To the Death (20 page)

Numbed with shock, a grey faced Berenice clung to her brother. “Home,” she whispered, “we must go home. The nationalists are mad dogs. In the name of God, brother kills brother. The Romans”, she ended bitterly, “will thank their gods that they face a divided enemy, who will do much of their work for them”.

With the stink of the unburied dead in his nostrils Agrippa faced Gallus. “I will not” he said coldly to the
Legate
, “march on Jerusalem without a direct order from the Emperor”.

Gallus couldn't believe what he was hearing. “I order you”, he grated, “to join with me and put down this rebellion, or be branded a traitor”.

The King stared at the angry Roman for a moment. When he replied it was in a firm voice. “I was appointed by the Emperor. I report directly to him. I have no jurisdiction outside of my own kingdom. You”, he ended, “have no jurisdiction over me”.

“The Emperor will hear of this treachery!” Gallus shrieked.

“Yes”, replied Agrippa. “He will hear of what happened and more much more. It will be in my report to Rome”.

Gallus' advance was brutal. On reaching the Greek city of Caesarea, a chastened Florus was ordered to leave most of his men behind to ensure the city's safety. “You”, said Gallus spitefully, “will be at the head of the first assault on Jerusalem's walls”.

Gallus continued his advance along the coast arriving eventually at Lydda. The town was virtually deserted, its citizens having gone to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of Tabernacles. Sixty or so people remaining, mostly elderly, were casually put to the sword and the town burnt. Gallus' forces were now on the main road to Jerusalem, which winds through the hills at Beth-Horon.

In Jerusalem the rebels, seeing Gallus so close to the city, charged out in a surprise attack. In a sortie that went in their favour, five hundred Roman legionaries and one hundred and fifty cavalry were killed. Simon ben Gioras took the opportunity to attack the rear of the column. Cutting out a number of baggage animals, he dashed back to the safety of the city, cheered by the Jews lining the walls.

A chastened Gallus' next move was to choose a site on which to build a series of forts for the protection of his forces. This was done with usual Roman thoroughness. In a very short space of time, five substantial forts had been constructed, their outer defences encircled with deep ditches and strengthened with the addition of wooden walls and watch towers. With these in place the Roman engineers positioned artillery in a strategic arc to protect the whole encampment and started building roads. With thirty thousand men plus animals needing to be fed and watered on a daily basis, supply lines were established and protected.

Gallus was in no hurry to attack. Instead he relied on the rival factions within the city to do his job for him. He spent the next seven weeks sending out well armed foraging parties to seize all the grain in the neighbouring villages, whose able-bodied inhabitants he ordered to be chained and driven back to serve as slave labour. The old and the young were killed out of hand.

True to his word, Gallus ordered the Judaean Procurator to lead the first assault. This was against the neglected and unrepaired third wall. To the
Legate's
surprise the Jews fell back in apparent disarray. The jubilant Romans stormed it and the second wall; again they met with little resistance. Scarcely able to credit their luck, the Roman forces had the whole of the new town at their mercy and promptly set fire to it, the timber market providing extra fuel. With the new town well alight, the Romans advanced as far as the Upper Palace. If Florus, who was leading the way and knew the city well, had made a determined push against the main city wall, Jerusalem would have been theirs. Instead, he advised Gallus to hold his position and was supported in this by the
Legate's
senior officers. What the wavering
Legate
didn't know was that Florus didn't want Jerusalem to be taken. An early and successful victory would vindicate the
Legate
and damn him. He would be on the first boat back to Rome, to answer to Nero for the loss of Masada and the Antonia garrison; to say nothing of the general uprising against Rome.

Florus, knew success at Jerusalem would not go well for him. Somehow he had to turn the situation to his advantage, which meant things had to go badly, particularly for the
Legate
- a man who was a ditherer and had had little experience in military matters. He was a politician. The son of a
consul
he too was a
consul
, who lacked the wealth needed to buy real political power, and whose prime reason for accepting the Governorship of Syria and the overseeing of Judaea, was the opportunity to extort the fortune he lacked.

Knowing that Gallus' officers were as corrupt as he was, Florus had secretly bribed the
Legate's
second in command, Tyranius Priscus, and those officers most senior and closest to the
Legate
. They had been paid to ensure any assault on Jerusalem would fail, resulting in an early withdrawal while they awaited reinforcements from Rome. Above all, this would buy Florus the time he needed, in order to arrange for Gallus to have a fatal accident or be killed in the withdrawal.

Consequently, inexplicably to the legion's soldiers, their commander did nothing for two months. Gallus then ordered that the Antonia was to be assaulted. A picked band of legionaries was ordered to undermine the wall, opening up the chance to attack the Temple. It was at this point that a number of priests offered to open the city gates if Gallus would spare the city. Before he could decide whether or not to accept the offer, the would-be collaborators were found out. The furious nationalists threw the traitors off the walls and bombarded their broken bodies with rocks.

All of this happened in early November. Winter, which promised to be early, was approaching fast and the highlands of Judaea would be scoured by freezing ice-filled winds. An army camped in the open for any length of time would find just staying alive a full-time job.

So, with the city his for the taking, the
Legate
, gulled by his own officers, decided to withdraw and wait for reinforcements from Rome - a decision that presented him with an immediate problem.

During the weeks he had dithered, the Jews had been busy. Every building in the narrow streets surrounding the new city had been evacuated. Tons of masonry had been added to the stone prised loose with iron bars from their roofs. Under the cover of darkness men supplied with food and water had taken cover on the flat rooftops, hiding in the mounds of stone that would become ammunition. At pinch points in the streets and alleys that spread like a web around the Roman position they collapsed walls, blocking the road to any would-be advancing infantry.

Unaware of these preparations, Gallus knew that pulling out of the city and re-joining his main forces would not go unchallenged. He needed time to achieve this and time to put distance between his forces and the Jews. A few officers who had not pocketed Florus' gold argued against retreat. Threatened with a court martial for insubordination, they had fallen silent, at which point Gallus played them a particularly dirty trick. He ordered them to hand-pick six hundred of their steadiest men and take up a defensive position on the roofs of the buildings not occupied by the Jews. They were ordered to cover Gallus' retreat by delaying the Jews for twelve hours. They were to do this by spreading themselves thinly and calling out to each other as though on sentry duty. Under no circumstances were they to leave their posts in an attempt to re-join the main force, until twelve hours had elapsed.

It says much for Roman training and discipline that the doomed men obeyed their orders and held their positions, fighting to the last man before being overwhelmed and killed.

Meanwhile, Gallus' forces retreated through the mountains with the Jews in vengeful pursuit. The
Legate
, hell bent on speed at all costs, disregarded the first and last rule of mountain warfare against an enemy that knows the terrain. He failed to take command of the high ground. Before the Romans had even got as far as Beth-Horon, they had taken a mauling. The Roman column, compressed between the valley walls, was attacked from above. First they were showered with javelins and arrows. Then they experienced avalanches of loose scree and stones, released by tripping trigged boulders.

With their way blocked, the Romans were forced to turn back and seek a new route, only to be hit by Jewish cavalry galloping out of the narrow side gullies and concentrating on the Romans' baggage train and siege weapons. When Gallus' cavalry tried to relieve the pressure, the Jews focused on injuring and killing their enemy's horses - a much easier target than armoured riders. Repeatedly the Jews attacked hard and fast, hit and run, never directly engaging with an enemy that was the best in the world in set piece confrontations.

Nightfall had brought some respite to the battered Romans, who finally sought refuge in Beth-Horon. When Gallus gathered his officers together and asked the whereabouts of the Procurator, he was told he was dead, mashed to pulp by one of the boulders bouncing wildly down a mountain slope.

At dawn, a haggard Gallus woke to the realisation that the worst was yet to come. Every hill was lined with the enemy - waiting, ready, totally silent.

Forced to continue, the Romans marched and were harried all the way. By the time they reached Antiparis six thousand had died – the equivalent of a complete legion. They also counted the loss of the Twelfth Legion's eagle - an unspeakable disgrace. At this point Gallus abandoned his baggage and his siege train of artillery, which the warlord Simon ben Gioras and his followers delivered to the authorities in Jerusalem. Gioras had hoped that this would buy him a position of authority in the city, but was rejected by the ruling council who did not want a warlord in their midst when they attempted to negotiate with the Romans.

When Gallus eventually made it as far as Caesarea and the safety of the legions stationed there, he was a broken man. His campaign had turned into calamity. The rebels now controlled the whole of Jerusalem. They held the strongholds of Machaerus in southern Peraea, Masada and a large part of Judaea. At this point, some of the city's leading citizens left Jerusalem and headed for Jordan.

Learning of the
Legate's
defeat the citizens of Damascus, a predominantly Greek city with a long standing grudge against its Jewish minority, decided to get rid of them. They achieved this by rounding them up and holding them in the city's gymnasium, from which they released them in batches to cut their throats at leisure.

18

T
o
celebrate his thirtieth birthday, the Emperor decided to tour Greece. He would liberate Hellus (which meant it would be exempt from tribute). This tour of Greece would celebrate the world's first
artistic
games at which, of course, Nero would win all the significant first prizes. It was in Greece that Nero came under the influence of a Satanist and magician; a Greek named Karkinos.

Under the magus' influence, an already seriously flawed character slipped into madness. He came to believe that his role in life was to become an artist of the highest aesthetic and spiritual standing. As a living deity his destiny and duty was to demonstrate by example. People were told to abandon accepted morality and copy his example. Nero, utterly without morals, announced anything was allowed; that the moral laws of society were an invention and were to be discarded.

In the Grecian artistic games, the senators and their wives were
invited
to participate in competitions embracing music, poetry and chariot racing - three categories based on the Greek festivals of antiquity. What was not part of Greek antiquity were elderly Roman matriarchs being forced to lose their dignity, capering in an unseemly manner on the stage, whilst their equally elderly husbands, powerful and respected senators, found themselves in clumsy combat in the gladiatorial arena.

Not to be outdone, Nero himself pranced about on the stage in the feminine roles; a particular practice that scandalised a senate heartily sick of its ruler. More than a few minds were secretly scheming as to how they might rid themselves of the monster who had the power of life and death over them, who offended their sensibilities and insulted all the virtues and morality that embodied what it was to be Roman. They had put up with Nero's scandalous incestuous relationship with his mother, but refused to support him when he scandalised the whole of Roman society, by marrying a freedman called Doryphorus in a ceremony complete with dowry and bridal veil. The couple celebrated their marriage by indulging in one of Nero's favourite pastimes of dressing up in the skins of tigers and disembowelling men and women tied to stakes. This revolting behaviour reached its peak at a banquet turned orgy, given in Nero's honour by Tigellinus. The entertainment took place on a raft, moored on a lake owned by Marcus Agrippa. The raft had been towed by gilded barges rowed by degenerates and unfortunates; the disfigured and malformed.

On the quays, brothels had been stocked with high ranking courtesans who had to vie for trade with lower ranking prostitutes, male and female, who solicited competitively, indicating by lewd posturing and gesturing their unnatural and bizarre sexual services. That which caused the most offence had been the panders offering children of all ages for their use. The sexually inexperienced youngsters stared about in bewilderment and incomprehension - and eventually terror as their role became apparent.