This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[316]
But as the people of Jotapata still held out manfully, and bore
up tinder their miseries beyond all that could be hoped for, on the forty-seventh
day [of the siege] the banks cast up by the Romans were become higher than
the wall; on which day a certain deserter went to Vespasian, and told him
how few were left in the city, and how weak they were, and that they had
been so worn out with perpetual watching, and as perpetual fighting, that
they could not now oppose any force that came against them, and that they
might he taken by stratagem, if any one would attack them; for that about
the last watch of the night, when they thought they might have some rest
from the hardships they were under, and when a morning sleep used to come
upon them, as they were thoroughly weary, he said the watch used to fall
asleep; accordingly his advice was, that they should make their attack
at that hour. But Vespasian had a suspicion about this deserter, as knowing
how faithful the Jews were to one another, and how much they despised any
punishments that could be inflicted on them; this last because one of the
people of Jotapata had undergone all sorts of torments, and though they
made him pass through a fiery trial of his enemies in his examination,
yet would he inform them nothing of the affairs within the city, and as
he was crucified, smiled at them. However, the probability there was in
the relation itself did partly confirm the truth of what the deserter told
them, and they thought he might probably speak truth. However, Vespasian
thought they should be no great sufferers if the report was a sham; so
he commanded them to keep the man in custody, and prepared the army for
taking the city.
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.