitch.

Bodies lay five feet high at the pyramids.

The pyramids? Uri was amazed, but it turned out that Helena had raised three pyramids for the Adiabene dynasty outside the walls of Jerusalem.

The first to be demolished was the palace of Agrippa. Uri could not figure that out either until it emerged that it had been put up by Agrippa II in front of the old palace of the Hasmoneans, opposite Herod’s palace in the market square of the Upper Town, and a splendid building it had been too.

Where, then, were the towers that the rebels had put up? Well, one was above the Chystos, the Chamber of Hewn Stone, and another two on the east, by the ravine. What did they mean by above the Chystos? A wall stretched all the way there, from the Antonia fortress to the bridge, said Uri; it’s possible to walk along the top of it. He was laughed at because that western wall had been pulled down back when it was still almost peacetime.

He asked questions, making notes when he got back home, but then the prisoners were informed that Uri was an unclean person, whereupon they grew cool toward him.

Uri asked about the reason for hostile turn in their attitude. Those who deigned even to answer said: you are a Nazarene madman, the whole thing was your fault. Others stated: you’ve been putting on the feedbag here in Edom all the time we’ve been shedding blood for the freedom of the Jews. They said: you’re Jewish like Tiberius Julius Alexander is Jewish. They declared: you’re a rotten traitor. Whatever they said, a look of boundless hatred flashed from their slaves’ eyes. Uri noted this, but as long as he was able to afford it he continued to pay for the gifts, though he personally no longer went out among them.

It was better so because the mood in the tents was frightful; the prisoners loathed one another even more intensely than they did the Romans; there were at least twenty factions, each of which loathed the other nineteen with an undying passion, and they squealed on and denounced one another to the Jews of Rome, who lost no chance — as they had during the Jewish War over the past four years — to distance themselves from everything which was happening in Judaea and Galilee. Uri once made the mistake of inquiring after the fate of Beth Zechariah, which led to it being spread around that in fact he himself was from Beth Zechariah, and one after the other reported that everything and everybody in Beth Zechariah was just fine, even claiming to be personally acquainted with Uri’s relatives there, they were all alive and well: it was awkward.

The money ran out; he had to do something for the wretches. The elders among the Roman Jews organized a collection for the slaves and asked the municipal authority to assist them in distributing it: they did not wish to take sides in the domestic squabbles of the prisoners. Everyone could well imagine how much of that money actually got to the slaves. The native Jews of Rome made sporadic donations, but in moderation; they had no money themselves as the Jewish tax had taken it all.

A vast palace was built for the emperor’s darling, a certain Antonia, next to the barracks of the Praetorian Guard past the Via Nomentana. That just has to be Kainis, Uri thought to himself; after what seemed like the hundredth time of trying, and at the cost of a tidy sum of money, he eventually arranged for a letter to be handed over to her.

Two days before the time he had indicated, it sprang to Uri’s mind that he ought to take Kainis a gift. A nice scroll of some kind. He went out to the unoccupied peasant cottage; the cement storehouse in the yard was untouched. He opened the door and entered.

It was empty, not one scroll remaining.