The capture of the Temple placed the lower city at the mercy of the victors, and the soldiers plundered the Akra, the Council House, and the Ophel, setting the whole on fire to Siloam. Yet the upper city still held out under Simon, son of Gioras, the last left of the rebel leaders. Eleven days after the Temple was fired, banks were begun against this last citadel, and the siege dragged on yet for eighteen days more,[364] till at length the rampart was breached on the west, and the upper city also fell, after a siege of 134 days, on Elul 8, in August. The few survivors fled to Siloam and hid in the tunnel. Simon concealed himself in a “certain subterranean cavern,” and John in another. The latter was forced by hunger to give himself up, and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. The whole city was burned and the walls entirely demolished, except the three “royal towers” and part of the wall on the west side of the upper city, where the 10th legion was left under Terentius Rufus. A little later, while Titus was still at Cæsarea, “Simon, thinking he might be able to astonish and delude the Romans--”after he had failed to mine his way out of the cavern--“put on a white dress and buttoned on him a purple robe, and appeared out of the ground in the place where the Temple had formerly been.” He thus seems to have been hidden in the cave under the Ṣakhrah. He was taken alive, and afterwards walked the Via Sacra at Rome, to meet his death in the triumph of Titus. [Sidenote: “LET US DEPART”] The captives were condemned to fight wild beasts at Cæsarea. The golden lamp, the golden table, the trumpets of Jubilee, and the Temple copy of the law[365] (afterwards given to Josephus), were borne in triumph on that day, as the arch of Titus still bears witness. Medals were struck recording the great victory,[366] with the head of Vespasian on one side and on the other Israel mourning under the palm, with the Latin legend “Judæa Capta.” Well might they remember the prophecies of Jesus, son of Ananus, who for eight years had walked the streets, crying, “Woe, woe, to Jerusalem!” till the stone from an engine slew him; and the prediction that the temple should perish when it became a quadrangle; and, above all, that awful night[367] of the last Pentecost ever celebrated in the sanctuary, to which Tacitus and Josephus alike refer. “As the priests were going by night to the inner Temple as their custom was, to perform their sacred ministrations, they said that first of all they felt a quaking and heard a great noise”--the sound of the great doors of Nicanor as they swung suddenly open--“and after that they heard a sound as of a great multitude saying, Let us depart hence.” FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER VIII [321] “Wars,” V. xi. 1. [322] “Ant.,” XVII. x. 1–10; “Wars,” II. iii. 1–4.