Titus

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.

The Flavians turned the destruction of Jerusalem into the foundation of their dynasty. In 71 Vespasian and Titus celebrated a joint triumph through Rome, parading the Temple spoils before the crowd; the loot was housed in a new Temple of Peace, and the victory was stamped on the Judaea Capta coinage that circulated for years. Two triumphal arches were raised to Titus. One is lost; the other, the Arch of Titus at the entrance to the Roman Forum, was completed under his brother Domitian about 81-82 CE, after Titus's death and deification.

Inside its passageway, one relief panel shows the triumphal procession itself: Roman soldiers, crowned with laurel, carrying the plundered treasures of the Temple, the golden table of the showbread, the silver trumpets, and, unmistakably, the great seven-branched menorah hoisted on a frame. It is the most important surviving contemporary image of the Temple menorah, and nearly every later reconstruction depends on it. The object it depicts vanished from history after Rome, but the image did not: in 1949 the menorah of the Arch of Titus was adopted as the emblem of the State of Israel. Long tradition held that Jews would not walk beneath the arch that celebrated their defeat, a boycott said to have been broken, pointedly, only in 1948. This is the artifact link the atlas records under Titus: the Second Temple Menorah, whose one certain likeness he put on his arch.

Titus founded no religion, taught no doctrine, and is the object of no cult: and so, although his actions bear directly on sacred history, this atlas records him as a historical figure rather than as a sacred character of any tradition. Where a caliph or a monk belongs inside the tradition he served, Titus stands outside the traditions his acts touched. His weight here is entirely that of an agent of history: the man who destroyed the Second Temple and carried off its menorah.

That role gave him a durable place in Jewish memory, and not a kind one. Rabbinic tradition calls him Titus ha-Rasha, "Titus the Wicked," and tells lurid legends of his sacrilege in the sanctuary and of the divine punishment, a gnat that tormented his brain, that killed him. The Roman record is very different: Suetonius and the senatorial tradition remember a handsome, capable, popular prince, "the darling of the human race," who completed the Colosseum, relieved the disaster of Vesuvius in 79, and reigned briefly and well before dying of a fever in 81, aged only forty-one. The two memories never meet, and the atlas keeps both: the same man is a benefactor in Rome and a destroyer in Jerusalem.