Characters

"An emperor ought to die standing."

Titus Flavius Vespasianus rose from the Italian municipal gentry rather than the old senatorial aristocracy — a self-made soldier-administrator with a reputation for bluntness, frugality, and dry humor. Nero gave him command of the war in Judea in 67 AD precisely because he was capable but unthreatening: a man too lowborn to dream of the throne. Vespasian methodically reconquered Galilee, captured Josephus at Jotapata, and was closing on Jerusalem when the empire dissolved into the chaos of the Year of the Four Emperors. In 69 AD the eastern legions proclaimed Vespasian emperor. He left the final reduction of Jerusalem to his son Titus and marched on Rome, founding the Flavian dynasty and restoring stability after Nero's fall and the civil wars. He funded his reign partly from the spoils of Judea — the great Colosseum was built with the plunder and slave labor of the Jewish war — and stamped 'IVDAEA CAPTA' on his coins. Pragmatic to the last, he reportedly joked on his deathbed about his impending deification: 'Alas, I think I am becoming a god.'

"Friends, I have lost a day."

Titus Flavius Vespasianus the Younger served as his father's chief lieutenant in Judea and inherited command of the war when Vespasian departed to seize the throne. In 70 AD he pressed the siege of Jerusalem to its terrible conclusion: the storming of the walls, the burning of the Second Temple, and the sack of the city. Roman sources portrayed him as reluctant to destroy the Temple; Jewish tradition remembered him as its destroyer. He carried the menorah and the Temple treasures back to Rome for a spectacular triumph, commemorated on the Arch of Titus that still stands in the Forum. As emperor (79–81 AD) Titus was remembered, somewhat improbably for the sacker of Jerusalem, as 'the darling of the human race' — generous, affable, and decisive in the relief efforts after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, and after a great fire and plague struck Rome. He completed and inaugurated the Colosseum his father had begun. His reign was brief; he died of fever after barely two years, and was succeeded by his far less beloved brother Domitian.

"Fortune had entirely passed over to the Romans."

Yosef ben Matityahu was a Jerusalem priest and scholar who, at the outbreak of the Great Revolt, was given command of Galilee. Besieged at Jotapata, he survived a suicide pact among the last defenders and surrendered to Vespasian, to whom he famously prophesied imperial power. When the prophecy came true, the grateful Vespasian freed him; Yosef took the family name Flavius and spent the rest of his life in Rome as a Roman citizen, pensioner, and writer. Reviled by many Jews as a traitor and distrusted by Romans as a Jew, Josephus turned his ambiguous position into literature. His 'Jewish War' and 'Jewish Antiquities' are the indispensable narrative sources for first-century Judea, the revolt, and the destruction of the Temple — and contain the only detailed account of Masada. A propagandist, an apologist, and a survivor, he wrote to explain the catastrophe to both peoples: arguing to the Romans that the Jews were an ancient and honorable nation, and to the Jews that resistance to Rome had been a tragic, God-ordained futility.

"He proclaimed liberty to slaves and rewards to the free."

Simon bar Giora ('son of the proselyte') was the most powerful of the rebel warlords during the Great Revolt — a charismatic populist who freed slaves, promised the poor relief from debt, and built a private army of tens of thousands. He fought at Beth Horon, terrorized the Judean countryside, and was eventually invited into Jerusalem to counter the rival faction of John of Gischala. The two warlords and a third, Eleazar ben Simon, fought a destructive civil war inside the besieged city even as the Romans closed in, burning the grain stores that might have sustained a long defense. When Jerusalem fell, Simon hid in the tunnels beneath the ruined city, then dramatically emerged in a white robe at the very spot where the Temple had stood — and was seized by the Romans. As the war's most prominent surviving commander, he was reserved for the climax of Titus's triumph in Rome: paraded through the streets, scourged, and ritually executed in the Forum, the customary fate of a defeated enemy general. His death formally closed the Roman victory.

"Let us die unenslaved by our enemies, and leave this world as free men."

Eleazar ben Yair was the commander of the Sicarii — the most radical of the rebel factions, named for the small daggers (sicae) they used in political assassinations — who seized the desert fortress of Masada early in the revolt. After Jerusalem fell, Masada held out for years as the last redoubt of the rebellion, a self-sufficient eyrie stocked with Herod's old storehouses and cisterns high above the Dead Sea. When the Tenth Legion's siege ramp finally reached the wall in 73–74 AD, Eleazar — according to Josephus's celebrated account — delivered two impassioned speeches persuading the 960 defenders that death as free men was preferable to slavery and outrage at Roman hands. The men killed their families and then themselves, casting lots so that the last would die by his own hand. The Romans entered to find the fortress silent and the defenders dead. The story, dependent entirely on Josephus and two women survivors he claims hid in a cistern, is debated by archaeologists, but it made Eleazar and Masada an enduring emblem of choosing death over subjugation.

"From Simon bar Kosiba to the men of En-Gedi… you sit, eat, and drink the property of Israel and care nothing for your brothers."

Simon bar Kosiba led the third and last great Jewish revolt against Rome (132–135 AD), provoked by the emperor Hadrian's plan to plant a pagan colony over Jerusalem and, the sources say, to ban circumcision. A leader of fierce discipline and authority, he was hailed by the great sage Rabbi Akiva as the Messiah and given the name 'bar Kokhba' — 'son of the star,' from a messianic prophecy. He established a functioning independent state, minting coins dated to the 'Freedom of Israel' and issuing administrative orders preserved in letters found in desert caves nineteen centuries later. His forces, exploiting a vast network of underground tunnels, inflicted heavy losses on the Romans and may have destroyed an entire legion, forcing Hadrian to recall his best general from Britain and commit enormous resources. But the Romans adopted a remorseless strategy of attrition, reducing fortress after fortress and devastating the country. Bar Kokhba made his final stand at Betar, where he was killed when the fortress fell. Later rabbinic tradition, embittered by the catastrophe, punned his name into 'bar Koziba' — 'son of the lie' — for his failed messianic claim.

"Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body…"

Publius Aelius Hadrianus was among the most cultured and restless of Roman emperors — a philhellene, traveler, builder, and consolidator who toured nearly every province of the empire and fixed its frontiers, most famously with the wall across northern Britain that bears his name. His reign (117–138 AD) was largely peaceful, but his policies in Judea ignited the empire's last great Jewish revolt. His decision to rebuild Jerusalem as the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina, crowned by a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount, was experienced by Jews as a deliberate desecration. When the Bar Kokhba revolt broke out, Hadrian responded with overwhelming and methodical force, and his retribution after victory was designed to extinguish Jewish nationhood: Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina, Jews were banned from Jerusalem, and Jewish religious practice was for a time suppressed. A patron of architecture, he left the Pantheon's reconstruction, his sprawling villa at Tivoli, and his great mausoleum (today's Castel Sant'Angelo). Grief-stricken by the drowning of his young companion Antinous, he had him deified across the East. He died in 138 AD, having secured a stable succession through Antoninus Pius.

"All is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is given."

Akiva ben Yosef was the towering rabbinic sage of his generation and, by tradition, an unlettered shepherd who began studying Torah only at the age of forty before becoming the architect of the systematized Oral Law that underlies the Mishnah and Talmud. His scholarship reorganized Jewish legal tradition; his students carried it forward through the catastrophe of the revolt. He was also the most prominent religious supporter of Simon bar Kokhba, reportedly applying to him the messianic verse 'a star shall come out of Jacob' — the source of the rebel leader's name. When the revolt failed and Hadrian's decrees forbade the teaching of Torah, Akiva defied the ban and continued to teach publicly. He was arrested, imprisoned, and executed by torture — flayed with iron combs — becoming the archetype of the Jewish martyr who dies sanctifying God's name. Tradition holds that he expired while reciting the Shema, the declaration of God's oneness, drawing out the final word 'Echad' (One) as he died. Revered ever after as one of the founders of rabbinic Judaism, his death made him, with the other 'Ten Martyrs,' a central figure of Jewish memory.