Let us take the opportunity of stating our opinion that Josephus’s testimony may generally be relied upon. It was for a long time the fashion to hold up his exaggerations to ridicule. Thus, when he spoke of the height of the wall as being such as to make the head reel, travellers remembered the fifty feet of wall or so at the present day and laughed. But Captain Warren has found that the wall was in parts as much as 200 feet high. Surely a man may be excused for feeling giddy at looking down a depth of 200 feet. Whenever Josephus speaks from personal knowledge, he appears to us to be accurate and trustworthy. There is nothing on which he could speak with greater authority, which would sooner have been discovered, than a misstatement as regards the Roman army.
Milman gives a list of the losses of the Jews in this war compiled from the numbers given by Josephus. It amounts to more than three millions. Deductions must, of course, be made.
No argument ought to be founded on the supposed numbers of the legions. The number _generally_ composing a legion in the time of the Empire was 6000, and before the Empire, was 4000. But at Pharsalia Cæsar’s legions were only 2000 each, while Pompey’s were 7000.
It is very curious that these “servants” are not mentioned either by Mr. Lewin or Mr. Fergusson. Mr. Williams puts down the number of the legions at 10,000 each, perhaps including the servants.
It is not easy to make any kind of estimate of the number of these servants. Perhaps, however, we shall be within the mark if we put down the whole number of forces under Titus’s command at something like eighty thousand—an army which was greatly superior in numbers to that of the besieged. It was also fully provided and equipped with military engines, provisions and material of all kinds. It marched, without meeting any enemy, from Cæsarea to Jerusalem, where it arrived on the 11th of April.[7]
The city, meanwhile, had been continuing those civil dissensions which hastened its ruin. John, Simon Bar Gioras, and Eleazar, each at the head of his own faction, made the streets run with blood. John, whose followers numbered six thousand, held the Lower, New, and Middle City; Simon, at the head of ten thousand Jews and five thousand Idumeans, had the strong post of the Upper City, with a portion of the third wall; Eleazar, with two thousand zealots, more fanatic than the rest, had barricaded himself within the Temple itself. There they admitted, it is true, unarmed worshippers, but kept out the rest. The stores of the Temple provided them with abundance of provisions, and while the rest of the soldiers were starving, those who were within the Temple walls[8] were well fed and in good case. This was, however, the only advantage which Eleazar possessed over the rest. Their position, cooped up in a narrow fortress—for such the Temple was—and exposed to a constant shower of darts, stones, and missiles of all sorts, from John’s men, was miserable enough. John and Simon fought with each other in the lower ground, the valley of the Tyropœon, which lay between the Temple and Mount Zion. Here were stored up supplies of corn sufficient, it is said, for many years’ supply. But in the sallies which John and Simon made upon each other all the buildings in this part of the town were destroyed or set on fire, and all their corn burned; so that famine had actually begun before the commencement of the siege.