Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
As the outposts were eliminated, surviving Jewish fighters and their families withdrew to remote hiding places. Numerous such rebel hiding places were located by twentieth-century Jewish archaeologists in the rocky heights west of the Dead Sea. Between Engedi and Masada, the archaeologists found several caves along the cliffs of the Nahal Hever wadi, one containing ancient skeletal remains of eighteen men, women and children plus clothing and implements, which were dated to around the second century.
Tellingly, in one of the caves, the archaeologists also came upon an archive of Jewish documents written on papyrus. Among them were letters from Shimeon bar-Kokhba himself to his subordinates, giving them orders. In one of those letters, Bar-Kokhba wrote, “Get hold of the young men and come with them. If not, a punishment. And I shall deal with the Romans.” Other letters, from Bar-Kokhba and his deputies, urged the capture of traitors. [Yadin, 10]
These Nahal Hever caves, some precariously placed in cliff faces, were difficult to reach and even more difficult to locate, making them ideal hideouts for the rebels, from where they could emerge to make hit-and-ruin raids on Roman forces. Eventually, the Roman military became aware that there were Jewish hiding places somewhere in this vicinity, for the remains of two small Roman camps are located in the area, high on opposite clifftops overlooking the Nahal Hever wadi. Both camps were capable of housing eighty men—a unit of century strength. [Ibid.] This fits the story told by Dio, of a number of small units being separated from their legions, cohorts and wings and sent out into the countryside relentlessly to track down the rebels.
A papyrus of
AD
124 put the 1st Thracian milliaria Cohort at Engedi, not far from the Nahal Hever caves. [Hold.,
DRA
] This 800-man cohort continued to be based in the area following Bar-Kokhba’s revolt. [Yadin, 10] It would seem likely that the two Roman camps of the Nahal Hever belonged to centuries of the 1st Thracians, and that these troops eventually caught and dealt with most of the Jews hiding out in the region—with the exception of the group of eighteen, never found by the Romans, who must have starved to death in what became known as the Cave of the Letters.
While some rebels were being hunted down in the barren Dead Sea region, to deny them shelter and support other Roman troops progressively destroyed one Jewish
village after another across the length and breadth of Palestine, as Roman control edged closer and closer to Jerusalem and Bar-Kokhba’s headquarters at Bethar. According to Cassius Dio, in the application of this scorched earth policy, 985 villages were destroyed. [Ibid., 14] It was a slow process, said Dio, but the Roman troops were gradually able to “crush, exhaust and exterminate” the Jews. It was an ethnic cleansing operation which, over three years, took the lives of 580,000 Jewish men; Dio could not calculate how many Jews also died from famine, disease, or in those villages put to the torch, but between these remedies and the sword “nearly the whole of Judea was made desolate.” [Ibid.]
Roman operations against the rebels continued in Judea for three years, but it appears that by the winter of
AD
134–135, two years after the revolt first erupted, only Bar-Kokhba’s headquarters at Bethar remained to be taken, and had already been isolated. The Judean situation had stabilized sufficiently for Hadrian’s Palatium to remove auxiliary units from the province and transfer them north to the command of Arrian, governor of Cappadocia, for a campaign against the invading Alans in Lesser Armenia.
That transfer was also made possible by the fact that legionary reinforcements had arrived from Europe. Probably assured by Severus that one final, reinforced push would bring about the downfall of the rebels holed up at Bethar, and that the legions in the East were exhausted, Hadrian sent vexillations from the 5th Macedonica Legion, then based at Troesmis in Moesia, and from another legion based in Moesia, the 11th Claudia, whose base was at Durosturum. [Yadin, 13]
Cohorts from these two Moesian legions would have been shipped from Europe together, arriving in time for the spring offensive of
AD
135. Severus marched his army to Bethar, surrounding it with a siege wall 4,000 yards (3,656 meters) long, and setting up two major camps on the dry, rocky soil, camps which can still be traced today. One of those camps measured 400 yards (365 meters) by 200 yards (182 meters), and was large enough to accommodate 5,000 men, the equivalent of a full legion, while the other was roughly half the size of the first camp. [Ibid.]
Using the loose stones littering the area, the Roman troops built low walls around their tents in the camps, and these walls remain to this day. There is a spring close to one of the camps, and idle legionaries of a water-carrying party cut an inscription into the rock there—“
LEG V MAC ET XI CL
,” identifying two of the legions taking part in the siege of Bethar, the 5th Macedonica and 11th Claudia. [Ibid.]
According to the Jewish
Midrash
, 200,000 Jews congregated in the Bethar fortress with Bar-Kokhba. Other Jewish sources give a far greater number. Either way, the hilltop compound would have been crowded beyond belief. Standing more than 2,000 feet (609 meters) above sea level, the fortress was surrounded by a deep natural canyon on three sides, with the rocky saddle connecting the hilltop to the surrounding mountains to the south—where the defenders had dug their moat. [Yadin, 13]
In undertaking the siege of Bethar, Severus followed the model used in the siege of nearby Masada sixty-two years before. Once he had surrounded the Jews and cut them off from outside supply, he commenced to build a ramp of earth across the southern saddle toward the fortress wall. Once completed, the ramp would fill in the defensive moat and lead to the summit of the hill, allowing the legions to drive up it as if it were a highway and gain entry to the fortress over the wall. In the meantime, Roman catapults maintained steady fire against the Jewish defenders.
“The siege lasted a long time,” said Eusebius, “before the rebels were driven to final destruction by famine and thirst, and the instigator of their madness paid the penalty he deserved.” [Eus.,
EH
,
IV
,
VI
] The siege was terminated before the summer had ended—traditional Jewish sources say that Bar-Kokhba was dead by September
AD
135. [Yadin, 10] From Eusebius’ narrative it would seem that Bethar fell, and Shimeon bar-Kokhba died—probably at his own hands—before the Roman legions’ assault ramp was completed.
With the fall of Bethar and massacre of all those within its walls, the Second Jewish Revolt had come to its bloody conclusion. On the orders of Hadrian, Jews were banned from ever setting foot in Jerusalem again, or of even approaching it, “so that even from a distance” they “could not see [their] ancestral home.” [Eus.,
EH
,
IV
,
VI
] Roman colonies would progressively be built at Jerusalem and throughout the province in previously Jewish areas. On Hadrian’s orders, to expunge any reference to the Jews, the name of the province was changed from Judea to Syria Palestina—the Palestina referring to the Philistines, age-old foes of the Jewish people.
Shimeon bar-Kokhba’s bloody revolt and his brief reign as the prince of Israel had brought about a predictably fierce response from Rome. This had been the second time that Romans had paid a painful price at the hands of the Jews in Judea. Hadrian was determined that there would not be a third time. The Jewish people had been expelled from their homeland, and Judea would never again be a flashpoint for Rome.
AD
135
XLVIII. ARRIAN AGAINST THE ALANS
Throwing the barbarians back
By the winter of
AD
134–135, Roman forces had all but quashed the Second Jewish Revolt in Judea. With the last of the rebels confined at Bethar, and legionaries arriving from Europe to undertake a siege of Bethar through the summer, the situation in Judea had been sufficiently turned around for Hadrian’s Palatium to turn its attention to another threat in the East.
In the summer of
AD
134, after learning from Pharasmanes, king of Iberia, today’s Georgia, that Rome’s forces were tied up fighting the Jews in Judea, many thousands of mounted warriors of the Alani tribe, Sarmatians from the Caucasus region between the Caspian and Black Seas, had pushed southeast. [Dio,
LXIX
, 15] According to Dio, the Alans invaded the territory of the Albani and also the kingdom of Media, where they “caused dire injury.” [Ibid.] From there, the Alans threatened Armenia, Lesser Armenia, Cappadocia, Pontus and the neighboring Roman provinces.
Originating from north of the Black Sea, the nomadic Alani, or Alans, were renowned both as horse-breeders and as fierce mounted warriors. Hadrian’s military policy, unlike that of his predecessor, the soldier emperor Trajan, was one of defense rather than offense. But an offensive operation against the Alans, designed to drive them back across the mountains and seal the western passes from the Caucasus, had a defensive objective, that of securing existing Roman territory and that of Rome’s allies.
Now that much of the pressure had been taken off the Roman military in Judea, sufficient Roman resources could be redirected for an offensive against the Alans. The man chosen to lead the operation was Flavianus Arrianus, or Arrian, as later writers would dub him. Then Roman governor of the province of Cappadocia, Arrian had been born at Nicomedia in Bithynia around
AD
90. Working his way up the Roman promotional ladder, Arrian had entered the Senate in Rome in approximately
AD
120, becoming a consul ten years later.
To reach the Senate and later achieve a consulship, Arrian had to serve as a junior officer with Rome’s auxiliary forces and legions, the culmination of his military career being the command of a legion. During this early stage of his career he had almost certainly served in Britain, for in one of his written works, he describes the Britons’
chariot horses as if from firsthand knowledge. Of Greek stock, Arrian was a fan of Alexander the Great, writing a biography of the Greek king in seven volumes which was to become one of our key sources on Alexander and his military conquests.
Arrian also wrote a handbook on military matters, which, while hankering back to the Greek-style military of Alexander, who had used armies made up of phalanxes of spearmen, still reveals much about the Roman army of Arrian’s day, and earlier. Arrian was a man who both led from the front and who organized his military campaigns in fine detail, well in advance. A copy of his orders for the
AD
135 expedition against the Alans,
Aries contra Alanos
, has come down to us, and from this we have an excellent idea of how the mission developed.
At his immediate disposal for the campaign, Arrian had the 15th Apollinaris Legion at Satala in Cappadocia. This, Arrian knew, was a vastly experienced legion with a lengthy history; it had a long roll of battle honors in the east and in Europe, including the First Jewish Revolt and the Dacian Wars. The 15th would form the core of Arrian’s army, and the legion’s commander, the legate Marcus Vettius Valens, would be Arrian’s second-in-command.
To the 15th, Arrian added his other locally based legion, the 12th Fulminata, which had been based at Melitene in Cappadocia since taking part in the First Jewish War in
AD
66–70. For this campaign, the 12th Fulminata was led by its senior tribune, just as it had been during the Jewish War. The 12th had lost both its eagle and its commander to the Jewish rebels in
AD
66, and it is tempting to think that, after that disgrace, the legion was not given a commander of senatorial rank.
One of the auxiliary units in Arrian’s army was the 1st Apamenorum Cohort, an equitata unit of both horse and foot archers raised at Apamea in Syria. For some time prior to this, the unit had been based in Egypt, but more recently, before being sent up to Cappadocia, it had probably taken part in Sextus Severus’ operations in Judea. Two factors indicate that this Alani operation was not a knee-jerk offensive initiated locally, but was an operation planned and directed by the Palatium in Rome. Firstly, for Arrian to lead the legions based in Cappadocia out of his province he required specific permission from the emperor; otherwise, he was breaking the law and could be declared an enemy of the state by the Senate. Arrian, therefore, had been granted special powers by Hadrian for this operation, as Severus had been in Judea.
Secondly, of the auxiliary units tasked with the Alani operation, six were specialist units of foot and horse archers, indicating that they had been very carefully chosen
for this mission. This was the single largest concentration of archers in any Roman province at that time. In Britain, for example, there was then not a single unit of archers, while there was just one in Syria. [Hold.,
DRA
, ADRH] Arrian’s planned tactics for the operation against the Alans would depend heavily on archers, indicating that he had specifically asked for the bowmen. Alternatively, knowing that the Alans, like so many Eastern tribes, were themselves strong in archers and were all mounted, the Palatium may have chosen to equip Arrian with a large contingent of bowmen to enable him to fight fire with fire.
Auxiliary units and allied units supplied by Roman allies marched to Armenia Minor either late in the autumn of
AD
134, to spend the winter in Cappadocia or Armenia Minor, or made the journey at the beginning of the spring of
AD
135. Either way, before the spring of 135 was over, all the elements of Arrian’s army including local troops had come together at the assembly point. From Caesarea Mazaka, capital of Lesser Armenia, Arrian’s army marched east toward the Caucasus, intent on throwing the Alans back across the mountains.
Arrian’s army, in addition to the two legions, comprised four cavalry alae including one of dark-skinned Moors, a force of allied cavalry from the Getae tribe, originally from Thrace, and a large number of horse archers supplied by the king of Armenia. For auxiliary infantry, Arrian had ten cohorts of auxiliary light infantry, as well as mounted infantry and foot and horse archers—not all of them at full strength according the Arrian’s figures—and two groups of fighters of unspecified size, provided by Roman allies. In all, there were over 20,000 men in the Roman force.