Читать книгу Jerusalem, the City of Herod and Saladin - Walter Besant - Страница 7

Sept. 8.

It took eighteen days to complete the siege-works. At last the banks were ready to receive the battering-rams, and these were placed in position. But little defence was made. Panic-stricken and cowering, the hapless Jews awaited the breach in the wall, and the incoming of the enemy. Simon and John, with what force they could collect, abandoned the towers, and rushed to attempt an escape over Titus’s wall of circumvallation at the south. It was hopeless. They were beaten back; the leaders hid themselves in the subterranean chambers with which Jerusalem was honeycombed, and the rest stood still to be killed. The Romans, pouring into the town, began by slaying all indiscriminately. Tiring of butchery they turned their thoughts to plunder; but the houses were filled with dead and putrefying corpses, so that they stood in horror at the sight, and went out without touching anything. “But although they had this commiseration for such as were destroyed in this manner, yet had they not the same for those that were still alive; and they ran every one through whom they met with, and obstructed the streets with dead bodies, and made the whole city run with blood to such a degree, indeed, that the fire of many of the houses was quenched with their men’s blood.”

And then they set fire to the houses, and all was over.

As for the prisoners who remained alive, they were destined to the usual fate of slaves. To fight as gladiators; to afford sport among the wild beasts in the theatres; and to work for life in the mines, was their miserable lot. Woe, indeed, to the conquered in those old wars, where defeat meant death, whose least cruel form was the stroke of the headsman, or, worse than death, life, whose least miserable portion was perpetual slavery in the mines. It would have been well had Josephus, after narrating the scenes which he tells so well, gone to visit these his miserable fellow-countrymen in slavery, and described for us, if he could, the wretchedness of their after-life, the unspeakable degradation and misery which the Jew, more than any other man, would feel, in his condition of slavery. Their history began with the slavery in Egypt: to these unfortunate captives it would seem as if it was to end with slavery in Egypt.

The Romans, knowing that Jerusalem had a sort of subterranean city of excavated chambers beneath it, proceeded to search for hiding insurgents and for hidden wealth. The chambers were, like the houses, often full of dead bodies. They found fugitives in some of them; these they put to death. In others they found treasure; in others they found corpses.

Simon and John were not among the prisoners, nor were they among the killed. John, several days after the capture of the city, came out voluntarily from his hiding-place, and gave himself up to Titus. He was reserved for the triumph. And then came the grand day of rejoicing for the conquerors. Titus made a long and laudatory oration to the army, adjudged promotions, coronets, necklaces, and other prizes of valour, and with lavish hand distributed the spoils among his soldiers. For three days the troops banqueted and rejoiced. Then Titus broke up his camp, and departed for Cæsarea with the 5th and 15th Legions, leaving the 10th, under Terentius Rufus, to guard the city, and sending the 12th to the banks of the Euphrates.^[18]

18. Joseph. vii. v. 3.

It was not till October that Simon gave himself up. To prevent being killed at once, he emerged by night from his hiding-place dressed in a long white robe, so that the astonished soldiers took him for a ghost. “I am Simon, son of Gioras,” he cried. “Call hither your general.” Terentius received him as a prisoner, and sent him to Titus.

One of the most important things in the conduct of a triumph at Rome was the execution of the general of the vanquished army. Titus had both generals to grace his procession. He assigned to Simon the post of honour. At the foot of the Capitoline Hill the intrepid Jew was led to the block, with a halter round his neck, and scourged cruelly. He met his death with the same undaunted courage as he had defended his city. John of Giscala remained a prisoner for life.

No historian, except perhaps Milman, whose sympathies are ever with the fallen cause, seems to us to have done justice, not only to the bravery and heroism of the Jews, but also to the heroism of their leaders. Their leaders have been described by an enemy and a rival—that Josephus, son of Matthias, who, after making an heroic resistance at Jotapata, obtained his life by pretending to be a prophet, and continued in favour with the conquerors by exhorting his fellow-countrymen to submission. That Simon and John were men stained with blood, violent, headstrong, we know well; but it does not seem to us that they were so bad and worthless as Josephus would have us to believe. After the siege fairly began they united their forces: we hear no more of the faction-fights. If their soldiers committed excesses and cruelties, they were chiefly for food; and everything was to give way to the preservation of the defenders. Moreover, discipline was not thought of among the Jews, whose notion of fighting was chiefly a blind and headlong rush. But we must again recall the religious side of the defence. To the Jew his Temple was more, far more, than Mecca can ever be to a Mohammedan. It had traditions far higher and more divine. The awful presence of Jehovah had filled the sanctuary as with a cloud. His angels had been seen on the sacred hill. There, for generation after generation, the sacrifice had been offered, the feast kept, the unsullied faith maintained. The Temple was a standing monument to remind them by whose aid they had escaped captivity; it taught them perpetually that freedom was the noblest thing a man can have; it was the glorious memorial of a glorious history; it was a reminder that theirs was a nation set apart from the rest of the world. To defend the Temple from outrage and pollution was indeed the bounden duty of every Jew. And these Romans, what would they do with it? Had they not the keys of the treasury where the vestments of the priests were laid up? Had not one of their emperors ordered a statue of himself to be set up, an impious idol, in the very Holy of Holies?

A handful of men, they offered war to the mistress of the world. True, the insurgents were rude and unlettered, who knew nothing of Rome and her power. Even if they had known all that Rome could do, it would have mattered nothing, for they were fighting for the defence of all that made life sweet to them; and they were sustained by false prophets, poor brainstruck visionaries, who saw the things they wished to see, and foretold what they wished to happen. God might interfere; the mighty arm which had protected them of old might protect them again. The camp of the Romans might be destroyed like the camp of the Assyrians; and because these things might happen, it was a natural step, to an excited and imaginative people, to prophesy that they would happen. But when the time passed by, when none of these things came to pass, and the deluded multitude hoped that submission would bring safety at least, the tenacity of their leaders held them chained to a hopeless defence. Whether Simon and John fought on with a stronger faith, and still in hope that the arm of the Lord would be stretched out, or whether they fought on with the desperate courage of soldiers who preferred death by battle to death by execution, it is impossible now to say.

It has been suggested by Josephus, as well as by modern writers, that the courage of the Jews was shaken by predictions, omens, and rumours; but if there were predictions of disaster, there were also predictions of triumph. If Jesus, whom a few called Christ, had prophesied the coming fall of the city, there were others who had announced the fall of the enemy. Omens could be read either way. If a sword-shaped comet hung in the sky, who could deny that the sword impended over the heads of the Romans? And when the gate of the Temple flew open, did it not announce the opening of the gates for the triumph of the faithful? In that wild, unsettled time, when there was nothing certain, nothing stable, the very faith of the people would be intensified by these prophecies of disaster; their courage would be strengthened by the gloomy foretellers of defeat; and, as the Trojans fought none the worse because Cassandra was with them, so the Jews fought none the worse because voices were whispering among them about the prophecies of him whom some recognised as the Messiah.

Let us, at least, award them the meed of praise for a courage which has never been equalled. Let us acknowledge that, in all the history of the world, if there has been no siege more bloody and tragic, so there has been no city more fiercely contested, more obstinately defended; and though we may believe that the fall of Jerusalem had been distinctly prophesied by our Lord, we must not therefore look on the Jews as the blind and fated victims of prophecy. The city fell, not in order to fulfil prophecy, but because the Jews were, as they ever had been, a turbulent, self-willed race; because they were undisciplined, because they loved freedom above everything else in the world except their religion; and their religion was the ritual and the Temple.