=1. Titus completes his Conquest.=――With the taking of the capital the war was practically at an end. Jerusalem, ‘grander in her fall than even in her days of magnificence,’ was in the hands of the Romans, and Titus did not loiter nor grow lenient over the rest of his work. What fire and sword had left standing was ordered to be deliberately destroyed, and the ruins of the city and its Temple and its walls were all made level with the ground. The chief leaders of the defence were taken to Rome, and John of Gischala made a strong point of interest in Titus’s triumphal entry. There was presently a ceremony in which the ambitious Jewish soldier once more played the first part; he was led out to public execution. =2. Masada.=――There were three fortresses which held out even after the fall of Jerusalem, and one of them, Masada by name, in a certain sense was never taken by the Romans. The garrison of this place was commanded by a descendant of Judas of Galilee, named Eleazar. Eleazar was quite hopeless of victory and quite fearless of death. When he found that the entry of the enemy was only a question of hours, he called all his little world together and made them a speech. He told them of the Roman way of dealing with prisoners of war, and bade them make their choice between surrender and self-inflicted death. Like the voice of one man came the answer of the nine hundred men who listened to him. ‘We will die by our own hands, we and our wives and our children; rather death than dishonour.’ Then they deliberately set fire to their poor dwellings and exchanged death-wounds. Thus, guided by fires lit by dead hands, and stumbling over unresisting corpses, the Romans entered the silent city, and came into possession of the last Jewish stronghold. =3. What became of the Chief Actors.=――By the events of the war Herod Agrippa had lost his kingdom and his reputation, but he had contrived to save his fortune, and that kept for him the friends he cared about. In Rome he was very much appreciated. He and his money and his charming sister Berenice were all made very welcome at the court of the Emperor Titus. Josephus was very often one of the party. He, in his retirement, took to literature, and almost managed to make that disreputable. He wrote the ‘Wars of the Jews’ and the ‘Antiquities of the Jews,’ and his own most instructive autobiography. All these works are very valuable contributions to history――are, in fact, the chief, and almost only, records extant of these events; but each one of his books shows proofs of the authorship plainly enough to make it a trifle untrustworthy. In compliment to his Roman patrons Josephus took the surname of Flavius. He lived in the full sunshine of imperial favour, and managed to find three women in succession to marry him. We may conclude that they were not Jewesses.