This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[551]
And then it was that Cestius, despairing of obtaining room for a
public march, contrived how he might best run away; and when he had selected
four hundred of the most courageous of his soldiers, he placed them at
the strongest of their fortifications, and gave order, that when they went
up to the morning guard, they should erect their ensigns, that the Jews
might be made to believe that the entire army was there still, while he
himself took the rest of his forces with him, and marched, without any
noise, thirty furlongs. But when the Jews perceived, in the morning, that
the camp was empty, they ran upon those four hundred who had deluded them,
and immediately threw their darts at them, and slew them; and then pursued
after Cestius. But he had already made use of a great part of the night
in his flight, and still marched quicker when it was day; insomuch that
the soldiers, through the astonishment and fear they were in, left behind
them their engines for sieges, and for throwing of stones, and a great
part of the instruments of war. So the Jews went on pursuing the Romans
as far as Antipatris; after which, seeing they could not overtake them,
they came back, and took the engines, and spoiled the dead bodies, and
gathered the prey together which the Romans had left behind them, and came
back running and singing to their metropolis; while they had themselves
lost a few only, but had slain of the Romans five thousand and three hundred
footmen, and three hundred and eighty horsemen. This defeat happened on
the eighth day of the month Dius, [Marchesvan,] in the twelfth year of
the reign of Nero.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.