A legend under siege

As rousing death-and-glory speeches go, it is one of the best. With a besieging Roman army only hours from storming the mountain stronghold of Masada, where 967 Jews were making their last stand in around AD 73, the rebel leader Eleazar Ben-Yair gathered the men together and called for a mass suicide. He told them:

We have it in our power to die nobly and in freedom. Our fate at the break of day is certain capture; but there is still the free choice of a noble death with those we hold most dear.

That way their wives would not be dishonoured by Roman soldiers, nor their children enslaved:

Let us spare nothing but our provisions; for they will testify, when we are dead, that it was not want which subdued us, but that… we preferred death to slavery.

Most popular

Douglas Murray

What real justice would look like for grooming gang victims

The stirring story comes from Josephus, the 1st-century Jewish-Roman historian, in his seven-volume account of The Jewish War.