From this time forward Judaea becomes more and more under the shadow of Rome. The walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt by Antipater, and later, the Temple, which had become much dilapidated, was demolished, and rebuilt in great magnificence by Herod the Great. He was the last King of Judaea with any semblance of autonomy, and, in the year A.D. 6, Palestine was annexed to the Roman Empire. We pass over the incidents in the Life and death of our Lord, which, at the time, could have but little affected current events, but which were destined to influence so deeply the subsequent history, not merely of Palestine but of the whole world. And we come to the cataclysm of which Our Lord had been the sorrowful yet unerring Prophet. Blinded by religious fanaticism, and convinced that God must fight upon their side and give victory to His chosen people, be their conduct never so cruel and their bearing never so arrogant, the Jewish race, though a mere handful of men, offered war to the mistress of the world. With little military organization or training, divided by factions and torn asunder by internal dissensions, they yet dared to defy the mighty power of Rome. They defeated the ill-starred expedition of Cestius Gallus, and inflicted upon the Roman arms the most terrible disgrace they had ever endured in the East. But the triumph was short-lived; a terrible revenge was at hand. It was in this year, A.D. 70, that Titus laid siege to the city. At the time, its population was swollen ten or twenty-fold by the pilgrims attending the Passover. The reserves of food were destroyed in faction fights even before the Romans arrived outside the city walls. "Of all wretched and bloody sieges in the world's history, few, if any, have been more wretched or more bloody than the siege of Jerusalem by Titus. Fierce and bloody as was the fighting, the deaths from sickness and famine were yet more terrible. Dead bodies were thrown out into the valleys, where they lay rotting, a loathsome mass. The number of those who died in the siege were estimated at 600,000. At night, miserable, starving wretches would steal into the ravines to gather roots for food; here they were pounced upon by ambushed Romans and crucified by hundreds next morning in full view of the battlements."[5] Gradually the assaulting Romans got possession of portions of the city, yet the portions still uncaptured refused to surrender, their defenders still hoping against hope for a divine intervention, as in the days of Sennacherib. At length the city fell. The Romans, pouring in, began by slaying indiscriminately. Tiring of butchery, they turned their thoughts to plunder, but stood aghast at the houses filled with dead and putrefying corpses. The Temple of Herod was burnt, the city was desolate, while those whose miseries had not been relieved by death, were carried away into yet more miserable slavery or to a death more ignominious at Rome. As a Jewish city, Jerusalem had perished for ever.