Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (49 page)

On the afternoon of May 2, General Silva called off the battering ram crews and sent in men armed with flaming torches. The wall was soon burning well. A strong wind then sprang up, at first blowing the fire into the faces of the Romans, before it changed direction and blew the other way, fanning the flames. Leaving a strong guard at the burning wall to ensure that none of the Jews on the summit escaped in the night, Silva c24.qxd 12/5/01 5:52 PM Page 263

gave orders for preparations to be made for an all-out assault through the burned wall next morning, then went to his bed.

The Zealots of Masada could see the writing on the burning wall.

They knew that next day the final Roman assault would take place. That night the men agreed that rather than fall into the hands of the Romans, they would prefer to die. They went to their wives and children and cut their throats. Then they submitted their own throats to their comrades.

Once the fighting men had been dispatched, ten Zealots, including Eleazar ben Jair, remained. They burned all their possessions, scrawled their names on pieces of broken pottery, and drew lots to see which of them would kill the others. In the end, one man remained. After setting fire to the palace, he fell on his sword beside his dead family.

At dawn on May 3, the Spanish legionaries of the 10th came storming through the ruined second wall, ready for anything—except, perhaps, for the desolate silence that greeted them. They shouted for the Jews to come out. In answer, an old woman emerged, followed by a younger woman, a relative of Eleazar, with five small children. While all the killing had been going on, these women and children had hidden in one of the underground water conduits.

Combing through the buildings on the summit, the legionaries found the bodies of the dead, and they praised the nobility of the Zealots’ end.

It was also the end of the First Jewish Revolt. After Masada, there were no more partisans left to fight.

In the second half of the twentieth century, following the creation of the modern state of Israel, new recruits into the Israeli Army were required to vow that, as long as they lived, Masada would never fall again.

The ramp built by the 10th Legion in a.d. 73 still runs from White Cliff to Masada today. An earthquake in 1927 caused it drop some 30 feet from its original height, but it otherwise remains much as the legion constructed it.

While he marched back to Jerusalem with most of the legion in mid-May of a.d. 73, General Silva delegated a detachment of the 10th to clean up Masada and repair its defenses, then set up quarters for themselves in the fortress. A detachment from the 10th, probably of cohort strength, continued to occupy Masada until a.d. 111.

The 10th Legion underwent its latest reenlistment in a.d. 104, during the early years of the reign of the Spanish-born soldier-emperor Trajan, son of the 10th’s commander back in the early stages of the Jewish Revolt.

It appears that for the first time in its history, the legion now took in new recruits from a recruiting ground other than Spain. Trajan was in the mid-

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dle of his Dacian Wars at this time, and had recently raised four new legions, one or more of them possibly in Spain. Increasingly during the second century, reenlistments took place in the regions where legions were stationed, and it appears that the 10th’s new recruits for a.d. 104 came from the provinces of Bithynia-Pontus, in northern Turkey. The second-enlistment senior cohorts would continue to be made up of Spaniards for the next twenty years, and some third-enlistment men would have stayed on in a.d. 124, But by a.d. 144 not a single Spaniard would have marched in the ranks of the 10th Legion.

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LAST DAYS

n a.d. 132, a new rebellion exploded across Judea. The Second Jewish Revolt took the Roman authorities completely by sur-

I
prise. The uprising had two catalysts. Emperor Hadrian, Trajan’s cousin and successor, had issued an edict declaring castration and circum-cision capital crimes. At the same time, he ordered that a temple to Jupiter be built on the site of the old Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Both acts incensed the Jews, who once more flourished in Judea.

A new Jewish leader, Simon bar Kochba, considered the Messiah by some Jews, skillfully organized his followers into guerrilla bands, and for three and a half years he ran the Roman military ragged. The men of the 10th Legion, mostly twenty-eight-year-old soldiers from northern Turkey at the outset who had seen no action in all their eight years with the legion, seem to have been surprised in their garrisons and ambushed on the march during the early stages of the revolt, sustaining heavy losses.

The 10th Legion seems fated to have suffered in Judea. The 10th had been the legion trapped at Jerusalem in 4 b.c. by the riots following the death of Herod, it had taken countless casualties in the a.d. 67–70 offensive, and now it was being stung by Jewish partisans yet again.

After the initial bloody uprising, the then Procurator of Judea, Tinnius Rufus, desperately sent to his superior at Antioch, the Governor of Syria, for reinforcements. But even the legions that came marching down into Judea in a.d. 132–133—probably the 4th Scythica, which didn’t gain its title until about a.d. 179, and the 16th Flavia—struggled against the hit-and-run tactics. More reinforcements had to be brought in, including the 6th Ferrata Legion, the “Ironclads.”

Issuing coins bearing his name and styling himself “Prince of Israel,”

Simon bar Kochba continued to send his bands darting from their secret strongholds to ravage the countryside before they melted away again.

Unprotected Gentile communities such as that peopled by the descendants
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of the 15th Legion veterans who had settled at Emmaus in a.d. 71 were savaged mercilessly.

So serious was the situation considered by Rome that the Palatium dispatched Lieutenant General Julius Severus from Britain, where he was governor, to head the Roman forces fighting the rebels in Judea. General Severus eventually wiped out the guerrilla bands by fighting fire with fire—he broke up his legions and cavalry wings into scores of small, mobile units commanded by tribunes and centurions, rapid-reaction groups that could respond quickly whenever reports of guerrilla activities in their locality came in.

Many of the rebel strongholds had been ingeniously built underground, making them almost impossible to locate. But gradually, one by one, the legions did track them down and destroy them—50 of the most important hideouts were obliterated, according to Cassius Dio, who also writes that 985 Jewish villages were destroyed in the campaign, and 580,000 Jews killed by the sword, with many more dying from starvation.

The war was brought to an end in a.d. 135 when General Severus finally cornered and captured Simon bar Kochba himself in his last stronghold, at Bether, near Jerusalem.

This Second Jewish Revolt devastated the province. And it sealed the fate of Jews in Judea. Following the termination of the revolt, Jews were banned from Jerusalem, and before long from all of Judea. It would take them eighteen hundred years to return.

The 10th Legion seems to have suffered badly during the revolt, as did many of the units involved in the forty-two-month war, which resulted in so many Roman casualties that Emperor Hadrian omitted the customary “I and the legions are well” at the commencement of his a.d. 135 letter to the Senate in which he advised that the revolt had finally been put down.

After the revolt, the Palatium increased the strength of the Judea station to two legions, based permanently in the province to police the strict laws that from that time forward prevented Jews from even clapping eyes on what used to be Jerusalem. The city was renamed Aelia Capitolina after 135, in honor of Hadrian—Aelius was his family name—and the principal Roman god, Jupiter. In another step designed to eliminate all reminders of the Jewish era, the province’s name was also now changed, to Syria Palaestina—Palestinian Syria. But the name of Judea would continue to be used colloquially for Palestine and would reassert itself over time.

The Palatium had a tendency to relocate any legion that took heavy casualties in its theater of operations, and, apparently, because its strength had been so reduced by the revolt, the 10th Legion was now withdrawn to c25.qxd 12/5/01 5:52 PM Page 267

Caesarea, the provincial capital, on the coast, and the 6th Ferrata Legion took over its quarters at Aelia Capitolina. From a.d. 89, following a decree of the emperor Domitian in the wake of the Saturninus Revolt on the Rhine, no two legions could share the same base, anywhere in the empire. As a consequence, separate bases in Judea for the 10th and the 6th Ferrata were the norm.

The 6th Ferrata, a unit raised by Galba in Spain in a.d. 68 during the early stages of the civil war that brought Vespasian to power, soon undertook a number of construction projects on orders from Rome, including the rebuilding of the legionary fortress at Jerusalem. Over the gates they installed the motif of a boar, believed to be the 6th Ferrata Legion’s emblem, and a symbol considered very powerful by the Spanish legionaries’ Celtic ancestors. The legionaries also built the planned temple to Jupiter on the site of the Jewish Temple, and constructed another Roman temple at Golgotha outside the city, over the site where the annoying Christian sect claimed that its founder, Jesus Christus, had been crucified in the reign of Tiberius.

The 10th Legion and the 6th Ferrata Legion were still based in Judea in a.d. 233. To the south, another legion was stationed in Egypt, one in Arabia, two in Mesopotamia. To the north, there was a single legion in Phoenicia, two in Syria, and two in Cappadocia.

By the fifth century, Syria would be divided into five provinces, of which Palestine was one, administered from Constantinople, the former Byzantium, as a part of the Byzantine Empire, the eastern remnant of the Roman Empire. In the West, Rome had by then fallen to the barbarians.

Of necessity, with their old recruiting grounds in foreign hands, recruits for the legions in the East were raised locally as a matter of course, although that process had, as was the case with 10th, already begun as early as the second century. From the third century, “Caesar’s finest,” the 10th Legion, like all the legions in the Syrian provinces, if it still existed in its old form, occupied the line of forts along the Euphrates, the
limes.

The concept of the legions as totally self-contained mobile forces had given way to a Byzantine strategy of defending the frontier from static fortifications, in an attempt to counter masses of heavily armored mounted raiders from the East. Fifteen centuries later, similar monuments in con-crete and stone, such as the Maginot Line, would prove even less effective against mobile armor.

Five new legions, the Palatine Legions, of just fifteen hundred men each, were created in the fourth century by the Byzantine emperor Constantine the Great, as rapid reaction forces, and for a time they proved c25.qxd 12/5/01 5:52 PM Page 268

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successful in that role. But before the fourth century was out one of Constantine’s successors, Valens, led his Palatine legions to their destruction.

His crushing defeat by the Germanic Visigoths at Adrianople in Turkey in a.d. 378, in which forty thousand of Valens’s troops are said to have died, well and truly signaled the end of the golden age of the legions.

By the seventh century, Syria and the Middle East generally were in the hands of Muslim invaders. The latest invasion had begun in 633–634.

Damascus fell the following year, and an attempt in 636 to regain Syria by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius ended in defeat at the Battle of the Yarmuk River in Turkey, in the vicinity of Julius Caesar’s great 47 b.c. victory at Zela. Like Caesar, the Muslim invaders came, saw, and conquered.

And in the process, the 10th Legion, in whatever form as a border guard unit it had survived to this point, would have been obliterated by the invaders.

Such was the fate of the legion of proud, determined Centurion Gaius Crastinus. The legion Julius Caesar trusted with his fate, and his life, more than once. The legion Pompey the Great recognized at his opponent’s stoutest. The legion that rediscovered its grit under Corbulo’s tough tute-lage and that shed its blood under the walls of Jefat and Jerusalem for Vespasian and Titus.

Many legions were granted official titles over the years in recognition of their courage and their loyalty. The original 6th became the Conqueror, the 12th the Thunderer, the 20th the Powerful Conqueror, while, for the same reasons, others were bestowed with the names of emperors—the 2nd, 3rd, and 8th Augustans, the 7th and 11th Claudians, the 4th and 16th Flavians. Others had titles that celebrated where they had been raised, or where they achieved a great victory, such as the 5th Macedonica and the 9th Hispana. The 10th Legion didn’t need an official title. Everyone knew the “world-famous” 10th, knew where it had been, what it had done, what it was capable of. With its glory days lasting perhaps 135 years from the day Julius Caesar founded it in 61 b.c., it would always be remembered as Caesar’s finest. And Rome’s best.

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T h e L e g io n s of R om e ,

3 0 B.C. – A.D. 233

A. The Augustan Legions

According to Cassius Dio, legions marked with an asterisk were still in existence in a.d. 233.

1st Legion:
Founded by Pompey the Great in 84 b.c. Believed to have been disbanded by the emperor Vespasian in a.d. 74.

2nd Augusta Legion:
Founded by Pompey the Great in 84 b.c. Granted “Augusta”

title, meaning “Augustus’s,” by the emperor Augustus circa 25 b.c.*