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[275]
And now, upon the finishing the Roman works, the workmen measured
the distance there was from the wall, and this by lead and a line, which
they threw to it from their banks; for they could not measure it any otherwise,
because the Jews would shoot at them, if they came to measure it themselves;
and when they found that the engines could reach the wall, they brought
them thither. Then did Titus set his engines at proper distances, so much
nearer to the wall, that the Jews might not be able to repel them, and
gave orders they should go to work; and when thereupon a prodigious noise
echoed round about from three places, and that on the sudden there was
a great noise made by the citizens that were within the city, and no less
a terror fell upon the seditious themselves; whereupon both sorts, seeing
the common danger they were in, contrived to make a like defense. So those
of different factions cried out one to another, that they acted entirely
as in concert with their enemies; whereas they ought however, notwithstanding
God did not grant them a lasting concord, in their present circumstances,
to lay aside their enmities one against another, and to unite together
against the Romans. Accordingly, Simon gave those that came from the temple
leave, by proclamation, to go upon the wall; John also himself, though
he could not believe Simon was in earnest, gave them the same leave. So
on both sides they laid aside their hatred and their peculiar quarrels,
and formed themselves into one body; they then ran round the walls, and
having a vast number of torches with them, they threw them at the machines,
and shot darts perpetually upon those that impelled those engines which
battered the wall; nay, the bolder sort leaped out by troops upon the hurdles
that covered the machines, and pulled them to pieces, and fell upon those
that belonged to them, and beat them, not so much by any skill they had,
as principally by the boldness of their attacks. However, Titus himself
still sent assistance to those that were the hardest set, and placed both
horsemen and archers on the several sides of the engines, and thereby beat
off those that brought the fire to them; he also thereby repelled those
that shot stones or darts from the towers, and then set the engines to
work in good earnest; yet did not the wall yield to these blows, excepting
where the battering ram of the fifteenth legion moved the corner of a tower,
while the wall itself continued unhurt; for the wall was not presently
in the same danger with the tower, which was extant far above it; nor could
the fall of that part of the tower easily break down any part of the wall
itself together with it.
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