And now for something completely different: historical fiction. I originally wrote this piece for my Roman Culture class at Portland State University, all the way back in February 20231. Technically, all we had to do was write 800 words about the lives of a lower-class group in Roman society (slaves, prostitutes, gladiators, or soldiers), but the professor let me take the project and run with it. Thank you, Tim Nidever!
Our story takes place during the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The people of Judea rose in revolt against the Roman Empire in 66 AD, during the reign of the emperor Nero. After a long and bloody campaign, a force of four legions surrounded the Jewish capital, Jerusalem, to crush the rebellion once and for all. Fair warning: I tried my best here to capture the worldview of soldiers in the Roman Army. That worldview was very different from modern sensibilities when it came to things like slavery and treatment of prisoners of war. Reader discretion is advised.
The featured image is The Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans Under the Command of Titus, A.D. 70, painted in 1850 by David Roberts.
The Fifth Legion was making another push against the walls of Jerusalem, and Lemonius Corvus was happy to sit it out. He figured he’d earned a reprieve by now. For fifteen days he had labored, putting his back into ramparts and ditches and siege towers, all while the rebellious Jews had rained arrows and stones from their high walls. Dangerous and exhausting business. Far better to rest in the shade of an olive tree, facing the city, and watch other men slog it out.
“How long until Severus realizes we’re gone?” asked Quintus Favonius Rusca. There were three of them here, perched on the rock-strewn slope leading down from the camp: Corvus, Quintus, and Acacius, the Greek.
“The way I see it, there’s no problem at all,” Corvus said. “He told us to move a pot of water. We moved it. When we came back, he was nowhere to be seen. So we’re at liberty until good Didius Severus shows up again with something else for us to do.”
Corvus was out of uniform, wearing only a tunic. His armor and weapon lay piled together nearby. His friends were in similar disarray: pale, skinny Quintus reclined against a boulder, his helmet in his lap, while Acacius, clean-shaven with a jawline to rival Achilles, had the blade of a gladius balanced atop his knees.
“I don’t know. Seems like we should be doing… something.” Quintus looked over his shoulder towards the camp, though they couldn’t quite see it from down here. Off to the left, a stream of auxiliary troops carried supplies towards the fighting, and wounded men away from it.
“You can always go back up and find a chore to keep you busy,” Corvus said, absently scrutinizing the blisters on his palm. All that shoveling had taken a toll. “You have to admit this is a good view, though.”
“And we’re in the shade,” Acacius cut in. Even after ten years’ service, he spoke Latin with an accent—not just Greek, but Ionian, or maybe Cypriot. Acacius had never said where he was from, which meant he’d probably joined up to escape something. There were lots of men like that in the legions.
“Yeah. I suppose that’s pretty nice.” Quintus stayed where he was, and raised no further concerns.
They could see most of Jerusalem from here: the holy city of the Jews, now risen up in rebellion. It would never rival Rome, or even Alexandria, but that was not to say it couldn’t be impressive in its own right. Apartments of mud-brick and stone stretched beyond counting in the lower city. In the walled citadel of the upper city stood the Temple—tall, white, monumental, its lines as stark and straightforward as the solitary god it honored.
The task at present was to break into the lower city. From up here, the fighting along the wall was a distant spectacle, so many little ant-like figures doing their best to kill each other. Corvus might as well have been sitting in the rear seats of a gladiator game. Of course, he would hardly have compared his brothers in the Fifth Legion to the common miscreants of the arena.
So far they were making solid progress against the rebels. Rams pounded relentlessly against the wall’s base, and with each passing day the wall looked a little weaker, even if the legion paid a steep price in blood. Relentlessness was the Roman way. Supporting the rams were a bevvy of archers, catapults, and ballistae, firing from open ground as well as from Titus’s newly erected siege towers, whittling away at Jerusalem’s defenders with a steady rain of projectiles. The cries of dying men carried faintly up the hill.
“You’re a betting man, Corvus,” Acacius spoke up. He pointed at the wall. “Take a look—see that man there? The tall, bearded bastard, wearing a red cloak, with a bow and arrow?”
Corvus believed he saw him. A Judean archer, who took potshots at the legionaries trying to smash through the wall beneath his feet. “I see him.”
“Great. Now, look at that one, up top, with the sling.” Acacius moved his finger towards the adjacent tower. “A bit stockier. Got a scar on his face.”
Corvus squinted, without any luck. “What scar? Your vision may be sharp, but it’s not that sharp.”
“You seriously can’t spot it? Next to him the Gorgon is as pretty as Helen of Troy. Must have really been unlucky, or pissed someone off.”
“All right. I can kind of see it.” He couldn’t, but he still knew who Acacius was referring to—only so many stocky, stone-throwing Jews at the top of that particular tower. “What’s your bet?”
“Thirty denarii that red-cloak dies before scar-face. What do you wager?”
Quintus gave Corvus a playful nudge. “Maybe that pretty slave girl you took in Emmaus, eh?”
“She’s not on the table!” Corvus batted his friend away, but he couldn’t suppress a chuckle. He watched the wall and weighed his options. “All right. Scar-face dies first, you pay me thirty. Red-cloak dies, I pay you fifteen.”
“Fifteen?” Acacius turned to Quintus. “The man’s trying to scam me!”
Quintus shrugged. “You figure the odds are in his favor, Corvus?”
“They are. Scar-face has the height advantage.”
“But we have a tower right next to him!” Acacius said.
Indeed, an iron-plated siege tower of four or five stories was crawling up an earthen ramp towards that section of wall, firing arrows and ballista bolts all the while. To see the thing move even an inch under its own power was uncanny. Buildings of that size were supposed to stay in place, not trundle along like elephants.
“Tower or no tower, your man’s likely to die second,” Corvus said. “Red-cloak is lower than him, and thus more vulnerable, no matter where our own archers might be positioned. Two-to-one odds.”
“Odds my ass! If anything, scar-face is more exposed. Thirty for thirty, or no deal.”
A ballista bolt decapitated the Judean with the scar on his face. He collapsed onto his back, out of sight, while the projectile continued over the tower wall and into the city below. Decent chance it would kill someone there, too.
“Well. So much for your man.” Corvus extended an open palm. “Better pay up.”
Acacius made a face. “We never agreed on the terms.”
“Trying to weasel your way out of this one, huh? Thirty denarii!”
“You could’ve had your thirty denarii if you hadn’t blathered about odds!”
“Pedantry won’t save you—Lemonius Corvus never forgets a debt.”
“You don’t, do you?” Acacius grinned. “How about the time I saved your sorry hide in Armenia? Haven’t heard you talk about that for a good while, now.”
“Saved me? I needed no saving.”
Quintus picked up his sword and pretended to be pinned with a blade to his neck, his face contorted in mock terror. “Yes—fine! Just fine!”
Quintus and Acacius shared a laugh. They were right, unfortunately. Corvus really had been prone on the ground, within moments of impalement by a Parthian horseman, and Acacius really had saved his life with the heroic thrust of a javelin into the Parthian’s mount. Corvus was forever grateful—just not grateful enough to go around admitting it.
Corvus leaned back on his palms, taking a sniff of the Judean air. It was pleasantly fresh, far from the latrines of the camp, and from the squalor of the besieged city. “Ah, well. Too fine a day to argue. You got any posca to spare, Acacius?”
“Right here.”
Acacius passed over a leather waterskin, and Corvus took a sip. The taste was to be endured more than savored—cheap vinegar had been mixed into the water for freshness—but it was a way to keep hydrated. He drank again, then handed the canteen back.
“Appreciate it. True Roman water for true Romans, eh?”
“More like true Roman water from that well over there.”
“Aha! But it is Roman water.” Corvus swept a hand around the landscape. “Roman water, Roman air, Roman trees, Roman people—it’s all Roman. The Judeans just need to be reminded of that.”
“Problem is, Rome keeps conquering absolute shitholes.”
“Judea’s not so bad. It has great olives.”
“And gold,” Quintus said. “Once we’re in that temple, we’re rich men.”
“Only if we’re fortunate enough to be part of the last push, not stuck mopping up somewhere else in the city,” Corvus said. “We have three other legions to compete with.”
“Well, there’s plenty of city for all of us,” Acacius said. “Even if we can’t get our hands on the gold, I hear the trade in slaves is very good for those looking to sell.”
Corvus tilted his head. “Right this moment, maybe. How about when there’s a hundred thousand Jewish slaves flooding the market?”
“If you’re smart, and get in ahead, anything’s possible.”
“Speaking of slaves,” Quintus said, “how much for the girl, Corvus?”
“You sure seem taken by her.” Corvus regarded him coolly. “If you can somehow scrape together enough for me to make centurion, I’ll consider it. Otherwise, go fuck yourself.”
“Still gunning for that promotion, I see,” Acacius said. “Only been in the Army for eight years, and you want to be a centurion!”
“Why not?” Corvus pounded his chest. “I’m telling you, lads—Centurion Lemonius Corvus! Born to a fishmonger, and look at him now!”
“Well, you’re sure working hard towards your goal,” Quintus said.
“Oh, piss off! You’re also fucking around in the shade, aren’t you?”
“Sure, but I have no aspirations of being a centurion.”
Corvus caught movement in the corner of his eye, towards the city. He turned and saw a cloud of dust rising from a rubble pile that, moments before, had been part of the wall. The rams had accomplished their task. It wasn’t a wide gap—maybe four men abreast could fit through it, and even then only by clambering over a treacherous landscape of debris—but that was good enough as far as sieges were concerned.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Guess what we just missed out on?”
Quintus sat upright, and stared in slack-jawed amazement. Acacius muttered something in Greek.
Romans cheered at the base of the wall, where a small number of legionaries were pushing through the breach against what looked to be only token resistance. The stalemate of a few minutes before had turned into a rout. Which meant, among other things, that now was no time to be taking a break.
The three exchanged glances, then hurriedly stood up and put their armor back on. Sword in hand, Corvus led them up the path to the camp, where the rest of the century would now be forming up for battle.
A man came galloping down the path on horseback—it was their centurion, Didius Severus, wearing full armor and a scarlet cloak. He tugged the reins and came to a halt in front of Corvus.
“There you are, you lazy dogs!” Severus shouted. “Where have you been?”
“Water detail, sir!” Corvus said.
“Takes you an hour to get water?”
“Apparently it does, sir!”
“Hm.” Severus pointed towards the camp—the palisades of which could, from here, just be seen at the top of the hill. “Get up there and join the rest of the unit. We have a breach, and we’re damn well exploiting it!”
“Right away, sir!”
The centurion turned and rode up the hill, leaving the legionaries to make the same journey on foot. As Corvus climbed, he glanced over his shoulder at the city—at the ruins of a once-impregnable wall, and far beyond that the Temple, gleaming white in the sun. It would take who knew how long for the Fifth to fight its way up there, but the eventual outcome seemed certain, now. Rome was nothing if not relentless. Treasure and triumph lay in his future, provided he survived the fighting.
He smiled—woe to the conquered.
A big thanks for everyone who took a look at this rather unconventional post. I hope I entertained you, and maybe taught you something about Roman history. Please, don’t hesitate to drop any feedback (positive or scathing) in the comments below.
Next week I’ll probably review a movie, though I’m not sure which one. Until then!
- Which was… almost two years ago, now. Sheesh. ↩︎
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