本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛windriver (夏河) 在 { 犹太人 － 一个没有根的民族 （上）} 中声称 { 令人不寒而傈的是，也许长期为生存挣扎，饱受欺凌的生活给他们留下了深刻的烙印，与其他以抢劫为生的民族不同：犹太人对其他人的种族灭绝，是在其宗教影响下自觉而冷静的行为。 }
下文摘自 丘吉尔 的 THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN， THE FIRST VOLUME OF A HISTORY OF THE English-Speaking Peoples ：种族灭绝 是一而再再而三在不同时间地点重复上演的大戏。
A broader question is keenly disputed. Did the invaders exterminate the native population, or did they superimpose themselves upon them and become to some extent blended with them? Here it is necessary to
distinguish between the age of fierce forays in search of plunder and the age of settlement. { Gildas is speaking of the former, and the scenes he describes were repeated in the Danish invasions three centuries later.} But to the settler such raids are only occasional incidents in a life mainly occupied in subduing the soil, and in that engrossing task labour is as important as land. The evidence of place-names suggests that in Sussex extermination was the rule. Farther west there are grounds for thinking that a substantial British population survived, and the oldest West Saxon code of A.D. 694 makes careful provision for the rights of â€oeWelshmen†of various degrees—substantial landowners, and â€oethe King’s Welshmen who ride his errands,†his native gallopers in fact, who know the ancient track-ways. Even where self-interest did not preserve the native villagers as labourers on Saxon farms we may cherish the hope that somewhere a maiden’s cry for pity, the appeal of beauty in distress, the lustful needs of an invading force, would create some bond between victor and vanquished. Thus the blood would be preserved, thus the rigours of subjugation would fade as generations passed away. The complete obliteration of an entire race over large areas is repulsive to the human mind. There should at least have been, in default of pity, a hearing for practical advantage or the natural temptations of sex. Thus serious writers contend that the Anglo-Saxon conquest was for the bulk of the British community mainly a change of masters. The rich were slaughtered; the brave and proud fell back in large numbers upon the Western mountains. Other numerous bands escaped betimes to Brittany, whence their remote posterity were one day to return.
而 timurzhao(timurzhao) 的回帖：“看夏河历史方面的文章，发现他喜欢打死老虎、病老虎，喜欢偷下口、喜欢在别人无法反抗或不知道的情况下泼脏水。喜欢在不研究历史不写大块文章的人面前贩卖非常突兀的结论。”
--- 读来让人觉得阴气飕飕，想起非洲能平地立起3米多高居高临下咬人的毒蛇。
下文描叙的大屠杀摘自 Simon Sebag Montefiore 的 Jerusalem （in plain English: City of Peace, or City of God )：
Around the walls, there were gruesome scenes that must have resembled Hell on Earth. Thousands of bodies putrefied in the sun. The stench was unbearable. Packs of dogs and jackals feasted on human flesh. In the preceding months, Titus had ordered all prisoners or defectors to be crucified. Five hundred Jews were crucified each day. The Mount of Olives and the craggy hills around the city were so crowded with crucifixes that there was scarcely room for any more, nor trees to make them.
Titus’ soldiers amused themselves by nailing their victims splayed and spread-eagled in absurd positions. So desperate were many Jerusalemites to escape the city that, as they left, they swallowed their coins, to conceal their treasure, which they hoped to retrieve when they were safely clear of the Romans. They emerged “puffed up with famine and swelled like men with dropsy,” but if they ate they “burst asunder.” As their bellies exploded, the soldiers discovered their reeking intestinal treasure troves, so they started to gut all prisoners, eviscerating them and searching their intestines while they were still alive. But Titus was appalled and tried to ban these anatomical plunderings. To no avail: Titus’ Syrian auxiliaries, who hated and were hated by the Jews with all the malice of neighbours, relished these macabre games.
The war had begun when the ineptitude and greed of the Roman governors had driven even the Judaean aristocracy, Rome’s own Jewish allies, to make common cause with a popular religious revolt. The rebels were a mixture of religious Jews and opportunistic brigands who had exploited the decline of the emperor, Nero, and the chaos that followed his suicide, to expel the Romans and re-establish an independent Jewish state, based around the Temple. But the Jewish revolution immediately started to consume itself in bloody purges and gang-warfare.
Three Roman emperors followed Nero in rapid and chaotic succession. By the time Vespasian emerged as emperor and despatched Titus to take Jerusalem, the city was divided between three warlords at war with each other. The Jewish warlords had first fought pitched battles in the Temple courts, which ran with blood, and then plundered the city. Their fighters worked their way through the richer neighbourhoods, ransacking the houses, killing the men and abusing the women — “it was sport to them.” Crazed by their power and the thrill of the hunt, probably intoxicated with looted wine, they “indulged themselves in feminine wantonness, decked their hair and put on women’s garments and besmeared themselves with ointments and had paints under their eyes.”
These provincial cut-throats, swaggering in “finely dyed cloaks,” killed anyone in their path. In their ingenious depravity, they “invented unlawful pleasures.” Jerusalem, given over to “intolerable uncleanness,” became “a brothel” and torture-chamber — and yet remained a shrine.
Somehow, the Temple continued to function. Back in April, pilgrims had arrived for Passover just before the Romans closed in on the city. The population was usually in the high tens of thousands, but the Romans had now trapped the pilgrims and many refugees from the war, so there were hundreds of thousands of people in the city. Only as Titus encircled the walls did the rebel chieftains halt their in-fighting to unite their 21,000 warriors and face the Romans together.
The city that Titus saw for the first time from Mount Scopus, named after the Greek skopeo meaning “look at,” was, in Pliny’s words, “by far the most celebrated city of the East,” an opulent, thriving metropolis built around one of the greatest temples of the ancient world, itself an exquisite work of art on an immense scale. Jerusalem had already existed for thousands of years but this many-walled and towered city, astride two mountains amid the barren crags of Judaea, had never been as populous or as awesome as it was in the first century AD: Indeed, Jerusalem would not be so great again until the twentieth century. This was the achievement of Herod the Great, the brilliant, psychotic Judaean king whose palaces and fortresses were built on so monumental a scale and were so luxurious in their decoration that the Jewish historian Josephus says that they “exceed all my ability to describe them.”
The Temple itself overshadowed all else in its numinous glory. “At the first rising of the sun,” its gleaming courts and gilded gates “reflected back a very fiery splendour and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away.” When strangers — such as Titus and his legionaries — saw this Temple for the first time, it appeared “like a mountain covered with snow.” Pious Jews knew that at the centre of the courts of this city-within-a-city atop Mount Moriah was a tiny room of superlative holiness that contained virtually nothing at all. This space was the focus of Jewish sanctity: the Holy of Holies, the dwelling-place of God Himself.
Herod’s Temple was a shrine but it was also a near-impregnable fortress within the walled city. The Jews, encouraged by Roman weakness in the Year of the Four Emperors and aided by Jerusalem’s precipitous heights, her fortifications and the labyrinthine Temple itself, had confronted Titus with overweening confidence. After all, they had defied Rome for almost five years. However, Titus possessed the authority, the ambition, the resources and the talent necessary for the task. He set about reducing Jerusalem with systematic efficiency and overwhelming force. Ballistae stones, probably fired by Titus, have been found in the tunnels beside the Temple’s western wall, testament to the intensity of Roman bombardment.
The Jews fought for every inch with almost suicidal abandon. Yet Titus, commanding the full arsenal of siege engines, catapults and the ingenuity of Roman engineering, overcame the first wall within 15 days. He led a thousand legionaries into the maze of Jerusalem’s markets and stormed the second wall. But the Jews sortied out and retook it. The wall had to be stormed all over again. Titus next tried to overawe the city with a parade of his army — cuirasses, helmets, blades flashing, flags fluttering, eagles glinting, “horses richly caparisoned.” Thousands of Jerusalemites gathered on the battlements to gawp at this show, admiring “the beauty of their armour and admirable order of the men.” The Jews remained defiant, or too afraid of their warlords to disobey their orders: no surrender.
Finally, Titus decided to encircle and seal the entire city by building a wall of circumvallation. In late June, the Romans stormed the hulking Antonia Fortress that commanded the Temple itself and then razed it, except for one tower where Titus set up his command-post.
By mid-summer, as the blistered and jagged hills sprouted forests of fly-blown crucified cadavers, the city within was tormented by a sense of impending doom, intransigent fanaticism, whimsical sadism, and searing hunger. Armed gangs prowled for food. Children grabbed the morsels from their fathers’ hands; mothers stole the tidbits of their own babies. Locked doors suggested hidden provisions and the warriors broke in, driving stakes up their victims’ rectums to force them to reveal their caches of grain. If they found nothing, they were even more “barbarously cruel” as if they had been “defrauded.” Even though the fighters themselves still had food, they killed and tortured out of habit “to keep their madness in exercise.” Jerusalem was riven by witch-hunts as people denounced each other as hoarders and traitors. No other city, reflected the eyewitness Josephus, “did ever allow such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was, since the beginning of the world.”
The young wandered the streets “like shadows, all swollen with famine, and fell down dead, wherever their misery seized them.” People died trying to bury their families while others were buried carelessly, still breathing. Famine devoured whole families in their homes. Jerusalemites saw their loved ones die “with dry eyes and open mouths. A deep silence and a kind of deadly night seized the city” — yet those who perished did so “with their eyes fixed on the Temple.” The streets were heaped with dead bodies. Soon, despite Jewish Law, no one buried the dead anymore in this grandiose charnelhouse. Perhaps Jesus Christ had foreseen this when he predicted the coming Apocalypse, saying “Let the dead bury their dead.” Sometimes the rebels just heaved bodies over the walls. The Romans left them to rot in putrescent piles. Yet the rebels were still fighting.
Titus himself, an unsqueamish Roman soldier, who had killed 12 Jews with his own crossbow in his first skirmish, was horrified and amazed: He could only groan to the gods that this was not his doing. “The darling and delight of the human race,” he was known for his generosity. “Friends, I’ve lost a day,” he would say when he had not found time to give presents to his comrades. Sturdy and bluff with a cleft chin, generous mouth and round face, Titus was proving to be a gifted commander and a popular son of the new emperor Vespasian: their unproven dynasty depended on Titus’ victory over the Jewish rebels.
Titus’ entourage was filled with Jewish renegades including three Jerusalemites — a historian, a king and (it seems) a double-queen who was sharing the Caesar’s bed. The historian was Titus’ adviser Josephus, a rebel Jewish commander who had defected to the Romans and who is the sole source for this account. The king was Herod Agrippa II, a very Roman Jew, brought up at the court of the Emperor Claudius; he had been the supervisor of the Jewish Temple, built by his great-grandfather Herod the Great, and often resided in his Jerusalem palace, even though he ruled disparate territories across the north of modern Israel, Syria and Lebanon.
The king was almost certainly accompanied by his sister, Berenice, daughter of a Jewish monarch, and twice a queen by marriage, who had recently become Titus’ mistress. Her Roman enemies later denounced her as “the Jewish Cleopatra.” She was around 40 but “she was in her best years and at the height of her beauty,” noted Josephus. At the start of the rebellion, she and her brother, who lived together (incestuously, claimed their enemies), had attempted to face down the rebels in a last appeal to reason. Now these three Jews helplessly watched the “death-agony of a famous city” — Berenice did so from the bed of its destroyer.
Prisoners and defectors brought news from within the city that especially upset Josephus, whose own parents were trapped inside. Even the fighters started to run out of food, so they too probed and dissected the quick and the dead, for gold, for crumbs, for mere seeds, “stumbling and staggering like mad dogs.” They ate cow dung, leather, girdles, shoes and old hay. A rich woman named Mary, having lost all her money and food, became so demented that she killed her own son and roasted him, eating half and keeping the rest for later. The delicious aroma crept across the city. The rebels savoured it, sought it and smashed into the house, but even those practised hatchetmen, on seeing the child’s half-eaten body, “went out trembling.”
Spy-mania and paranoia ruled Jerusalem the Holy — as the Jewish coins called her. Raving charlatans and preaching hierophants haunted the streets, promising deliverance and salvation. Jerusalem was, Josephus observed, “like a wild beast gone mad which, for want of food, fell now upon eating its own flesh.”
That night of the 8th of Ab, when Titus had retired to rest, his legionaries tried to douse the fire spread by the molten silver, as he had ordered. But the rebels attacked the fire-fighting legionaries. The Romans fought back and pushed the Jews into the Temple itself. One legionary, seized “with a divine fury,” grabbed some burning materials and, lifted up by another soldier, lit the curtains and frame of “a golden window,” which was linked to the rooms around the actual Temple. By morning, the fire had spread to the very heart of holiness. The Jews, seeing the flames licking the Holy of Holies and threatening to destroy it, “made a great clamour and ran to prevent it.” But it was too late. They barricaded themselves in the Inner Court then watched with aghast silence.
Just a few yards away, among the ruins of the Antonia Fortress, Titus was awakened; he jumped up and “ran towards the Holy House to put a stop to the fire.” His entourage including Josephus, and probably King Agrippa and Berenice, followed, and after them ran thousands of Roman soldiers — all “in great astonishment.” The fighting was frenzied. Josephus claims that Titus again ordered the fire extinguished, but this Roman collaborator had good reasons to excuse his patron. Nonetheless, everyone was shouting, the fire was racing and the Roman soldiers knew that, by the laws of warfare, a city that had resisted so obstinately expected to be sacked.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
下文摘自 丘吉尔 的 THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN， THE FIRST VOLUME OF A HISTORY OF THE English-Speaking Peoples ：种族灭绝 是一而再再而三在不同时间地点重复上演的大戏。
A broader question is keenly disputed. Did the invaders exterminate the native population, or did they superimpose themselves upon them and become to some extent blended with them? Here it is necessary to
distinguish between the age of fierce forays in search of plunder and the age of settlement. { Gildas is speaking of the former, and the scenes he describes were repeated in the Danish invasions three centuries later.} But to the settler such raids are only occasional incidents in a life mainly occupied in subduing the soil, and in that engrossing task labour is as important as land. The evidence of place-names suggests that in Sussex extermination was the rule. Farther west there are grounds for thinking that a substantial British population survived, and the oldest West Saxon code of A.D. 694 makes careful provision for the rights of â€oeWelshmen†of various degrees—substantial landowners, and â€oethe King’s Welshmen who ride his errands,†his native gallopers in fact, who know the ancient track-ways. Even where self-interest did not preserve the native villagers as labourers on Saxon farms we may cherish the hope that somewhere a maiden’s cry for pity, the appeal of beauty in distress, the lustful needs of an invading force, would create some bond between victor and vanquished. Thus the blood would be preserved, thus the rigours of subjugation would fade as generations passed away. The complete obliteration of an entire race over large areas is repulsive to the human mind. There should at least have been, in default of pity, a hearing for practical advantage or the natural temptations of sex. Thus serious writers contend that the Anglo-Saxon conquest was for the bulk of the British community mainly a change of masters. The rich were slaughtered; the brave and proud fell back in large numbers upon the Western mountains. Other numerous bands escaped betimes to Brittany, whence their remote posterity were one day to return.
而 timurzhao(timurzhao) 的回帖：“看夏河历史方面的文章，发现他喜欢打死老虎、病老虎，喜欢偷下口、喜欢在别人无法反抗或不知道的情况下泼脏水。喜欢在不研究历史不写大块文章的人面前贩卖非常突兀的结论。”
--- 读来让人觉得阴气飕飕，想起非洲能平地立起3米多高居高临下咬人的毒蛇。
下文描叙的大屠杀摘自 Simon Sebag Montefiore 的 Jerusalem （in plain English: City of Peace, or City of God )：
Around the walls, there were gruesome scenes that must have resembled Hell on Earth. Thousands of bodies putrefied in the sun. The stench was unbearable. Packs of dogs and jackals feasted on human flesh. In the preceding months, Titus had ordered all prisoners or defectors to be crucified. Five hundred Jews were crucified each day. The Mount of Olives and the craggy hills around the city were so crowded with crucifixes that there was scarcely room for any more, nor trees to make them.
Titus’ soldiers amused themselves by nailing their victims splayed and spread-eagled in absurd positions. So desperate were many Jerusalemites to escape the city that, as they left, they swallowed their coins, to conceal their treasure, which they hoped to retrieve when they were safely clear of the Romans. They emerged “puffed up with famine and swelled like men with dropsy,” but if they ate they “burst asunder.” As their bellies exploded, the soldiers discovered their reeking intestinal treasure troves, so they started to gut all prisoners, eviscerating them and searching their intestines while they were still alive. But Titus was appalled and tried to ban these anatomical plunderings. To no avail: Titus’ Syrian auxiliaries, who hated and were hated by the Jews with all the malice of neighbours, relished these macabre games.
The war had begun when the ineptitude and greed of the Roman governors had driven even the Judaean aristocracy, Rome’s own Jewish allies, to make common cause with a popular religious revolt. The rebels were a mixture of religious Jews and opportunistic brigands who had exploited the decline of the emperor, Nero, and the chaos that followed his suicide, to expel the Romans and re-establish an independent Jewish state, based around the Temple. But the Jewish revolution immediately started to consume itself in bloody purges and gang-warfare.
Three Roman emperors followed Nero in rapid and chaotic succession. By the time Vespasian emerged as emperor and despatched Titus to take Jerusalem, the city was divided between three warlords at war with each other. The Jewish warlords had first fought pitched battles in the Temple courts, which ran with blood, and then plundered the city. Their fighters worked their way through the richer neighbourhoods, ransacking the houses, killing the men and abusing the women — “it was sport to them.” Crazed by their power and the thrill of the hunt, probably intoxicated with looted wine, they “indulged themselves in feminine wantonness, decked their hair and put on women’s garments and besmeared themselves with ointments and had paints under their eyes.”
These provincial cut-throats, swaggering in “finely dyed cloaks,” killed anyone in their path. In their ingenious depravity, they “invented unlawful pleasures.” Jerusalem, given over to “intolerable uncleanness,” became “a brothel” and torture-chamber — and yet remained a shrine.
Somehow, the Temple continued to function. Back in April, pilgrims had arrived for Passover just before the Romans closed in on the city. The population was usually in the high tens of thousands, but the Romans had now trapped the pilgrims and many refugees from the war, so there were hundreds of thousands of people in the city. Only as Titus encircled the walls did the rebel chieftains halt their in-fighting to unite their 21,000 warriors and face the Romans together.
The city that Titus saw for the first time from Mount Scopus, named after the Greek skopeo meaning “look at,” was, in Pliny’s words, “by far the most celebrated city of the East,” an opulent, thriving metropolis built around one of the greatest temples of the ancient world, itself an exquisite work of art on an immense scale. Jerusalem had already existed for thousands of years but this many-walled and towered city, astride two mountains amid the barren crags of Judaea, had never been as populous or as awesome as it was in the first century AD: Indeed, Jerusalem would not be so great again until the twentieth century. This was the achievement of Herod the Great, the brilliant, psychotic Judaean king whose palaces and fortresses were built on so monumental a scale and were so luxurious in their decoration that the Jewish historian Josephus says that they “exceed all my ability to describe them.”
The Temple itself overshadowed all else in its numinous glory. “At the first rising of the sun,” its gleaming courts and gilded gates “reflected back a very fiery splendour and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away.” When strangers — such as Titus and his legionaries — saw this Temple for the first time, it appeared “like a mountain covered with snow.” Pious Jews knew that at the centre of the courts of this city-within-a-city atop Mount Moriah was a tiny room of superlative holiness that contained virtually nothing at all. This space was the focus of Jewish sanctity: the Holy of Holies, the dwelling-place of God Himself.
Herod’s Temple was a shrine but it was also a near-impregnable fortress within the walled city. The Jews, encouraged by Roman weakness in the Year of the Four Emperors and aided by Jerusalem’s precipitous heights, her fortifications and the labyrinthine Temple itself, had confronted Titus with overweening confidence. After all, they had defied Rome for almost five years. However, Titus possessed the authority, the ambition, the resources and the talent necessary for the task. He set about reducing Jerusalem with systematic efficiency and overwhelming force. Ballistae stones, probably fired by Titus, have been found in the tunnels beside the Temple’s western wall, testament to the intensity of Roman bombardment.
The Jews fought for every inch with almost suicidal abandon. Yet Titus, commanding the full arsenal of siege engines, catapults and the ingenuity of Roman engineering, overcame the first wall within 15 days. He led a thousand legionaries into the maze of Jerusalem’s markets and stormed the second wall. But the Jews sortied out and retook it. The wall had to be stormed all over again. Titus next tried to overawe the city with a parade of his army — cuirasses, helmets, blades flashing, flags fluttering, eagles glinting, “horses richly caparisoned.” Thousands of Jerusalemites gathered on the battlements to gawp at this show, admiring “the beauty of their armour and admirable order of the men.” The Jews remained defiant, or too afraid of their warlords to disobey their orders: no surrender.
Finally, Titus decided to encircle and seal the entire city by building a wall of circumvallation. In late June, the Romans stormed the hulking Antonia Fortress that commanded the Temple itself and then razed it, except for one tower where Titus set up his command-post.
By mid-summer, as the blistered and jagged hills sprouted forests of fly-blown crucified cadavers, the city within was tormented by a sense of impending doom, intransigent fanaticism, whimsical sadism, and searing hunger. Armed gangs prowled for food. Children grabbed the morsels from their fathers’ hands; mothers stole the tidbits of their own babies. Locked doors suggested hidden provisions and the warriors broke in, driving stakes up their victims’ rectums to force them to reveal their caches of grain. If they found nothing, they were even more “barbarously cruel” as if they had been “defrauded.” Even though the fighters themselves still had food, they killed and tortured out of habit “to keep their madness in exercise.” Jerusalem was riven by witch-hunts as people denounced each other as hoarders and traitors. No other city, reflected the eyewitness Josephus, “did ever allow such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was, since the beginning of the world.”
The young wandered the streets “like shadows, all swollen with famine, and fell down dead, wherever their misery seized them.” People died trying to bury their families while others were buried carelessly, still breathing. Famine devoured whole families in their homes. Jerusalemites saw their loved ones die “with dry eyes and open mouths. A deep silence and a kind of deadly night seized the city” — yet those who perished did so “with their eyes fixed on the Temple.” The streets were heaped with dead bodies. Soon, despite Jewish Law, no one buried the dead anymore in this grandiose charnelhouse. Perhaps Jesus Christ had foreseen this when he predicted the coming Apocalypse, saying “Let the dead bury their dead.” Sometimes the rebels just heaved bodies over the walls. The Romans left them to rot in putrescent piles. Yet the rebels were still fighting.
Titus himself, an unsqueamish Roman soldier, who had killed 12 Jews with his own crossbow in his first skirmish, was horrified and amazed: He could only groan to the gods that this was not his doing. “The darling and delight of the human race,” he was known for his generosity. “Friends, I’ve lost a day,” he would say when he had not found time to give presents to his comrades. Sturdy and bluff with a cleft chin, generous mouth and round face, Titus was proving to be a gifted commander and a popular son of the new emperor Vespasian: their unproven dynasty depended on Titus’ victory over the Jewish rebels.
Titus’ entourage was filled with Jewish renegades including three Jerusalemites — a historian, a king and (it seems) a double-queen who was sharing the Caesar’s bed. The historian was Titus’ adviser Josephus, a rebel Jewish commander who had defected to the Romans and who is the sole source for this account. The king was Herod Agrippa II, a very Roman Jew, brought up at the court of the Emperor Claudius; he had been the supervisor of the Jewish Temple, built by his great-grandfather Herod the Great, and often resided in his Jerusalem palace, even though he ruled disparate territories across the north of modern Israel, Syria and Lebanon.
The king was almost certainly accompanied by his sister, Berenice, daughter of a Jewish monarch, and twice a queen by marriage, who had recently become Titus’ mistress. Her Roman enemies later denounced her as “the Jewish Cleopatra.” She was around 40 but “she was in her best years and at the height of her beauty,” noted Josephus. At the start of the rebellion, she and her brother, who lived together (incestuously, claimed their enemies), had attempted to face down the rebels in a last appeal to reason. Now these three Jews helplessly watched the “death-agony of a famous city” — Berenice did so from the bed of its destroyer.
Prisoners and defectors brought news from within the city that especially upset Josephus, whose own parents were trapped inside. Even the fighters started to run out of food, so they too probed and dissected the quick and the dead, for gold, for crumbs, for mere seeds, “stumbling and staggering like mad dogs.” They ate cow dung, leather, girdles, shoes and old hay. A rich woman named Mary, having lost all her money and food, became so demented that she killed her own son and roasted him, eating half and keeping the rest for later. The delicious aroma crept across the city. The rebels savoured it, sought it and smashed into the house, but even those practised hatchetmen, on seeing the child’s half-eaten body, “went out trembling.”
Spy-mania and paranoia ruled Jerusalem the Holy — as the Jewish coins called her. Raving charlatans and preaching hierophants haunted the streets, promising deliverance and salvation. Jerusalem was, Josephus observed, “like a wild beast gone mad which, for want of food, fell now upon eating its own flesh.”
That night of the 8th of Ab, when Titus had retired to rest, his legionaries tried to douse the fire spread by the molten silver, as he had ordered. But the rebels attacked the fire-fighting legionaries. The Romans fought back and pushed the Jews into the Temple itself. One legionary, seized “with a divine fury,” grabbed some burning materials and, lifted up by another soldier, lit the curtains and frame of “a golden window,” which was linked to the rooms around the actual Temple. By morning, the fire had spread to the very heart of holiness. The Jews, seeing the flames licking the Holy of Holies and threatening to destroy it, “made a great clamour and ran to prevent it.” But it was too late. They barricaded themselves in the Inner Court then watched with aghast silence.
Just a few yards away, among the ruins of the Antonia Fortress, Titus was awakened; he jumped up and “ran towards the Holy House to put a stop to the fire.” His entourage including Josephus, and probably King Agrippa and Berenice, followed, and after them ran thousands of Roman soldiers — all “in great astonishment.” The fighting was frenzied. Josephus claims that Titus again ordered the fire extinguished, but this Roman collaborator had good reasons to excuse his patron. Nonetheless, everyone was shouting, the fire was racing and the Roman soldiers knew that, by the laws of warfare, a city that had resisted so obstinately expected to be sacked.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net