Jerusalem. The city is unrecognizable. Calculating the losses is difficult today. Josephus speaks of 1.1 million victims. But, given the city’s size, it is estimated that no more than 150,000 people lived there. Regardless of the exact count, the fate of the city and its survivors was atrocious. But Rome followed its own logic, inflexible, cynical, yet coherent. Jerusalem was not, in itself, an exception: its fate was no different or worse than that of Carthage or Corinth or Numantia or Athens, all cases with which the world of the time was all too familiar. Beyond the horrendous tragedy of the war, there was a total lack of communication between two worldviews.
