TITUS FLAVIUS VESPASIANUS had the strange sensation that he had been here before. In fact, to Vespasian, the circumstances of the situation were so similar to an incident twenty-two years previously that he was not surprised by this sense of revisiting time. Almost every detail was in repetition: the legions and auxiliary cohorts drawn up awaiting the order to begin the assault; the objective itself: a small hilltop sett lement of rebels holding out against Roman rule; and then the possibility that the leader of said rebels was trapped within the township. It was uncannily akin to the siege of a hill fort in Britannia, during the second year of the Claudian invasion, when he, Vespasian, had hoped to capture the rebel chieftain, Caratacus. It was all so similar; all, except for one detail: then he had been a legionary legate in command of a single legion, the II Augusta, and its associated auxiliary cohorts; now he was a general in command of three legions and their auxiliaries as well as other contingents supplied by friendly, local client kings, including Herod Agrippa, the second of that name, nominal tetrarch of Galilee, as well as Vespasian’s old acquaintance, Malichus, King of the Nabatean Arabs. All in all he had over forty-five thousand men under his command. It was a huge difference; almost as big as the difference in the climate between that damp isle and this realm of the Jews, he reflected as he watched his son and second in command, Titus, ride, kicking up a cloud of dust, towards him and his companion sitt ing quietly upon his horse to his right. Vespasian could not remember the last time it had rained anything more than a light drizzle in the three months since he had arrived in this arid part of the Empire that had so violently risen up against Rome.
And it had been violent; violent and humiliating. For, but a year ago, Cestius Gallus, the then Governor of Syria, had come south to Galilee and Judaea, in an attempt to quell the burgeoning rebellion; with him he brought the XII Fulminata bolstered by contingents from the three other Syrian legions and their auxiliaries, upwards of thirty thousand men in total. His initial success in retaking Acre, in western Galilee, and then marching south to Caesarea and Jaffa in Judaea, where he massacred almost nine thousand rebels, was overturned when, citing threats to his supply lines, he withdrew, just as he was on the point of investing Jerusalem, and was ambushed at the pass of Beth Horon. More than six thousand Roman soldiers died that day, with nearly twice that number wounded; the XII Fulminata was alm
