When Vespasian left the Judaean war in 69 CE to make himself emperor, he handed the command to his son Titus. In the spring of 70 Titus brought four legions up to Jerusalem, which was crowded with Passover pilgrims and torn by civil war between rival Jewish factions who had been fighting and burning each other's grain stores inside the walls. The historian Josephus, a captured Jewish commander who had gone over to the Romans and watched the siege from their camp, is the near-contemporary eyewitness for what happened, and his account, for all its bias, remains the primary source.
The siege lasted about five months. The Romans took the outer walls, then the Antonia fortress, and finally stormed the Temple Mount. The Second Temple was set ablaze, Josephus claims against Titus's orders, though that may be Flavian whitewash, and burned on a day Jewish tradition fixes as the ninth of Av. The city was razed, its population killed or enslaved in numbers Josephus puts implausibly high but which were certainly catastrophic, and the Temple's sacred furnishings were carried off as spoil. It is that seizure of the Temple treasures, and above all of the great seven-branched lampstand, that makes Titus the figure this atlas ties to the Second Temple Menorah.