Masada

Masada: what would you have done?

  • ask someone else to kill me

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • surrender to the Romans and be enslaved or tortured to death

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    47

unscratchedfoot

War is a good thing.
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Had you been in that fortress on the night before the Romans stormed it, what would you have done? To avoid cheap ways out, let's assume the zealots have already voted for mass suicide and the discussion is over. The remaining options are not so favorable.

Adding info link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada

There is a movie about it too which is good. Today the Israeli Defence Force uses a gondola to swear in all it's new recruits on the summit of Masada and sets flame to a big sign which says "Masada will not fall again."
 
I'd have fought to the bitter end. Their bitter end preferably.

And you shouldn't post random threads without background detail..I had to wiki Masada to find out what you are on about.
 
ComradeDavo said:
I'd have fought to the bitter end. Their bitter end preferably.

And you shouldn't post random threads without background detail..I had to wiki Masada to find out what you are on about.

Sorry I thought Masada was like the Battle of Hastings and Waterloo which everyone knows about. You learned something new which is good! Don't hate my threads. I'm trying to spice the forum up cause it is too overburdened with the tired old topics of Iraq and politics.
 
That is true but a link then provided would have been nice Comrade Davo :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada

Flavius Josephus, a First century Jewish Roman historian, Herod the Great fortified Masada between 37 and 31 BCE as a refuge for himself in the event of a revolt. In 66 CE, at the beginning of the First Jewish-Roman War (also called the Great Jewish Revolt) against the Roman Empire, a group of Jewish rebels called the Zealots (kana'im, "zealous ones", commanded by Elazar ben Ya'ir (who may have been the same person as Eleazar ben Simon), who objected to Roman rule of Judea (as the Roman province of Iudaea, its Latin name) took Masada from the Roman garrison stationed there. In 70 CE, they were joined by additional Zealots and their families who were expelled from Jerusalem by the other Jews living there shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem (and the Second Temple), and for the next two years used Masada as their base for raiding and harassing Roman and Jewish settlements alike.

In 72 CE, the Roman governor of Iudaea, Lucius Flavius Silva, marched against Masada with the Roman legion X Fretensis and laid siege to the fortress. After failed attempts to breach the wall, they built a circumvallation wall and then a rampart against the western face of the plateau, using thousands of tons of stones and beaten earth. Josephus does not record any major attempts by the Zealots to counterattack the besiegers during this process, a significant difference from his accounts of other sieges against Jewish fortresses, suggesting that perhaps the Zealots lacked the equipment or skills to fight the Roman legion. Some historians also believe that Romans may have used Jewish slaves to build the rampart, whom the Zealots were reluctant to kill because of their beliefs.

The rampart was complete in the spring of 73 CE, after approximately two to three months of siege, allowing the Romans to finally breach the wall of the fortress with a battering ram on April 16. When they entered the fortress, however, the Romans discovered that its approximately 1000 defenders had set all the buildings but the food storerooms ablaze and committed mass suicide rather than face certain capture or defeat by their enemies (which would probably have led to slavery or execution). Because Judaism strongly discourages suicide, however, the defenders were reported to have drawn lots and slain each other in turn, down to the last man, who would be the only one to actually take his own life. The storerooms were apparently left standing to show that the defenders retained the ability to live and chose the time of their death over slavery. This account of the siege of Masada was related to Josephus by two women who survived the suicide by hiding inside a cistern along with five children and repeated Elazar ben Yair's final exortation to his followers, prior to the mass suicide, verbatim to the Romans.

I'd of been sold into slavery but then I'm not that faithful, and would not have been convinced by the idea of eternal life.

EDIT:

unscratchedfoot said:
Sorry I thought Masada was like the Battle of Hastings and Waterloo which everyone knows about. You learned something new which is good! Don't hate my threads. I'm trying to spice the forum up cause it is too overburdened with the tired old topics of Iraq and politics.

Spice away my amigo. I remember seeing a dramatisation of these events as a youngster, it was very poignant, with lots of artisitc licence about the Romans offering to spare them, and spiritual dialogue about martyrdom and eternal life. It was good pathos, even if it was very specualtive.
 
Gr3yL3gion said:
What happened in Masada?
From a brief look on wiki, it's seems to be an historic event where the Romans slaughtered a bunch of rebellious Jews.
 
unscratchedfoot said:
The wikipedia article is very brief and not a fair description of the campaign. Better to do a google search and do some reading here and there.

Considering Flavius's writings appear to be the only source, there really isn't much out there other than his brief account.

Here's the works of Flavius Jospehus, if you want to read the whole account of Masada. Chapters 8/9/10/ are on the siege of Massada itself.

http://www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/war-7.htm
 
Fight! Suicide is for weaklings!
 
Sorry I thought Masada was like the Battle of Hastings and Waterloo which everyone knows about. You learned something new which is good! Don't hate my threads. I'm trying to spice the forum up cause it is too overburdened with the tired old topics of Iraq and politics.
If everyone does not know about Masada, then the education of those who do not must be... examined. It should be common knowledge, but then since it is not obscure, a person should be expected to google or wiki for it.

However, it is kind of a courtsey to provide a link, if you start a thread... and maybe a short summary, since it might refresh those who forgot, or set those on track whom don's know . :) :)
 
In that situation, I would stay alive to fight the Romans. I'd probably die, but maybe I would get to kill one Roman soldier before I did.

But if it were really me, I wouldn't be there in the first place. Holing up in Masada was dumb, if you're fighting a military force superior to you in discipline, numbers, and equipment, you don't gather together in one place - you disperse, and fight a guerilla war, harassing supply lines, killing isolated detachments, and generally making a nuisance of yourself. You only mass together when you have the enemy outnumbered, and are very likely to win - IE, they have 500 men coming in to reinforce, and you have 3,000 men to ambush them with.

Very brave men, but they needed a leader with a head on his shoulders, not just fanatacism.
 
I've never heard of Masada in my life, but I'd either commit suicide with my friends or I'd have tried to escape.
 
Elrohir said:
In that situation, I would stay alive to fight the Romans. I'd probably die, but maybe I would get to kill one Roman soldier before I did.

But if it were really me, I wouldn't be there in the first place. Holing up in Masada was dumb, if you're fighting a military force superior to you in discipline, numbers, and equipment, you don't gather together in one place - you disperse, and fight a guerilla war, harassing supply lines, killing isolated detachments, and generally making a nuisance of yourself. You only mass together when you have the enemy outnumbered, and are very likely to win - IE, they have 500 men coming in to reinforce, and you have 3,000 men to ambush them with.


Very brave men, but they needed a leader with a head on his shoulders, not just fanatacism.

The zealots were doing a guerilla war. That's what invited the Roman attack. And Palestine was not a big nation with very little terrain favorable for raiders to hide in so trying to hide out anywhere but in Masada would have resulted in being killed earlier. If you look at the footage of Masada today, it really does seem impregnable and the zealots were not being unreasonable in thinking it was especially with almost unlimited food and water supplies on it. The ramp the Romans built with the complex process of getting a battering ram up the steep angle was engineering genius not easily predicted.
 
I honestly don't know how I would respond in that situation. I fear my life experience is not sufficient to give me a definite answer.
 
i'd like to say i'd fight the Romans to my death, but you never what you'd do until you're in the situation.
 
I'd do as the Germanic peoples would have done, fight to the death and kill as many overpriveleged Roman officers and legions as possible. Also, Im good at finding hiding spots, so I would hover around it to avoid becoming too outnumbered.
 
Dong2Long said:
If everyone does not know about Masada, then the education of those who do not must be... examined. It should be common knowledge, but then since it is not obscure, a person should be expected to google or wiki for it.

Same could be said about the battle of Numantia. Except that I don't expect non spaniards with just basic knowledge in history to know the insights of that battle. what I am saying, I don't expect them to even know that the battle took place.

Man, I don't even expect my british friends ton know about the war of Jenkin's Ear, many of them don't even know what I was talking about when I mention it. Even they don't know that British lost more ships in their attempt to siege Cartagena de Indias that the Spanish lost in the Invencible. Ah... but they know about the Invencible thing. ;)

(And in every link I look for the War of Jenkin's ear in english sites, they dilute it with the war of the Austrian sucession. :lol:
 
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