Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
There were few structures of note here. Only the towering Temple Mount, from which the Jews’ Second Temple, built by Herod, had been removed. And the fortress of the 10th Fretensis Legion, apparently built in the vicinity of the former palace of Herod. A small ramshackle
vicus
, or civilian settlement, had also grown outside the legion base to house camp followers.
Hadrian now instructed his subordinates to build a new city on the site of Jerusalem. He would give it
colonia
status and settle retiring legionaries there. He named the new city Aelia Capitolina, incorporating his family name of Aelius. Meanwhile, the soaring Temple Mount begged a new adornment, and Hadrian ordered a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter erected there. He also issued an edict that circumcision, a rite among the Jews which Hadrian considered a barbaric form of mutilation, was forthwith illegal throughout the empire. In addition to founding the new city of
Aelia, said Eusebius, who was the Christian bishop of Caesarea in the fourth century, “before its gate, that by which we go to Bethlehem, he [Hadrian] set up an idol of a pig in marble, signifying the subjugation of the Jews to Roman authority.” [Eus.,
Chron
., 2, HY 20]
Because Jerusalem was then the site of the base of the 10th Fretensis Legion, later historians would assume that this pig, or boar as they perceived it, was forthwith adopted as the new emblem of the legion. But with the 10th Fretensis’ old emblems of bull, dolphin and war galley reoccurring on its coins after it left Jerusalem and transferred to Arabia, it is clear that Hadrian’s pig identified the city, not the legion that occupied it. As Eusebius made clear, this idol of a pig at the city gate was intended by Hadrian to be a deliberate double-edged slight to the Jews, whose religion required them to avoid both the pig and graven images.
Hadrian, the emperor who prided himself on maintaining a state of peace, departed for Egypt. But he had lit a fuse under Judea. “The Jews deemed it intolerable that foreign races should be settled in their city and foreign religious rites planted there,” said Dio. [Dio,
LXIX
, 12] There was a leader among the Jews of Judea by the name of Shimeon bar-Kosiba who now directed Jewish anger at Hadrian’s acts into a well-planned resistance movement, with him at its head. His leadership was given credibility by his claim that he descended from King David, and by the most influential rabbi of the day, Akiva ben Yosef, who called him Bar-Kokhba, or “Son of the Star,” which implied that he was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah.
Calling himself
nasi
, or prince, Bar-Kokhba, as he was to become known far and wide, launched his revolt quietly, and cunningly. Through the remainder of that year of
AD
131, according to Dio, while Hadrian remained close by, first in Egypt and then in Syria, Bar-Kokhba and his followers continued to make the weapons that their overlords required them to produce as part of their tribute to Rome; but they made them with faults, so that they would be returned to them to be corrected. In this way, they actually made arms for themselves. At the same time, the rebel leadership began to build underground strongholds in out-of-the-way places, “and they pierced these subterranean passages from above at intervals to let in air and light.” [Ibid.]
Had Roman officials in Judea been more observant, they would have realized that something was afoot among the locals, but they took no heed of the signs of looming insurrection. They would pay the price for their laxity. By the spring of
AD
132, “all Judea had been stirred up.” [Dio,
LXIX
, 13] Jews were gathering everywhere,
sometimes in public, sometimes in secret. Dio talks of overt and secret acts of Jewish defiance—among other things, Roman statues would have been torn down. And help for the rebel movement was coming from foreign countries—there were large Jewish communities east of the Euphrates in Parthia, and elsewhere. [Ibid.]
And then, one day in the first half of
AD
132, the revolt exploded across the province, no doubt in a number of simultaneous and coordinated attacks, taking the Romans completely by surprise. The two legions stationed in the province, the 10th Fretensis at Jerusalem, or Aelia Capitolina as the Romans now called it, and the 6th Ferrata at Caparcotna in Galilee, took the brunt of the uprising.
The province’s governor, Tineus Rufus, survived the initial revolutionary outbreak by virtue of the fact that he was headquartered at Caesarea, on the coast, but it was a different matter for Romans inland. Meanwhile, anyone in the Jewish territories who did not support the revolt suffered at the hands of the rebels, who, according to the later Christian bishop, Eusebius, “killed the Christians with all kinds of persecutions” for refusing to help them against the Romans. [Eus.,
Chron
., 2, HY 17]
When news of the revolt reached Hadrian, he was in Greece. He immediately ordered one of his best generals to Judea to command the Roman response to the revolt. The task fell to Sextus Julius Severus, then governor of Britain. With one of the consuls for the year in Rome stepping down to hurry to Britain to take Severus’ place there, the general, who is likely to have made his military reputation in Trajan’s Parthian campaign—a general identified only as Severus was named by Dio among the successful Roman commanders against the Parthians—set off for the East.
Clearly, the militarily conservative Hadrian would not release any legions from the west to help Severus, for there is no record of legions being transferred to the East at this stage of the revolt. Severus would have to put down the uprising using whatever resources he found in the East, together with the few auxiliary troops that accompanied him from Britain.
But Hadrian did give Severus sweeping powers that placed him above provincial governors, whose authority did not extend beyond the borders of their individual provinces. Those powers would enable Severus to bring in units from outside Judea. They also allowed him almost
carte blanche
authority in the region while acting in the name of the emperor—as demonstrated by the term
ex indulgentia divi Hadriani
, meaning, at the indulgence of Hadrian, which was used on special military discharge diplomas issued by Severus in Judea. [Starr,
V
, 2]
Severus probably took several British-based auxiliary units to Judea with him, plus detachments from various other units as his personal bodyguard. One of the units likely to have contributed to, or been part of, Severus’ British contingent was the 1st Hispanorum Cohort, based at Maryport on the Solway Firth—the unit’s prefect Marcus Censorius Cornelianus is known to have gone to Judea with Severus. [Hold.,
RAB
, 4]
It is probable that Severus did not reach Judea until the spring or summer of
AD
133. The situation that confronted Severus and his accompanying troops when they arrived at Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast, having been brought from a port in southern Gaul or western Italy aboard warships of the Misene Fleet, can only be imagined. [Starr,
VIII
] Modern-day writers have speculated that a legion was wiped out by the Jewish rebels during Bar-Kokhba’s revolt. But while Dio wrote that the Romans suffered grievously during this revolt, neither he nor any other classical author stated that a legion was totally destroyed, nor even lost its eagle.
Of two legions known with some certainty to have been wiped out in the second century, one, the 9th Hispana, disappeared after
AD
120, and can be demonstrated to have perished in northern Britain. [
See
Disappearance of the 9th
] The other legion that disappeared from the records, the 22nd Deiotariana, is likely to have been the unit which, according to Dio, was most definitely wiped out in Armenia in
AD
161.
What Dio did say about Roman losses in the Second Jewish Revolt was that “many Romans” perished in this war, and that, as a consequence, when Hadrian sent one of his annual new year’s letters to the Senate during this conflict, to be read to the House on January 1—probably in
AD
133, after the first bloody year of the revolt—he omitted the traditional opening of, “If you and your children are in health, it is well; I and the legions are in health.” [Dio,
LXIX
, 14] But this does not constitute evidence that a legion had been wiped out.
Certainly, the two legions stationed in Judea, the 10th Fretensis and 6th Ferrata, would have taken heavy casualties in the opening stages of the revolt. The 10th Fretensis in particular must have suffered severely. As evidence of this, newly arrived Roman commander Sextus Severus was forced to take an almost unprecedented step in order to bring the 10th Fretensis up to some sort of fighting strength. As discharge diplomas show, Severus granted Roman citizenship to a number of sailors and marines crewing ships of the Misene Fleet that had brought him to Judea, and whom he transferred into the ranks of 10th Fretensis Legion. [Starr,
VIII
] Such a heavy toll was taken on the ranks of the centurions of the 10th Fretensis that Severus took the equally rare step of transferring the prefect of the 1st Hispanorum Cohort to this legion as a senior centurion. [Hold.,
RAB
, 4] No doubt other transfers of a similar nature also took place.
Shimeon bar-Kokhba established his headquarters at the hilltop fortress of Bethar, 8 miles (12 kilometers) southwest of Jerusalem. Today, the village of Bittir sits at the bottom of the hill, and the rail line to Tel Aviv runs by it. There had been a small fortress on the hill here since the time of the First Temple at Jerusalem, and Bar-Kokhba’s fighters rebuilt the tumbled-down stone walls that ran for 1,000 yards (915 meters) around the hill, repaired the semicircular bastions set along the walls, and dug out the 15-feet (4.5-meter) deep and 50-feet (15-meter) wide moat which ran across the saddle of earth connecting the hill to a mountain ridge to the south. The roughly oval-shaped fortress covered 25 stony acres (10 hectares). [Yadin, 13]
It is certain that the rebels succeeded in taking and destroying the fortress of the 10th Fretensis Legion in Jerusalem at the outbreak of the revolt, and tearing down the offensive marble pig that stood above the city gate. All the men of the legion caught there would have been put to the sword by the rebels, in the same way that the Roman garrison of Jerusalem had been slaughtered in
AD
66. Only those cohorts of the 10th Fretensis occupying outstations, and its 1st Cohort stationed with the legion’s eagle at the provincial capital of Caesarea, escaped the fate of their comrades at Jerusalem.
Bar-Kokhba remained at Bethar for the next three years, ruling Judea as its self-proclaimed “prince” and “president” with the help of his Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish religious council. He also appointed Jewish administrators to various parts of Palestine. Surviving documents reveal that several of those administrators were still approving land leases in their areas three years later. [Yadin, 12] Bar-Kokhba also minted his own coins—possibly melting down captured Roman coinage, for Roman coin images representing the emperor and his legions were alien to the Jews. On those new coins were
inscribed legends such as, “Year 1 of the Liberty of Israel,” and “Shimeon, President of Israel.” [Ibid., 1]
Roman general Severus was faced with the very same task that had awaited Vespasian in
AD
67—the recovery of Jerusalem and much of Judea from rebel Jewish hands. To achieve that, he needed many more men. Numismatic evidence reveals that, to consolidate the Roman position in Judea, for the duration of the revolt Severus brought in two legions from neighboring provinces—from Arabia, the 3rd Cyrenaica, and from Raphanaea in southern Syria, the 3rd Gallica.
In all likelihood Severus also used vexillations from other legions in the East. A vexillation from the 4th Scythica Legion, for example, which was based at Zeugma in Syria, was very likely to have taken part in Severus’ Judean counter-offensive, because a centurion of the 20th Valeria Victrix Legion, Ligustinius Disertus, accompanied Severus from Britain to Judea and subsequently served with the 4th Scythica during the revolt. Disertus’ name suggests that he was a Syrian native, like a number of men of the 20th
VV
. Centurion Disertus’ local knowledge may have been the reason that Severus took him to Judea. After the revolt, Disertus returned to his own unit, the 20th
VV
, in Britain. [Hold.,
RAB
, 4]
The fourth-century author Eusebius gave the province’s governor Tineus Rufus credit for supervising the Roman offensive against the rebels, writing that “Rufus, the governor of Judea, once military aid had been sent to him by the emperor, moved out against them treating their madness without mercy.” Severus outranked Rufus, and Roman command in this war was his. According to Eusebius, too: “He destroyed in heaps thousands of men, women and children, and under the law of war, enslaved their land.” [Eus.,
EH
,
IV
,
VI
] There can be no doubting that the Roman response was indeed harsh and merciless, just as the rebel slaughter of Romans had been when the uprising began. But the counter-offensive was not as swift or as sure as Eusebius implied. It would prove to be a long, grinding war.
With just the two full-strength 3rd legions, the battered remnants of the 6th Ferrata and 10th Fretensis, vexillations from several more legions and his auxiliary units, Severus devised a brutal but effective strategy for the best deployment of his vastly outnumbered troops against hundreds of thousands of armed rebels and their supporters. “Severus did not venture to attack his opponents in the open at any one point, in view of their numbers and their desperation,” said Dio. [Dio,
LXIX
, 13] Severus broke up his units into a number of wide-ranging smaller groups. These parties intercepted
Jews in small groups, captured them, locked them up, deprived them of food and allowed them to die. Elsewhere, Roman flying columns made lightning raids in which they located the hidden Jewish outposts, destroying fifty of them. [Ibid.]