Collective Suicide at Masada

In this passage, Roman soldiers amass against the last holdouts at Masada. Eleazar commands the rebel Sicarii. Silva, the Roman commander, constructs embankments to buttress his earthworks, and his soldiers breach an outer wall, but the rebels have constructed an inner barricade less susceptible to battering rams. The Romans set that second barrier alight. Upon concluding that God is on the side of the Romans and there is no possibility of escape, Eleazar suggests mass suicide to the rebels, that they might die “honorably as free men” rather than at the hands of the Romans. He laments God’s apparent abandonment of their cause.

Impassioned by Eleazar’s rhetoric, the rebels are driven to action and set fire to the entire fort, leaving no booty for the Romans except for their extensive food stores, “to bear witness that we were not starved into submission.” According to Josephus, they then enthusiastically carry out a mass suicide. The Romans, shocked the next morning when they enter the fort and meet no resistance, feel “none of the usual triumph over an enemy: instead they could only feel a wondering admiration.” The fall of Masada marks the end of the rebellion, though it happens years after Titus had celebrated the subjugation of Judaea with a triumph in Rome.