After the 1st Century CE, our contemporary sources on the Roman Empire become fragmented and tantalizingly incomplete. Inscriptions found by archaeologists in recent decades attest to wars across the Empire, from the Alps to Egypt, that went totally unrecorded in the writings of Cassius Dio, Herodian, and other historians of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Centuries.
Other wars were not forgotten in our written sources, but even these are not documented in the same detail as the civil wars of the late Republic and early Empire. One such war has gone down in Jewish history as the Kitos War, and if Cassius Dio’s account is even partially true, it was a war of almost unparalleled destruction and human tragedy.
Another Jewish Revolt
Imperial Rome fought three wars over the course of the 1st and 2nd Centuries that were termed bellum iudaicum – Jewish Wars. All three constituted the revolts of Jewish communities within the Eastern provinces (the first and third revolts centered on Judea itself), who were aspiring to set up an independent Jewish state totally free of Roman control. The First (or “Great”) Revolt spanned from 68 to 73 CE, and was the backdrop for such dramatic encounters as the sieges of Jerusalem in 70, and of Masada in 73.
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| Emperor Hadrian, whose generals were tasked with putting down the revolt. |
The Roman occupation of Jerusalem in 70 resulted in the thorough destruction of the Herodian Temple. Titus Flavius Vespasianus the Younger, the Roman general commanding the siege, recognized the Temple as a focal point for Jewish nationalistic aspirations, and reacted accordingly. Their Temple destroyed, their rebel armies butchered or driven into the hill country, thousands of Jews were sold into slavery. Many consecrated the newly-constructed Flavian Amphitheater – otherwise known as the Colusseum – with their blood and sweat.
The Jews were not banned from Jerusalem in the aftermath of the First Revolt, but their catastrophic losses – both human and spiritual – had made them a deeply embittered people. They still made up the bulk of Judea’s population; very large Jewish minorities also resided in Syria, Cyprus, and both the urban and rural areas of northern Egypt. Egypt’s greatest metropolis, Alexandria, was home to an estimated 150,000 Jews, who lived in a constant state of friction with the city’s larger Greek population.
The Second Jewish War – the Kitos Wars – broke out in 115 CE. Exactly what caused the revolt is unknown. Its outbreak during the Emperor Trajan’s Parthian War has led some modern scholars to suggest Parthian meddling was the catalyst, the latter making deliberate attempts to stir up the already discontented Jewish community’s passions against Rome. Its spontaneous nature, its diverse and apparently uncoordinated leaders, and the appalling ill-discipline and brutality of the revolt would suggest that it was not a pre-planned event. Passions that had been simmering for a generation boiled over. Men who, as children, had heard tearful recountings of the Roman barbarities in Judea a generation before were now old enough to avenge the crime committed against their people.
As apparent evidence of its lack of organization, the Kitos War in fact broke out in two locations simultaneously. In Mesopotamia – modern Iraq – bands of armed Jewish men surrounded and butchered Roman garrisons left behind by Trajan, who was now marching on the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon. Mesopotamia was home to a large Jewish population who had received no ill-treatment at the hands of the Parthians; they were loathe to trade these gentler masters for Rome’s heavy hand.
It was in the African province of Cyrenaica, however, that the revolt broke out in its most horrific intensity. Angry Jewish mobs in the streets of the provincial capital of Cyrene were welded into a ragtag army of sorts by a rabble-rouser named Lukuas, also known as Andreas. Cassius Dio tells us that this Lukuas took the title “King of the Jews” – perhaps he was claiming to be the long-awaited Maschiach? Lukuas definitely appears to have been grinding an axe of a religious nature – he is credited with destroying the temples and cult-buildings of every Graeco-Roman god worshipped in Cyrene. For good measure, Lukuas’ followers also destroyed Roman government buildings and burnt down the Roman bath-houses of the city, apparently viewing these as symbols of government oppression and gentile influence, respectively.
Cyrene had been home to a very large Jewish community since pre-Roman times; readers of the Gospels will recall a certain Simon of Cyrene, staying in Jerusalem for the Seder feast when he was tasked with helping Jesus Christ carry his cross. As a result, Lukuas’ following grew into an unwieldy mob, predominately of lower-class young men, which proved impossible to control. Dio blames them for a long list of atrocities, even accusing them of cannibalism and using the internal organs of murdered Romans and Greeks as belts. Somewhat more plausibly, the rebel Jews are also accused of forcing Romans to fight as gladiators. Jews were common victims of Roman brutality in the arenas, and inscriptions attest to the existence of Jewish gladiators (including some with stereotypical names such as Yeshua – Jesus). This would suggest that, like Spartacus’ rebel gladiators two centuries before, the Cyrenaic Jews were taking sadistic pleasure from enforcing a brutal role-reversal on the hated Romans.
Lukuas and his rebels did not stop at Cyrene – advancing eastwards into Egypt, they found Alexandria had been abandoned by the Roman governor Marcus Rutilius Lupus and his soldiers. Here they joined forces with the local Jewish communities, which were deeply embittered by prejudice they had endured at the hands of Alexandria’s Greek majority. The result was an orgy of bloodshed and arson similar to that which had taken place in Cyrene – it culminated in the destruction of Pompey the Great’s tomb, and of the partial burning of Alexandria herself.
In response to this news, the Jews of the island of Cyprus also broke out into a bloody revolt, with almost identical results. These Jews, under the leadership of a man named Artemio, burned the provincial capital of Salamis to the ground. Simultaneously, the fires of rebellion spread into Judea herself. Here two Jews, Julianus and Pappos, gathered their own force of rebels and took the city of Lydda by storm, making it their makeshift capital. All of this also apparently occurred in 115 CE, while Trajan was pursuing his dream of Eastern conquest.
The End of the Revolt
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| The Eastern Mediterranean provinces of the Roman Empire, the area most effected by the Kitos War. |
The Roman army was stretched very thin. Trajan’s immediate forces were spread across Mesopotamia, where they were clashing with Parthians, Jews, and others. The Praetorian Prefect Quintus Marcius Turbo was nonetheless dispatched at the head of several legions, tasked with putting down the revolt in Egypt and Cyrene. Only after two years of bitter fighting did he quash these revolts, and Lukuas and his remaining followers fled to Judea, perhaps in an attempt to join forces with Pappos and Julianus. In Mesopotamia herself, Lusius Quietus was given command of a predominately mounted force that was tasked with silencing the rebels. Quietus was a Moorish prince who had enjoyed a somewhat controversial career in the Roman army. Dashing, arrogant, and sadistic, Quietus displayed both ferocious energy and a total lack of human pity in destroying or driving out very nearly all the Jews of Mesopotamia.
By the fall of 117 Turbo and Quietus had both entered Judea, which had become the focal point of the revolt under the joint leadership of Lukuas, Julianus, and Pappos. They put Lydda up to siege, forcing great hardship upon the rebels. Trapped within the city was the Rabbi Gamaliel II, who famously gave the defenders permission to fast even during Chanukkah, for such was the desperate situation of their rations. Gamaliel had already died at the end of the year, when Lydda fell to an assault and all of her defenders were killed – many were crucified after the fall of the city. When and how the revolt in Cyprus was extinguished has not been recorded by history.
The amount of destruction caused by the Kitos War (so called from the Hebrew form of Lusius Quietus’ name) was titanic. Supposedly 220,000 Greeks and Romans were murdered in Egypt and Cyrene, and another 240,000 perished in Cyprus. Papyri found in Egypt attest to the murderous fighting between Jewish and gentile gangs in the desert, and the state of fear in which the common people of the province lived. How many Jews were killed, Cassius Dio does not bother to record. But he does tell us that such was the bitterness of the people of Cyprus towards the Jews, that a law was passed banning any person of Jewish descent or faith from ever setting foot on Cyprus, under pain of death. This law was still in effect a century later under the Severan emperors, and was even applicable if the offender had been shipwrecked on Cyprus or had been blown to its shores by unforeseen winds.
Fate did not reward Lusius Quietus for his cruelty. Just one year after his victories in Mesopotamia and Judea, he fell out of favor with the new Emperor Hadrian and was executed. The War that Jewish tradition named after him, however, gave the entire Empire, both its Jewish and gentile populations, reason to mourn.
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