On this episode, the siege of Jerusalem is over and Titus is handing out medals, melting down temple gold to crown his best soldiers, and carving up his legions for their next postings around the empire. We dig into what happened to the early Christian community in Jerusalem — spoiler: nobody really knows, and that's the fascinating part. Then Cam and Ray pause to take in the sheer scale of what just happened: a 2,200-year-old city, wiped off the face of the earth.

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On this episode, the siege of Jerusalem is over and Titus is handing out medals, melting down temple gold to crown his best soldiers, and carving up his legions for their next postings around the empire. We dig into what happened to the early Christian community in Jerusalem — spoiler: nobody really knows, and that's the fascinating part. Then Cam and Ray pause to take in the sheer scale of what just happened: a 2,200-year-old city, wiped off the face of the earth.

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This week we finally reach the end of the Siege of Jerusalem — and it's brutal. Titus storms the upper city, the rebels' back is broken, Simon and John have vanished into the tunnels, and by September 25th, 70 CE, the city is rubble and the Temple is gone forever. We also dive into the fate of the sacred Menorah — where it went, what it meant, and why nobody knows where it is today.

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This week we finally reach the end of the Siege of Jerusalem — and it's brutal. Titus storms the upper city, the rebels' back is broken, Simon and John have vanished into the tunnels, and by September 25th, 70 CE, the city is rubble and the Temple is gone forever. We also dive into the fate of the sacred Menorah — where it went, what it meant, and why nobody knows where it is today.

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It's August 70 CE, and the siege of Jerusalem is entering its apocalyptic final act. In this episode, Cameron and Ray pick up where the last one left off — starving rebels launching desperate sorties against exhausted Roman legionaries, Titus ordering his men to burn down the silver-coated temple gates to finally crack open the last Jewish stronghold, and the mounting pressure on one of the ancient world's most sacred structures. Before the walls even fall, Cameron takes a deep dive into the remarkable cast of Jesuses and Ananiases haunting Josephus's account of the war — including a wild-eyed plebeian prophet named Jesus son of Ananias, who spent seven years and five months wandering Jerusalem's streets howling "Woe to Jerusalem!" until a Roman siege engine stone ended his career mid-prophecy. Cameron draws pointed connections between this forgotten street-prophet and the Gospel accounts of Jesus of Nazareth, noting that the Gospel of Matthew — written around 75–80 CE, after Jerusalem had already fallen — may owe more to Josephus's war stories than to genuine prophecy. Then history's most consequential act of arson takes centre stage: against Titus's explicit orders, an unnamed Roman soldier — dubbed "Carl" by Cameron and Ray in an extended bit of comedy gold — hurled a burning torch through a golden-framed window of the Temple, setting in motion a conflagration that consumed one of the ancient world's greatest buildings while Titus himself was still inside the Holy of Holies. The looting that followed was so spectacular it caused a gold glut across Syria, halving the price of the metal. Titus freed roughly 40,000 non-combatants into the smouldering ruin of their city — good news delivered alongside very bad news. The end of the siege is now finally within sight.

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It's August 70 CE, and the siege of Jerusalem is entering its apocalyptic final act. In this episode, Cameron and Ray pick up where the last one left off — starving rebels launching desperate sorties against exhausted Roman legionaries, Titus ordering his men to burn down the silver-coated temple gates to finally crack open the last Jewish stronghold, and the mounting pressure on one of the ancient world's most sacred structures. Before the walls even fall, Cameron takes a deep dive into the remarkable cast of Jesuses and Ananiases haunting Josephus's account of the war — including a wild-eyed plebeian prophet named Jesus son of Ananias, who spent seven years and five months wandering Jerusalem's streets howling "Woe to Jerusalem!" until a Roman siege engine stone ended his career mid-prophecy. Cameron draws pointed connections between this forgotten street-prophet and the Gospel accounts of Jesus of Nazareth, noting that the Gospel of Matthew — written around 75–80 CE, after Jerusalem had already fallen — may owe more to Josephus's war stories than to genuine prophecy. Then history's most consequential act of arson takes centre stage: against Titus's explicit orders, an unnamed Roman soldier — dubbed "Carl" by Cameron and Ray in an extended bit of comedy gold — hurled a burning torch through a golden-framed window of the Temple, setting in motion a conflagration that consumed one of the ancient world's greatest buildings while Titus himself was still inside the Holy of Holies. The looting that followed was so spectacular it caused a gold glut across Syria, halving the price of the metal. Titus freed roughly 40,000 non-combatants into the smouldering ruin of their city — good news delivered alongside very bad news. The end of the siege is now finally within sight.

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It's 70 CE, the walls of Jerusalem are crumbling, and the city is eating itself alive — literally. In this episode of Life of Caesar, Cameron and Ray wade deep into Josephus's harrowing account of the final, grinding assault on the Antonia Fortress and the Temple Mount, where the siege of Jerusalem has reached a level of horror almost beyond comprehension. Titus is still trying to take the city intact, still offering surrender terms that rebel leader John of Gischala keeps refusing, even as 600,000 corpses have been thrown out of the gates and the starving population has been reduced to eating dung, leather belts, and — in one unforgettable episode — a widow named Mary from Perea who roasts and eats her own infant son, leaving even Jerusalem's most hardened killers staggering into the street in shock. Meanwhile, the Roman assaults keep producing their own gruesome catalogue of disasters: brave volunteers like Sabinus the Syrian and the Abian centurion Julian charge the walls in spectacular solo acts of courage, only to be undone by the cruel physics of hobnailed caliga boots sliding out on blood-slicked marble floors. A trumpeter and sixteen centuries break into the Antonia in a daring pre-dawn raid, a legionnaire named Longus cuts his own throat rather than surrender or burn, and a soldier called Artorius survives a sixty-foot jump by landing on — and killing — his tentmate Lucius, who had agreed to catch him in exchange for his inheritance. Through it all, Josephus insists it wasn't the Romans but God himself who condemned the Jews, a theological contortion Cameron links to the writing of the Gospel of Mark and the birth of Christianity from the ashes of the Temple. There's also a lengthy and highly entertaining detour into medieval witch trials, broomsticks, and the surprisingly pharmaceutical origins of flying — Cameron has been reading Carlo Ginzburg, and he has things to tell you about salves and sticks that will change how you watch *Wicked* forever.

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It's 70 CE, the siege of Jerusalem is entering its most savage phase, and Titus is running out of patience. In this episode of Life of Caesar, Cameron and Ray wade through the blood-soaked, famine-ravaged final weeks of the Roman assault on the Holy City, guided by the gleefully self-serving account of Josephus — a man who has somehow convinced himself that God personally switched teams and is now rooting for Rome. The Jews inside Jerusalem are starving by the hundreds of thousands, eating leather belts, rummaging through sewers, and in one truly unforgettable case, a widow named Mary roasts and eats her own infant son — a scene so horrifying it sends hardened killers staggering into the street. Meanwhile, rebel leader John of Gischala is busy pre-sacking the temple he's supposedly defending, melting down sacred vessels and drinking the priests' wine, while Titus makes offer after offer of clemency that keeps getting thrown back in his face. On the Roman side, the assault on the Antonia Fortress produces a parade of spectacular individual catastrophes: a Syrian legionnaire named Sabinus who volunteers for a suicidal wall-scaling at 11am, fights brilliantly, then trips on a rock and is swarmed; the peerless centurion Julian, who leaps alone into a Jewish courtyard twirling swords like General Grievous, only to be undone by his own hobnailed boots — the very Roman innovation designed for traction — on blood-slicked marble floors. Cameron delivers a detailed and genuinely fascinating digression on the caliga, the Roman military boot, before pivoting — via witches, medieval French lepers, conspiracy theories, broomsticks, and psychoactive vaginal salves — to the origins of the witch trials. It's an episode where the walls are literally collapsing, the marble floors are running with blood, bodies are piling up in the streets, and Cameron still finds time to recommend a sex position called the Kneeling Bodyguard. All roads lead to Rome, apparently, and all Rome's roads eventually end in catastrophe.

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