Free A Long Way to Shiloh by Lionel Davidson Page A

had himself assembled for the defence of Northern Command was greatly superior to that sent to take him. He sent the Jerusalem brigade away with a flea in its ear, and history has no more to tell on the subject.
    Besides, the Romans were almost upon them.
    Vespasian had noted that the most strongly fortified town in the area was Jotapata, and he decided to take it. There was not much of a road to the town, which was not much of a town. Vespasian built a new road. He moved a gigantic weight of equipment up it. He threw in earthworks, battering rams, towers, a siege train and a hundred and sixty pieces of heavy artillery; an operation akin, say, to taking Giggleswick by use of the entire Afrika Korps.
    It took him forty-seven laborious days to do all these things and then knock the place down. It was May 29th before he walked in and set light to what was left of it. But neither among the dead nor the few survivors did he find the Commander, ben Matthias. The reason was that ben Matthias and his staff of forty were hiding in a cave outside the town. A woman gave them away two days later.
    Vespasian called for their surrender, and was refused three times. On the last occasion, when ben Matthias himself was inclined to comply, he had to be forcibly restrained by his subordinates, who preferred suicide to surrender. ‘Not destitute of his usual sagacity,’ as Flavius Josephus says, the commander agreed, and suggested they drew lots to decide the order of death, the act to be carried out at each unlucky draw. ‘By the providence of God,’ as the historian urbanely records, the commander himself drew the last lot – and lost no time in surrendering . He was not put to death. Within a week he was the bosom pal of Titus and the confidant of Vespasian.
    The collapse of the commander did not end the fighting in Galilee. Ben Levi, his rival, put up a rather better show, holding the Romans down till November, when he himself escaped to Jerusalem to be greeted as a hero and to become a leader of the revolutionary council, and the Romans went into winter quarters . They emerged again in the spring of 68 and Vespasian resumed his stately offensive, first mopping up other Administrative Districts, including that containing the Essene settlement at Qumran, whose inmates fled, hiding their papers in nearby caves where they remained undisturbed for a couple of thousand years.
    But as he took up position before Jerusalem, express news reached the general from Rome. The emperor, thirty-one years old, had committed suicide. Everything ground to a halt. The offensive was the emperor’s offensive; no emperor, no offensive. A somewhat dreary interregnum ensued. This was the Year of the Four Emperors when one son of Rome after another got in the saddle; and fell out of it. Nobody bothered very much about Judea except of course the Judeans, and Vespasian, whose enormous army was sitting around in it, eating.
    The size of his army, its present geographical position, between Rome and Rome’s granary, Egypt, and the presence all around of old friends, province-governing, right-thinking friends, began to give him ideas. What the old country wanted was not so much song-singing, Games-attending, suicidally-inclined thirty-year-olds, as somebody, say, in his sixties, who knew a thing or two and was stable , not likely to go off at half-cock .
    Nobody ever accused Vespasian of going off at half-cock. He carefully sounded the views of his friends the provincial governors . Syria and Egypt, both okay, and controlling incidentally just about half the imperial armies. The general acted. Establishing himself in Egypt, and directly controlling food shipments to Rome, he sent the governor of Syria with an army to Italy to oppose the current jack-in-office, Vitellius. By the late spring of 70, master of Rome and the empire, Vespasian set sail himself . He told his son Titus to finish off the Judean business as quickly as possible and join him.
    Titus gladly did.