This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[254]
And now a certain person came running to Titus, and told him of this
fire, as he was resting himself in his tent after the last battle; whereupon
he rose up in great haste, and, as he was, ran to the holy house, in order
to have a stop put to the fire; after him followed all his commanders,
and after them followed the several legions, in great astonishment; so
there was a great clamor and tumult raised, as was natural upon the disorderly
motion of so great an army. Then did Caesar, both by calling to the soldiers
that were fighting, with a loud voice, and by giving a signal to them with
his right hand, order them to quench the fire. But they did not hear what
he said, though he spake so loud, having their ears already dimmed by a
greater noise another way; nor did they attend to the signal he made with
his hand neither, as still some of them were distracted with fighting,
and others with passion. But as for the legions that came running thither,
neither any persuasions nor any threatenings could restrain their violence,
but each one's own passion was his commander at this time; and as they
were crowding into the temple together, many of them were trampled on by
one another, while a great number fell among the ruins of the cloisters,
which were still hot and smoking, and were destroyed in the same miserable
way with those whom they had conquered; and when they were come near the
holy house, they made as if they did not so much as hear Caesar's orders
to the contrary; but they encouraged those that were before them to set
it on fire. As for the seditious, they were in too great distress already
to afford their assistance [towards quenching the fire]; they were every
where slain, and every where beaten; and as for a great part of the people,
they were weak and without arms, and had their throats cut wherever they
were caught. Now round about the altar lay dead bodies heaped one upon
another, as at the steps 1
going up to it ran a great quantity of their blood, whither also the dead
bodies that were slain above [on the altar] fell down.
1 These steps to the altar of burnt-offering seem here either an improper and inaccurate expression of Josephus, since it was unlawful to make ladder steps; (see description of the temples, ch. 13., and note on Antiq. B. IV. ch. 8. sect. 5;) or else those steps or stairs we now use were invented before the days of Herod the Great, and had been here built by him; though the later Jews always deny it, and say that even Herod's altar was ascended to by an acclivity only.
Flavius Josephus. The Works of Flavius Josephus. Translated by. William Whiston, A.M. Auburn and Buffalo. John E. Beardsley. 1895.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
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.