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laws of warfare, a city that had resisted so obstinately expected to be sacked.
    They pretended not to hear Titus and even shouted ahead to their comrades to toss in more firebrands. The legionaries were so impetuous that many were crushed or burned to death in the stampede of their bloodlust and hunger for gold, plundering so much that the price would soon drop across the East. Titus, unable to stop the fire and surely relieved at the prospect of final victory, proceeded through the burning Temple until he came to the Holy of Holies. Even the high priest was allowed to enter there only once a year. No foreigner had tainted its purity since the Roman soldier-statesman Pompey in 63 BC . But Titus looked inside ‘and saw it and its contents which he found to be far superior’, wrote Josephus, indeed ‘not inferior to what we ourselves boasted of it’. Now he ordered the centurions to beat the soldiers spreading the fire, but ‘their passions were too strong.’ As the inferno rose around the Holy of Holies, Titus was pulled to safety by his aides – ‘and no one forbade them to set fire to it’ any more.
    The fighting raged among the flames: dazed, starving Jerusalemites wandered lost and distressed through the burning portals. Thousandsof civilians and rebels mustered on the steps of the altar, waiting to fight to the last or just die hopelessly. All had their throats cut by the exhilarated Romans as though it were a mass human sacrifice, until ‘around the altar lay dead bodies heaped one upon another’ with the blood running down the steps. Ten thousand Jews died in the burning Temple.
    The cracking of vast stones and wooden beams made a sound like thunder. Josephus watched the death of the Temple:
     
The roar of the flames streaming far and wide mingled with the groans of the falling victims and owing to the height of the hill and the mass of the burning pile, one would have thought the whole city was ablaze. And then the din – nothing more deafening or appalling could be conceived than that. There were the war cries of the Roman legions sweeping onward, the howls of the rebels encircled by fire and swords, the rush of the people who, cut off above, fled panic-stricken only to fall into the arms of the foe, and their shrieks as they met their fate, blended with lamentations and wailing [of those in the city]. Transjordan and the surrounding mountains contributed their echoes, deepening the din. You would have thought the Temple hill was boiling over from its base, being everywhere one mass of flame.
     
    Mount Moriah, one of the two mountains of Jerusalem, where King David had placed the Ark of the Covenant and where his son Solomon had built the first Temple, was ‘seething hot full of fire on every part of it’, while inside, dead bodies covered the floors. But the soldiers trampled on the corpses in their triumph. The priests fought back and some threw themselves into the blaze. Now the rampaging Romans, seeing that the inner Temple was destroyed, grabbed the gold and furniture, carrying out their swag, before they set fire to the rest of the complex. 6
    As the Inner Courtyard burned, and the next day dawned, the surviving rebels broke out through the Roman lines into the labyrinthine Outer Courtyards, some escaping into the city. The Romans counterattacked with cavalry, clearing the insurgents and then burning the Temple’s treasury chambers, which were filled with riches drawn from the Temple tax paid by all Jews, from Alexandria to Babylon. They found there 6,000 women and children huddled together in apocalyptic expectation. A ‘false prophet’ had earlier proclaimed that they could anticipate the ‘miraculous signs of their deliverance’ in the Temple. The legionaries simply set the passageways alight, burning all these people alive.
    The Romans carried their eagles on to the Holy Mountain, sacrificed to their gods, and hailed Titus as their
imperator
– commander-in-chief.Priests were still