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By J.E.
Lendon
he
prosecution of one of the greatest sieges in ancient history
offers a chance to assess the nature of
Rome's military discipline and its importance to
the success of the imperial army.  
In
a.d. 67, Levantine Ptolemais looked seaward to the calm of the Roman
Mediterranean and inland to the storms of a rebel
Galilee. The year before, the
province of Judea had flown to arms against a monstrous Roman
governor. The hapless legate of
Syria had descended with a legion to suppress the
revolt but had been driven back with loss, abandoning his siege
engines. Now Nero's new general, Vespasian, marched south from
Antioch with two of the legions of
Syria, and his son Titus marched north to meet
him at Ptolemais with a legion from the garrison of
Egypt.
His army united, Vespasian marched inland
into Galilee, the north of the Jewish realm, which was
defended by a scratch force led by the Jewish notable Josephus.
After the Romans captured him and he began to assist them, the
flexible Josephus was eventually to chronicle the war, first in
Aramaic, then in Greek. The Romans had fought many wars and
countless battles since Caesar's day -- had captured Britain,
completed the circuit of the Mediterranean, extended their power to
the Danube, been thrown back from beyond the Rhine, and fenced with
the kings of proud Parthia in the eastern wastes -- but The
Jewish War of Josephus is by far the most detailed written
description of Roman fighting that survives from the first three
centuries of the Roman Empire.
Josephus had striven mightily to organize and drill
his Galileans, yet at the approach of the Romans most of his army
deserted and fled to fortified places. This humiliation is
significant because it, as well as the unruliness of the Jews
throughout the war and their fierce internal battles, provides the
context for Josephus' one-dimensional evaluation of the Roman army.
To Josephus -- and he has convinced many of his modern readers --
the army of the Roman Empire excelled because of its relentless,
realistic training and the exact obedience to orders that that
training inculcated:
To
the Romans the beginning of war is not their introduction to
arms....Instead, as if they had grown with weapons in their hands,
they never have an armistice from training, never wait for crises to
arrive. Their exercises lack none of the vigor of true war, but each
soldier trains every day with his whole heart as if it were war
indeed....He would not err who described their exercises as battles
without blood, and their battles as bloody exercises.
Of
this same training, the fourth-century Vegetius gives details,
looking back longingly to an earlier day: marching in regular step
and quick time; marching with kit, with three long route marches a
month; running, jumping, and swimming; throwing javelins; endless
attacks with mock shield and sword on a wooden post, which stood in
for a flesh-and-blood enemy; mass drill in keeping ranks and
formation; and finally, mock battles. When the weather was fine, the
Romans trained out-of-doors; when foul, under roofs. Even veterans,
Vegetius tells us, were expected to exercise with their arms every
day. The reality of such training is confirmed by the excavation of
drill grounds and cavalry riding areas, of catapult ranges, by the
traces of countless "practice" camps -- sometimes many on the same
plot of land -- that Roman units built on maneuvers, and of
elaborate practice siege works built around pre-Roman hill
forts.
"The Romans are unbeatably strong," Josephus wrote,
"especially because of their obedience and practice at arms." In the
Roman camp "there is nothing that happens without the word of
command." In short, "no disorder disperses them from their usual
formation, no fear confounds them, no labor exhausts them, and
certain victory follows against those unequal in these respects."
In
fact, disorder, fear, and exhaustion were the Romans' constant
companions in the Jewish war, as the detailed narrative of Josephus
reveals. Roman training and discipline were certainly admirable in
comparison to that of Josephus' countrymen, as he pointedly told
them, and especially valuable in a world where many opponents
undertook cursory training or none. But training and discipline
alone do not account for Roman success, and training and discipline
themselves present a puzzle: How did they fit into the wider culture
of the Roman imperial army? In a professional army, what was the
relationship between Rome's two ancestral military values:
virtus, or courage, manifested as aggressiveness on the
battlefield, and disciplina, or discipline, which the Romans
conceived as a brake on overly aggressive
behavior?
Gabara was the first strong place in
Galilee that Vespasian captured. Romans killed all
the men and burned the city, and the villages and country towns
round about. Next the Romans moved south to the well-protected town
of Jotapata, as Josephus rushed to oversee its defense.
The siege of Jotapata was bitter and lasted forty-seven days.
Finally, the Romans built their earthworks up to the height of the
walls. The Romans rushed the town before dawn, when they hoped the
sentries would be drowsing. Vespasian's son Titus and a military
tribune were the first on the wall; others followed, and the city
was captured before most of the inhabitants were awake. There was a
general massacre. The dead were calculated at forty thousand.
Josephus was captured.
After a pause to rest his troops, Vespasian
turned his attention to eastern Galilee. After some indecision the town of
Tiberias surrendered and so preserved itself from
destruction. Tarichaeae, by the Sea of Galilee, was the center of what resistance
remained, and Vespasian moved toward it. A body of Jews attempted to
resist the Romans in the field outside the city, and Vespasian sent
Titus with cavalry against them. Titus led the charge in person and
killed many by his own hand during the pursuit. It may be in this
battle that, as Suetonius records, Titus had a horse killed under
him and mounted another in its stead. The survivors fled into the
town, and the dispute about whether Tarichaeae should surrender soon
became an uproar audible even to the Romans outside. Taking
advantage of the chaos, Titus led his cavalry into the shallows of
the lake and so into the town, which was not walled on the lakeward
side. Thus Tarichaeae was captured.
Next came Gamala, on the other side of the lake and
beyond. Soon the Roman rams had broken through the walls, and Roman
columns were in the city, advancing without orders to the higher
reaches of that steep place. But the Jews rallied and threw them
back. The town was built on a precipitous incline: It was hard to
retreat except onto the roofs of houses where they were flush with
the slope, and these soon collapsed under the weight, killing many
Romans in the resulting avalanche. In his anxiety at the crisis,
Vespasian himself advanced heedlessly within the walls. Suddenly he
found himself in the front lines and under attack. He formed those
near him into a shield wall, stopped the Jewish onrush, and then
retired slowly, front to the enemy, until he was outside the
city.
There could be no doubt that Vespasian and Titus were
father and son: Both looked as if a giant had seized them by the
ears and stretched their faces broad, leaving deep creases in their
brows from the pulling. But father and son had far different
perceptions of their roles in battle. Vespasian fought like Caesar,
close enough to the front to command and encourage -- at Jotapata he
had even been hit in the foot with an arrow -- but not to fight.
Titus, by contrast, fought at the head of his troops and cut down
enemies with his own sword. And the contrast was not merely because
one was a cautious fifty-eight-year-old supreme commander and the
other a carefree twenty-seven-year-old: Titus too had grave
responsibilities, as commander of the Fifteenth
Legion.
After the setback at Gamala, Josephus depicts
Vespasian giving a speech to correct and reassure his troops,
carefully balancing the need for discipline with the need for
courage. But if Vespasian gave such an address, his men paid it
little heed. Soon after, three soldiers of the Fifteenth Legion
crept by night to the base of one of the towers of Gamala and
quietly dug out five great stones. They leaped back as the entire
tower and the sentries atop it crashed to the ground. The Jews were
in a panic. No less surprised were the Romans: No plans had been
made to exploit the collapse and the chaos, and, remembering their
previous failure, the Romans did not try to enter the city for a
full day after. The digging appears to have been a private
enterprise on the part of the three legionaries.
When the Romans did enter the city again, Titus led
them (he had been away during the first attack), and he once again
cut down those he met. Even women and infants were slaughtered in
this sack, in revenge for the earlier defeat; nine thousand were
killed or threw themselves from the walls into the ravine that
bordered the town. Only two women survived.
After the capture of Gischala in the north,
which surrendered to Titus after the warriors escaped by a ruse, all
of Galilee was in Roman hands. It was now November and
time to send the legions into winter quarters. In the new year,
Vespasian's strategy was to put down the revolt outside
Jerusalem and drive all the surviving rebels into the
seething city. While it was still winter he quickly seized the
Jewish towns of the Peraea, to the east, across the
Jordan
River from
Jerusalem. Those downstream learned of his coming
when thousands of bodies floated down the river and washed up on the
shores of the Dead
Sea. In the spring
Vespasian struck south into Idumaea, then north into
Samaria. By June he had captured
Jericho, completing his circuit of ravaging around
Jerusalem. Vespasian was told that nothing sank in
the nearby Dead
Sea: He had
prisoners cast in with their hands bound, and lo! They floated. Now
all that remained was to march directly to
Jerusalem and lay it under
siege.
But then fate put a halt to the campaign.
Far away in Rome, Nero was overthrown and the year of the
four emperors cast Italy into confusion. In the East, Vespasian
waited upon events, and so the summer of a.d. 68 passed into winter.
In June of the next year he moved to reassert his hold on
Judea outside Jerusalem, wasting the countryside and taking some
towns he had neglected before. He rode with his cavalry even up to
the walls of Jerusalem and then rode away again. He avoided a
major campaign in a.d. 69 because he had his eye on higher things:
On July 1 the carefully instructed garrison of
Egypt proclaimed Vespasian emperor, and his own
legions and the powerful Syrian army soon followed suit. Away went
Vespasian to manage a civil war against his rival emperor Vitellius,
and by December Vespasian's lieutenants in Europe had made him master of the Roman world.
Rome's new emperor sailed for the capital and
left Titus to bring the war against the Jews to an
end.
Two years had now been squandered. Titus
delayed no longer and ordered his legions, now reinforced to four by
another from Syria, to advance on
Jerusalem from both east and west. Approaching the
city, he rode ahead with six hundred horse to reconnoiter, but,
riding too close to the walls, he was cut off by a Jewish sally that
broke the head of his cavalcade from the body. Titus could not go
forward -- garden walls and trenches blocked that path. The only way
to safety was through the enemy, and through them he led his
companions in a breathless, headlong charge, killing those who tried
to block his onrush. Although unarmored, for this was no more than a
reconnaissance expedition, Titus came through unscathed. Two of his
companions were killed.
Then the legions came up, and Titus ordered
them to camp around the city. The Tenth Fretensis was assigned the
Mount of
Olives. While the
Tenth was fortifying its camp, the enemy unexpectedly struck against
it from the city. After a confused struggle the legion was turned to
flight. It was rallied by Titus, who took the Jews in the flank with
his personal guard. Having restored the situation, Titus established
a protective line nearer the city and sent the Tenth back to build
its camp. But the Jews thought the legionaries were fleeing and
attacked again, and the forward Roman line collapsed before them,
leaving Titus isolated with his companions on the slope. Now, and
not for the last time in this war, Titus' friends and staff begged
him to take care: He was the general-in-chief, not a soldier.
Everything depended on him, and he should not risk himself. This was
also the standard advice of Greek tactical writers and the principle
to which Julius Caesar had adhered. But Titus was having none of it.
He held his position, himself fighting by
hand.
In
their eagerness to chase those in flight, the Jews split around
Titus' small band like a torrent around a rock, and so Titus and his
guard charged them in the flank. Once again the Tenth was in a panic
-- so much for Josephus' "no disorder disperses them from their
usual formation, no fear confounds them" -- and it began to flee.
Then legionaries noticed Titus in the fight on the slope below, and
(Josephus says) pure shame at having abandoned their general rallied
them. They pushed the Jews back down the
slope.
With the legions encamped, the Romans turned
to clearing the ground before Jerusalem, shifting their camps closer to the walls,
and bringing up the baggage. During this work, the defenders worked
a ruse upon the besiegers. The Romans knew from defectors that the
Jews inside the city were riven by religious and political faction
and that some yearned to come to terms with
Rome. So when a body of men appeared to have
been ejected from the city amid a shower of stones and seemed to be
trying to force their way back in while cowering from the Romans who
looked on, and when those who had expelled them shouted "Peace" and
offered to open the gates to the enemy, many Romans were deceived.
Titus suspected a trick and ordered his troops not to
move, but the guards of the Roman works made a rush for the gates
without orders. Now those who had pretended to be expelled attacked
them in the rear, and those who had promised to open the gates shot
them down with missiles from the ramparts. Only slowly and with
great loss did the Romans fight their way free. The defenders jeered
and capered on the walls.
Titus fumed and ranted -- "among the Romans even
victory without orders is a disgrace!" Josephus has him insist. He
terrified the disobedient soldiers by threatening the horrible
penalty for fighting without orders: death. But then Titus allowed
the pleas of the legions to soften his anger, and no one was
punished. Like Vespasian at Gamala, Titus contented himself with a
lecture. At the climax of the siege, he would have reason to rejoice
that he did not bloodily stamp out his soldiers'
initiative.
Having selected what he hoped was a weak
stretch of the fortifications, Titus ordered three siege ramps
erected. With their throwing engines, towers, rams, and ramps, the
Romans were fully up-to-date besiegers, but fully up to date in a
technology of siege that had advanced hardly at all since Greeks had
made a science of it in the Hellenistic period. An engineer employed
by Demetrius Poliorcetes at his great siege of
Rhodes (305-304 b.c.) would have been quite at
home before Jerusalem with Titus, more than three and a half
centuries later.
The Jews attacked the builders with engines, missiles,
and sallies, but to no avail. Then rams were brought up on the
ramps. The defenders charged out against them but were thrown back,
Titus leading the relief in person. Again the Jews sallied against
the rams, and again Titus led his cavalry in, killing with his own
hand.
The Romans built towers to defend the rams. At night
one of these, badly constructed, collapsed with an enormous crash.
The Romans panicked, thinking the Jews were inside their camps, and
confusion reigned until the truth became known. The Greeks had a
saying they often applied to the blind and inexplicable panics that
afflicted armies: "There are many empty things in war." Despite
Josephus' editorializing, the Romans of the empire were no less
vulnerable to empty panic than any other ancient
army.
With the towers brought up, the Romans swept the walls
with missiles, so they could work the rams in safety. When a ram
nicknamed "Victor" made a breach, the Jews abandoned the wall;
behind it, two city walls remained. The Romans established a camp
inside the wall they had taken, and during their preparations to
attack the next wall, there was skirmishing in the open between the
Romans and the defenders.
During a combat at range with javelins, Longinus, a
cavalryman, leaped out from the Roman lines and charged the mass of
the enemy. He killed one, pulled his spear out, stabbed another in
the side, and then made his way safely back to his comrades. Others
subsequently emulated his deed. On one occasion a Jew challenged any
Roman who dared. Pudens, another cavalryman, answered the challenge
but tripped during the fight, and the Jewish challenger killed him,
only to be shot down in the act of vaunting over the body by a Roman
centurion with a bow.
In
Josephus' account, reckless bravery was primarily the province of
the Roman army's auxiliary soldiers. Pudens was certainly an
auxiliary; Longinus probably was also. During a Jewish sally, an
exceptionally strong auxiliary cavalryman reached down from his
saddle, grabbed a fleeing enemy by the ankle, and then bore his
armored captive off just as he was to be admired by
Titus.
Such behavior is part of a wider trend: The
Romans increasingly relied on auxiliaries to do their hand-to-hand
fighting. This trend is most remarkably illustrated on Trajan's
Column, the enigmatic monument that depicts in astonishing detail on
a huge spiral relief the Roman conquest of
Dacia, in two wars of a.d. 101-102 and 105-106.
So detailed and circumstantial is the sculpted narrative that it is
nearly irresistible to suppose that it adapts to pictures a literary
account of the war, perhaps that of Trajan
himself.
In
the standard type of battle scene on the column, auxiliaries and
bare-chested barbarian allies fight at the front, while at the back
legionaries stand or build or lurk in fortifications, cosseting
their ballistas. Pointing up the contrast between the roles of
auxiliary and legionary is a scene high on the column in which
auxiliaries attack Dacians on top of a wall, while a party of
legionaries, right beside them, attacks the wall itself with picks;
just up the spiral more legionaries hew and stack wood for use in
the siege.
On
all of Trajan's Column, legionary and nonlegionary infantry
(auxiliary infantrymen, conical-helmeted Eastern archers,
bare-chested barbarian allies) play very different roles. Put
simply, legionaries parade, march, and work -- and nonlegionaries
fight. There are more than fifteen scenes in which legionaries build
fortifications, sometimes with auxiliaries as sentries, or cut wood
or clear forests or harvest grain or conduct supply wagons, fatigues
that are depicted in seemingly demented detail over yard after yard
of stone. However, legionaries are depicted fighting in only four
scenes, while nonlegionary infantry fight in
fourteen.
Moreover, nonlegionary infantry engage in fatigues in
only a handful of scenes, and when they do so the depiction is far
less elaborate, and what noncombat work they do is more aggressive
than the legionaries': They slaughter prisoners and burn Dacian
villages.
The column strikingly conveys the wildness
of Rome's auxiliary soldiers. In several scenes
auxiliaries, but never legionaries, are depicted as proudly
presenting severed heads to the emperor, and one auxiliary who has
taken a head but both of whose hands are occupied in fighting
carries the severed head in his teeth, hanging by the hair.
At
the same time art and archaeology reveal changes in legionary
equipment that suggest a more specialized role: armor with
exaggerated protection for the shoulders, and helmets with
exaggerated protection for the face and back of the neck, protection
against downward blows. Roman legionary armor evolved under the
early empire to protect the Roman soldier against attacks from above
-- exactly the type of attacks he might expect when toiling beneath
the walls of Jerusalem; exactly the type of attacks he suffered
when assailing Dacian forts. The Roman legions were used
increasingly as combat engineers, and their armor evolved along with
the function of its wearers.
This increasing reliance on auxiliaries in
battle reflects Roman patterns of recruitment. As the
Roman
Empire piled decade
upon decade, the Roman army went farther and farther afield to find
soldiers. Legionaries were supposed to be Roman citizens upon
enlistment; auxiliaries were not required to be citizens. But to
find both, recruiting officers struck out into the wild marches of
the empire. By the end of the first century a.d., few legionaries
were recruited in Italy, and even by the middle of that century the
accents of legionaries from the northern borders sounded barbarous
to soldiers stationed elsewhere. Such recruiting may have been
driven by the reluctance of those in Rome's more civilized dominions
to serve or by their greater power to resist conscription, but it
was certainly also driven by the sense that men from some of the
empire's less developed areas made excellent
soldiers.
The Greeks and the Romans were comfortable
with the idea that some peoples were simply more warlike than
others. Possessed of a vast empire, the Romans naturally recruited
heavily from such warlike folk. Of the German tribes living on the
Roman side of the Rhine, "the Batavians are outstanding in
virtus," Tacitus says, and so are "set aside for use in
battle, like missiles and arms reserved for war." Through the third
century a.d., more than twenty-five Thracian auxiliary units are
known, and in the fourth century the Thracians were still being
recruited for their special warrior qualities. It was in areas where
the most warlike recruits came from --
Thrace,
Britain, and Batavia -- that the Romans pushed conscription to
the point of inspiring revolts.
The Roman army of the empire went out of its
way to recruit virtus. And the army went out of its way to
encourage virtus in its ranks as well. At Jerusalem Longinus
the brave cavalryman had acted, Josephus says, in the hope of
attracting the eye of Titus, expecting a reward if he did so. Hardly
surprising; compared to the Republic, the Roman Empire had regularized and elaborated the spurs to
rivalry in virtus among individual soldiers. The system of
military decorations, which Polybius had pointed out as so powerful
a motivating force in the Republic, was formalized and graded for
rank. Decorations were mentioned in soldiers' epitaphs, sometimes
noting that they were given ob virtutem (for virtus) -- and
were carved upon their tombstones. Decorations were of enormous
importance to soldiers.
The creation and elaboration of a permanent rank
structure for the imperial army also allowed promotion in that
structure to be used systematically as another form of motivation.
And no wonder, for not only did promotion bring honor and easier
duty, but the pay structure of the Roman army was severely
hierarchical -- a centurion was paid fifteen times what a common
legionary earned. The decision of some soldiers, including a few
never promoted to centurion, to lay out in their epitaphs each
posting in their entire career shows how powerful a motivator rank
was to these soldiers.
Still, despite Longinus' expectation, Titus was not
entirely delighted by him and his emulators: The commander issued an
order telling them to prove their bravery without running such
risks. Given Titus' own behavior, his soldiers must have chortled;
they certainly do not seem to have paid him much
attention.
Five days after the capture of the first
Jerusalem wall the Romans penetrated the second, were thrown back --
Titus and the tribune who had accompanied him over the wall at
Jotapata shot arrows to cover the retreat -- and four days later
pushed their way in again. The siege had now reached its climax; two
walls had fallen, but the last wall stretched from the
Temple Mount itself.
After giving the besieged in the city a
respite to surrender, Titus set each of his four legions to building
great ramps of wood and earth at opposite ends of the last wall.
They raised two ramps against the massif of the Antonia Fortress,
which rose from the corner of the
Temple Mount. Built as King Herod's high castle, it had
afterward been the sheer aerie of the city's Roman garrison. As the
Temple dominated the city of
Jerusalem, so the Antonia Fortress dominated the
Temple, and unless the
Temple were taken, the city could not be
held.
Once again the besieged harassed the
builders with raids, missiles, and projectiles from captured Roman
engines. For seventeen days the Romans toiled, but underneath them,
the defenders tunneled out from the Antonia and propped up the Roman
works with timbers. When they set the timbers alight, the ramps
collapsed with a tremendous crash. A fierce Jewish sally destroyed
the earthworks at the other end of the wall where the Romans had
already brought up their rams, and drove the Romans back to their
camps, which they defended from the entrenchments. Once again Titus
and his guard charged the attackers in the flank, and the Jews were
driven back within the walls. But the Roman attack had been
resoundingly defeated. The Romans were despondent. Perhaps
Jerusalem could not be taken by assault. Perhaps it
would have to be starved out.
Titus decided to postpone his next attack
until a wall had been drawn about Jerusalem. He wanted to stop the smuggling of
provisions into the city, so that famine would press even harder
upon the defenders. They might even surrender. Building a circuit of
entrenchments around the whole of that great city -- nearly four and
a half miles, with thirteen attached forts -- took the Romans only
three days, a striking credit to their training. But the achievement
reveals something else about the Roman
army.
Josephus, to whom it seemed the soldiers labored as if
possessed, was astonished by the speed of the work, and he reveals
how they were motivated. Each section of the circuit was assigned to
a legion, each portion of a legionary span to a cohort, each
cohort's share was split between centurions, each centurion's share
split between his subordinates. So at every level soldiers, units,
and officers competed with their neighbors under the watchful eye of
their superiors, and Titus, the supreme commander, toured the works
and was umpire over all.
If
fighting in the Roman imperial army was competitive, so too was
Roman military building. "When I was assigning shares of the work,
so that each would know what part of the tunneling was his, I
arranged for competition between the soldiers of the fleet and the
infantry, and thus they cooperated in drilling through the mountain
together," records a Roman military engineer from the second century
a.d. Competition seems to have been the usual method by which the
Roman army carried out large projects, like Hadrian's Wall and the
Antonine Wall in Britain.
Suddenly the long stretches of Trajan's Column devoted
to legionary building make sense. These are not merely a robotic
transfer of material from a written account to sculpture, but
illustrate the competitive excellence of the legionaries.
Labor was the Latin word for such excellence in hard work,
and along with patientia (endurance), labor formed part of
the wider concept of disciplina. What seems so puzzling --
the unheroic activities of legionaries on the column, in contrast
with the fighting of the auxiliaries -- is less puzzling if the
legionaries' work is understood to manifest disciplina, one
of the two fundamental military values of the
Romans.
Another meaning of the Latin word disciplina
was training. Like fighting and building, Roman training too was
fiercely competitive. A particularly successful soldier recorded his
triumphs in training on his tombstone:
Once I was the most
renowned on the
Pannonian
shore
Amidst a thousand
Batavians the
strongest.
With
Hadrian watching I swam the
huge
waters
Of
Danube's
deep in full arms.
While a bolt from my bow
hung in the
air –
while it fell -- I hit
and shattered it
with another
arrow.
Neither Roman nor
barbarian, no
soldier with his
javelin,
no Parthian with his
bow, could
defeat
me.
Here I lie. I have
entrusted my deeds
to the memory of this
stone.
Whether another after me
will
emulate my deeds has yet
to be seen.
I am the first who did
such things: I
emulated
myself.
Swimming, archery, javelin throwing: This paragon
excelled in all. An extended description of auxiliary cavalry drill
also survives. Beneath standards and writhing serpent banners, the
cavalry competed in riding and charging, wheeling and circling, in
casting spears at targets and blunted javelins at one
another.
Disciplina, existing in counterpoint to virtus,
included not merely obedience and punishment but nearly every
military excellence that was not encompassed under virtus,
including training and building. Roman disciplina was at once
something imposed upon the Roman soldiers from above, and something
soldiers were expected to feel in their hearts. Like virtus,
disciplina was fiercely competitive: It was a source of
honor, something on which soldiers prided themselves. When they
failed in disciplina, soldiers sometimes felt crippling
shame, just as when they failed in virtus. Neither
disciplina nor virtus took precedence over the other
in the Roman military mind.
Under the empire, the opposition of
virtus and disciplina developed and flowered
exotically into a tacit distinction between the legionaries, among
whom the stress was upon disciplina, and the auxiliaries,
among whom the stress was upon virtus. It was the exemplars
of virtus who were increasingly used in battle, and the
exemplars of disciplina who were increasingly used in
construction, to erect the sophisticated engineering works that, as
the Jerusalem siege demonstrated, gave the Romans a
considerable part of their relative superiority in war. This was a
matter of emphasis, not a schism; the auxiliaries were not relieved
of drill and building, and the army did not cease to recruit and
encourage virtus in the legions. But the differing roles of
soldiers at Jerusalem and on Trajan's Column betray a degree of
matter-of-fact specialization.
After the wall around
Jerusalem was complete, Titus ordered four new ramps,
larger than the old ones, to be raised against the Antonia;
presumably each ramp was assigned to a legion, as the previous ramps
had been. In twenty-one days they were complete. The Romans threw
back a badly coordinated attack on the ramps by the besieged, and
brought up rams against the walls. The defenders cast down stones,
missiles, and fire, but the Romans held their positions at the
bottom of the walls, the rams did their work, and legionaries even
pried out four great stones by hand. In the night, when fighting was
suspended, the Roman efforts were rewarded when the wall of the
Antonia, undermined by the countermines dug beneath the first ramps
and weakened by the rams, collapsed. But behind it loomed another
wall, erected in haste by the defenders against just such a
development.
Now Titus appealed with promises of reward and
promotion for volunteers to lead the ascent up the rubble to this
new wall. The Roman commander found twelve volunteers, led by a
frail, shrunken Syrian auxiliary named Sabinus. The Syrian led on
bravely but tripped at the top of the wall. He was overwhelmed, and
the assault failed.
Two nights later the Romans captured the
Antonia in an unexpected way. Twenty legionaries on sentry duty
banded together and decided, apparently without informing their
officers, to make an attempt upon the wall in the dark. They
recruited a standard-bearer of the Fifth Legion (presumably their
own), a trumpeter, and two auxiliary cavalrymen for their adventure.
The first Titus knew of the assault was when the Roman trumpet sang
out from the top of the wall, the attackers having climbed by
stealth and killed the sentries. The general called the sleeping
Romans to arms and hastened with his bodyguard and staff to
reinforce the lodgment. He found the Antonia empty of enemies. The
defenders, on hearing the same trumpet blast as he, fled in panic
into the neighboring Temple, thinking the Romans were inside the
Antonia in force.
The fact that there were no forces held in readiness
to exploit the ascent of the wall indicates that, like the
undermining of the tower at Gamala, the taking of the Antonia was
the independent project of common soldiers who drew a more sen-ior
man, the standard-bearer, in with them. That so great an event
should hang on the private initiative of private soldiers would be
surprising in any army. But it is especially so in the Roman army,
which had for centuries -- in principle -- doomed to death sentries
who left their posts, a custom upon which Josephus remarks. To
attack the wall unordered was to risk death at the hands of both
Jews and Romans. Why did the Roman sentries attempt
it?
The answer lies in the oddest detail of the
ascent. Why, on a night so dark as to allow climbing the wall
unseen, take a legionary standard? For the soldiers to take a
trumpeter up the wall made sense, because they used the trumpet to
signal their success from the top. But no one would be able to see
the standard of the Fifth Legion atop the Antonia. Yet they carried
the awkward object up the wall because, seen or unseen, it
symbolized the unit of the soldiers engaged in the perilous ascent.
Later in the siege, standards were carried up the
Temple wall in the heat of fighting -- and lost in
a Jewish counterattack. Taking the standard suggests that the
soldiers' brave, punishable, valuable initiative was a product of
the ferocious competition between units in the Roman imperial
army.
The rivalry between units of the Roman army
was powerful. In time of mutiny, three legions could agree to
amalgamate, but unit pride prevented them from extinguishing their
identity in another unit, so the standards of all had to be planted
together. In time of civil war, rivalry could lead to fighting
between units and influence which of the rival leaders units chose
to follow. Romans relied particularly on unit rivalry to push
forward military building projects, like the wall around
Jerusalem. Later in the siege, when the Romans were
trying to advance from the Antonia to the
Temple, access was narrow. Rather than simply
assigning the task to a limited number of units, Titus selected
thirty of the best centuries from many, so that the goad of unit
rivalry would not be lost and the Roman soldiers would "vie man with
man and unit with unit."
It
is tempting to associate the rivalry between Roman military units
with the bonds of soldierly cohesion so valued and encouraged in
contemporary armies. No doubt many years of living and fighting
together did produce connections of friendship and mutual loyalty
among small groups of Roman soldiers, and no doubt those bonds did
contribute, to a degree, to the effectiveness of the Roman army in
action. But ancient authors stress far more frequently the fierce
rivalry that existed between individual Roman
soldiers.
Thus the rivalry between units in the Roman army
should perhaps be understood as a form of outward-looking
solidarity, rather than inward-looking solidarity arising from
internal bonds of friendly sentiment. A Roman unit was less like a
modern family and more like a modern professional sports team, whose
members come together to compete against other teams but whose
members' feelings toward teammates are often more rivalrous than
affectionate.
The taking of the Antonia Fortress was the
decisive moment in the siege of Jerusalem, for now there was no question that the
city would fall. Yet there was much more savage fighting, both for
the Temple, which was burned, and for what lay beyond.
On the Roman side, the fighting followed the same pattern as earlier
in the siege: brave acts by individual centurions and common
soldiers, Roman masses advancing without orders and suffering for
it, and Titus charging with his cavalry or wanting to fight but
being restrained by his staff.
As
final victory came closer, the Roman soldiers became increasingly
uncontrollable. When Titus finally gave them permission to sack and
burn the city, he was merely giving his official imprimatur to what
was going to happen anyway. When, after the destruction of the city,
Titus paraded his army, decorating and promoting and rewarding with
booty those who had distinguished themselves and thanking his
soldiers in general for their courage and obedience, we may suspect
more than a slight note of irony at the
latter.
When the last resistance in the city failed,
the Romans slaughtered until their arms grew weary: Now devouring
fire and quenching blood fought their own battle for control of the
streets. The total Josephus gives for the dead in the siege -- 1.1
million, or nearly half the Jews in Judea -- may be somewhat less unlikely than most
such stratospheric figures that survive from antiquity. The siege of
Jerusalem was probably the greatest single slaughter
in ancient history. Not only was the city sacked and burned, but
Titus gave directions that what remained should be wholly
demolished, except for a stretch of wall and some high towers that
were left as a symbol to the world of Roman strength -- and as a
warning to anyone who might again defy the fury of the
Romans.
Titus returned to
Rome soon after the capture of
Jerusalem, leaving the final mopping-up operations in
Judea to his successors. The final drama played
out at the fortress of Masada, perched on a gaunt fourteen-hundred-foot
prominence and besieged by the Tenth Legion and several thousand
auxiliaries. In a massive engineering feat, the Romans built an
enormous ramp to the walls of the fortress and winched up their
siege engines. The end came in April of a.d. 73, when more than nine
hundred of Masada's defenders -- all but two women and five
children -- chose suicide over inevitable
defeat.
Bedazzled by the contrasts between the Romans, the
chaotic Galileans he commanded, and the Judeans whose fighting and
infighting he witnessed during the Jewish war, Josephus pointed to
discipline and training as the key qualities that set the Roman army
apart. Josephus' own narrative, however, shows that his formulation
was far too simple.
Roman soldiers of the empire remained highly volatile,
not only subject to panic (like all armies, in all generations) but
also to disobedience born of individual and mass aggression. Roman
generals understood that Roman victory depended on maintaining a
balance between competitive disciplina and undisciplined
virtus. Generals could preach and rail against the heedless
boldness of their troops, but they did not execute them for it,
knowing full well that the success of their soldiers in battle
depended on the qualities of spirit that produced their disobedience
and being happy to profit from the initiative that spirit produced,
as when soldiers without orders undermined the tower at Gamala or
made their night ascent up the Antonia.
The Romans saw no contradiction between their training
and discipline on the one hand and recruiting and using in battle
men not brought up in Roman ways on the other. They did not worry
(as many modern commentators have) about the increasing use of
barbarian soldiers in the Roman army. To the contrary, the army
actively sought out wild soldiers, confident that disciplina
was easier to teach than virtus, which came in the blood or
had to be inculcated from birth and could only be evoked, not
created, by leadership. A professional army with long terms of
service needed to recruit wilder soldiers to preserve the balance of
disciplina and virtus upon which victory
depended.
The Romans in fact exploited the variations in degree
of virtus and disciplina that their recruiting and
training produced, the legions coming to be valued and used
especially for their competitive disciplina, the auxiliaries
for their competitive virtus. The vaunted discipline of the
Romans drew its strength from the ancient Roman culture of
competition, and even so, the Romans knew full well it was of little
use alone. Roman victory came from mixing civilized competition in
duty, training, and restraint with savage courage, from joining the
dark forest to the shining city.
This article was written
by J.E. Lendon and originally published in the Summer 2005 edition
of MHQ. J.E. Lendon is an associate professor of history at
the University of Virginia. This article is excerpted from his book
Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical
Antiquity, to be published in May 2005 by Yale University Press.
Copyright ©2005 by Yale University.
Josephus' Jewish Wars
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