Jotapata (or Iotapata), Galilee, now Israel. After a 47-day siege, the Romans entered the city and devastated it. The death toll reached 40,000. It was the final act in a series of clashes, city by city, involving incredible subterfuge and cunning, such as sacks of crasca to cushion the impact of Roman battering rams, boiled fenugreek that produced mucilage to make infantry and cavalry slip, Roman towers covered with iron roofs, and javelin throwers. Eventually, even the soul of the revolt, Josephus ben Matthias, after convincing the other 1,200 diehards, who had taken refuge in a cave, to kill each other rather than surrender to the Romans, was able to convince him, left alone with a companion, to surrender to the Romans. From now on, he would be a useful ally and historian at the side of the Empire. With the capture of Iotapata, resistance in central-western Galilee ceases entirely.
