70 AD. Tens of thousands of Roman troops surround Jerusalem. What follows is one of the most brutal sieges in ancient history—and the dramatic climax of the Great Jewish Revolt.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Guy Maclean Rogers to uncover the full story of this epic uprising against Rome. From its origins in rising tensions and religious strife to the devastating siege and destruction of the Second Temple, discover how this revolt shaped the ancient world and continues to resonate today.For more on The Great Jewish Revolt listen to our episode on Masada:Besieging Masada: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0FcheOKepMhzYGDjZUcP6aMyths of Masada: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5YncKSM3r79AD8PwmZNWjkPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Chapter 1: What events led to the Great Jewish Revolt?
Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's 70 AD.
Jerusalem is under siege. Some 50,000 Roman soldiers have descended on the city, keen to crush the greatest beacon of resistance still standing. The brutal siege that followed would be the climax to a bloody revolt that has been going on for four years. An anti-Roman revolt that still resonates with many people today. We know it as the Great Jewish Revolt. It's the Ancients of History Hit.
I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Joining me today to talk through the story of the Great Jewish Revolt, I was delighted to interview Dr. Guy McLean-Rogers, the classicist historian and an author who has written an incredibly detailed book on the Great Jewish Revolt from origins to endgame. Let's get into the interview. Guy, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Well, thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it. You're more than welcome, but I hope you're ready because this is a massive topic, the Great Jewish Revolt. So we've got eight years, a war that lasted eight years. We've got two Roman emperors, a merciless siege of Jerusalem. And I mean, this whole event, it still holds so much meaning today, isn't it?
It's still significant for people down to present day.
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I tell my students all the time that most of the ancient history that I teach is fascinating and interesting, especially to ancient historians, but it's kind of all over.
It doesn't really matter to most of my students who won the Peloponnesian War, but the revolt against Rome in 66 and its outcome with the destruction of the temple and then kind of the progressive... deterioration in relations between Romans and Jews and Jews and Christians unfortunately has resonances right down to the present and
Actually, although I wrote the book back in 2020, 21, the events of the last year to year and a half have only kind of heightened that sense that this is history that isn't over. It's living history. So yeah, it's still present in the minds of tens of millions of people.
Absolutely. An interesting comparison or contrast you put there, Guy, with the Peloponnesian War between Athens and its allies and Sparta and its allies. But let's set the scene. So with the Great Jewish Revolt, what kinds of sources do you have to study this incredibly important period in ancient history?
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Chapter 2: Who were the key figures in the Roman control of Judea?
He, in fact, wrote an original version of it, apparently in Aramaic, which was kind of the sister language of Hebrew, and sent that version to his countrymen across the Euphrates River relatively soon after the war was completed in 73 or 74. We don't have that. When Josephus went to Rome with Titus, he wrote a Greek version of it, which was finished around 79 CE.
And that's the basic narrative account. Like a lot of people who have engagement with major historical events, Josephus decided afterward that he needed to write a a much longer book about his people. And so in the 80s and early 90s, he wrote this monstrously large history of the Jewish people, which is usually called the Antiquities, but in fact was called in Greek the Archaeologica.
And there's a section of it which deals a second time with the revolt. And toward the end of that, he decided that he needed to do what a lot of people, a lot of American generals do anyway, to write his life story, which was made as a kind of an addendum to the antiquities. And one of the tricky parts of reconstructing what really happened is that
There are some contradictions between his account of what went on, especially in the North during the war, in the life as compared to the war. And then finally, in the late 90s, He wrote another work, which was another defense of Judaism and Jews and their traditions, kind of against the slurs of this Greek intellectual called Appian.
And again, there are kind of valuable pieces of information in that work as well. So we have to try to stitch everything together from those multiple sources written by Josephus. There also are accounts, shorter accounts in Greco-Roman sources like Suetonius and Tacitus and a third century Roman historian, Cassius Dio. And then there are coins and archaeological artifacts and inscriptions.
And I just want to put a plug in for the epigraphical sources, which have been put together in an unbelievably... professional and useful corpus by a group of scholars in Israel and outside of Israel, which have English translations of all the Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, and other language inscriptions throughout antiquity. So we have a lot of sources.
The trick is always is making sense of them.
Sorting fact from fiction, but as you've highlighted there, Guy, and just to restate, the importance of Josephus, because he was actively there, he was an eyewitness, he participated in this revolt. As we're going to see, you write several works and some of those in detail, he explores this revolt.
But as you say, and with so many other ancient historians, my mind immediately actually goes to one of those prime figures who wrote about the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides. where he is involved in the fighting.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of Josephus in this historical event?
Yeah, no, that's actually exactly right. In the case of the analogy between Thucydides and Josephus, it's probably not quite as strong because Thucydides failed to relieve a city that was under siege for the Athenians, whereas Josephus, after the siege and conquest of Jotapeta, where he was kind of the presiding general on the Jewish side,
He surrendered and he went over to the Roman side and actually accompanied Titus to the siege of Jerusalem in seven days. So you're 100% correct. There are problems with working with Josephus' text, which are, I think, almost unique in antiquity.
And on that, also a colleague of mine, a very good Josephus scholar named Steve Mason has kind of brought out some of the rhetorical issues in Josephus' text. And then finally, very quickly, you know, Josephus has a sort of Deuteronomic view of history, which is essentially that God determines how everything is going to come out.
And when the Jewish people are faithful to his commands, everything works out well. And when they don't, there's disaster. And that's sort of the frame that he puts all of this in for his readers. So we have to take all of those things into account.
So let's set the scene for the ultimate outbreak of this great revolt. So in those decades previous, Guy, how did the Romans control Judea? Because I have in my mind immediately big titanic names like King Herod the Great at the time of Jesus of Nazareth. So what do we know about how the Romans controlled Judea in the run-up to this great revolt?
Right. So I think the starting point for understanding what happened and what went wrong really is just after the assassination of Julius Caesar. After Caesar was killed on the Ides of March in 44, his right-hand man, Mark Anthony, who had had some experience in this region, decided that
the point man for Roman policy should be this guy, Antipater II, who was an Edomian, and his sons, Herod, eventually Herod the Great, and his brother, Phacael, who originally were made tetrarchs, or rulers of a quarter of territory. But after a couple of years,
Anthony decided that he would push the Roman Senate to make Herod into the king of Judea, the Galilee, the so-called Pariah, which is the region to the east of the Jordan River, and then also South Syria. So in 40, Herod becomes king.
And basically, from a strategic point of view, Hera's role was going to be kind of Rome's man to hold down this very valuable real estate, which was in between the Roman enemies, the Parthians to the east, and then, of course, the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. So it took Herod a few years to consolidate his role. But by 37, he was kind of in charge there.
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Chapter 4: How did the tensions between cultures escalate before the revolt?
Right. So he's in charge from 37 until he dies in four. And in my book, I sort of argue that Probably the reason why Herod was successful was that he figured out that on the one hand, it would be important for him to keep order, which was always a kind of Roman requirement of their client kings.
But he wasn't really that interested in policing the beliefs and the cultural practices of the people living in his kingdom, as long as they didn't cross the line into public actions. So that's kind of how he did it. Unfortunately, after he died, his heir, his son and heir, Archelaus, wasn't as successful.
And after a relatively brief reign as Ethnarch, not king, Augustus kind of had enough of his incompetence and rusticated him to southern Gaul. And at that point, he decided that he would start sending out governors, handpicked governors who are called prefects to Judea to keep on top of things.
Right, so it goes from cloying kingdom to sending this son basically into a lovely, not an exile, but a farmland retreat in what is today southern France. And then it's the governors are basically the new rulers of Judea, Roman governors. I'm guessing this name's like Pontius Pilate, who we have from the Bible as well. They're the new figures.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, Pontius Pilate, of course, is the most famous of the prefix because, of course, according to the Gospel of John 1916, he's the guy that gave the order for the execution of somebody your audience may have heard of, Yeshua Nazarene, otherwise known as Jesus Christ. But in fact... Pontius Pilate had a lot of problems apart from that.
And although his prefecture lasted for 10 years, he definitely made some mistakes which caused unrest. Like, for instance, at one point, trying to sneak some Roman military standards into Jerusalem, which probably had representations of the Roman emperors on them. So the record of the prefects who were in charge from 6 to 41 was mixed at best.
And I would say that the same goes for the guys who were running the show in Rome, like our friend Gaius Caligula, whose reign was from 37 to 41, who had the brilliant idea of introducing a statue of himself into the temple itself. which undoubtedly would have caused a major rebellion, a first big Jewish revolt at the time, except that he was assassinated.
So, you know, the early period from 6 to 41, there were problems. In 41, the Emperor Claudius decided to return Judea to a client king rule under this guy, Agrippa I. And he sort of went back to the Herodian model of trying to leave people alone as long as they didn't cause riots and things like that. But he died suddenly in 44.
And at that point, the Romans decided again to send out governors, this time called procurators. And
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Chapter 5: What triggered the outbreak of the Great Jewish Revolt?
So there are these tensions that start bubbling under the surface just before the revolt begins. And as you've highlighted there, these tensions, they've been there for decades by the time of 66 AD or CE, and then it's almost an eruption of those tensions. That's exactly right.
In fact, our friend Alexander the Great, in many ways, was responsible for kind of laying the groundwork for all of this. Because until Alexander went through there in 332, basically there were only indigenous peoples living in this area, speaking these Near Eastern languages. In Alexander's wake, his successors, so Lucas in this area and his successors,
brought in a different culture with different practices and traditions. And by the time we get to the middle of the first century CE,
These peoples are living side by side in places like Caesarea on the coast, which was probably originally what they call a Phoenician foundation, but had been kind of refounded by Herod the Great as a place that had synagogues in it, but also Greco-Roman public buildings and games being celebrated.
theaters and race courses and stuff like that.
Yes, everything. All the sort of typical things you would find in a Greek city of the first century. And there developed a conflict and a rivalry over who was going to be kind of in charge of places like Caesarea. Was it going to be the Hellenes, the Greeks, or people who Josephus called Syrians, who were probably non-ethnically Greek, but culturally Greek people, or the Jews.
And actually, that's kind of the exact starting point for the war itself. According to Josephus, that rivalry in Caesarea, it led to a riot over a sacrifice that a Greek guy decided he would make next to a synagogue owned by the Jews. And that was the start of it.
Well, yes, guys. Let's explore this trigger point. You've highlighted that there are these underlying tensions between these different cultural groups and various religions and so on, and that kind of contrast and clashing. Highlight this spark and what happens in Caesarea with this Greek man deciding to do this sacrifice outside of a synagogue.
Right. So the background to the spark which lit off the revolt was this conflict over who was going to be able to say that they were in charge of Caesarea. And essentially, both sides were provoking the other, but it got ratcheted up by this attempted sacrifice of birds outside of the synagogue. We don't know exactly what the purpose of the sacrifice was.
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Chapter 6: How did the Jewish forces respond to Roman military actions?
went to Jerusalem because at the time, apparently, the Jews of Judea were in arrears in the payment of the tribute to the Romans. He decided that what he would do is he would go to the temple treasury and withdraw 17 talents worth of silver, which was an enormous sum of money from the treasury, which was not the procedure that he was supposed to follow.
And when the civilian population of Jerusalem protested against that, he unleashed upon them the auxiliary troops that were under his command, and they massacred something like 3,600 civilians. And as I tell my students, in these situations of ethnic conflict, They tend to be resolvable until large amounts of blood are shed.
And it's really at that point in the spring of 66 that ethnic conflict turns into a war in Judea centered in Jerusalem.
So it is Jerusalem. I can imagine, as you say, news of that spreads far and wide. For instance, in my head, I was thinking similarities with maybe the Boston Massacre before the American War of Independence, but I'm not quite sure that quite fits.
But maybe in regards to that value, well, how information about that is spread across to different groups of Jewish people across the area, and all of a sudden, the rebellion, this idea of revolt really takes deep and strong roots.
Exactly. There were among the Jews leaders who tried to convince the population of Jerusalem to not react to what happened and escalate the situation.
But I think you're exactly right that the news of what had happened, and I really think for your audience that it's worth thinking about how it is that people would react to having their sisters, their brothers, their grandparents killed really without very much provocation. And at that point, I think a lot of people who were kind of sitting on the fence were
were kind of pushed over to the side of thinking that they really couldn't live with this particular governor. And when the Romans showed no inclination to punish this guy or replace him, I think that that's when the people who were in favor of a national liberation movement movement in Judea, gained the upper hand. And that's really the start of the war.
Again, Josephus focuses on this episode where after this happens, the guy who was the head of security in the temple, a man named Eleazar, convinces the priest that to no longer accept sacrifices on behalf of Rome, the Romans, and Caesar or the emperor. He says that that's really the point at which the war begins. But I see that as essentially symbolic.
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Chapter 7: What were the immediate consequences of the revolt?
And so you have that spark, and as you said, we go from Caesarea to Jerusalem, and Caesar the Revolt is really taking root now and spreading far and wide. But of course, for those who decide still to take up arms against the Romans and join this revolt, I'm presuming it's mostly people from the Jewish population, you're still going up against a juggernaut, against the superpower.
Yeah.
It's not clear that during the early days, so spring, early summer of 66, that they had an absolutely coherent strategy. But as soon as the dust settles and they realize there's going to be a Roman reaction, They do put together an army. Of course, the Romans, in reaction to what had happened in Jerusalem, send the governor of Syria down to first the Galilee and then to Jerusalem.
led by this guy, Cestius Gallus, with a fairly large army, a substantial army of about 30,000. I don't think that he thought that he was going to have to besiege Jerusalem. I think he thought that he was going to go and intimidate them into acquiescence. But that's not the way it worked out.
And his army got mauled on the way into Jerusalem and on the way out of Jerusalem, losing more than 5,300 infantrymen and a cohort worth of cavalrymen. And that really with the cat among the pigeons, because at that point, it was clear that the Jews who were in revolt were going to fight, and they were not intimidated by Roman legions, and they could do damage to them. And that was a shock.
to the Romans.
It's a massive shock, isn't it? Because this army, 30,000, it's not just the local troops that the Jews have been able to manage and overwhelm in Jerusalem. This is an army which would have included legionaries, the best troops the Romans have available, their citizen soldiers.
It almost feels like another, dare I say, a Teutoburg forest kind of thing, where full sense of security ambushed, significantly mauled as you've highlighted there, and almost then the Romans realizing, oh bleep, this is actually a much more difficult situation. This is a bigger revolt than we actually anticipated, than we imagined.
Right. You're right. There is an analogy with what went on in Teutoburg. Although the Romans lost a lot more guys in that vault in 9 CE, on the other hand, the Jews had been cooperating with the Romans for a long time, actually arguably since even before the time of Julius Caesar. So I'm sure this was a huge shock for them. And as a result of that,
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